Firm Says Administration’s Han­dling of Video Ruined Its Spy­ing Efforts

by Joby War­rick
WASHINGTON POST

A small pri­vate intel­li­gence com­pany that mon­i­tors Islamic ter­ror­ist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its offi­cial release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it noti­fied the Bush admin­is­tra­tion of its secret acqui­si­tion. It gave two senior offi­cials access on the con­di­tion that the offi­cials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 min­utes, a range of intel­li­gence agen­cies had begun down­load­ing it from the company’s Web site. By midafter­noon that day, the video and a tran­script of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush admin­is­tra­tion to cable tele­vi­sion news and broad­cast worldwide.

The founder of the com­pany, the SITE Intel­li­gence Group, says this pre­ma­ture dis­clo­sure tipped al-Qaeda to a secu­rity breach and destroyed a years-long sur­veil­lance oper­a­tion that the com­pany has used to inter­cept and pass along secret mes­sages, videos and advance warn­ings of sui­cide bomb­ings from the ter­ror­ist group’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions network.

“Tech­niques that took years to develop are now inef­fec­tive and worth­less,” said Rita Katz, the firm’s 44-year-old founder, who has gar­nered wide atten­tion by pub­li­ciz­ing state­ments and videos from extrem­ist chat rooms and Web sites, while attract­ing con­tro­versy over the secrecy of SITE’s method­ol­ogy. Her firm pro­vides intel­li­gence about ter­ror­ist groups to a wide range of pay­ing clients, includ­ing pri­vate firms and mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence agen­cies from the United States and sev­eral other countries.

The pre­cise source of the leak remains unknown. Gov­ern­ment offi­cials declined to be inter­viewed about the cir­cum­stances on the record, but they did not chal­lenge Katz’s ver­sion of events. They also said the inci­dent had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not dimin­ish the government’s abil­ity to antic­i­pate attacks.

While acknowl­edg­ing that SITE had achieved suc­cess, the offi­cials said U.S. agen­cies have their own sophis­ti­cated means of watch­ing al-Qaeda on the Web. “We have indi­vid­u­als in the right places deal­ing with all these issues, across all 16 intel­li­gence agen­cies,” said Ross Fein­stein, spokesman for the Office of the Direc­tor of National Intelligence.

But pri­vately, some intel­li­gence offi­cials called the inci­dent regret­table, and one offi­cial said SITE had been “tremen­dously help­ful” in fer­ret­ing out al-Qaeda secrets over time.

The al-Qaeda video aired on Sept. 7 attracted inter­na­tional atten­tion as the first new video mes­sage from the group’s leader in three years. In it, a dark-bearded bin Laden urges Amer­i­cans to con­vert to Islam and pre­dicts fail­ure for the Bush admin­is­tra­tion in Iraq and Afghanistan. The video was aired on hun­dreds of West­ern news Web sites nearly a full day before its release by a dis­tri­b­u­tion com­pany linked to al-Qaeda.

Com­puter logs and records reviewed by The Wash­ing­ton Post sup­port SITE’s claim that it snatched the video from al-Qaeda days before­hand. Katz requested that the pre­cise date and details of the acqui­si­tion not be made pub­lic, say­ing such dis­clo­sures could reveal sen­si­tive details about the company’s methods.

SITE—an acronym for the Search for Inter­na­tional Ter­ror­ist Entities—was estab­lished in 2002 with the stated goal of track­ing and expos­ing ter­ror­ist groups, accord­ing to the company’s Web site. Katz, an Iraqi-born Israeli cit­i­zen whose father was exe­cuted by Sad­dam Hus­sein in the 1960s, has made the inves­ti­ga­tion of ter­ror­ist groups a pas­sion­ate quest.

“We were able to estab­lish sources that pro­vided us with unique and impor­tant infor­ma­tion into al-Qaeda’s hid­den world,” Katz said. Her company’s income is drawn from sub­scriber fees and contracts.

Katz said she decided to offer an advance copy of the bin Laden video to the White House with­out charge so offi­cials there could pre­pare for its even­tual release.

She spoke first with White House coun­sel Fred F. Field­ing, whom she had pre­vi­ously met, and then with Joel Bag­nal, deputy assis­tant to the pres­i­dent for home­land secu­rity. Both expressed inter­est in obtain­ing a copy, and Bag­nal sug­gested that she send a copy to Michael Leiter, who holds the No. 2 job at the National Coun­tert­er­ror­ism Center.

Admin­is­tra­tion and intel­li­gence offi­cials would not com­ment on whether they had obtained the video sep­a­rately. Katz said Field­ing and Bag­nal made it clear to her that the White House did not pos­sess a copy at the time she offered hers.

Around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, Katz sent both Leiter and Field­ing an e-mail with a link to a pri­vate SITE Web page con­tain­ing the video and an Eng­lish tran­script. “Please under­stand the neces­sity for secrecy,” Katz wrote in her e-mail. “We ask you not to dis­trib­ute . . . [as] it could harm our investigations.”

Field­ing replied with an e-mail express­ing grat­i­tude to Katz. “It is you who deserves the thanks,” he wrote, accord­ing to a copy of the mes­sage. There was no record of a response from Leiter or the national intel­li­gence director’s office.

Exactly what hap­pened next is unclear. But within min­utes of Katz’s e-mail to the White House, government-registered com­put­ers began down­load­ing the video from SITE’s server, accord­ing to a log of file trans­fers. The records show dozens of down­loads over the next three hours from com­put­ers with addresses reg­is­tered to defense and intel­li­gence agencies.

By midafter­noon, sev­eral tele­vi­sion news net­works reported obtain­ing copies of the tran­script. A copy posted around 3 p.m. on Fox News’s Web site referred to SITE and included page mark­ers iden­ti­cal to those used by the group. “This con­firms that the U.S. gov­ern­ment was respon­si­ble for the leak of this doc­u­ment,” Katz wrote in an e-mail to Leiter at 5 p.m.

Al-Qaeda sup­port­ers, now alerted to the intru­sion into their secret net­work, put up new obsta­cles that pre­vented SITE from gain­ing the kind of access it had obtained in the past, accord­ing to Katz.

A small num­ber of pri­vate intel­li­gence com­pa­nies com­pete with SITE in scour­ing ter­ror­ists’ net­works for infor­ma­tion and mes­sages, and some have ques­tioned the company’s motives and meth­ods, includ­ing the claim that its access to al-Qaeda’s net­work was unique. One com­peti­tor, Ben Ven­zke, founder of Intel­Cen­ter, said he ques­tions SITE’s decision—as described by Katz—to offer the video to White House pol­i­cy­mak­ers rather than qui­etly share it with intel­li­gence analysts.

“It is not just about get­ting the video first,” Ven­zke said. “It is about hav­ing the proper meth­ods and pro­ce­dures in place to make sure that the appro­pri­ate intel­li­gence gets to where it needs to go in the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity and else­where in order to sup­port ongo­ing coun­tert­er­ror­ism operations.”