18 February 2001, Foxstone Park (Virginia)

Self driven to hair-pulling distraction by all this coverage of “pomp and circumstance” on cnn. Something happening tomorrow? Hard pass.

She’s on Chapter 6 of Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, and it’s about another thrilling event (possibly second only to the killing of Osama in the thrills meter): the arrest of the FBI mole, Robert Hanssen.

Just after Hanssen had left a small garbage bag under a bridge (his last dead drop ever ever ever), “ten FBI agents” came out of the woods, “surrounded him, cuffed him, and read him his Miranda rights.” Self can just imagine the scene! That’s what makes the Hanssen arrest so satisfying.

Here was the damage:

“Hanssen was found to have betrayed at least four Russian agents working for US intelligence, three of whom were executed as a result of his treachery.”

Spies, as Zegart points out, do not just work for adversaries. She cites the case of Jonathan Pollard, a civilian Navy intelligence analyst who spied for Israel. “One day an alert coworker saw Pollard carrying what looked like a classified envelope into the parking lot and reported him.” He served 30 years of a life sentence.

“Today, according to former U.S. intelligence officials, two to three million people are engaged in espionage around the world, most of them aiming at the United States.”

— Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence, p. 146

The Hunt for bin Laden

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms maintains that US special forces almost captured bin Laden in the December following 9/11. The CIA traced bin Laden and about a “thousand of his men to a maze of tunnels and caves high in the icy peaks of the Hindu Kush.” Yet, even “with bombs pummeling Tora Bora from above,” bin Laden slipped the noose. He would elude American agents for 10 long years.

What followed was the arduous task of sifting through “phone calls, emails, radio signals, tweets and text messages” — 1.7 billion of which were intercepted every day. It turned out this was all futile effort, because after Tora Bora, bin Laden and his “trusted lieutenants had ditched their cell and satellite phones” and for the next 10 years would rely solely on trusted couriers. “US airplanes dropped flyers with bin Laden’s face behind bars and offered a $25 million reward for anyone who helped turn him in,” but the trail still went cold.

In the end, the break came from a tip from a detainee: the name of a courier. Other information came from what detainees did not say. When they ran the courier’s name past Abu Faraj al-Libbi, al-Qaeda’s third in command, Faraj al-Libbi denied ever knowing him. They ran the name past “another senior al-Qaeda leader in custody, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who downplayed the courier’s importance.” Then “KSM returned to his cell after questioning and communicated to other prisoners that they should not mention anything about this courier.” American interest in this “courier was now sky-high.”

Eventually — this took years — they were able to identify the courier’s real name and discover what kind of car he drove: a white Suzuki. Tracking the car was what eventually led them to the compound in Abbotabad.

Fun Facts

from Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence, by Amy B. Zegart:

• In 2018, China spent more on internal security than external defense.
• Russian domestic surveillance and political repression have such a long history, the country celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Soviet secret police in 2017. During the Cold War, domestic spying operations became so large, the Soviet Union’s spy agency, the KGB, established a special directorate to handle them.

Remember When?

Remember when the least-posturing leader the Free World has ever known took out the world’s #1 Most Wanted Criminal? OK, self might say: Was that when Biden had covid and took out — ?

No, though that comes close. She’s talking about Obama taking out Osama, an event so top-secret no one even knew about it until it was over (No one except for a civilian live-tweeting from Abbotabad).

Since that momentous event, details cling to self’s memory: the fact that the SEAL team were given Ambien (or Benadryl) before taking off for the mission and some of them were NODDING OFF in the helicopter. The fact that one of the team had a sex-change operation.

Remember the photograph in the Situation Room with everyone staring intently at a screen, and there’s Hillary and there’s even our currrent Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, standing at the very edge of the picture, watching from the door?

The event was so momentous, self even wrote a short story about it, and called her story The Walker, after the code name the Americans gave Osama, because even before they knew for sure it was him, they identified a tall figure taking daily walks around a walled compound in Abbotabad. (PS: That story, in case anyone cares to read, was published Oct. 2021 in Issue # 25 of — self just loves the name of the journal, so apt considering the nature of the story! — The Museum of Americana. AND for all you budding writers out there, the editor is fantastic. Submit here!)

Well, here’s that event again, in the opening paragraph of Chapter 4 of Amy B. Zegart’s (fascinating) Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence.

This was it. Decision time. On April 28, 2011, President Obama gathered his top foreign policy advisors in the White House Situation Room. After months of meetings so secret that not even the secretary of homeland security or the FBI Director knew about them, Obama was about to make one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency: whether to green-light a Navy SEAL team raid to capture or kill a man the CIA believed might be Osama bin Laden.

— Chapter 4: Intelligence Basics, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence

Sentence of the Day: 1st Tuesday of May 2023

Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet wrote a memo declaring war on Osama bin Laden nearly three years before 9/11, urging that “no resource or people (be) spared,” but only a few agency heads received the memo and all of them ignored it.

— Chapter Three, p. 69, Spies, Lies and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence

Cee’s Flower of the Day: Another Rose Gets Ready

Her Betty Boop rose, which has survived over a decade of neglect, is about to bloom. It’s in the backyard, trapped behind some overgrown holly trees. Self went tramping around back there this afternoon, trying to assess damage.

Not too bad, as it turned out.

Posting for Cee’s Flower of the Day.

Last on the Card, April 2023

Last on the Card is hosted by bushboys world.

Self loves getting daily delivery of a physical newspaper. For the past four years, that’s been the Wall Street Journal. But she’s since decided to do a little scaling back, budget-wise. So, alas! She may not have many of these print wsj issues to share.

Last Friday’s wsj Page One was a winner!

Look at Biden’s new Secret Service detail! All business, they are!

For Take Your Child to Work Day, staffers’ children took on roles normally played by their parents. Aren’t they so precious! Self loves the poker faces, the shades, the adjusting of the earpiece. In keeping with the spirit of the event, POTUS also took questions from children of the White House Press Corps.

She loves POTUS’s affability: she hopes this becomes AN ANNUAL TRADITION!

(Though the paper was delivered on Friday, self only got around to taking a picture of the front page yesterday, making it the Last on her Card for April 2023)

Your Quote of the Day: Spies, Lies, and Algorithms p. 40

The dean of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Army Brig. Gen. Patrick Finnegan, became so concerned that (the show) 24 was hurting cadet training by glamorizing the efficacy and morality of torture, he visited the show’s creative team in Los Angeles to request that they produce episodes where torture backfires. In a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction moment, the show’s crew thought that General Finnegan, who came wearing his military uniform, was an actor.

LOL!!!

Fan Of . . .#204

Thanks to Jez for hosting this fun Challenge!

Self is a super-big fan of . . . roses.

As any regular readers of this blog can attest.

She’s just back from a month-long to the Philippines. The roses in her backyard did not fare well. Except for THIS ONE: Winsome, a mini-rose. It had only two blooms when she first arrived, but from the looks of it, it will soon be profusely covered in winsome, scarlet flowers.

Cee’s Flower of the Day: Winsome (Rose)

Self is back from the Philippines. So now she can start posting pictures of her garden again.

First up, her roses. They are spectacular (the ones in the front yard). The roses in the backyard, the ones in pots right in front of the French doors, look horrible: over-run with rust, and leaves scorched. Self will have to do major reconstruction: the Moonlight Romantica would have been covered in blooms, but the rust and the leaf scorch have really done a number on it. She’d say about 1/3 of the plant has healthy leaves, the rest will need to be chopped off.

There IS one backyard rose that seems to be thriving, and it’s one that she’s moved here and there in the garden, and neglected. It is usually covered in rust. This year — barely any rust. And it is blooming.

Posting for Cee Neuner’s Flower of the Day.