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FTR#1305 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Mantra Rock poster
Photo Credit: Wikipedia
Introduction: Exploring aspects of the “counter-culture” of the 1960’s against the background of the CIA and military’s experimentation with mind-altering substances and various mind-control techniques, this program asks the question: “Was it really good?”
Key Points of Analysis and Discussion Include:
1.–Details concerning SPAN, the operational code-name for the dosing with LSD of the entire town of Pont St.-Esprit in Southern France.
2.–The story of William Hayward, the director of the ’60s cult film Easy Rider. Hayward was the victim of psychiatric confinement by elements associated with the intelligence community.
3.–The monitoring of Ken Kesey’s LSD events by members of the intelligence community.
4.–Former OSS agent Gregory Bateson’s stewardship of the introduction of Ken Kesey to LSD.
5.–Sourcing for the information about the Bateson/Kesey dynamic and discussion of CIA and military experiments with mind-altering substances at the University of Vermont.
6.–CIA operative George Hunter White’s surreptitious dosing of unwitting subjects with LSD.
7.–George Hunter White’s arrest of jazz singer Billie Holiday for opium possession in 1949. Drug arrests destroyed Holiday’s ability to work in establishments that served alcohol.
8.–The story of a San Francisco event featuring the cream of the psychedelic bands of the time. The event benefitted the Hare Krishna cult.
9.–Discussion of the fascist philosophy of the leader of the Hare Krishna cult.
10.–The biography of John Perry Barlow, former campaign manager for Dick Cheney and lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Barlow’s role with the EFF, an organization with many worthy members and reputation but one which, nonetheless, has worked for the intelligence community.
11.–Barlow’s interaction with the CIA and NSA and an examination of the possibility of his stewardship of social media.
1. A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments by H.P. Albarelli; Trine Day [HC]; Copyright 2009 by H.P. Albarelli, Jr.; (ISBN-13) 978–0‑9777953–7‑6. ISBN (10) 0–9777953‑7–3; pp. 689–690.
3. A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments by H.P. Albarelli; Trine Day [HC]; Copyright 2009 by H.P. Albarelli, Jr.; (ISBN-13) 978–0‑9777953–7‑6. ISBN (10) 0–9777953‑7–3; pp. 291–292.
4. A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments by H.P. Albarelli; Trine Day [HC]; Copyright 2009 by H.P. Albarelli, Jr.; (ISBN-13) 978–0‑9777953–7‑6. ISBN (10) 0–9777953‑7–3; p. 629.
5. A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments by H.P. Albarelli; Trine Day [HC]; Copyright 2009 by H.P. Albarelli, Jr.; (ISBN-13) 978–0‑9777953–7‑6. ISBN (10) 0–9777953‑7–3; p. 797.
6. A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments by H.P. Albarelli; Trine Day [HC]; Copyright 2009 by H.P. Albarelli, Jr.; (ISBN-13) 978–0‑9777953–7‑6. ISBN (10) 0–9777953‑7–3; p. 290.
7. A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments by H.P. Albarelli; Trine Day [HC]; Copyright 2009 by H.P. Albarelli, Jr.; (ISBN-13) 978–0‑9777953–7‑6. ISBN (10) 0–9777953‑7–3; pp. 407–408.
8. In FTR #991, we detailed the esoteric fascist/Nazi philosophy of Hare Krishna cult founder and head guru A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada.
On 1/29/1967, Prabhupada and his cult were the beneficiaries of monies generated by a concert and dance featuring the leading San Francisco psychedelic-era rock bands. The event also featured participation by LSD guru Timothy Leary, whose activities and career are inextricably linked with the CIA.
We discussed this at length in AFA #28:
AFA 28: The CIA, the Military & Drugs, Pt. 5
The CIA & LSD
Part 5a 46:15 | Part 5b 45:52 | Part 5c 42:56 | Part 5d 45:11 | Part 5e 11:25
(Recorded April 26, 1987)
It is so very, very tragic that idealistic young people were led astray in such a fashion. It is outrageous that the process was effected in considerable measure by elements of CIA, employing a chemical–LSD—which developed by the Nazi-affiliated Sandoz corporation during World War II as a disabling agent. It works very well.
It is grotesque that so many of the people who lived through those events have failed to come to terms with what was done to them and the implications of that experience. The ramifications of those events are still very much with us.
“Mantra Rock;” The Hare Krishna Movement.
Mantra Rock Concert
Sunday, January 29, 1967 marked the major spiritual event of the San Francisco hippie era, and Srila Prabhupada, who was ready to go anywhere to spread Krishna Consciousness, was there.
The Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service — all the new-wave San Francisco bands — had agreed to appear with Srila Prabhupada at the Avalon Ballroom’s Mantra-Rock Dance, proceeds from which would go to the local Hare Krishna temple.
Thousands of hippies, anticipating an exciting evening, packed the hall.
At about 10 p.m., Srila Prabhupada and a small entourage of devotees arrived amid uprorious applause and cheering by a crowd that had waited weeks in great anticipation for this moment. Srila Prabhupada was given a seat of honor onstage and was introduced by Allen Ginsberg, who explained his own realizations about the Hare Krishna maha-mantra and how it had spread from the small storefront in New York to San Francisco.
The chanting started slowly but ryhthmically, and little by little it spread throughout the ballroom, enveloping everyone. Hippies got to their feet, held hands, and began to dance as enormous, pulsing pictures of Krishna were projected around the walls of the ballroom in perfect sync with the beat of the mantra.
By the time Srila Prabhupada stood and began to dance with his arms raised, the crowd was completely absorbed in chanting, dancing and playing musical instruments they had brought for the occasion.
As the tempo speeded up, the chanting and dancing became more and more intense, spurred on by a stageful of top rock musicians, who were as charmed by the magic of the maha-mantra as the amateur musicians had been at the Tompkins Square kirtanas only a few weeks before.
The chant rose; it seemed to surge and swell without limit. When it seemed it could go no further, the chanting stopped. Srila Prabhupada offered prayers to his spiritual master into the microphone and ended-by saying three times, “All glories to the assembled devotees!” The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood buzzed with talk of the mantra-Rock Dance for weeks afterward.
Allen Ginsberg later recalled, “We sang Hare Krishna all evening. It was absolutely great — an open thing. It was the height of the Haight-Ashbury spiritual enthusiasm.”
“Mantra-Rock Dance;” Wikipedia.com.
. . . . The participation of countercultural leaders considerably boosted the event’s popularity; among them were the poet Allen Ginsberg, who led the singing of the Hare Krishna mantra onstage along with Prabhupada, and LSD promoters Timothy Leary and Augustus Owsley Stanley III.[3][10]
Excerpted from the description for FTR #991.
- Hare Krishna founder and chief guru Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada provided commentary on Hindu religious text “. . . . and often suggested that they had not actually been written by himself, but that God, Krishna, had revealed them to him. . . .” This was in order to “ . . . .underline the absolute position, superhuman qualities, and overall importance of the guru. [Basically, “guru” as “fuhrer”–D.E.] . . . .”
- Bhaktivedanta Swami was fundamentally opposed to democracy. “So monarchy or dictatorship is welcome. . . . Personally, I like this position, dictatorship. Personally, I like this.”
- Bhaktivedanta Swami felt that Hinduism was in a “fallen state” and that only his discipline/teachings could restore it to its proper place. In our discussions with Peter Levenda, we have noted that fascism manifests a longing for a bygone time–one that never really existed.
- Fascist philosophies frequently invoke a by-gone, mythical “golden age,” which the fascist cadre in question will restore, after the corrupting forces have been neutralized. ” . . . . He too believed that in bygone ages a divine and scientific social system had existed in India, and like Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati, he too founded a movement whose express mission was to reestablish what he often referred to as the “perfectional form of human civilization,” varnashram dharma. . . .” Note that “foreigners” or what would be termed in our society today “immigrants,” “migrants,” “Mexicans,” or “Muslims” are blamed for this degeneration. ” . . . . . . . . Indian civilization on the basis of the four varnas and ashrams deteriorated because of her dependency on foreigners, or those who did not follow the civilization of varnasham. . . .”
- Bhaktivedanta Swami valued the traditional position of the Kshatriya warrior caste, to which the Nazi SS considered themselves as successors, according to Kevin Coogan’s brilliant analysis (in Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International.) “. . . . the kshatriyas should be taught how to fight also. There will be military training. There will be training how to kill. Kshatriya students in the ISKCON varnashram college were to practice killing: ‘Just like Kshatriyas, they have to learn how to kill.’ . . . . There is no single instance where Bhaktivedanta Swami speaks about kshatriya training without mentioning killing. . . . ‘Learn to kill. No nonviolence. Learn to kill. Here also, as soon you’ll find, the Kshatriya, a thief, a rogue, unwanted element in the society, kill him. That’s all. Finish. Kill him. Bas. Finished. . . .” It is not that because the Kshatriyas were killing by bows and arrows formerly you have to continue that. That is another foolishness. If you have got . . . If you can kill easily by guns, take that gun. All the royal princes were trained up how to kill. . . . A Kshatriya, he is expert in the military science, how to kill. So the killing art is there. You cannot make it null and void by advocating nonviolence. No, That is required. Violence is also a part of the society. . . .”
- Tulsi Gabbard’s political vector may be evaluated against the background of Bhaktivedanta Swami’s prognostication that the Hare Krishna cult could infiltrate and take over a key political party and/or government in a democracy. Recall that he viewed democracy with utmost contempt. ” . . . . Bhaktivedanta also thought that he and his movement could take over some government and rule some part of the world: ‘However in Kali-yuga, democratic government can be captured by Krishna conscious people. If this can be done, the general populace can be made very happy.’ . . . .”
- Bhaktivedanta Swami’s teachings dovetail superbly with Nazi occult philosophy. ” . . . . Bhaktivedanta Swami, however, speaks extensively about ‘the Aryans’–at least twenty-five of his purports and over a hundred lectures and conversations contain lengthy elaborations on the topic. He places all those whom he calls ‘non-Aryan’ in a category similar to his ‘unwanted population,’ thus dividing humans into two groups: a large group of varna sankara and non-Aryans on one side, and a small group of Aryans, ie those who follow varnashram, on the other: ‘Those who traditionally follow these principles are called Aryans, or progressive human beings.’ ‘The Vedic way of life,’ he writes, ‘is the progressive march of civilization of the Aryans.’ ‘In the history of the human race, the Aryan family is considered to be the most elevated community in the world.’ . . . . In more than one fifth of his statements he clearly describes or defines them in racial terms: The Aryan family is distributed all over the world and is known as Indo-Aryan. The Aryans are white. But here, this side, due to climatic influence, they are a little tan. Indians are tan but they are not black. But Aryans are all white. And the non-Aryans, they are called black. Yes . . .”
- Bhaktivedanta Swami’s philosophy saw Europeans and Americans as part of, and extensions of, the Aryan race. In an address to a French audience, he intoned as follows: ” . . . . So we all belong to the Aryan family. Historical reference is there, Indo-European family. So Aryan stock was on the central Asia. Some of them migrated to India. Some of them migrated to Europe. And from Europe you have come. So we belong to the Aryan family, but we have lost our knowledge. So we have become non-Aryan, practically. You French people, you are also Aryan family, but the culture is lost now. So this Krishna consciousness movement is actually reviving the original Aryan culture. Bharata. We are all inhabitants of Bharatavarsha, but as we lost our culture, it became divided. So on the whole, the conclusion is that the Aryans spread in Europe also, and the Americans, they also spread from Europe. So the intelligent class of human being, they belong to the Aryans. Aryan family. Just like Hitler claimed that he belonged to the Aryan family. Of course, they belonged to the Aryan families. . . .”
- It should come as no surprise that Bhaktivedanta was pro-Hitler, viewing the Fuehrer as “a gentleman,” who had to kill the Jews because they were “financing” against him. “. . . . So these English people, they were very expert in making propaganda. They killed Hitler by propaganda. I don’t think Hitler was so bad [a] man. Hitler knew it [the atomic bomb] . . . . He was gentleman. He said that ‘I can smash the whole world, but I do not use that weapon.’ The Germans already discovered. But out of humanity they did not use it. . . . The activities of such men are certainly very great . . . Therefore Hitler killed these Jews. They were financing against Germany. Otherwise he had no enmity with the Jews. . . . Therefore Hitler decided, ‘Kill all the Jews.’ . . . .”
- An in-depth view of Bhaktivedanta Swami’s view of “shudras” reveals the deep racist/fascistic views of social class/caste. Described variously as “black” or “common,” shudras are the focus of deep ideological contempt. This should be seen against the background of the Aryan racial philosophy of Bhaktivedanta Swami. “. . . . ordinary people; the laborer class; once-born; the lowest class of men; non-Aryan; worker; the black man; he must find out a master; one who has no education; almost animal; just like a dog; he becomes disturbed; one who is dependent on others; they are ignorant rascals; unclean; equal to the animal; no training; fools, rascals. . . According to his understanding, people of black or dark skin color, as well as native Americans, are shudras, are third-class, degraded, and less intelligent: ‘Shudras have no brain. In America also, the whole America once belonged to the Red Indians. Why they could not improve? The land was there. Why these foreigners, the Europeans, came and improved? So Shudras cannot do this. They cannot make any correction. . . . A first-class Rolls Royce car, and who is sitting there? A third class negro. This is going on. You’ll find these things in Europe and America. This is going on. A first-class car and a third-class negro. . . .”
- Bhaktivedanta Swami did not feel that the black American slaves should be freed. ” . . . . Just like in America. The blacks were slaves. They were under control. And since you have given them equal rights they are disturbing, most disturbing, always creating a fearful situation, uncultured and drunkards. What training they have got? . . . That is best, to keep them under control as slaves but give them sufficient food, sufficient cloth, not more than that. Then they will be satisfied. . . . ‘So the Kiratas, they were always slaves of the Aryans. The Aryan people used to keep slaves, but they were treating slaves very nicely.’ And that the Kiratas were Africans, he had explained many times: ‘Kirata means the black, the Africans.’ . . . .”
- Bhaktivedanta Swami had some “choice” things to say about women: ” . . . . Generally all women desire material enjoyment.Women in general should not be trusted. Women are generally not very intelligent. It appears that women is a stumbling block [sic] for self-realization. . . . Although rape is not legally allowed, it is a fact that a woman likes a man who is very expert at rape. When a husbandless woman is attacked by an aggressive man, she takes his action to be mercy. Generally when a woman is attacked by a man—whether her husband or some other man—she enjoys the attack, being too lusty. . . .”
9. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was co-founded by John Perry Barlow. A political chameleon, Barlow was a former lyriticist for the Grateful Dead and Dick Cheney’s former campaign manager. A perusal of his CV is revealing:
- “John Perry Barlow;” com.
- . . . Weir and Barlow maintained contact throughout the years; a frequent visitor to Timothy Leary’s facility in Millbrook, New York, Barlow introduced the musical group to Leary in 1967. . . .
- . . . . He was engaged to Dr. Cynthia Horner, whom he met in 1993 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco while she was attending a psychiatry conference and Barlow was participating in a Steve Jobs comedy roast at a convention for the NeXT Computer. She died unexpectedly in 1994 while asleep on a flight from Los Angeles to New York, days before her 30th birthday, from a heart arrhythmia apparently caused by undetected viral cardiomyopathy.
- . . . Barlow had been a good friend of John F. Kennedy, Jr. ever since his mother Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had made arrangements for her son to be a wrangler at the Bar Cross ranch for 6 months in 1978, and later the two men went on many double dates in New York City with Kennedy’s then-girlfriend Daryl Hannah[15] and Cynthia. . . .[16]
- . . . . Barlow is a former chairman of the Sublette CountyRepublican Party and served as western Wyoming campaign coordinator for Dick Cheney during his 1978 Congressional campaign. . . .
- . . . . By the early 2000s, Barlow was unable to reconcile his ardent libertarianism with the prevailing neoconservative movement and “didn’t feel tempted to vote for Bush”; after an arrest for possession of a small quantity of marijuana while traveling, he joined the Democratic Party and publicly committed himself to outright political activism for the first time since his spell with the Republican Party.[citation needed] Barlow has subsequently declared that he is a Republican, including during an appearance on The Colbert Report on March 26, 2007,[30][31] and also claimed on many occasions to be an anarchist.[32] . . .. .
- . . . . All of my presidential votes, whether for George Wallace, Dick Gregory, or John Hagelin, have been protest votes.” . . . .
- . . . . Barlow currently serves as vice-chairman of the EFF’s board of directors. The EFF was designed to mediate the “inevitable conflicts that have begun to occur on the border between Cyberspace and the physical world.”[34] They were trying to build a legal wall that would separate and protect the Internet from territorial government, and especially from the US government.[35]
- In 2012, Barlow was one of the founders of the EFF-related organization the Freedom of the Press Foundation and also currently serves on its Board of Directors.[36] Barlow has had several public conversations via video conference with fellow Freedom of the Press Foundation Board of Directors member Edward Snowden,[37][38] and has appeared in interviews with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks touting Snowden as “a Hero.”[39] . . .
- . . . . Barlow is a friend and former roommate[24] of entrepreneur Sean Parker, and attended Parker’s controversial 2013 wedding.[2. . . .
10. In FTR #854, we noted the curious professional resume of John Perry Barlow, containing such disparate elements as–lyricist for the Grateful Dead (“Far Out!”); Dick Cheney’s campaign manager (not so “Far Out!”); a voter for white supremacist/segregationist George Wallace in the 1968 Presidential campaign (very “Un-Far Out!”).
Barlow introduced the Grateful Dead to Timothy Leary, who was inextricably linked with the CIA. We discussed this at length in AFA #28.
AFA 28: The CIA, the Military & Drugs, Pt. 5
The CIA & LSD
Part 5a 46:15 | Part 5b 45:52 | Part 5c 42:56 | Part 5d 45:11 | Part 5e 11:25
(Recorded April 26, 1987)
” . . . . Timothy Leary’s early research into LSD was subsidized, to some extent, by the CIA. Later, Leary’s LSD proselytization was greatly aided by William Mellon Hitchcock, a member of the powerful Mellon family. The financing of the Mellon-Leary collaboration was effected through the Castle Bank, a Caribbean operation that was deeply involved in the laundering of CIA drug money.
After moving to the West Coast, Leary hooked up with a group of ex-surfers, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. This group became the largest LSD synthesizing and distributing organization in the world. Their “chief chemist” was a curious individual named Ronald Hadley Stark. An enigmatic, multi-lingual and well-traveled individual, Stark worked for the CIA, and appears to have been with the agency when he was making the Brotherhood’s acid. The quality of his product projected the Brotherhood of Eternal Love into its leadership role in the LSD trade. Stark also operated in conjunction with the Italian intelligence/fascist milieu described in AFA #‘s 17–21.
The broadcast underscores the possibility that LSD and other hallucinogens may have been disseminated, in part, in order to diffuse the progressive political activism of the 1960’s.
Program Highlights Include: CIA director Allen Dulles’ promotion of psychological research by the Agency; the work of CIA physician Dr. Sidney Gottlieb for the Agency’s Technical Services Division; connections between Stark and the kidnapping and assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro; Stark’s mysterious death in prison while awaiting trial; Leary’s connections to the milieu of the “left” CIA and the role those connections appear to have played in Leary’s flight from incarceration; the CIA’s intense interest in (and involvement with) the Haight-Ashbury scene of the 1960s. . . . .”
For our purposes, his most noteworthy professional undertaking is his founding of the EFF–The Electronic Frontier Foundation. A leading ostensible advocate for internet freedom, the EFF has endorsed technology and embraced personnel inextricably linked with a CIA-derived milieu embodied in Radio Free Asia’s Open Technology Fund. (For those who are, understandably, surprised and/or skeptical, we discussed this at length and in detail in FTR #‘s 891 and 895.)
A listener contributed an article in the “Comments” section that brings to the fore some interesting questions about Barlow, the CIA and the very genesis of social media.
We offer the listener’s observations, stressing that Barlow’s foreshadowing of the communication functions inherent in social media and his presence at CIA headquarters (by invitation!) suggest that Barlow not only has strong ties to CIA but may have been involved in the conceptual genesis that spawned CIA-connected entities such as Facebook:
“Fascinating article by John Perry Barlow, can’t believe I haven’t seen this before. From Forbes in 2002. Can’t accuse Barlow of hiding his intel ties, he’ll tell you all about it! To me, this is practically a historical document, as it hints at the thinking that inevitably lead to Inqtel, Geofeedia, Palantir, Facebook, etc. Including whole article, but here are a few passages that jumped out at me.
This part cracks me up: it’s “mystical superstition” to imagine that wires leaving a building are also wires ENTERING a building? Seriously? For a guy who never shuts up about networking, he should get that there is nothing “mystical” about such a notion. It’s exactly how attackers get in. If you are connected to the internet, you are not truly secure. Period.
“All of their primitive networks had an ‘air wall,’ or physical separation, from the Internet. They admitted that it might be even more dangerous to security to remain abstracted from the wealth of information that had already assembled itself there, but they had an almost mystical superstition that wires leaving the agency would also be wires entering it, a veritable superhighway for invading cyberspooks. ”
Here, JPB brags about his connections and who he brought back to CIA. I’ve always had spooky feelings about Cerf, Dyson, and Kapor. Don’t know Rutkowski. But the other three are serious players, and Cerf and Kapor are heavily involved with EFF. You know, because the EFF is all about standing up for the little guy.
“They told me they’d brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site”
This next part SCREAMS of intel’s ties to the “social media explosion.” I think this passage is what qualifies Barlow’s article as a historical doc of some value.
“Let’s create a process of information digestion in which inexpensive data are gathered from largely open sources and condensed, through an open process, into knowledge terse and insightful enough to inspire wisdom in our leaders.
The entity I envision would be small, highly networked, and generally visible. It would be open to information from all available sources and would classify only information that arrived classified. It would rely heavily on the Internet, public media, the academic press, and an informal worldwide network of volunteers–a kind of global Neighborhood Watch–that would submit on-the-ground reports.
It would use off-the-shelf technology, and use it less for gathering data than for collating and communicating them. Being off-the-shelf, it could deploy tools while they were still state-of-the-art.
I imagine this entity staffed initially with librarians, journalists, linguists, scientists, technologists, philosophers, sociologists, cultural historians, theologians, economists, philosophers, and artists‑a lot like the original CIA, the OSS, under “Wild Bill” Donovan. Its budget would be under the direct authority of the President, acting through the National Security Adviser. Congressional oversight would reside in the committees on science and technology (and not under the congressional Joint Committee on Intelligence). ”
“Why Spy?” by John Perry Barlow; Forbes; 10/07/02.
If the spooks can’t analyze their own data, why call it intelligence?
For more than a year now, there has been a deluge of stories and op-ed pieces about the failure of the American intelligence community to detect or prevent the September 11, 2001, massacre.Nearly all of these accounts have expressed astonishment at the apparent incompetence of America’s watchdogs.
I’m astonished that anyone’s astonished.
The visual impairment of our multitudinous spookhouses has long been the least secret of their secrets. Their shortcomings go back 50 years, when they were still presumably efficient but somehow failed to detect several million Chinese military “volunteers” heading south into Korea. The surprise attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were only the most recent oversight disasters. And for service like this we are paying between $30 billion and $50 billion a year. Talk about a faith-based initiative.
After a decade of both fighting with and consulting to the intelligence community, I’ve concluded that the American intelligence system is broken beyond repair, self-protective beyond reform, and permanently fixated on a world that no longer exists.
I was introduced to this world by a former spy named Robert Steele, who called me in the fall of 1992 and asked me to speak at a Washington conference that would be “attended primarily by intelligence professionals.” Steele seemed interesting, if unsettling. A former Marine intelligence officer, Steele moved to the CIA and served three overseas tours in clandestine intelligence, at least one of them “in a combat environment” in Central America.
After nearly two decades of service in the shadows, Steele emerged with a lust for light and a belief in what he calls, in characteristic spook-speak, OSINT, or open source intelligence. Open source intelligence is assembled from what is publicly available, in media, public documents, the Net, wherever. It’s a given that such materials–and the technological tools for analyzing them–are growing exponentially these days. But while OSINT may be a timely notion, it’s not popular in a culture where the phrase “information is power” means something brutally concrete and where sources are “owned.”
At that time, intelligence was awakening to the Internet, the ultimate open source. Steele’s conference was attended by about 600 members of the American and European intelligence establishment, including many of its senior leaders. For someone whose major claim to fame was hippie song-mongering, addressing such an audience made me feel as if I’d suddenly become a character in a Thomas Pynchon novel.
Nonetheless, I sallied forth, confidently telling the gray throng that power lay not in concealing information but in distributing it, that the Internet would endow small groups of zealots with the capacity to wage credible assaults on nation-states, that young hackers could easily run circles around old spies.
I didn’t expect a warm reception, but it wasn’t as if I was interviewing for a job.
Or so I thought. When I came offstage, a group of calm, alert men awaited. They seemed eager, in their undemonstrative way, to pursue these issues further. Among them was Paul Wallner, the CIA’s open source coordinator. Wallner wanted to know if I would be willing to drop by, have a look around, and discuss my ideas with a few folks.
A few weeks later, in early 1993, I passed through the gates of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and entered a chilled silence, a zone of paralytic paranoia and obsessive secrecy, and a technological time capsule straight out of the early ’60s. The Cold War was officially over, but it seemed the news had yet to penetrate where I now found myself.
If, in 1993, you wanted to see the Soviet Union still alive and well, you’d go to Langley, where it was preserved in the methods, assumptions, and architecture of the CIA.
Where I expected to see computers, there were teletype machines. At the nerve core of The Company, five analysts sat around a large, wooden lazy Susan. Beside each of them was a teletype, chattering in uppercase. Whenever a message came in to, say, the Eastern Europe analyst that might be of interest to the one watching events in Latin America, he’d rip it out of the machine, put it on the turntable, and rotate it to the appropriate quadrant.
The most distressing discovery of my first expedition was the nearly universal frustration of employees at the intransigence of the beast they inhabited. They felt forced into incompetence by information hoarding and noncommunication, both within the CIA and with other related agencies. They hated their primitive technology. They felt unappreciated, oppressed, demoralized. “Somehow, over the last 35 years, there was an information revolution,” one of them said bleakly, “and we missed it.”
They were cut off. But at least they were trying. They told me they’d brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site.
They didn’t see how this would be possible without compromising their security. All of their primitive networks had an “air wall,” or physical separation, from the Internet. They admitted that it might be even more dangerous to security to remain abstracted from the wealth of information that had already assembled itself there, but they had an almost mystical superstition that wires leaving the agency would also be wires entering it, a veritable superhighway for invading cyberspooks.
We explained to them how easy it would be to have two networks, one connected to the Internet for gathering information from open sources and a separate intranet, one that would remain dedicated to classified data. We told them that information exchange was a barter system, and that to receive, one must also be willing to share. This was an alien notion to them. They weren’t even willing to share information among themselves, much less the world.
In the end, they acquiesced. They put up a Web site, and I started to get email from people @cia.gov, indicating that the Internet had made it to Langley. But the cultural terror of releasing anything of value remains. Go to their Web site today and you will find a lot of press releases, as well as descriptions of maps and publications that you can acquire only by buying them in paper. The unofficial al Qaeda Web site, http://www.almuhajiroun.com, is considerably more revealing.
This dogma of secrecy is probably the most persistently damaging fallout from “the Soviet factor” at the CIA and elsewhere in the intelligence “community.” Our spooks stared so long at what Churchill called “a mystery surrounded by a riddle wrapped in an enigma,” they became one themselves. They continue to be one, despite the evaporation of their old adversary, as well as a long series of efforts by elected authorities to loosen the white-knuckled grip on their secrets.
The most recent of these was the 1997 Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, led by Senator Patrick Moynihan. The Moynihan Commission released a withering report charging intelligence agencies with excessive classification and citing a long list of adverse consequences ranging from public distrust to concealed (and therefore irremediable) organizational failures.
That same year, Moynihan proposed a bill called the Government Secrecy Reform Act. Cosponsored by conservative Republicans Jesse Helms and Trent Lott, among others, this legislation was hardly out to gut American intelligence. But the spooks fought back effectively through the Clinton Administration and so weakened the bill that one of its cosponsors, Congressman Lee Hamilton (D‑Ind.), concluded that it would be better not to pass what remained.
A few of its recommendations eventually were wrapped into the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2000. But of these, the only one with any operational force–a requirement that a public-interest declassification board be established to advise the Administration in these matters-has never been implemented. Thanks to the vigorous interventions of the Clinton White House, the cult of secrecy remained unmolested.
One might be surprised to learn that Clintonians were so pro-secrecy. In fact, they weren’t. But they lacked the force to dominate their wily subordinates. Indeed, in 1994, one highly placed White House staffer told me that their incomprehensible crypto policies arose from being “afraid of the NSA.”
In May 2000, I began to understand what they were up against. I was invited to speak to the Intelligence Community Collaboration Conference (a title that contained at least four ironies). The other primary speaker was Air Force Lt. General Mike Hayden, the newly appointed director of the NSA. He said he felt powerless, though he was determined not to remain that way.
“I had been on the job for a while before I realized that I have no staff,” he complained. “Everything the agency does had been pushed down into the components…it’s all being managed several levels below me.” In other words, the NSA had developed an immune system against external intervention.
Hayden recognized how excessive secrecy had damaged intelligence, and he was determined to fix it. “We were America’s information age enterprise in the industrial age. Now we have to do that same task in the information age, and we find ourselves less adept,” he said.
He also vowed to diminish the CIA’s competitiveness with other agencies. (This is a problem that remains severe, even though it was first identified by the Hoover Commission in 1949.) Hayden decried “the stovepipe mentality” where information is passed vertically through many bureaucratic layers but rarely passes horizontally. “We are riddled with watertight information compartments,” he said. “At the massive agency level, if I had to ask, ‘Do we need blue gizmos?’ the only person I could ask was the person whose job security depended on there being more blue gizmos.”
Like the CIA I encountered, Hayden’s NSA was also a lot like the Soviet Union; secretive unto itself, sullen, and grossly inefficient. The NSA was also, by his account, as technologically maladroit as its rival in Langley. Hayden wondered, for example, why the director of what was supposedly one of the most sophisticated agencies in the world would have four phones on his desk. Direct electronic contact between him and the consumers of his information–namely the President and National Security staff–was virtually nil. There were, he said, thousands of unlinked, internally generated operating systems inside the NSA, incapable of exchanging information with one another.
Hayden recognized the importance of getting over the Cold War. “Our targets are no longer controlled by the technological limitations of the Soviet Union, a slow, primitive, underfunded foe. Now [our enemies] have access to state-of-the-art….In 40 years the world went from 5,000 stand-alone computers, many of which we owned, to 420 million computers, many of which are better than ours.”
But there wasn’t much evidence that it was going to happen anytime soon. While Hayden spoke, the 200 or so high-ranking intelligence officials in the audience sat with their arms folded defensively across their chests. When I got up to essentially sing the same song in a different key, I asked them, as a favor, not to assume that posture while I was speaking. I then watched a Strangelovian spectacle when, during my talk, many arms crept up to cross involuntarily and were thrust back down to their sides by force of embarrassed will.
That said, I draw a clear distinction between the institutions of intelligence and the folks who staff them.
All of the actual people I’ve encountered in intelligence are, in fact, intelligent. They are dedicated and thoughtful. How then, can the institutional sum add up to so much less than the parts? Because another, much larger, combination of factors is also at work: bureaucracy and secrecy.
Bureaucracies naturally use secrecy to immunize themselves against hostile investigation, from without or within. This tendency becomes an autoimmune disorder when the bureaucracy is actually designed to be secretive and is wholly focused on other, similar institutions. The counterproductive information hoarding, the technological backwardness, the unaccountability, the moral laxity, the suspicion of public information, the arrogance, the xenophobia (and resulting lack of cultural and linguistic sophistication), the risk aversion, the recruiting homogeneity, the inward-directedness, the preference for data acquisition over information dissemination, and the uselessness of what is disseminated-all are the natural, and now fully mature, whelps of bureaucracy and secrecy.
Not surprisingly, people who work there believe that job security and power are defined by the amount of information one can stop from moving. You become more powerful based on your capacity to know things that no one else does. The same applies, in concentric circles of self-protection, to one’s team, department, section, and agency. How can data be digested into useful information in a system like that?
How can we expect the CIA and FBI to share information with each other when they’re disinclined to share it within their own organizations? The resulting differences cut deep. One of the revelations of the House Report on Counterterrorism Intelligence Capabilities and Performance Prior to September 11 was that none of the responsible agencies even shared the same definition of terrorism. It’s hard to find something when you can’t agree on what you’re looking for.
The information they do divulge is also flawed in a variety of ways. The “consumers” (as they generally call policymakers) are unable to determine the reliability of what they’re getting because the sources are concealed. Much of what they get is too undigested and voluminous to be useful to someone already suffering from information overload. And it comes with strings attached. As one general put it, “I don’t want information that requires three security officers and a safe to move it in around the battlefield.”
As a result, the consumers are increasingly more inclined to get their information from public sources. Secretary of State Colin Powell says that he prefers “the Early Bird,” a compendium of daily newspaper stories, to the President’s Daily Brief (the CIA’s ultimate product).
The same is apparently true within the agencies themselves. Although their finished products rarely make explicit use of what’s been gleaned from the media, analysts routinely turn there for information. On the day I first visited the CIA’s “mission control” room, the analysts around the lazy Susan often turned their attention to the giant video monitors overhead. Four of these were showing the same CNN feed.
Secrecy also breeds technological stagnation. In the early ’90s, I was speaking to personnel from the Department of Energy nuclear labs about computer security. I told them I thought their emphasis on classification might be unnecessary because making a weapon was less a matter of information than of industrial capacity. The recipe for a nuclear bomb has been generally available since 1978, when John Aristotle Phillips published plans in The Progressive. What’s not so readily available is the plutonium and tritium, which require an entire nation to produce. Given that, I couldn’t see why they were being so secretive.
The next speaker was Dr. Edward Teller, who surprised me by not only agreeing but pointing out both the role of open discourse in scientific progress, as well as the futility of most information security. “If we made an important nuclear discovery, the Russians were usually able to get it within a year,” he said. He went on: “After World War II we were ahead of the Soviets in nuclear technology and about even with them in electronics. We maintained a closed system for nuclear design while designing electronics in the open. Their systems were closed in both regards. After 40 years, we are at parity in nuclear science, whereas, thanks to our open system in the study of electronics, we are decades ahead of the Russians.”
There is also the sticky matter of budgetary accountability. The director of Central Intelligence (DCI) is supposed to be in charge of all the functions of intelligence. In fact, he has control over less than 15% of the total budget, directing only the CIA. Several of the different intelligence-reform commissions that have been convened since 1949 have called for consolidating budgetary authority under the DCI, but it has never happened.
With such hazy oversight, the intelligence agencies naturally become wasteful and redundant. They spent their money on toys like satellite-imaging systems and big-iron computers (often obsolete by the time they’re deployed) rather than developing the organizational capacity for analyzing all those snapshots from space, or training analysts in languages other than English and Russian, or infiltrating potentially dangerous groups, or investing in the resources necessary for good HUMINT (as they poetically call information gathered by humans operating on the ground).
In fact, fewer than 10% of the millions of satellite photographs taken have ever been seen by anybody. Only one-third of the employees at the CIA speak any language besides English. Even if they do, it’s generally either Russian or some common European language. Of what use are the NSA’s humongous code-breaking computers if no one can read the plain text extracted from the encrypted stream?
Another systemic deficit of intelligence lies, interestingly enough, in the area of good old-fashioned spying. Although its intentions were noble, the ’70s Church Committee had a devastating effect on this necessary part of intelligence work. It caught the CIA in a number of dubious covert operations and took the guilty to task.
But rather than listen to the committee’s essential message that they should renounce the sorts of nefarious deeds the public would repudiate and limit secrecy to essential security considerations, the leadership responded by pulling most of its agents out of the field, aside from a few hired traitors.
Despite all the efforts aimed at sharpening their tools, intelligence officials have only become progressively duller and more expensive. We enter an era of asymmetrical threats, distributed over the entire globe, against which our most effective weapon is understanding. Yet we are still protected by agencies geared to gazing on a single, centralized threat, using methods that optimize obfuscation. What is to be done?
We might begin by asking what intelligence should do. The answer is simple: Intelligence exists to provide decision makers with an accurate, comprehensive, and unbiased understanding of what’s going on in the world. In other words, intelligence defines reality for those whose actions could alter it. “Given our basic mission,” one analyst said wearily, “we’d do better to study epistemology than missile emplacements.”
If we are serious about defining reality, we might look at the system that defines reality for most of us: scientific discourse. The scientific method is straightforward. Theories are openly advanced for examination and trial by others in the field. Scientists toil to create systems to make all the information available to one immediately available to all. They don’t like secrets. They base their reputations on their ability to distribute their conclusions rather than the ability to conceal them. They recognize that “truth” is based on the widest possible consensus of perceptions. They are committed free marketeers in the commerce of thought. This method has worked fabulously well for 500 years. It might be worth a try in the field of intelligence.
Intelligence has been focused on gathering information from expensive closed sources, such as satellites and clandestine agents. Let’s attempt to turn that proposition around. Let’s create a process of information digestion in which inexpensive data are gathered from largely open sources and condensed, through an open process, into knowledge terse and insightful enough to inspire wisdom in our leaders.
The entity I envision would be small, highly networked, and generally visible. It would be open to information from all available sources and would classify only information that arrived classified. It would rely heavily on the Internet, public media, the academic press, and an informal worldwide network of volunteers–a kind of global Neighborhood Watch–that would submit on-the-ground reports.
It would use off-the-shelf technology, and use it less for gathering data than for collating and communicating them. Being off-the-shelf, it could deploy tools while they were still state-of-the-art.
I imagine this entity staffed initially with librarians, journalists, linguists, scientists, technologists, philosophers, sociologists, cultural historians, theologians, economists, philosophers, and artists‑a lot like the original CIA, the OSS, under “Wild Bill” Donovan. Its budget would be under the direct authority of the President, acting through the National Security Adviser. Congressional oversight would reside in the committees on science and technology (and not under the congressional Joint Committee on Intelligence).
There are, of course, problems with this proposal. First, it does not address the pressing need to reestablish clandestine human intelligence. Perhaps this new Open Intelligence Office (OIO) could also work closely with a Clandestine Intelligence Bureau, also separate from the traditional agencies, to direct infiltrators and moles who would report their observations to the OIO through a technological membrane that would strip their identities from their findings. The operatives would be legally restricted to gathering information, with harsh penalties attached to any engagement in covert operations.
The other problem is the “Saturn” dilemma. Once this new entity begins to demonstrate its effectiveness in providing insight to policymakers that is concise, timely, and accurate (as I believe it would), almost certainly traditional agencies would try to haul it back into the mother ship and break it (as has happened to the Saturn division at General Motors). I don’t know how to deal with that one. It’s the nature of bureaucracies to crush competition. No one at the CIA would be happy to hear that the only thing the President and cabinet read every morning is the OIO report.
But I think we can deal with that problem when we’re lucky enough to have it. Knowing that it’s likely to occur may be sufficient. A more immediate problem would be keeping existing agencies from aborting the OIO as soon as someone with the power to create it started thinking it might be a good idea. And, of course, there’s also the unlikelihood that anyone who thinks that the Department of Homeland Security is a good idea would ever entertain such a possibility.
Right now, we have to do something, and preferably something useful. The U.S. has just taken its worst hit from the outside since 1941. Our existing systems for understanding the world are designed to understand a world that no longer exists. It’s time to try something that’s the right kind of crazy. It’s time to end the more traditional insanity of endlessly repeating the same futile efforts.
John Perry Barlow is cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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