Secretive Pentagon Spy Unit: Closed or Outsourced?
by Tom Burghardt
Global Research, April 4, 2008
Antifascist Calling.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that the Pentagon is expected to shut a
controversial intelligence office that has drawn fire from lawmakers and civil
liberties groups who charge that it was part of an effort by the Defense
Department to expand into domestic spying.
The Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), created by former Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld after the September 11 attacks, illegally conducted
broad domestic operations that targeted antiwar and other dissident domestic
groups.
Mark Mazzetti writes,
The move, government officials say, is part of a broad effort under Defense
Secretary Robert M. Gates to review, overhaul and, in some cases, dismantle an
intelligence architecture built by his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld. ...
The Pentagon's senior intelligence official, James R. Clapper, has
recommended to Mr. Gates that the counterintelligence field office be
dismantled and that some of its operations be placed under the authority of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, the government officials said. (Mark Mazzetti,
Pentagon is expected to close intelligence unit, The New York Times, April 2,
2008)
Portions of CIFA, notably its Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON)
database, were allegedly dismantled after documents uncovered by the ACLU
through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, revealed in 2006 that the
Department of Homeland Security, the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force and local
police departments had supplied the Pentagon with information that aided
intelligence operations against the antiwar movement.
According to a report published in 2006 by The New Standard,
One of the TALON documents was written to alert commanders and staff to a
counter-recruitment protest the Broward Anti-War Coalition (BAWC) was staging
at the Ft. Lauderdale Air and Sea Show. The alert, submitted by the Miami-Dade
police department, said, BAWC plans to counter military recruitment and the
'pro-war' message with 'guerilla theater and other forms of subversive
propaganda.'
Another document revealed the government is tracking some of the
anti-recruitment activities of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker
peace organization.
A third TALON report detailed counter-recruitment rallies in Georgia, and
cited Military Families Speak Out, Veterans for Peace, and Iraq Veterans
Against the War as participants.
In December 2005, NBC News obtained part of the TALON database that included
reports on about 48 anti-war meetings or protests. (Megan Tandy, Pentagon
Treats Counter-Recruitment Activism as Terrorism, The New Standard, October
16, 2006)
What the Times reporter failed to mention, is that CIFA is probably the most
heavily-outsourced unit in the Pentagon's intelligence arsenal.
According to national security analyst R.J. Hillhouse, over 30 corporations
provide 90% of CIFA's staff, drawn from a bevy of security and defense firms.
An early CIFA recipient of Bush crime family largess was none other than
Mitchell Wade, the disgraced former CEO of MZM Inc. who pleaded guilty to
conspiracy and bribery charges in 2006 in connection with the sleazy
shenanigans of now-imprisoned Rep. Randy Duke Cunningham (R-CA).
In a cash-and-hookers-for-contracts scandal, Cunningham oversaw a number of
questionable appropriations given by CIFA to Wade's MZM. As a member of the
House Intelligence Committee, Cunningham chaired the terrorism subcommittee
that had authority over CIFA's operations. He acted accordingly, showering his
friends with dubious earmarks slipped into various Department of Defense
(DoD) appropriations.
When CIFA's two top officials, David A. Burt II and his deputy, Joseph Hefferon
abruptly resigned in August 2006, Pentagon officials were quick to deny any
link to on-going corruption investigations, claiming their departure was a
personal decision that they both made together, according to The Washington
Post.
In January 2008, Tim Shorrock reported that a crony of former Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, Stephen Cambone, who helped oversee CIFA's creation, joined a
firm when he left the Pentagon that recently, was awarded a multi-million
dollar contract to manage the dodgy intel outfit. Shorrock writes,
On January 7, QinetiQ (pronounced kinetic) North America (QNA), a major
British-owned defense and intelligence contractor based in McLean, Virginia,
announced that its Mission Solutions Group, formerly Analex Corporation, had
just signed a five-year, $30 million contract to provide a range of unspecified
security services to the Pentagon's Counter-Intelligence Field Activity
office, known as CIFA.
According to Pentagon briefing documents, CIFA's Directorate of Field
Activities assists in preserving the most critical defense assets, disrupting
adversaries and helping control
