by Wayne Madsen

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FOR AT LEAST HALF A CENTURY, THE US HAS BEEN
INTERCEPTING AND DECRYPTING THE TOP SECRET
DOCUMENTS OF MOST OF THE WORLD'S GOVERNMENTS

It may be the greatest intelligence scam of the century: For decades, the US has routinely intercepted and deciphered top secret encrypted messages of 120 countries. These nations had bought the world's most sophisticated and supposedly secure commercial encryption technology from Crypto AG, a Swiss company that staked its reputation and the security concerns of its clients on its neutrality. The purchasing nations, confident that their communications were protected, sent messages from their capitals to embassies, military missions, trade offices, and espionage dens around the world, via telex, radio, teletype, and facsimile. They not only conducted sensitive albeit legal business and diplomacy, but sometimes strayed into criminal matters, issuing orders to assassinate political leaders, bomb commercial buildings, and engage in drug and arms smuggling. All the while, because of a secret agreement between the National Security Agency NSA) and Crypto AG, they might as well have been hand delivering the message to Washington. Their Crypto AG machines had been rigged so that when customers used them, the random encryption key could be automatically and clandestinely transmitted with the enciphered message. NSA analysts could read the message traffic as easily as they could the morning newspaper. The cover shielding the NSA-Crypto AG relationship was torn in March 1992, when the Iranian military counterintelligence service arrested Hans Buehler, Crypto AG's marketing representative in Teheran. The Iranian government charged the tall, 50ish businessman with spying for the "intelligence services of the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America." "I was questioned for five hours a day for nine months," Buehler says. "I was never beaten, but I was strapped to wooden benches and told I would be beaten. I was told Crypto was a spy center" that worked with foreign intelligence services. Despite prolonged interrogation, Buehler-who had worked for Crypto AG for 13 years and was on his 25th trip to Iran -apparently maintained his ignorance. "I didn't know that the equipment was bugged, otherwise the Iranians ould have gotten it out of me by their many _methods._ " With millions of dollars in contracts and a major international spy operation at stake, the company was eager to make the incident and Buehler go away, even though the salesman had brought in 40 percent of Crypto's 100 million Swiss franc sales revenue. Crypto bought Buehler's freedom with a $1 million payment to the Iranians, returned him to Switzerland, and then, astonishingly, fired him and ordered the bewildered salesman to repay the bond. The cover-up backfired, however, when current and former Crypto employees came to Buehler's defense and shared their first-hand knowledge of manipulated cipher equipment. "I hold proofs [sic] of the rigging of code machines," said an unidentified former Crypto AG engineer. "Fifteen years ago, I saw American and German engineers doctoring our machines. It took me some time until I was certain about the manipulations. The proofs: technical documents. ... I put them in a bank safety deposit box. Then I informed the federal prosecutors_ office in Berne. There were many conversations. Suddenly, these contacts were broken off and the affair petered out." The engineer told another reporter: the schemes and the cipher keys were created by them [NSA and BND (Bundesnacrichtendienst-the German intelligence service)]. I immediately, discreetly, notified the Swiss prosecutors. There was an investigation. I was never able to find out he result. Today, the Buehler affair brings everything out in the open again. And, I'm afraid. What happened to Hans Buehler could happen to any other salesperson of Crypto AG. It's not a question of attacking this company; it's a question of saving lives. ... When the Swiss media began to reveal the background of Buehler's story, Crypto AG responded with a lawsuit in an attempt to quash the story and muzzle Buehler. The suit was settled days before former Crypto engineers were to testify that they thought the machines had been altered. The parties agreed not to disclose the settlement and Crypto sought to reassure its clients. Informed sources in Switzerland and the Middle East confirmed that Crypto AG settled because it, and the NSA and BND, didn_t want to reveal anything in court. Nevertheless, the damage to Crypto AG's credibility was already done. Customers from Saddam Hussein to the Pope grew nervous. Informed of the details around the Hans Buehler incident, the Vatican Ñ which uses Swiss cipher machines to secure diplomatic communications transmitted from the Holy See to the many papal nuncios around the world-showed a marked lack of charity. An official branded the perpetrators "bandits!" SWISS CHEESE NEUTRALITY
Although the Iranians may have been technically wrong about Buehler's complicity in the massive deception, they were right that something was rotten at Crypto AG. And even before the firing of Hans Buehler, some of Cypto's engineers were ambivalent about secret deals with the NSA. "At first, I was idealistic," said Juerg Spoerndli, who left Crypto in 1994. "But I adapted quickly. ... The new aim was to help Big Brother USA look over these countries_ shoulders. We_d say, _It's better to let the USA see what these dictators are doing._ " Soon, however, Spoerndli grew apprehensive over the manipulation. "It's still an imperialistic approach to the world. I don_t think it's the way business should be done." Ruedi Hug, another former Crypto AG engineer, was also critical. "I feel betrayed," he declared. "They always told us, _We are the best. Our equipment is not breakable, blah, blah, blah. ... Switzerland is a neutral country._ "
Apparently not. A document released in 1995 by Britain's Public Records Office indicates that Switzerland and nato concluded a secret deal in 1956. The "Top Secret" document, dated February 10, 1956, with the reference "prem 11/1224," was written by the famous British World War II figure, Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery. While "Monty" was a vice-commander of nato, he discussed a secret alliance with Swiss Defense Minister Paul Chaudet. In peacetime, Switzerland would be officially neutral, but in wartime, it would side with nato. A US document released in 1995 shows Switzerland's importance to US national security. A Presidential directive on national security prepared for President Truman states that "Switzerland ... delivers precision instruments and other materials necessary for the armament of the USA and NATO countries [emphasis added]." Germany's BND, too, has apparently cooperated with the US encryption rigging scheme through Siemens Defense Electronics Group of Munich. A previous director of Siemens called Crypto AG a "secret Siemens daughter," while a former Crypto AG financial director said, "the owner of the firm [Crypto] is the Federal Republic [of Germany]." The Siemens connection to Crypto was remarkably incestuous. Siemens provided technical assistance for the machine manipulation process. Suspicion about the German electronics giant's role in Crypto's operations was heightened when it was reported that Siemens helped raise the $1 million to spring Buehler from his Teheran prison cell. In fact, after revelations of the Crypto-Siemens association hit the Swiss press, Crypto's managing director Michael Grupe informed the employees that the advisory board to Crypto's board of directors was being dissolved. The two advisers-Alfred Nowosad and Helmut Wiesner-were both full-time Siemens employees. With the world media describing the company as a silent partner of German and American signals intelligence (sigint) agencies around the world, Grube announced that "Crypto is changing its profile." The German government's contribution to the encryption rigging scheme also included its pressuring another Swiss firm, Gretag Data Systems AG, to allow a "red thread" program to be installed in the encryption software. "Red threading" is the software equivalent of sending in a Greek Trojan horse.18 Once owned by AT&T, this encryption manufacturer was acquired in 1995 by Information Resources Engineering (IRE), Inc. of Baltimore, Maryland.19 Interestingly, IRE is staffed by a number of ex-NSA cryptographic engineers. A third Swiss encryption company, Info Guard AG, was fully acquired by Crypto AG on June 16, 1994. Info Guard, which had been 50 percent owned by Crypto AG, primarily sells encryption units to banks in Switzerland and abroad. Although German and American sigint agencies were involved in manipulating Crypto's cipher machines, Motorola, one of the NSA's major US contractors, performed the actual technical lteration, according to a former Crypto AG chief engineer who was personally involved in the manipulation process. CRYPTO HUDDLE
Once the cipher machines were rigged to include the secret decryption key, the BND and NSA codebreakers could use the transmitted key to read any message sent by Crypto AG's 120 country customers. One previous Crypto AG employee contends that all developmental Crypto AG equipment had to be sent for approval to the NSA and to the German Central Cipher Bureau (Zentralstelle für Chiffrierung [ZfCH]), now the Federal Information Security Agency (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik [BSI] which is also Department 62 of the BND) in Bad Godesberg, near Bonn. In other cases, Crypto AG was apparently forced to market encryption equipment manufactured in the US, sent to Crypto, and passed off as Swiss equipment. In the 1970s, as Crypto was moving from electro-mechanical to computerized crypto units, a former Crypto AG engineer in Switzerland inspected one of the first prototype computerized machines sent from the US. He remarked that since the code could be easily broken, he found the machine useless. But when he told his superiors that he could improve the encryption process if he was given access to the mathematical functions, two US cryptographic "experts" refused to disclose the information. According to a confidential Crypto AG memorandum, one of the NSA "experts" may have been Nora L. Mackabee, an NSA cryptographer who is now retired on a horse farm in Maryland along with her husband Lester, another retired NSA employee. Between August 19 and 20, 1975, three Crypto AG engineers huddled with Mackabee (identified as representing "IA" Ñ most likely "intelligence agency") along with three Motorola engineers and one other American, Herb Frank. One Motorola engineer recalled that Frank was probably from another US intelligence agency based in northern Virginia but described him as a non-technical person who seemed to be making the administrative arrangements for Mackabee.
Crypto engineer Juerg Spoerndli, who was responsible for designing the firm's encryption equipment, had heard from older engineers about the visits in earlier years by mysterious Americans. He concluded that NSA was ordering the design changes through German intermediaries. He confirmed the manipulation and admitted that in the late 1970s, he was "ordered to change algorithms under mysterious circumstances"25 to weaken his cipher units. PRIVACY? HA!
Although the Buehler incident lent credence to the NSA Trojan Horse theory, it was not the first time that suspicions were raised. Teheran had become concerned in 1987 when US official claimed "conclusive evidence that Iran ordered the kidnapping" of ABC News Beirut correspondent Charles Glass.26 Washington's alleged proof was coded Iranian diplomatic cables Ñ intercepted by the NSA Ñ between Teheran and the Hezbollah (Party of God) terrorist group in Lebanon via Iran's embassies in Beirut and Damascus. The next year, when a terrorist bomb brought down PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, it seems the NSA gained information by intercepting the communications of Iranian Interior Minister Ali Akbar Mohtashemi. It was apparently these messages that implicated Iran, not Libya. One intelligence summary, prepared by the US Air Force Intelligence Agency, cites Iran's Mohtashemi as the mastermind. Released in redacted form pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (foia) request by lawyers for the bankrupt Pan American Airlines, it states: Mohtashemi is closely connected with the Al Abas and Abu Nidal terrorist groups. He is actually a long-time friend of Abu Nidal. He has recently paid 10 million dollars in cash and gold to these two organizations to carry out terrorist activities and was the one who paid the same amount to bomb PanAm Flight 103 in retaliation for the U.S. shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus. Mohtashemi has also spent time in Lebanon. An Israeli intercept of Iranian diplomatic coded communications between Mohtashemi's Interior Ministry in Teheran and the Iranian embassy in Beirut (where Mohtashemi once served as ambassador) revealed Ñ more than two years before Buehler was arrested by Iran Ñ that the Shi_ite cleric transferred $1.2 to $2 million used for the bombing of PanAm 103 to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command headed by Ahmed Jibril. Such revelations must have made the Iranians extremely suspect of the security of their diplomatic traffic. The role of Israel may be explained by a little-reported intelligence alliance. NSA maintains a link with the Israeli sigint entity, "Department 8200," located in northern Tel Aviv at Herzliya. The sigint link is said to involve the British Government Communications Headquarters (gchq) base on Cyprus. Israel's ability to crack the Iranian Crypto AG codes indicates that Israel had access to the key decoding programs. The ease with which the West was reading Iranian coded transactions obviously meant that someone in Israel's sigint services possessed the decryption keys. Then in 1992, Buehler was arrested. As the Swiss authorities struggled to put the pieces together, they at first believed that the Iranian secret services were retaliating for the arrest in Switzerland of Zeynold Abedine Sarhadi, an employee of the Iranian embassy in Berne and a nephew of former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani. Swiss police had arrested Sarhadi in early 1992 and were planning to extradite him to France to face trial for the 1991 assassination in Paris of former Iranian Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar. On August 7, 1991, one day before Bakhtiar was found dead with his throat slit, the Teheran headquarters of the Iranian Intelligence Service, vevak, transmitted a coded message to Iranian diplomatic missions in London, Paris, Bonn, and Geneva, inquiring "Is Bakhtiar dead?" The Iranians concluded from Western press reports that Briish and American sigint operators had intercepted and decoded the message (as reported by L_Express of Paris) and knew that Teheran was behind the assassination. They realized that their code had been broken,30 looked to their Crypto AG cipher machines, and picked up Buehler. According to one European source, they may also have been tipped off by Stasi files of the ex-East German regime that found their way to Iran and revealed the Crypto AG ruse. In any case, the Iranians immediately began grilling prisoner 01228-1 about the role he and his company played in giving Iranian and Libyan codes to the US. Iran knew that Bakhtiar's assassination had compromised the intelligence functions of the Iranian UN mission and embassy in Geneva. The NSA had already identified one of the assassins, Mohammed Azadi, from intercepts of his phone calls from a pay phone in the town of Annecy in Savoy and an Istanbul apartment to the Iranian diplomatic mission in Geneva. On December 6, 1994, a special French terrorism court convicted two Iranians of murdering Bakhtiar, but strangely, it acquitted Sarhadi. "Justice has not been entirely served [for] reasons of state," complained Bakhtiar's widow bitterly. Those "reasons" may have included a tacit agreement among France, Switzerland, the German BND, and the NSA to spare Sarhadi in order to avoid producing captured transmissions and preserve the questionable secrecy surrounding the Crypto AG cipher manipulation program. It was not only the "rogue states" that were targeted. During the sensitive Anglo-Irish negotiations of 1985, the NSA's British counterpart, the gchq, was able to decipher the coded diplomatic traffic being sent between the Irish embassy in London and the Irish Foreign Ministry in Dublin. It was reported in the Irish press that Dublin had purchased a cryptographic system from Crypto AG worth more than a million Irish pounds. It was also reported that the NSA routinely monitored and deciphered the Irish diplomatic messages. Later, during the Falklands War, British gchq operators were able to decrypt classified Argentine message traffic because the Argentineans were using rigged Crypto AG cipher machines. Former British Foreign Office minister Ted Rowlands publicly stated that gchq had penetrated Argentine diplomatic codes. US: CRYPTO BULLY
If it turns out that the extent of communications interception is as broad as suspected, the international implications are profound. Every country in the world that used secure communications is potentially affected. Some have sought to abandon Crypto AG, but found their options limited. The US had at times required purchase of specific machines as a condition for favors. Pakistan was allegedly granted American military credits with only one provision, that it buy its encryption equipment from Crypto AG. Additionally, "It is not unheard of for NSA to offer preferential export treatment to a company if it builds a back door into its equipment," says one person with long experience in the field. "I_ve seen it. I_ve been in the room." Several countries abandoned Crypto AG but failed to ensure secrecy. The Libyans switched to Gretag units after the NSA cited secret communications to allege Libyan involvement in the 1986 La Belle disco bombing in West Berlin. One senior US official said the fact that the Libyans were making their codes more difficult to crack would "make our job tougher." But the NSA seemed to have the Gretag base covered as well. According to one knowledgeable cryptographic industry expert, NSA's program to co-opt the services of encryption manufacturrs probably extends to all those within reach of NSA operatives. US cryptographic companies would be definite candidates for such participation. The NSA program also likely extends to companies in nato and pro-US countries which have close relationships with GCHQ, NSA, and the BND. Even neutral countries_ firms are not off-limits to NSA manipulations. A former Crypto AG employee confirmed that high-level US officials approached neutral European countries and argued that their cooperation was essential to the Cold War struggle against the Soviets. The NSA allegedly received support from cryptographic companies Crypto AG and Gretag AG in Switzerland, Transvertex in Sweden, Nokia in Finland, and even newly-privatized firms in post-Communist Hungary.39 In 1970, according to a secret German BND intelligence paper, supplied to the author, the Germans planned to "fuse" the operations of three cryptographic firms-Crypto AG, Grattner AG (another Swiss cipher firm), and Ericsson of Sweden. Securocrats often turn to the boogeyman of "rogue" nations in order to justify the expense and ethical necessity of eavesdropping on all forms of international communication, but in reality many intercepts involve messages by neutral or allied nations. NSA's 1993 release of the World War II era "magic" intercepts under foia pressure revealed that US military intelligence read not only messages by Axis nations, but also intercepted and decrypted the top secret communications of Allied and neutral nations. Switzerland was among the more than 30 countries whose messages were being read. Since Swiss-made cipher machines were used by many governments at the time, it is likely that the US has been reading such messages for over half a century. An early example is the use of top secret intercepts by the US delegation to the 1945 founding convention of the United Nations in San Francisco. Fifty years of intercepted communication have given the US and its co-conspirators trade, diplomatic, economic and strategic advantages. By intercepting the "bottom line" negotiating positions of foreign governments, they have been able to shape international treaties and negotiations in their own favor: They will know, for example, the exact health status of the king of Saudi Arabia, the secret financial transactions of the president of Peru, the negotiating position of South Africa's trade delegation to the World Trade Organization, or the anti-abortion strategy of the Pope in the United Nations. Such information, presented daily to the president and the secretary of state in their intelligence briefings, is extremely useful and allows the US to play high-stakes diplomatic poker with a mirror behind everyone else's back.

Cold Warriors Woo Generation X

by Steve Badrich From NameBase NewsLine, No. 6, July-September 1994

After more than three decades of down-and-dirty operations for the CIA, San Antonio resident Kenneth Michael Absher has come in from the cold.

Sitting in the sun-drenched living room of his house in the upscale Alamo Heights district, Absher, 59, seems glad to be back in friendly, patriotic South Texas, glad to reminisce about the many Cold War crises he saw close up. The Cuban missile crisis. Vietnam. Running agents in foreign countries he's not even allowed to name.

Spies in John le Carre novels often doubt themselves, and their side. Absher, apparently, does neither. He's Texas-friendly and seemingly quite at ease in his own skin. In a low-key way, he's also quite eloquent, the kind of natural explainer and storyteller one is glad to encounter at the front of a classroom.

Boink, Absher's graying black tomcat, keeps his master under lazy surveillance as one Cold War tale suggests another.

"It's my favorite subject," Absher says, disarmingly, about the often-maligned trade of intelligence. Now Absher hopes to pass his enthusiasm on.

Retired as of last year from the CIA's Operations Directorate, Absher has introduced a historically-oriented course at a local university on the enduring value of "espionage," the covert stuff -- apparently the only declassified college-level course on this subject in the United States.

More than a hundred colleges and universities nationwide offer courses on national security or intelligence. For example, the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), where Absher now teaches, also offers a "big picture" course on "the intelligence community" taught by James Calder, a UTSA criminal justice professor with a background in military intelligence.

But Absher's course, uniquely, concentrates on the potential value to policymakers of intelligence obtained through covert means like spying.

It's a declassified version of a course Absher once taught at the Defense Intelligence College at Bolling Air Force Base. At Bolling, Absher's students were military personnel with at least "top secret" clearances. At UTSA, they're South Texas representatives of Generation X -- most of them politically a notch or two to the right-of-center, but without being diehard ideological conservatives. Nor are many of them overburdened with historical knowledge.

UTSA's big, airy campus, just south of the Texas Hill Country, is far more "Anglo" than the rest of San Antonio -- spiritually, the northernmost major city in Mexico. Land for the campus was donated to the state by big-dog developer friends of former Texas governor John Connally. Connally's friends expected the value of their surrounding property, which is extensive, to ratchet up. It has.

The CIA's Publications Review Board duly cleared Absher's syllabus as posing no threat to the CIA's interests. But the Agency has no other official link to Absher's teaching. Texas taxpayers rather than the Agency are paying his part-timer's salary. Nor is Absher part of the CIA's often- criticized Officer-in-Residence program, which places active CIA personnel on campus as temporary professors -- and unofficial goodwill ambassadors for spookdom.

Absher acknowledges, but shrugs off, the fact that his course takes as its point of departure the existence of state secrecy. "There are always," he says mildly, "going to be secrets."

Absher's students swear by his course. "He's a gifted instructor and a wonderful, enthusiastic man," says Elaine Coronado, a Washington-savvy UTSA senior working on a second UTSA degree in political science. Her first is in history.

Coronado plans eventually to return to "the policy arena" in Washington, D.C., where she has already worked for the Hispanic Alliance for Free Trade, a pro-NAFTA lobbying group. Coronado's group project for Absher's course, in fact, wound up recommending an expanded CIA role in monitoring world trade.

Absher also wins praise from UTSA colleagues, even out-and-out CIA critics. Absher was hired by Dr. David Alvirez, Director of UTSA's Division of Social and Policy Sciences. Alvirez minces no words in blasting CIA interventions in Chile, El Salvador, and elsewhere.

But Alvirez thought UTSA students could benefit from Absher's "special expertise," and feels vindicated by the course's reception. Alvirez praises Absher's ability to attract high-level former CIA colleagues as guest lecturers. Absher's spring-semester course was visited by such figures as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence William Studeman, a four-star admiral, and Dawn Eilenberger, a deputy to CIA General Counsel Elizabeth Rindskopf.

(Eilenberger was a last-minute replacement for Rindskopf herself, who was forced to stay in Washington to put out fires started by the Aldrich Ames "CIA mole" case. Perhaps it's just as well that Rindskopf never made it to UTSA. Absher, without consulting local feminists, had scheduled Rindskopf's visit to coincide with UTSA's Women's History Week. Students who met with Eilenberger found her engaging -- whereas Rindskopf, a former General Counsel for the National Security Agency, was a never-give-an-inch stonewaller during the Iran-contra affair. According to published accounts, aides to Lawrence Walsh eventually found it difficult even to be in the same room with her.)

Absher, for his part, is glad to have a forum to address issues he considers important. He sees his course as part of a new era of "demystification" of intelligence issues, of CIA glasnost (if not yet of perestroika).

Such issues, he says, are not only intrinsically important, they're grist for the mills of future scholars. He cites the case of one of his former UTSA students, who is contemplating writing a master's thesis based on newly-declassified CIA documents on the Bay of Pigs debacle.

"The last thing I want to do," Absher says, "is to be intellectually dishonest in any way. I've pulled no punches in this course. I've talked about intelligence failures, policy failures, everything. I've encouraged my students to make arguments against the continued existence of the CIA."

Elaine Coronado confirms this last statement. In conversation, furthermore, Absher deplores what he considers CIA failures and abuses -- and loose cannons like Ollie North.

Nevertheless, Absher remains, at bottom, a believer: someone who looks back on his almost thirty-two years in the CIA without regrets. He has no doubts that the right side won the Cold War, nor that CIA espionage helped.

He also believes that espionage continues to be necessary in a world in which the Russian mafia has replaced the Politburo, trade wars are supplanting most large-scale "hot" and "cold" wars, and tinhorn dictators in backwater capitals think about going nuclear.

Absher is stoical about the Ames case, which he calls "a wake-up call for everybody about what life is going to be like in the post-Cold War period." Ames's unmasking proves only, Absher says, that "there's never going to be a total symmetry of national interests" between the U.S. and the new Russia.

Nor is Absher an enthusiast for "open source intelligence" (OSCINT), the hottest new topic within the hermetic world of theorists of intelligence. There's more useful information to be gleaned from a good library, as serious students of intelligence have always acknowledged, than there is from almost any meeting in a back street in the Casbah. This fundamental principle explains why intelligence agencies took an interest in the academic world in the first place.

But in a wired world, libraries and other vast archives of information are rapidly going on-line. A skilled net-surfer with a fast modem can routinely download volumes of the kind of high-grade information that old-style intelligence services once had to pay for with time, sweat, and money, if not blood. Or so say the proponents of OSCINT.

Robert David Steele, the champion of OSCINT, still believes in a strong intelligence community. Too young for Vietnam, he is a CIA veteran with three back-to-back postings in Latin America (including El Salvador from 1980-1981), and in 1988 became the senior civilian responsible for establishing the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence Center. But Steele nevertheless foresees, in an age of tight budgets, the death of intelligence dinosaurs like the bloated, centralized CIA of the 90s. In Steele's vision, many U.S. intelligence needs of the near future will be met by decentralized, shoe-string bands of cyberspooks tapping into a digitized sea of "open-source" information.

Steele and his Open Source Solutions, Inc. have a lot to say on these topics, and his ideas seem to be riding a wave that will take them, possibly soon, into closed Congressional hearing rooms. But it's a wave Absher declines to get on.

"We have tried 'open source intelligence,'" Absher maintains, "and it does not work. Anybody who thinks George Washington could conduct a revolution on the basis of `open source intelligence' hasn't read history."

The syllabus to Absher's UTSA course suggests the historical reasoning behind this remark. Called "The Role of Espionage in Foreign Policy," Absher's course blends history and political science to examine cases in which espionage helped policymakers make history. Absher insists the course is no exercise in CIA self-glorification.

He maintains, for example, that D-Day succeeded, in part, because of a bogus military buildup -- complete with phony, inflatable "tanks" -- that fooled the Germans into thinking that the Allies had targeted Calais rather than Normandy. Eisenhower's "Operation Fortitude," which created this phantom invasion force, is only one of the case studies Absher's course considers.

Absher can cite a laundry list of similar cases to support his contention that the U.S. still needs espionage, still needs a CIA.

Not everyone agrees with this contention. Absher is well aware that back in Washington, the CIA's detractors are enjoying another of their periodic revivals. The Ames scandal revealed that despite the Cold-War- cowboy bravado of William Casey, the Soviets have spent years pipelining burn-before-reading secrets out of the inner sanctum of the CIA -- a fact that resulted in the execution of a number of U.S. agents overseas -- while presumably spoon-feeding the CIA's own agents a steady diet of disinformation.

Ames, who may not be the last Soviet mole inside the Company, is a creepy enough character. Still, his courtroom denunciation of U.S. intelligence as a "cynical sideshow" seems to have struck a nerve with many in Congress.

Is this, many have asked, what the U.S. public gets in return for its umpty-ump-billion-dollar classified "intelligence" budget? Could these misspent dollars be related to the fact that nobody in the big-ticket U.S. intelligence establishment seems to have foreseen the smashup of the Soviet system?

Such questions, furthermore, revive Congressional memories of CIA failures and scandals of previous decades. It's a familiar litany, at least for Americans who predate MTV.

In the 1960s, radical journalists from the magazine "Ramparts" revealed that CIA officers had used Michigan State University cover to help create the security forces -- and the government -- of South Vietnam.

And although this fact wasn't widely known at the time, such covert CIA involvement with a university wasn't unique, or even particularly unusual. Michigan State's "international studies" program, like similar programs across the U.S., was a Cold War creation. The granddaddy of such programs was the School of International Affairs at Columbia University, founded in 1946, and soon a virtual nursery of future CIA employees and intelligence.

Such "international studies" programs came into existence as part of a massive, wide-ranging effort by the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and the Carnegie Corporation to enlist the U.S. academic community in the Cold War. There's not enough space here to detail everything they did. But it's worth noting that the CIA and its handmaidens in the private sector regularly funded research and programs designed to address perceived "political problems" of the Cold War.

The leaders of the bloody 1965 coup in Indonesia, for instance, were able to draw on the expertise of Indonesian elites trained at Ford Foundation expense by faculty members from MIT and Cornell, Berkeley and Harvard. Indonesian students at MIT attended CIA-funded Harvard seminars led by Henry Kissinger.

And university involvement didn't stop there. Sympathetic faculty members on many campuses acted as "spotters" of potential future CIA employees. And the CIA, as "Ramparts" also revealed in 1967, essentially bankrolled the supposedly-independent National Student Association, and used student leaders to carry out operational tasks. Feminist media star Gloria Steinem, who later said she had been "duped," was one such student leader.

In the 1970s, Congress's Church Committee revealed for the first time that the CIA had earlier tried to assassinate foreign leaders such as the Congo's Patrice Lumumba and (with Mafia help) Fidel Castro.

But the Church Committee also revealed that the CIA was even then making use of several hundred "academics" (professors, administrators, and propagandists). In a related, mind-bending revelation, the Committee disclosed that the CIA was even a factor in the psychedelic revolution of the 60s. A CIA "mind control" project called MK-ULTRA had funded 1950s LSD research -- including experimentation on unwitting subjects.

And even this thumbnail sketch must at least take note of the often-bloody overseas coups in which CIA involvement is either known or suspected. Iran. Guatemala. Indonesia. Chile. The list goes on, and the target governments, often enough, had been democratically elected.

This checklist of horrors is enough to suggest why legions of people who remember the 60s and 70s will believe anything about the CIA.

The CIA's latest crop of critics tend to be "mainstream," which makes them all the more dangerous to the CIA's future. This summer's Congressional debate over the 1995 intelligence budget, for instance, could get intense. R. James Woolsey, Clinton's cantankerous CIA director, has adopted a hard-charging attitude that has alienated many in Congress.

Even with the Cold War over, Woolsey has called for an expanded CIA budget -- in part to upgrade the aging U.S. armada of spy satellites.

But Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) complains that given its large (classified) annual budget, the CIA should have foreseen the implosion of the Soviet Union. Moynihan is pushing a bill that would shut down the CIA and spin off its functions to the State Department, the Pentagon, and other agencies. Unlikely to pass, Moynihan's bill nevertheless reflects one mood in Congress.

Absher deplores past CIA abuses as vehemently as anyone. Given CIA compartmentalization, Absher says he learned about them through the same newspapers and books as anybody else.

But Absher counts on learning more from the ongoing declassification of intelligence documents. When more is known, Absher suggests, the public may find that bad policy was sometimes driven by the White House rather than the CIA.

Absher suspects this may have happened during the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s. Given Absher's CIA role at the time, he should have known everything about Col. Ollie North's activities, if only North had been going through channels. In fact, says Absher, North "was running his own private intelligence operation" out of the White House.

Even as he acknowledges past abuses, Absher charges that Moynihan's bill would return the U.S. to "the situation we were in on Saturday, December 6, 1941" -- the day before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

Despite everything, Absher retains a bedrock faith in the U.S. intelligence establishment to which he has devoted his life. That life was shaped by a Cold War world that is rapidly passing out of existence, and even out of memory.

Perhaps this explains why Absher is so avid for his students to come into contact with the human reality behind intelligence work.

"We don't have horns," Absher says at one point, almost plaintively, referring to himself and his fellow spooks.

Yet Absher's own life, even though it doesn't officially figure in his syllabus, makes a story as striking as anything his students are likely to hear from visiting CIA lecturers.

The date was 1961, a vintage year for Cold War paranoia. A CIA- directed invasion force had folded up on the beaches of Castro's Cuba -- an event that first alerted many Americans to the fact that the CIA even existed.

As a Princeton philosophy major five years before, Absher had closely followed the student-led Hungarian revolt that drew workers and others into the streets before being suppressed by Soviet tanks.

"We were students at Princeton," Absher says today. "We felt a kinship with the students who were dying in the streets of Budapest. And we could do nothing."

As 1961 unfolded, Absher felt dissatisfied working at his promising job in the San Antonio city manager's office. He had already served in the Army, where he did his first teaching. But he wanted to do more. So Absher paid his own way from San Antonio to Washington to enlist in the Cold War.

His Congressman gave him some addresses to try. Absher's rounds eventually brought him to a dark corner office in the ramshackle wooden barracks that were the CIA's first headquarters.

With a glance, Absher pegged the interviewer sitting behind the plain wooden desk. The man looked like "a stern prep school dean," but was obviously one of the aristo cowboys of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA's wartime predecessor.

Absher's interrogator was cradling something in one hand. It turned out to be a mound of birdseed.

As the interview proceeded, Absher's interrogator would periodically fling a seed across the room. In a cage against the opposite wall sat a huge-beaked bird -- a toucan? -- as brilliantly colored as a parrot, only four times as large and ugly as sin.

"The bird," Absher recalls, "never missed a thing. Line drives. Fly balls. Grounders. He caught them all."

Absher himself, he admits today, was also caught -- as he says his interviewer must have intended. Before there were batteries of psychological tests, there were CIA mind-games.

So, Mr. Absher, his interviewer eventually got around to asking, do you think you want to come to work for us?

This was true, and Absher wasn't alone. A Barnes and Noble how-a- bill-becomes-law handbook Absher had brought with him on the train didn't even mention the CIA.

Good answer, Mr. Absher! responded his interviewer. You'll be hearing from us. We'll be offering you a job.

And they did. The letter Absher received offered such-and-such a salary, but never specifically mentioned the CIA.

Absher completed his training (which, because of the CIA's general secrecy agreement, he still can't talk about) just in time to go to work as a junior intelligence analyst during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. It was to prove a defining event in Absher's life, a crisis Absher thinks revealed to him "the unquestioned value of espionage."

Absher found himself working under Sherman Kent, a legendary figure widely considered the father of modern CIA analysis.

Just one month before, the CIA had predicted that the Soviets would probably not introduce missiles into Cuba. But the documents Absher was asked to read indicated otherwise. So did the U-2 "spy plane" photos Absher got to study almost as soon as JFK did.

Espionage, he says, was delivering intelligence that was both surprising and unwelcome -- but also unquestionably important.

Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles based in Cuba had a range of 2,200 miles. They could have hit any location in the U.S., except Alaska and one small corner of the Pacific Northwest. The Soviets, Absher believes, had seriously misjudged Kennedy.

Some critics have expressed horror at the superpower face-off that followed, seeing the entire episode as scary testosterone-driven brinksmanship that almost blew up the world.

"I happen to think," he says today, "that Kennedy handled this crisis about as well as anybody could have." Absher is prepared to argue this case on the historical record. The Cuban missile crisis, in fact, is one of the episodes examined in Absher's course.

Unfortunately, Absher can't very well argue for what he and his colleagues accomplished during his subsequent CIA postings overseas. Absher can't even say where he went.

His resume acknowledges that Absher served in "Europe" and in the "Caribbean," that he was CIA "Chief of Station" in two different countries, and that he was awarded numerous medals, including the Intelligence Medal of Merit (twice). Between overseas postings, Absher also spent "four tours" in CIA headquarters, where he supervised U.S. intelligence operations going on in (unnamed) foreign countries.

Given these gaps, it seems odd that Absher feels free to talk, as he apparently does, about 1972-73 in Vietnam. Once again, Absher has his own line on the subject.

"There were many wars in Vietnam," Absher acknowledges. The one Absher fought was "a conventional war" against battle-hardened North Vietnamese regulars operating at battalion strength. Absher zipped around his province in a helicopter, and when necessary called in B-52 strikes against suspected NVA troop concentrations.

In the interrogations he supervised, Absher says, "I never saw any brutality." It was the Viet Cong, Absher says, who went in for wholesale assassinations of South Vietnamese teachers, officials, and others. Or rather, Absher says, the competent and honest were assassinated. The incompetent and corrupt were left in place.

But what about alleged CIA assassinations, Absher is asked? What about the notorious CIA "Phoenix Program" that became public knowledge in the 1970s?

Absher agrees that some such program did exist. Former CIA director William Colby has said as much. But Absher thinks "Phoenix" had apparently been phased out before his Vietnam tour.

"You'll have to talk to somebody else," he says. "I haven't read very much about Phoenix."

Freelancer Doug Valentine has. In fact, Valentine says he interviewed the CIA creators of "Phoenix" for his massive 1990 study "The Phoenix Program." Interviewed by phone from his Massachusetts home, Valentine calls Absher's comment on "Phoenix" technically correct, but misleading.

"There were two CIA-created 'Phoenix' programs," says Valentine. The second was the "Phoenix Program" in the narrower sense, which had in fact been turned over to the Vietnamese before Absher arrived in Vietnam. This program used CIA resources to identify and target Vietnamese civilians that the American-created establishment in Vietnam considered "subversive."

According to Valentine, this vast group included students, labor organizers, and politically-active Vietnamese of all kinds. In American- dominated South Vietnam, says Valentine, virtually every kind of political and community activity whatsoever was illegal. After these "subversives" had been identified, they were then assassinated by local death-squads which had been organized by the CIA.

No one knows for sure, Valentine says, exactly how many people were assassinated. But Valentine notes that former CIA director William Colby, who still defends the program, puts the total at 25,000. Other estimates run much higher.

But according to Valentine, there is another, more inclusive meaning of "Phoenix." In this larger sense, "Phoenix" can stand for a whole style of counterinsurgency warfare that the CIA brought to Vietnam, and to many other places. (Unlike Absher, Valentine regards the nation of South Vietnam itself as the creation of Americans, who stepped into the imperial role abdicated by the French in 1954.)

The CIA, Valentine says, maintained paid agents within the heart of the South Vietnamese government. Any South Vietnamese politician who deviated from the CIA line was himself in danger of being denounced as a "subversive" -- and then being killed.

Seen in the larger context of the CIA's history, Valentine maintains, those B-52 strikes Absher was calling in on South Vietnam were part of the larger "Phoenix" counterinsurgency strategy. So were the interrogations Absher oversaw at the local Provincial Interrogation Center (PIC). The entire PIC program, Valentine maintains, was a creation of the CIA's original "Phoenix."

Valentine, obviously, is no CIA-critic-as-Congressional-penny-pincher. He's an old-style radical critic who turns Absher's contention that there "are always going to be secrets" on its head.

"If there are always going to be secrets," Valentine contends, "then power is always going to reside with the people who keep the secrets. Secrets are antithetical to democracy. But if there's no more need to keep secrets, then there's no need for a CIA."

Valentine comes from a military family, and says that he has plenty of CIA-officer friends with whom he agrees to disagree. He says he's sure he could get along with Absher the man.

"But you have to remember," Valentine says of Absher, "he cannot tell you the truth. All he can tell you is the cover story -- which is designed to be plausible."

One voice that might be expected to echo Valentine's is that of John Stockwell, one of the top three CIA critics who became an author and lecturer after resigning or retiring as an operations officer (the other two are Philip Agee and Ralph McGehee).

Stockwell is both a decorated military veteran and a former top- ranking CIA officer. He ran massive, covert CIA operations in Africa before resigning over some of the revelations of the 1970s.

One thing that bothered him, Stockwell says today, was being asked to lie to Congress -- like certain figures in the Iran-contra scandal. Another was knowledge that the CIA was being asked to carry out assassinations.

For decades now, Stockwell has been a well-known writer, lecturer, and CIA critic. In 1986, he even spoke to a large student-and-faculty audience at UTSA.

Reached by telephone at his home in Elgin, Texas, however, Stockwell has some surprising news.

The end of the Cold War, Stockwell says, "swept all the pieces from the board." Continuing to repeat his old criticisms in a changed situation, Stockwell says, would turn him into a "sorehead" instead of the serious intellectual critic he aspires to be.

The Cold War CIA, Stockwell suggests, has lost its traditional rationale. And although Moynihan's bill will never pass, the CIA's critics have been heard. Imperfect as it necessarily is, the existing system of Congressional oversight is probably as good an instrument as can be devised. The trick is to make it work, to curb the inevitable abuses of power.

But in the meantime, Stockwell says, Absher is right. The world swarms with threats. He cites the case of vastly-overpopulated Rwanda, a country he once kept track of for the CIA. The U.S., says Stockwell, does need a streamlined, high-quality intelligence capability pretty much like the one Absher calls for.

"The next fifty years," he says, with no evident pleasure, "may be much more violent than the last fifty."

His words virtually echo Absher's warning about tinhorn dictators and their "weapons of mass destruction."

It's strange to find these two agreeing about anything -- the notorious CIA critic and the unrepentant former spook now openly defending his craft to a new generation of college students -- a generation which needs someone to explain why anyone was ever out in the cold in the first place.

Sidebar from NameBase NewsLine, No. 6, July-September 1994:

Cyberspace Cowboy with CIA Credentials

by Daniel Brandt

Whenever history is stranded between two epochs, those few who recognize the shifting paradigms are usually voices in the wilderness. Robert David Steele spent the 80s fighting the Cold War for the CIA in Latin America, but now he writes for Whole Earth Review, invites Mitch Kapor and John Barlow to speak at the symposiums he organizes, and jets around the globe to swap impressions with unkempt hackers. Back at the ranch, he keeps up a steady diet of schmoozing with Washington intelligence professionals, testifying for Congressional committees, and consulting with corporate information experts. He's a man on a mission.

Steele believes that U.S. intelligence, with its cumbersome classification system, is like a dinosaur in a tar pit. He likes to tell the story of his "$10 million mistake." In 1988 Steele was responsible for spending this amount to help the Marine Corps set up a new intelligence facility. He acquired a system of workstations to handle Top Secret information, which also meant that they could not be connected to any unclassified systems. Meanwhile, a little personal computer in the next room was the only station with external unclassified access. After the system was built, they discovered that virtually everything the Marine Corps needed -- from bridge loading capabilities to the depth of water in ports around the world -- was available on the little PC through the Internet. But none of it was found on the classified systems, which tended to be filled with data on Soviet strategic capabilities.

U.S. intelligence was destined for major budget cuts and restructuring, even before the latest embarrassment of the Aldrich Ames case. The CIA's mole problems are merely the last nails in the coffin, and lead to cover stories such as the "U.S. News & World Report" of July 4, 1994, which declares that the CIA is "plagued by incompetence and fraud." But Robert Steele has a fix. All that's required is for U.S. intelligence to abandon its obsession with secrecy and find the nearest on-ramp to the information superhighway. He and his Open Source Solutions, Inc. will be happy to give directions (4350 Fair Lakes Court, Fairfax VA 22033, Tel: 703-242-1700, Fax: 703-242-1711, E-mail: info@oss.net).

Steele's articulation of the shortcomings of U.S. intelligence, along with other expert sources such as former Senate intelligence committee staffer Angelo Codevilla's "Informing Statecraft" (1992), make a powerful case that something has to change. The total intelligence budget is just over $37 billion, with the major portion going for technical collection -- mostly satellites and related processing systems. But these systems are narrowly focused, and encourage narrow policies designed to justify the expense. The CIA's portion of this budget is about $3.5 billion, and the NSA's is roughly $4 billion.

Steele points out that the cost-benefit ratio of open source intelligence (OSCINT) is so productive that nothing else even comes close. But U.S. intelligence is steeped in its old ways. He hears stories of agencies that refuse to cite information in their reports unless it comes from classified sources, or of CIA analysts who wanted to travel to Moscow to take advantage of newly-opened resources but were threatened with loss of their clearances if they made the trip. In other words, U.S. intelligence is doing everything backwards. No one disputes the fact that 80 percent of all the information worth analyzing is publicly available, and of the remaining 20 percent, much of it is made useless by a classification system that delays delivery and frequently restricts access to those who are not inclined to use it. In a rational world, OSCINT would be the "source of first resort."

Open Source Solutions, Inc., of which Steele is president, sponsors annual symposiums that draw a range of professionals: government intelligence analysts, corporate competitor intelligence departments, Beltway-Bandit think tanks that churn out classified studies for government clients, and various on-line ferrets, hackers, and futurists from around the world. They expected 200 for their 1992 symposium and got over 600. In 1993 they had over 800 from 32 countries, including some retired KGB colonels that made a few officials at CIA headquarters extremely nervous. The next symposium, scheduled for November 8-10 in Washington, will focus less on the U.S. intelligence community itself and more on the intelligence consumer in the global private and public sectors. These symposiums are financed by fees from those who attend ($500 unless you get an academic rate or "hacker scholarship"), and also from corporations and organizations that pay for exhibit space. OSS is nonprofit, but Steele also spun off a for-profit corporation that offers consulting services and "best of class" referrals for $750 a day or $200 an hour.

Steele's voice is one that needs to be heard in Washington. He's strongest when he criticizes U.S. intelligence, and he's excellent for those who are trying to keep up with cyberspace trends and information resources. But when he presents open source intelligence as an elixir for America's problems, from intelligence to competitiveness to ecology, his reach exceeds his grasp. For example, Steele's assurances that competitiveness and OSCINT are mutually compatible are unconvincing: it seems reasonable that at some point, what I know becomes more valuable to me by virtue of the fact that you DON'T have the same information. Human nature being what it is, secrecy is not something that can be restricted only to executive action and diplomacy, as Steele maintains. It is here to stay, on every level of society. Steele's unreal optimism is a religious conviction that's not uncommon among cyberspace cadets.

Ironically, the same technology that efficiently delivers Steel's open source intelligence has also given us the ability to keep digital data very secret. There is no guarantee that the mountains of public data won't someday become a Tower of Encrypted Babel. Steele's most glaring omission is his lack of comment on public encryption technology and the Clipper Chip -- the issue that has caused cypherpunks and some corporations to declare war on the U.S. intelligence community. It seems that if Steele took a strong position on this issue, he might lose half of his support in a cyberspace nanosecond.