I'm an electric, electric spy.
I'm protecting electric guys.
All right, welcome to Antiwar Radio.
It's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Wharton.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And we're going to go ahead and get the show started right away with our first guest, the great James Bamford.
He's a former reporter for ABC World News Tonight, former producer for ABC World News Tonight.
He's the author of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, A Pretext for War.
And his brand newest one is called The Shadow Factory, The Ultra Secret NSA, From 9-11 to the eavesdropping on America.
Welcome to the show, Jim.
Well, thanks, Scott.
I appreciate it.
It's good to talk to you again.
I was wondering where you were.
You were writing a book.
That's why I hadn't seen any articles by you in so long, I guess.
That's right, yeah.
Writing books on NSA is more than a full-time occupation.
It's just very hard, so I have to put all my concentration on that.
Yeah, well, congratulations.
I mean, this really is a piece of craftsmanship here.
Really incredible stuff.
Thank you.
So, really my only regret is that I didn't have enough time to go back and re-read the 9-11 portion of your last book, A Pretext for War, before we discuss the 9-11 part of this book.
But I want to go ahead and start with the 9-11 truthers, when they criticize me and say that I believe the official story, I respond, no, I believe James Bamford, and Lawrence Wright, and Terry McDermott, and other authors who have told the story of who did the 9-11 attacks.
And as far as I can tell, you're not the official story.
You're a real journalist, and you do real reporting.
So I didn't bother with the 9-11 Commission.
I read A Pretext for War.
And so, basically what I want to ask you about, what I want to focus the beginning of this interview on, is the prior knowledge and what ability the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, whoever else, may have had to stop this attack, and why they failed to do so.
You bring a major story in here.
The NSA, which we haven't known really anything about, what the NSA knew about the 9-11 attacks before they happened, turns out they knew plenty.
It sure looks like they could have stopped that attack, no problem, am I right?
Well, that's right.
The NSA was ignored, virtually ignored, by the 9-11 Commission.
They paid absolutely no attention to NSA and focused all their attention on the CIA.
So I was astounded when I read the report that they had virtually no information on there on what the NSA's role was, which gave me a lot to do in terms of this new book.
So I spent a lot of time looking at NSA's role in the 9-11 attacks, and it really had an extraordinary role.
First of all, the NSA was the agency that picked up the first clue of 9-11, which was this message transmitted to the house in Yemen.
The house in Yemen was bin Laden's operations center and his communications center.
It's where most everything went in and came out in terms of planning operations.
For example, the East African embassy attack, they were dumped from this house in Yemen.
And so NSA was listening to this house in Yemen for several years, and then in December of 1999, there was a message that came out of the house.
It actually went into the house from bin Laden's people in Afghanistan, and what it was was an order sending two people cleaned out mid-air, Nawaf al-Hazmi, to a terrorist meeting in Kuala Lumpur.
And that was the first step in the long road to 9-11.
So NSA picked that up.
They were able to intercept the communications in and out of that house.
And so clean out mid-air, Nawaf al-Hazmi, they went to Kuala Lumpur.
The CIA began surveillance of them, and then they flew to Bangkok, where the CIA lost them.
And then when they left Bangkok, they flew to California and ended up settling in San Diego.
And while they were in San Diego, they were communicating back and forth to that same house in Yemen.
And one key reason is because Khalid al-Midar was married to the daughter of the person who owned the house.
The house was owned by Ahmed al-Hada, and his daughter Hoda was married to Khalid al-Midar.
So what you have is the two lead terrorists, the two first terrorists into the United States, Khalid al-Midar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, living in San Diego.
They're communicating back and forth to the house where al-Midar's wife lives, and she's pregnant at this time.
So he's concerned about the pregnancy and so forth and concerned about his wife and all that.
So he's calling back and forth quite a bit, and NSA is intercepting these calls.
So here's NSA, our most expensive intelligence agency, most highly technical intelligence agency, eavesdropping on these calls between Khalid al-Midar in San Diego and the house that's long been the target of NSA's eavesdropping in Yemen.
And NSA is either not making any effort to find out where they are, or else they do know where they are and they're not telling anybody.
And that goes on for close to two years, from January 2000 when they arrived in California to September 2001.
The worst comes later on when the terrorists, al-Midar and al-Hazmi, end up establishing the base of operations in Laurel, Maryland, of all places.
They end up moving to Laurel, Maryland to set up the final base of operations for the attack on the Pentagon.
And the other key occupant of Laurel, Maryland is the National Security Agency.
They have this odd situation of the terrorists and the NSA being basically across the highway from each other.
Yeah, it's a really shocking part of the book there.
During the last month before the attack.
Yeah, it's a really shocking part of the book where you talk about all the NSA employees driving on the highway to work every morning, and they must be driving past the motel where the hijackers are staying there.
Well, they are, because I've been to the motel a number of times and seen it.
You know, they were staying right there on Route 1, which is the main road through Laurel, Maryland, where all the employees go to work.
Now, on the San Diego thing, while they were still in San Diego, these two hijackers, to be clear, this is the Yemen safe house.
They've already traced this safe house to the attack on the embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 1998, to the USS Cole.
And now one of these hijackers is the son-in-law of the guy that owns the Yemen safe house.
The NSA is tapping the Yemen safe house's phone.
They must know, question mark, that they're being called from San Diego all the time.
Now, was it just because the NSA was obeying the law that they didn't do anything?
Because I thought that the NSA, just as well as the FBI, had the authority then even to go to the FISA court and say, looks like we have a terrorist inside the United States.
We want to tap his phone.
We've connected him to Osama bin Laden's safe house in Yemen.
Give us a warrant.
Why didn't they do that?
Well, that's the $64,000 question, and that's the question I pose in the book.
NSA had all the authority, and I've followed the NSA closer than anybody else.
It's my third book on NSA.
So NSA had all the authority to simply just get a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and listen to their complete email, telephone calls, everything, the whole time they were in the United States.
NSA would not have had any problem at all getting a FISA warrant.
I mean, you have to remember, this court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in 30 years has approved some 20,000 applications for eavesdropping within the United States.
It's only turned down about three.
So NSA wouldn't have had any problem going to the court and showing that these guys, for example, was living in the house of bin Laden's operations center, and that both he and al-Hazmi were being sent by bin Laden's operations center on a mission.
So, I mean, you show that, you could easily get a FISA warrant, but NSA never did.
They never bothered in the two years, almost two years they were in the United States, to get a FISA warrant.
And it seems unbelievable that they would not be able to know that they're in the United States.
I mean, if somebody calls me and I just look at my cheap little cell phone, I can see whether they're calling from West Virginia or California.
So for two years there were eavesdropping on these calls, and this has to be one of the most important targets of NSA in the world.
This house is associated, as you mentioned, with the two worst terrorist incidents after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1973, the coal and also the MSC bombing.
So these two people are associated with that house, very closely associated with this house.
Sent on a mission, NSA is listening to their calls.
I mean, they were listening to them while they were in the U.S., and eventually they moved next door to NSA, and still nothing is done.
Well, can you speculate as to why?
Did they think that maybe these guys were Saudi intelligence and it was okay to leave them alone, that they were all right, or anything?
I mean, is there any plausible explanation for this?
Well, the only explanation I could come up with was that Mike Hayden, who I'd spent a fair amount of time with, he was the director of NSA, was very, very afraid of ever being called before Congress and being accused of illegal domestic eavesdropping.
That happened in the mid-'70s.
It was the only other time an NSA director had been called before Congress, and the director in the mid-'70s was grilled over illegal eavesdropping, and he didn't want that to happen.
So he was very paranoid about doing any kind of domestic eavesdropping.
I actually interviewed him at the time that these guys were in San Diego.
Obviously I didn't know they were in San Diego.
But at that time I asked, how many people are you listening to in the U.S.?
And at the time he said less than half a dozen.
And his attitude was that anything that happens in the U.S., it's the FBI's responsibility, not ours.
So the only thing I could think is that they know these guys are in the U.S., they don't want to do anything that shows that they're eavesdropping on somebody in the U.S., so they never tell anybody that these guys are in the U.S.
That way they don't have to show that they're listening to somebody in the U.S.
Even though, as you've already explained, it would have been perfectly legal for them to be doing what they were doing and then go to the FISA court and make it known and everything else.
Well, not only would it be perfectly legal, I mean, if they expect the FBI to do it, how is the FBI supposed to do it if they don't know that they're in the U.S.?
Right.
That was the other problem.
The NSA never passed any of this information on to anybody else.
I interviewed the former head of the bin Laden unit, CIA, the thing called Alex Station, and he said that he kept trying to get NSA to give him the information coming out of that house, which would have included the information from the conversations from Al-Minar and Hosny in San Diego.
And that would be Tom Wilshire?
I'm sorry?
That's Tom Wilshire, the head of Alex Station?
No, at the time it was Mike Scheuer.
Oh.
So Scheuer was, before 9-11, Scheuer knew how important the house was.
He knew NSA was eavesdropping on the house.
He went to NSA, he went to the head of operations for NSA, Barbara McNamara, and asked for transcripts of the conversations coming into and going out of the house.
And the best the NSA would do would be give them brief summaries every once a week or something like that, just a report, not the actual transcripts or anything.
So he got very frustrated, he went back there, and they still refused.
So eventually the CIA built their own intercept facility in the Indian Ocean area, I think it was on Madagascar, where they were intercepting the same signals.
The whole thing was directed at that house to try to get the signals going in and out of that house, the telephone calls.
But because the technology was not as good as NSA's, they were only picking up half of the conversations, apparently downlinked.
They weren't able to get the uplink, which you need a satellite.
And so the CIA, Mike Scheuer, went back to NSA and said, look, we're able to get half the conversations here, but we still need the other half.
And NSA still wouldn't give them the other half.
I mean, just absurd, but this is what was going on.
And again, these are the things that the 9-11 Commission never came up with.
So you have the NSA there listening to the actual hijackers.
The hijackers end up moving next door to NSA for the last month of the operation, going to Gold's Gym, working out next to NSA employees.
They went to Safeway frequently.
They sent money back to the Middle East from the Safeway store on a Saturday, the same day all the NSA people in there are shopping.
Mohammed Adda had his final two summit meetings right there.
They actually had to take over three motels at one point.
And all this is going on basically across the Baltimore-Washington Parkway from NSA.
So these are the things that I think the 9-11 Commission should have come up with, and these are the things that I think still need a full investigation, not just one writer working on one book, but a full investigation into it.
Well, you know, at some point you say in the book that the CIA finally figured out Khalid al-Midhar's last name and his whole name, and they figured out that, oh, no, these guys, they're in America, something's got to be done, and that at that time I guess Scheuer was gone and the new boss at Alex Station was this guy Tom Wilshire, and that he refused for I think a year or more than a year to allow the FBI agents who were stationed at the Joint Counterterrorism Center to take that information and give it to the FBI.
Well, that's the other extraordinary thing.
I actually interviewed the FBI agent who was in there just to set the scene.
The CIA set up Counterterrorism Center, and then within the Counterterrorism Center they set up a special unit just to focus on Osama bin Laden.
It was called the Bin Laden Unit, but it was also given sort of a cover name.
It was Alex Station, Alex Station.
So Alex Station had mostly CIA people, CIA counterterrorism people in it, and it was run at one time by Mike Scheuer.
He was the one who created it, and then later taken over by somebody whose name is still classified, but Tom Wilshire was one of the senior people in there.
I think he was the deputy.
Oh, I see.
He wasn't the boss.
No, there was another person who was the actual head of the unit, and then they assigned two FBI agents to it.
The FBI, sort of this joint cooperative agreement, assigned two FBI agents to it.
The FBI agents were Mark Rossini and Doug Miller.
So now just to go back again to Yemen.
In December of 1999, NSA picks up this communication from bin Laden to the house in Yemen saying Khalid al-Midar, Nawaf al-Hazni, should go to this meeting in Kuala Lumpur.
So NSA passes that on to the CIA.
The CIA then sets up this surveillance in Kuala Lumpur.
At the same time, they got the Dubai government, because al-Midar was going to pass through Dubai, to copy his passport as he passed through the airport, as he passed through customs.
They copied the passport, and the passport photographs were sent to the CIA.
What was extraordinary was that he had a visa to the United States, a very recent visa that hadn't been used yet, to the United States.
Obviously, he's headed to the United States.
Why get a visa if you're not going to go to the United States?
He had a Saudi passport.
That information was passed from the CIA station chief in Dubai to the CIA station chief at Alec Station, the CIA headquarters.
In Alec Station were the two FBI agents.
Doug Miller saw that communication from the station chief in Dubai with the information on the U.S. visa and the passport.
So we have to notify—well, actually, he typed up a memorandum to the FBI headquarters, saying these guys are on the way to the United States.
Here's the copy of their visa.
We ought to be on lookout for them.
Because he's working, in essence, for the Alec Station, he's only assigned there, they control what goes in and comes out of Alec Station.
So before he can send a memo to FBI headquarters, it has to be approved by the head of Alec Station.
So at one point, he brings it up and says, I'm sending this over to FBI headquarters, so what's the problem with that?
But he was denied.
He was denied twice.
Tom Wilshire was one of those people that denied it at one point.
So then Mark Rossini goes up the next day and says, well, what's going on here?
I interviewed Mark Rossini.
I was, I think, the only one that's actually interviewed Mark Rossini about this.
And neither of these people, Doug Miller nor Mark Rossini, were ever interviewed by the 9-11 Commission.
So Rossini says, you know, what's going on here?
You know, why are you preventing us from sending this memo to FBI headquarters?
And one of the CIA people in there, one of the CIA officials responsible for the Alec Station, and, again, I can't use her name because it's still, you know, part of the Intelligence Identities Act, she put her hands on her waist, got very angry, and said to Rossini, look, the next attack is going to take place in Southeast Asia.
It's not going to take place in the U.S.
So when we want the FBI to know about it, we'll tell the FBI about it.
Then they tried, I think, once or twice more.
And then three months later, the Alec Station CIA people there got another notice, and it was this time definite that the two hijackers had flown to California and entered the U.S., and still they weren't allowed to.
The CIA never passed that information on to FBI.
They have this enormous, all this money we're paying for all these people, and, you know, you're getting all this really outrageous activity going on.
Well, you know, it sounds like, well, I can imagine the truthers yelling at me now.
So I don't want to accept too easily that this is all just infighting and incompetence.
I mean, this seems like the worst criminal negligence ever.
But then again, I remember asking Michael Shoyer one time what he thought of John O'Neill, who was the head of the New York Counterterrorism Office of the FBI, and he just got angry.
I mean, and he wasn't even, you know, as we discussed, he wasn't even in charge of the bin Laden unit anymore at the time in 9-11.
But when I mentioned John O'Neill, he got angry and said, 9-11 is John O'Neill's fault.
That is the guy at blah-da-rah.
So basically these guys at all these different agencies, they just can't stand each other and can't stand to help each other.
Is that all we're dealing with here?
They would rather let Americans be attacked than do their damn job because they would have to help somebody at another agency that they don't like?
Well, that's what it looks like to me.
Everybody I've talked to, you know, I mean, there's all kinds of conspiracy theories out there.
I just report what I find, and I don't report conspiracies if I don't find conspiracies.
So, you know, I try to write a credible report if I found a conspiracy.
Believe me, I'm the first one to be the first kid on the block to report it.
I've reported, you know, how many conspiracies.
I wrote about Operation Northwood.
Right.
You know, I don't have any hesitation on reporting whatever I find.
My first book they threatened me, the NSA threatened me twice with prosecution.
And obviously not very happy this time since there's going to be a congressional investigation as a result of some of the stuff coming out in the book.
Well, I hope that that's true.
Is that already a sure thing that they're going to hold some hearings?
Well, the hearings will be on the aspects of the book where I talk about domestic eavesdropping.
Yeah, well, we'll get to that in just a sec.
But, I mean, they should also be holding hearings on the 9-11 information.
I haven't heard anything from them on that, but both the Judiciary Committee and the Intelligence Committee have said that they're going to begin an investigation is what they said.
And apparently at some point hold hearings on this issue of domestic eavesdropping by NSA.
Yeah.
Well, I'm like you.
I'd be happy to say 9-11 was a conspiracy if I really thought so.
And, well, the fact that, for example, the truthers often cite Operation Northwoods, and I like to respond, well, the guy who broke that story, James Bamford, he doesn't seem to think that 9-11 was an Operation Northwoods type thing, do you?
No, and it's not really what I think.
I mean, I don't, that's the difference between the way I write and the way other people, you know, a lot of other people write.
They write what they think.
You know, this might have happened.
This might not have happened.
What I try to do is I work very, very hard to find as much, you know, evidence as I can about what happens and what doesn't happen, so I don't have an awful lot of speculation in whatever I write.
I mean, people can speculate whatever they want, but when I write my book, I put down facts.
You know, this person told me this, this person told me that.
Now, you can always say, oh, everybody's lying and everybody's making this up.
I've been doing this for 30 years.
The government is so incompetent.
I mean, I've found so much incompetence of the government.
What I haven't found is the ability of the government to put together elaborate conspiracies because they are so incompetent.
First of all, somebody would leak it at some point, I mean, come out with really good information.
Conspiracies take an awful lot of people to put together.
All those people at some point are tempted to say something.
Those are the kind of people that talk to me.
I talk to people who, you know, in this book here, I've talked to a lot of people that I've never talked before, NSA people that are facing a lot of problems from NSA if they're talking, and that's how I get the information.
And nobody I've talked to has ever said, you know, this is the U.S. government planning this attack on the Pentagon or planning the attack on the World Trade Center and all that.
So I'm not going to write that unless I find that out, and I haven't found that out.
What I have found out are a lot of other things.
Right.
I mean, that's what I'm getting at.
I mean, but, you know, it's a free country.
You know, on the other hand, I certainly don't object to people speculating because sometimes speculation is right, and sometimes even what I find out goes beyond my comprehension, like Operation Northwood, for example.
Right.
And now, I mean, and this is really what I'm getting at, is that you're a real reporter.
You follow the facts where they lead you, and as you've written in your previous book, A Pretext for War, the facts lead you to Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
True or false?
Yeah, exactly.
You know, I've been all over the place.
I actually went to Yemen.
We're actually doing this as part of a documentary, an hour documentary for the PBS program NOVA also.
I went to these places.
We actually went to Yemen.
We found that house, that house, which is a very hazardous thing to go in there and shoot this house, but we found where that house was.
We shot the house in Yemen that Khalid Ahmed and I were living, where the phone calls were going in and out of, and I went to Kuala Lumpur, where the next meeting took place.
I was in San Diego.
I followed the trail of these people all over.
I mean, I've done a lot of homework on this, in addition to interviewing all these people at NSA and CIA and all over the place.
So, I mean, I've spent a lot of time on this working, and believe me, I would not hesitate in a second if I found some U.S. government involvement or some conspiracy I would have reported, but what you see in the book is what I got in terms of information, and you can either accept it or not.
Right.
Well, and you know, Michael Shoyer told me before, I asked him whether he thought that there could even have been sort of a deliberate blind eye turned, and he told me he thought that the infighting on the CIA, NSA, FBI level was so fierce and childish that he would have been amazed if anybody at the White House had known anything to deliberately turn a blind eye to.
He would have been amazed if it even got that high.
Well, it's a point that I interviewed a lot of people in government over the years, and the infighting has been tremendous between these agencies.
Who gets credit for what?
And with NSA, there was this enormous effort to hide the fact that they were ever tapping anybody in the U.S., and that's one of the reasons why they were so adamant that they did not let anybody know that they were listening to these guys' conversations.
I mean, it's come out that there's no question that they were actually listening to them while they were in the U.S., but the point was they never told anybody where they were and never notified the FBI.
I mean, you know, the FBI could have easily found them.
These guys were listed in the telephone directory in San Diego.
All the work that would have been to find them, even without a caller ID or whatever, which NSA, you're paying $8 billion for an agency, certainly would know where a call is coming from.
All they had to do was call a directory assistant and say, I'm trying to find somebody by the name Nawaf al-Hazmi, and Nationwide Directory Assistance would have said, oh, there's one in San Diego at this address with this phone number.
That's how easy it was.
These guys registered their car in their own name.
When they moved next to NSA into the hotel, the Valencian Motel, they used their own names.
Sleet al-Mirar, Nawaf al-Hazmi, Mohammed Adda, all these other people used their own names.
They registered for Gold's Gym under their own name.
They didn't really hide.
You know, they were driving a car registered to them in Maryland.
It was a car with California tags.
It was rather incredible that all this stuff was going on literally under their windows.
Yeah, boy, I sure would like to see some hearings on this.
It's pretty clear that there was a cover-up in terms of the questions that the 9-11 Commission did not want to ask about, say, for example, why didn't Tom Wilshire allow the FBI agents at the Alex Station to go and deliver that document?
Or, you know, there's a hundred of them in this book that deserve to be looked into.
You know, for this documentary I'm doing for NOVA, I interviewed the FBI agent Mark Licini for the book, and then I went to the FBI public affairs person, John Miller, and said, you know, I want to interview Mark Licini and Doug Miller, the two FBI agents that were at Alex Station, for our programming.
I'll put them on the air.
And they refused.
And, you know, this is absurd, but it's almost hard to believe.
But the reason he says, I'm not going to allow you to do that, is because it would hurt the feelings of the CIA's public affairs official, and I don't really want to have bad feelings with him, Mark Mansfield, the head of public affairs for the CIA.
So that's the reason why the public's not allowed to know this.
Did you call Mark Mansfield and ask him if it would be okay with him?
I never bothered to call Mark Mansfield, because I've never gotten anything from Mark Mansfield.
They just don't.
I asked them if I could interview Mike Hayden, the CIA director, and they said no.
So, I mean, I did my bit.
I went to the FBI, asked to speak to them, and they said no.
I mean, they're active duty.
You know, there's no way that they can go on camera without getting permission, and they won't give me permission, so what can I do?
But, you know, if you want to know the story, just read the book.
I quoted him in the book.
Yeah, it's all in there.
Well, tell me this.
When is the NOVA program going to air?
Well, it's going to air January 13, and it will be really interesting, because I get into a lot of these things, and I do it visually, so you'll be able to see the house in Yemen.
You'll be able to see these places and call them for it.
In the NOVA, I get into the domestic eavesdropping.
We show you basically how this is all done in terms of eavesdropping on U.S. citizens.
I interview the NSA intercept operators, and so it's a very interesting program.
You know, I'll let you know before it comes on, but right now it's scheduled for January 13.
Yeah, hopefully maybe I can interview you again right around that time.
Really, I feel bad that the fact that we only have about 20 minutes left in this interview and there's so much more to cover here in this book that we're not going to be able to talk about, but if we can start with the post-9-11 domestic spying, as we already talked about, the NSA could walk into a FISA court and get a warrant for anybody, and I don't know if we mentioned this, but I think most people know that they could even start recording 72 hours before getting a warrant if they had to, and yet this was not good enough for the Bush administration, and that invoked David Addington's theory of the plenary powers of the president, that he can do whatever he wants, and Michael Hayden, as you detail in the book, who was the new head of the NSA, went right along and they decided to break the law and wiretap just about everything, it sounds like.
Well, that's what happened.
You know, here they go from not doing their job good enough before the 9-11 to then completely overreaching after 9-11.
The absurd thing here is they didn't have to do all that.
They could have found the hijackers under the old law, under the old foreign intelligence surveillance law.
There was nothing wrong with that law.
There was nothing wrong with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
It was just that they never went to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
So what they do after 9-11 is they basically get rid of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
NSA is given basically carte blanche to do anything it wants to in terms of eavesdropping on U.S. citizens, and eventually what happens is NSA hardwires itself into the U.S. domestic communications network, builds these secret rooms in places like the AT&T switch in San Francisco and other places around the country, where they're getting not just international communications, if they wanted just international communications, they could have built the secret room in this little facility where all the cables come in from the Pacific.
And again, in this NOVA program, we actually go there and show these facilities.
So all these cables come into the U.S. on the Pacific coast under this one beach, 80% of them, and go to a little building.
So that's where you want to build your listening post, your secret room, if you want to tap just international communications.
But NSA didn't do that.
It built it in San Francisco where it gets both domestic and international communications.
So now that they're hardwired into the U.S. communications system, what is it that they're listening for?
And then I interviewed two of the NSA intercept operators, which is very rare because these people hardly ever talk, and what's even rarer is for them to let me use their names.
But they were outraged by what was going on, and what they said was that they were given basic waivers to eavesdrop on Americans, and these are Americans calling other Americans.
These are calls mostly from outside the United States into the U.S., these American calls, but it's from one American to another that has nothing to do with terrorism.
I mean, these are soldiers in the Middle East calling home to their spouses, their wives or their husbands or their families or whatever.
There are journalists in the Middle East calling home to their families or calling to their editors or calling their sources, and aid workers like Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and business people.
All this, these people were not only picked up, but they were targeted, and once the number gets into the system, they don't take it out.
They leave it in there, so every call being made from then on gets picked up.
And, you know, they're telling me that they're picking up these very intimate personal calls like bedroom chatter between a husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend or whatever, and recording it all, transcribing it, storing it, and when the information gets stored, it gets stored forever.
Well, and this was in the news.
A lot of times it's a conversation on sexual, and they thought it was interesting.
They'd pass it around the intercept spaces, and everybody would get a laugh out of it.
Oh, that's fun.
Well, and this has gotten in the news, too, because I believe one of the ladies that worked at the Listening Post in Georgia, and this is your story that you broke and ended up being picked up in the news, I believe, that she said to her supervisor, Hey, listen, you know, this is American soldiers calling their wives back home, having phone sex and what have you, and, you know, why don't we knock this off and pay attention to something that matters?
And her supervisor told her, No, I'm under orders to get everything, and you just keep doing exactly what you're doing.
That's what she told me.
Yeah, that was the story that I came up with, ABC News broke it on the world news or on the different news programs last week.
But, yeah, when I interviewed her, that's what she said.
These are very patriotic people here.
Both the whistleblowers who allowed me to use their names had joined the military for patriotic reasons.
She joined after high school and then later got her bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia, and her master's degree, and then was recalled after 9-11.
And so she knew how it was done before 9-11, when she was on active duty for four years.
And then she was shocked, by the way, things were done after 9-11.
Before 9-11, they'd have to turn the intercept equipment off, turn the switch off when an American was picked up, and certainly not record it or pass it on and so forth.
And afterwards, it was complete obvious that they were told to continue to listen to Americans, to keep their numbers in the system so they're continually being picked up, and then the information gets stored.
And I also report in the book how NSA's getting so much information now, it has lost all the room to store it at Fort Meade, and they're building this brand-new, enormous data storage facility in Texas near San Antonio, and it's almost the size of the Alamo Dome.
Which is huge.
I've been to the OzFest there.
It's a gigantic Alamo Dome.
And you see, this is a big part of the story here that I think will really help people in the audience wrap their mind around what we're dealing with here.
These people are dealing in teraflops and petaflops and bazilliaflops worth of information.
You talk about every printed word on Earth over and over and over again kind of capacity here.
Exactly.
I mean, you can figure out how much information goes on in like a flash drive, a little thumb drive that you stick in the side of your computer, which is 2 gigabytes today, and in a couple of years it'll probably be 4 or 8 gigabytes.
So if you could put that kind of capacity in just a little thumb drive, you could think of how much capacity there could be in data storage in a building almost the size of the Alamo Dome.
What's also worrying is that this isn't going to be just for storage.
All you need is a few dozen people basically just to maintain the routers if all you're doing is just storing data in there.
But the NSA is planning to put about 1,400 people in there, which means it's not going to be just for storage.
It's going to be for data mining.
So all the information in there is going to be stored, but it's also going to be used to sift through to find, type out people's names, type out words, look for patterns and who's ordering what books and reading what magazines or whatever.
So it's going to be used for data mining as well.
The other interesting thing that I found down there was that the NSA held off naming San Antonio the place where they were going to build it.
And I was curious as to why they were holding off.
It looked like they were going to build it, and then they decided to hold off.
And then at one point they said, okay, now we've decided to put it down here.
And one of the reasons for that was because it looked like they were waiting for a decision by Microsoft.
And Microsoft decided, as soon as Microsoft decided, they were going to build their huge data center down there.
And that's when NSA said, okay, we'll build ours down here.
And so they're only going to be a couple miles apart.
They're going to be the exact same size.
And all it would take is a fiber-optic cable, a couple miles worth of fiber-optic cable to go from the Microsoft data storage facility to NSA's.
And you're tapping into all this additional communications, every time you surf the web, every time you go to a web page or a link.
It's all recorded.
Right.
And this is so important, too.
We're not just talking about phone calls.
You say in the book, e-mails, voice-over Internet protocol, like Skype and things like that.
You're browsing everything you click, your chats, your instant messenger things, any faxes, search terms that you put in the search engines, address books in your web mail account.
Yeah, it's a quote of a few years ago, 15, 20 years ago.
You know, you could go into a library, pull out library books, flip through chapters, put the books back and look elsewhere for books and then go into a magazine store and flip through a magazine.
It would be the equivalent today of having a camera on your shoulder while you do all those things so they see what books you're pulling out of the library, what magazines you're flipping through, and that's basically the same thing you're doing when you're going on Google.
You know, you're looking at different things and everything that you look at, there's a record of it.
And the government now is trying to get these companies to keep these records for years, 5 years, 10 years, whatever, just so they'll be able to go back and see what you did 5 years ago or whatever, what web page you looked at 5 years ago.
People think that stuff disappears into the ether.
It doesn't.
You flip onto a... go to Google, look up something.
There's a record of that.
It's going to be kept for a long time and that's going to be part of the government's data mine.
Yeah, well, we'd be lucky if they ever got rid of the stuff.
But answer me this though, Jim, because I thought they got busted.
James Risen broke the story in the New York Times and George Bush had to back down and announce that he was going to start obeying the law again.
I guess Congress changed the law and made all this legal?
Well, yeah, that's the sad thing about all this.
Congress could have done the right thing and strengthened the protections of the American public and what it did was it weakened them.
It took away a lot of the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
It looked like Congress was going to stand up against the government, stand up against the White House back in February when the temporary law expired and the bill came forward to pass a permanent law, basically turning into law what the Bush administration had been doing all along.
And the U.S. House was a bit encouraged because they resisted, which was very unusual for them, but then in July they all caved in and they all signed the bill, or not everybody, but certainly the majority did.
And they were all worried about being accused by their opponents in the upcoming election of being weak on terrorism or whatever, so they all caved in and passed this new FISA Amendment Act.
So it's the fear-mongering, I think, that drives everything.
And if you drive people, you cause enough fear about terrorism and all that, almost anything.
And here we have this situation where Congress could have done the right thing and out of this hyper-fear of retaliation for being weak on terrorism they decided to vote for it.
Well, you know, I've got to tell you, as I was reading The Shadow Factory and learning about all the software, the hardware, the PETA and TeraFLOPS and all this massive amount of data and supercomputers and stuff, then I read about all these different software programs where they can even tell how angry I am when I'm talking or match my voice no matter what different kind of phone or Skype or whatever I'm using and all these different programs.
But then I don't know whether to be more alarmed about that or what you write about the software VARINT and NARAS, which apparently have been created by people extremely close to intelligence in a foreign country.
They're the ones coming up with the programs that run our government's data mining?
Yeah, I mean that was extraordinary to me also, the fact that it's not actually NSA that does the physical tapping between the agency and AT&T or Verizon or the major telecom companies.
There's these small companies that specialize in what they call mass surveillance.
I mean that's what their brochures say, mass surveillance.
That's what they specialize in.
And two of them, NARAS and VARINT, the two that are NARAS does AT&T, VARINT does Verizon, they were formed in Israel.
These were foreign companies.
And there's some close ties between these companies and Israeli intelligence, the Israeli equivalent of NSA.
So not only are private companies doing the actual tapping, these are private companies based in a foreign country or that were founded in a foreign country.
And one of these companies, VARINT, is so bad that the founder of the company is now a fugitive from the United States, wanted for fraud and theft and other charges, and hiding out in Africa, Namibia at this point.
And two other senior executives from the company pled guilty to fraud and theft charges.
So these are the people who are actually their equipment and their software that is being used to tap into all this information.
And another shocking thing was that the Australian government was using VARINT.
And they got very angry because they found that VARINT was able to tap into the intercepted phone calls remotely, in other words, outside the country.
So that's very frightening if you think that you have a private company that's able to tap into your nation's telecom system remotely from outside the country.
Well, you know, I read this and Comfort, I mean, the companies change their names all the time.
I'm not sure what it's called anymore, but Converse Infosys.
I remember that from the Carl Cameron four-part special about the Israeli spies who were in the country preceding 9-11 and hundreds of them who were deported afterwards.
Wasn't that part of the same story about the Israeli intelligence basically having the ability to know what all the different American intelligence agencies know?
Well, yeah, Carl Cameron on Fox got into that a few years ago.
And I don't get into that part of the story.
You know, that was his part of the story.
What I do is I go into the way the situation is right now, and that's what I write about with VARINT and NARA.
But, yeah, I mean, a person should look at all that, put it all together, and it's very worrying.
And I've got to jump off in a few minutes here.
Yeah, I was just going to lament all the different subjects that we still need to cover, total information awareness and support for Middle Eastern dictatorships and Vietnam and China and all the security industrial complex and all the work, the revolving door of corruption here where government employees go make a few million dollars a year as the CEO of some company and join the government.
Would you like to address that?
Well, you know, if we could have another hour at some point.
The problem is I've got to do another program in about three minutes here, so I've got to jump off.
But there is so much, these are the kind of things that if you have an agency that's as secret as NSA, they get away with because they tell everybody we're too secret for anybody to know about, the Congress, the reporters, the public, everybody, and that's why this agency deserves a lot more attention.
And that's what I try to give the NSA in my most recent book on them, you know, The Shadow Factory.
Two other books I've written on NSA, and now this one sort of brings us back to the old days of domestic eavesdropping.
Yeah, well, and these books are written in the very best tradition of freedom of speech and people protecting their rights, good journalism like this, getting the truth out to people despite the official secret stamp on top.
And I thank you very much for the books and for the interview today.
I hope maybe we can follow up in a few weeks or something and cover some more of this.
Would that be all right?
Well, sure, I'd love to talk, and we've talked before, and I'd be happy to chat about this any time, Scott.
So I appreciate being on your show.
Great, thank you very much for your time today.
Bye-bye.
All right, folks, that's James Bamford.
He's the author of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, A Pretext for War, and the brand-newest one, The Shadow Factory, the Ultra-Secret NSA from 9-11 to the eavesdropping on America.
