09/30/15 – James Bamford – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
ScottHorton.org for the archives.
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Okay, next up on the show today is our old friend Jim Bamford.
Now, here's the thing about Jim.
He wrote The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and The Shadow Factory, all about the National Security Agency.
And, of course, also wrote the absolutely indispensable A Pretext for War, 9-11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies, which I hope you'll read.
And there's a bunch of great journalism by him at Rolling Stone and all over the place, too, if you search around.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you?
Great, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Very good to have you back on the show here.
And good to read you in The Intercept, the Glenn Greenwald joint over there, The Intercept.com.
Well, I thought it was First Look slash The Intercept.
I guess not.
The Intercept.com it is now.
A death in Athens.
Did a rogue NSA operation cause the death of a Greek telecom employee?
And so that's my first question for you.
Did it, in fact?
Well, according to the Greek government, which did a lot of investigation of it, they said there was definitely a connection between his death, the death of the Greek telecom engineer, and the NSA's secret bugging operation.
The bugging operation was discovered basically the day before he was found hanged in his apartment.
So, yeah, there's definitely a connection.
The question, however, is how did he die and what was the cause?
Right.
Okay, so I think I'll follow your lead in the article.
You put off the question of whether it was really a suicide or a murder to later on in the article.
You go ahead and start with who this guy was and what was he doing working at this telecom and then get into the Olympics of 2004 and the entry of the Americans into his story.
So go ahead and tell us, and I'll let you pronounce his name so I don't ruin it here.
Costas.
Well, it's a very fascinating story.
This has been a mystery that's really involved Greece in enormous scandal for a decade now.
Ten years ago was the Greek Olympics, the Summer Olympics.
And the Olympics went on and everybody was happy, and then six months later, or rather about four months later, it was discovered that there was a massive bugging operation going on, including targeting the top officials of the Greek government, the prime minister, his wife, the mayor of Athens, over 100 people.
So the question was, who did this bugging and when did it start and why was it done?
And again, this was a scandal that was of the Watergate variety in Greece.
It's probably the biggest scandal that's hit the country in a generation.
So for years, nobody had any idea who did this or why it was done.
They just found this massive piece of malware on the major communications company there, which was called Vodafone.
And incidentally, the day after all this was discovered, one of the engineers that worked there was found hanged in his apartment, was ruled originally as a suicide.
So there was a definite mystery as to whether he was involved and who did this and why.
And that's pretty much been going on for years.
And then I did this story for The Intercept.
I spent a few months on it working with a Greek reporter for one of the major Greek newspapers over there.
And so we've really gotten a number of answers, and that was largely as a result of finding a number of documents that had never been disclosed before in the Snowden archive, and also getting exclusive interviews with some really high CIA sources who worked in Athens at the time and also were involved in the operation.
So what it came down to, basically, is that the U.S. had gotten permission from the Greek government to install malware into the Vodafone mobile phone system just prior to the Olympics and to look for a possibility of terrorists during the Olympics, which was fine with the Greek government because they didn't have very much of a capability for doing eavesdropping, especially on a widespread basis looking for terrorism and so forth.
So the agreement was, you come in here, you can put your bugs into the system here, listen for any potential threats involving terrorism during the Olympics, and then once the Olympics are over, you pull the bugs, you take them out, and go on your merry way.
Well, after the Olympics, the NSA turned off its bugs and then it secretly turned them back on about a week later, and instead of searching for terrorists, they turned them on and began targeting the top leadership of the Greek government, obviously very secretly.
And in order to do that, it required a lot of effort.
You needed to find a way to manipulate the system to get it to perform this eavesdropping capability, and they did that by manipulating a system within the telecom network called Lawful Intercept.
It's too long to get into in this interview, but I'll just say that they found a way to bug a lot of phones using the telecom system.
Well, one of the key things that the NSA does when it does the overseas interceptions, those massive interceptions in foreign countries, is to recruit a local telecom employee, to get a local telecom employee to actually plant the bugs in the system because they're in there and they're able to get access to it.
So that was one of the ideas, was that maybe Costas, the person who ended up allegedly committing suicide after this was all over, maybe he was the one who actually planted it, or he could have been the one who discovered it and tried to report it.
So what you have is you have the NSA bugging the system that was discovered after the Olympics and nobody knew who did it, and that was the basis of the article to show that the U.S. was behind it and how the U.S. planted it and the terrible repercussions that came out afterwards, the huge scandal, person dying, and so forth.
Well, so why did they need somebody to install it, though, like a rogue employee recruited off the clock here or something like that, when, as you said, the Greek government said, fine, go ahead and tap it.
The only scandal was that they didn't remove it.
So how does that process work, where they just pretend to remove it, or they really did remove it and they needed to recruit somebody to go and put it back on there, or I'm lost?
Yeah, I mean, the Greek government gave them permission, but it wasn't like they put an advertisement in the newspaper.
The whole thing was extremely secret.
Oh, so even to put it...
I'm sorry, so even when it was authorized by the Greek government in the first place, they still needed to get a rogue employee secret.
It wasn't like a government order to the bosses of the company.
They had to just recruit a tech guy and have him insert a thumb drive or something.
Is that right?
That's right, because, as I said, the Greek government didn't have a capability to do this.
The Greek government couldn't call up Vodafone and say, oh, hey, you know...
No, but, I mean, they could order them to go along with the NSA, right, the bosses of the company, or it was just too secret for that.
So the plan is just...
Well, that's what nobody knows at this point.
That's what the... still part of the mystery is.
Who within the government...
I mean, who within the company knew about it?
Now, the key thing is, you have to get somebody in the company at that point, because they had to install this piece of malware.
Right.
All right, now, hold it right there, Jim.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with more from Jim Bamford with this great new article in The Intercept.
Did a rogue NSA operation cause the death of a Greek telecom employee?
And when we get back, we'll find out about this employee and his death.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Lucky you and me, we've got James Bamford on the line.
So glad to know that you're working with Greenwald and them at The Intercept and that you have access to that Snowden archive, because as soon as I wondered, who's giving Greenwald this stuff?
I wondered if they're giving it to Bamford, too.
And so now I'm very happy to know that you've got access for reporting your stories here.
At The Intercept, did a rogue NSA operation cause the death of a Greek telecom employee?
Answer, apparently, yes.
Whether it was murder-suicide, don't know yet.
That's what I was about to ask, Jim.
But first, can you just tell us about this guy?
It's Costas, you say his last name.
It's pronounced in Greek, I think it's pronounced Tselakadias.
He was Costas Tselakadias, and he was a very experienced engineer.
He was one of the most experienced engineers within the Greek telecom company, Vodafone.
And he was involved one way or another, which was what was determined by the Greek government.
He was involved either as the person who planted the malware on behalf of the NSA or else the person who discovered it and tried to report it.
So one way or the other, he was involved, and that's the key question.
What caused him to either commit suicide or, as two medical examiners, including a former medical examiner from the San Francisco medical examiner's office, said that the indications are that it's not suicide.
It's a very big mystery, and that's one of the reasons I wanted to write the article and sort of bring these things out.
And as the article says, it was a rogue operation, which, again, is a really interesting fact here.
Rogue operation meant that it was not really authorized.
Hold that one second, because I want to talk about the dead victim here for a second, because that's all very important.
I want to give you plenty of time to elaborate on it.
I think it's important to note, as you're saying, there's reason to indicate, there's expert reason to indicate that maybe he was murdered.
But I think it's important to emphasize that at least if it was a suicide, the probable cause of that would be the American.
And this is just some guy, right?
This is not a national government-level cop in Greece.
This is just some tech expert, a civilian, a normal human being with a normal job who got put into this position by American intelligence, where it turned out he had betrayed his country to an incredible degree, which he surely didn't know that they were going to be tapping the highest levels of leadership or whatever.
He wouldn't have been told that.
But if it was a suicide, it was because they used him up and threw his worthless life away when they were done with it.
And then that's the gentle explanation.
The worst explanation is they murdered him before he could talk.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And I think that's why this is a very important story, because as you mentioned, one of the likely scenarios here is that he's working happily at his job.
He's working hard because the Olympics are coming and he's going to have to develop all these new systems to help the journalists and so forth when they come to work on the Olympics.
And then all of a sudden somebody whispers in his ear that the government has allowed the NSA to plant a massive bug in the system, and he's the one with administrator access and knows the system, and he's the one that can do this.
And would he help doing it?
It's a very patriotic thing.
We're trying to catch terrorists.
So he goes ahead and does it, and nobody tells him that it's supposed to end at the end of the Olympics, and nobody tells him after the Olympics is over that they've switched, that they're secretly doing it now, the NSA's secretly doing it now, and they've switched from looking for terrorists to eavesdropping on his own government, the top leaders of his own government.
And then he finds that out after the bug is discovered.
So here's a person who is a very loyal, patriotic Greek citizen who suddenly discovers that he's the guy responsible for bugging the senior members of government, the enormous Watergate-style scandal, and he's at the center of it.
And there was a lot of shouting that went on.
He threatened to quit.
He sent his girlfriend a text message saying, I have to get out of here, it's a matter of life and death and all that.
And then the day after it's exposed, he commits suicide.
So, you know, it could be a number of scenarios.
He could have been the one that planted it, like I said, felt guilty because he was used and, as you said, thrown away.
Or he could have discovered it and said, I'm going to report this before it was actually made public.
And somebody said, no, you're not, it'll be a huge scandal.
We'll all be involved.
And so that's the question.
I have no medical knowledge.
All I'm doing is saying basically what these coroners said.
And one of them was the former medical examiner from San Francisco.
Another was a professor at the medical school in Athens, a professor of forensic medicine.
So you have in your article, you're reporting two different experts who are disputing the original conclusion of suicide because of the marks on his neck.
That's right, yeah.
And, again, I'm just taking what they said.
I understand that.
And they don't have any reason to make it up or anything.
But, again, that's one small area of the article.
The other aspects of the article deals with who did it and why.
I just want to make sure it didn't sound to the audience like you're out on a limb or something.
All you're doing is repeating facts, which is what these experts told you.
You're basically, you're quoting them.
You're drawing conclusions.
And, yeah, I don't mean to say that's the heart of the article.
But he is the victim.
That's right.
That's why I said the death in Athens.
That's the key aspect here.
Because everybody talks about NSA operations.
It's just signals going from here to there.
There's human beings involved.
And this is really the first example of how these systems can actually cause enormous harm to human beings.
And this is a person who died.
So that's one of the reasons why this is such an important story, I think.
Because it takes away this whole theory that, oh, these are just technical operations that don't involve any human beings.
Well, you know, tell that to Acosta and his family.
So I think that's one of the main factors that has to come out of this article.
Of course, the other aspect.
Well, actually, let me ask you, is there any way you could stay one more segment?
I mean, I could keep recording you into the break here, but I'd rather keep you another segment if you have the time.
One more?
Yeah, that's fine.
Okay.
Okay, great.
Hang tight through this break.
And then we'll be right back, y'all, with James Bamford, this very important article, Did a Rogue NSA Operation Cause the Death of a Greek Telecom Employee?
And we're going to find out about the NSA sneaking around behind the CIA's back.
Question?
Hmm?
All right.
Hang on a minute.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jim Bamford, the author of The Shadow Factory, and this article at theintercept.com.
Did a rogue NSA operation cause the death of a Greek telecom employee?
Answer, yes, one way or the other.
Yes, it did.
And now the question, Jim, is about the operation, which I think you're portraying as itself illegal under Greek and maybe even under American law, the way this thing worked.
But I know that I got the question.
I know the answer is no to the question I asked before the break about who was going behind, who's back there.
But I'll let you explain.
Go ahead, please.
Well, normally in foreign countries, when an intelligence operation is conducted either by NSA, CIA, the CIA, or any other of the intelligence agencies, the person who is responsible and basically in charge is the CIA chief of station.
He's sort of the manager of all intelligence operations in a country.
So the CIA chief of station is responsible largely to the ambassador for any intelligence operations that are conducted.
So if the NSA, for example, wants to do a particular bugging in a country, perform an eavesdropping operation, it would normally get the approval of the CIA chief of station.
And if it's serious enough, then it also needs the approval of the ambassador.
Well, what happened in this case, which was extremely unusual, because a number of former CIA officials who I talked to said this hardly ever happens.
Most of them said they'd never heard of it happening before.
But in this case, the NSA went behind the CIA chief of station's back.
In other words, they did the operation without getting any kind of approval from the CIA chief of station or the ambassador.
So it was a rogue operation.
It was performed without any authority.
Now, this is the part where they actually turned the system back on.
The original bugging, the bugging during the Olympics looking for terrorism, that had been approved.
What hadn't been approved was turning the system back on and targeting the top leaders of the Greek government, which was a friendly allied government.
So that was extremely unusual, and that came from a very high-level intelligence source that was involved in the operation, who was telling me that the CIA was extremely surprised when they discovered the NSA had been doing this behind their back.
Wow.
And so the CIA and the embassy were both completely cut out, and the NSA was just doing it on their own accord?
It was totally on NSA's accord.
They had no permission from either the CIA or the Director of National Intelligence or the ambassador or anybody.
They just did it.
Later, one of the senior CIA people called one of the senior NSA people and asked what's going on, and they just said, oh, we forgot to tell you about this.
Well, they all got in really bad trouble, right?
Well, nobody knew.
Again, this was all secret until my article came out, so nobody knew about it.
Internally, it's not like the CIA complained to the NSA bosses and the NSA people involved were reprimanded or anything like that at all, right?
Well, I really don't know.
I know the CIA was very angry at the very highest levels that this was done without their permission.
What happened at NSA, I don't know.
I interviewed the person who was director at the time, General Hayden.
All he said was, I can't talk about that.
I just can't talk about that.
And I interviewed the person who was deputy director, Chris Engels, and he also wouldn't talk about it.
But he did say, Engels did say that, yes, anytime the NSA performs an operation overseas, it gets the permission and the oversight of the CIA chief of station.
So that was another factor here.
You have one factor, death being caused, another factor, the NSA going behind their host government and turning this on illegally.
And then the third factor is that they did it without even the knowledge or permission of their own government.
And now there have been indictments in Greece, right?
And that's of the CIA guys or the NSA guys?
Now, the Greeks, this came as a very big shock to the Greeks when they discovered this massive wiretapping.
As you can imagine, if somebody discovered that the president of the United States, the vice president, the president's wife, the mayor of Washington, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all these people were secretly being bugged by somebody, it would be an enormous scandal.
So there were five investigations that took place afterwards.
But because the bug was removed, that really was a really difficult aspect during the investigation.
Had they left the bug in, they would have been able to trace it to who was actually doing the eavesdropping by finding out where the signals were going and so forth.
But because as soon as it was found it was removed, the people who were behind it were able to turn off their phones and hide the evidence.
So it's taken five investigations and ten years, and they finally narrowed it down by tracing the signals, tracing the cell phones, tracing all these things that took a lot of technological capability.
They narrowed it down to the U.S. Embassy, and then within the embassy they pointed the finger at one of the CIA officials whose sort of digital fingerprints were found on the evidence.
One of the cell phones that was purchased that was used for the bugging, what happens is you bug the system, and the system sends the duplicate phone calls of the prime minister and everybody else out to basically throw away phones that the NSA had bought, had purchased.
And they traced one of those phones to this person at the embassy, a guy named William Basil.
And he was one of the CIA officials at the CIA station at the Greek Embassy.
What makes him extremely interesting, and nobody knew about him really much until I began investigating him, and I found out a great deal about him, he's ethnically Greek.
His parents came from a small island, Karpathos, in Greece, and his father moved to the United States before he was born, so Basil was born in the United States.
But then when he was nine years old he went back with his father and his father's new wife back to Karpathos.
And then he came back to the United States when he was a teenager and joined the army for five years and then became a deputy sheriff in Baltimore County.
And then he joined the CIA's security division as a polygraph operator.
And he did that for many years, 10 or 15, 20 years or so.
And he got tired of it and he wanted to get into the D.O., the Director of Operations, where all the spying was done.
And because of his ethnic background, he had obviously fluent in Greek, he knew the culture, knew the people well and all that.
So they accepted him into the D.O., the Director of Operations, and they sent him off to Greece as an undercover CIA person, masquerading as a State Department employee at the embassy.
And his job, and I interviewed one of his colleagues in Greece, one of his CIA colleagues who worked with him very closely, and he said, yeah, his job was to recruit sources for the CIA, recruit local Greeks.
And he would drive around in an SUV.
He had guns strapped to his side.
He had another gun on his ankle.
He wore a bulletproof vest.
That's what his job was.
And the person said he was the best recruiter the embassy had.
And so he would have logically been one of the people who would have been used to recruit the inside source at Vodacom, because he's Greek, he spoke Greek, he was ethnically Greek, and he was a CIA, and that's what the CIA does.
I interviewed the senior CIA official at CIA who was involved in this operation, and he said, yeah, that's the way it works.
The NSA doesn't really do the recruiting inside.
That's the CIA's job.
They do the human side of the business.
They go in, they recruit.
So the part that the CIA didn't know was that they had left it on, the NSA had left it on rather than shutting the thing down after the Olympics were over then.
Yeah, you could imagine that Basil, I mean, he wouldn't, even if he was just sort of a worker bee, he wouldn't have necessarily known what communication was being decided in Washington, who approved it.
He was just being told by whoever to go recruit somebody because they were playing with him.
He likely recruited the person before this all began, when everything was legal.
The problem was nobody told anybody that this was over, that the bug should have been removed and so forth.
So Basil may not have even known that the bug should have been removed.
So, again, this is, what I'm trying to do is bring out this mystery so that the Greek government can start looking deeply into this.
There was a huge front page story, 4,000 words, yesterday when my story came out in the front page of the Greek equivalent of the New York Times.
And another big story on Der Spiegel.
So Europeans are taking this very seriously.
There was another story today in The Guardian on it.
So good work.
This is very serious.
This was a friendly ally that we had that we basically shoved a sid to, shoved a sid in their back because we went behind their back and started bugging their own top leaders illegally.
And without even the permission of the ambassador or the chief of station.
So it's something that should be looked into.
And finally, as you mentioned earlier, the Greeks, just last February, issued an arrest warrant for Basil.
First time it's ever been done, except for one time in Italy it issued arrest warrants for CIA people.
But other than that, this is the first time an ally had issued an arrest warrant for a CIA person.
And then the investigation, the final investigation after ten years, was just completed last June, the end of June.
So this is just coming to a head now in Greece, even though it happened ten years ago.
The actual investigation is just coming to a head.
Now they have a new prime minister who, when this happened, it was under a conservative government in Greece, and now it's a more left-wing government in Greece.
So there may be an incentive to look back and see what went on.
All right.
With that, we've got to stop because we're about to be back on again after this break we're recording through.
But very happy to have you back on the show, Jim.
Really appreciate your journalism here and your time today.
Great.
Thanks, Doug.
Great being on the show.
Thanks.
All right, y'all.
That is the great James Bamford.
He's the author of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, A Pretext for War, The Shadow Factory, and this article, Did a Rogue NSA Operation Cause the Death of a Greek Telecom Employee?
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