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american intelligence is an oxymoron.....

That the Albanese government could further compromise Australia’s sovereignty, international integrity and national interests seemed inconceivable. Yet, intelligence, a vital government function inextricably connected with independence and protecting national interest, is being penetrated and colonised by the Americans.

 

A repost from August 3, 2023. 

By Mike Scrafton

 

 

At the Australia-United States Ministerial Consultations (AUSMIN) 2023 the establishment of “a Combined Intelligence Centre – Australia” (CIC-A) located within Australia’s Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO) was announced. The CIC-A will apparently see DIO and the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) cooperate on monitoring issues “of shared strategic concern in the Indo-Pacific”.

DIO and DIA are an odd coupling. Like DIO which “works primarily at the strategic level”, DIA’s role encompasses the collection and analysis of military-related foreign political, economic, industrial, and geographic data and its primary focus is national-level, long-term and strategic intelligence needs. Unlike DIO, DIA is also an instrument of policy. It collects human-source intelligence (HUMINT), both overt and clandestine, and has a counter intelligence role. Globally DIA deploys teams of case officers, interrogation experts, field analysts, linguists, technical specialists, and special operations forces, produces one fourth of the President’s Daily Brief, and reports through the Under Secretary of Defence for Intelligence to the Secretary of Defence.

Nowadays the intelligence agencies have extensive industrial capacities for organising, categorising, and interrogating vast amounts of data; mainly of American in origin. Australian generated current intelligence provides government policy and decision makers with up-to-date assessments of recent or unfolding events and is invaluable. In conflict situations operational level intelligence support to commanders and planners, and tactical intelligence support for troops in the field, is essential and is generally well done. Confidence in national control is central to the utility of these products.

Broader political and military assessments of the intentions, national power and resources of countries of strategic interest are important inputs into national decision making on strategic and foreign policy, but these are inevitably more subjective. DIO is recognised as providing “well judged, clear and timely insights into defence and security-related matters that may affect Australia’s national interests”.

Crafting intelligence products with Australia’s specific national interests and activities in mind is a critical requirement of sovereignty and independent action. Defence Minister Marles’ has declined to say what the CIC-A’s additional mission will be but considering DIA involvement it will probably contribute to shaping strategic policy. Marles lauded the new CIC-A as a “significant step forward” towards “seamless” intelligence ties and apparently anticipates erasure of all boundaries between Australian and American intelligence services.

The privileged access to ministers and to their policy advisers makes intelligence products influential. An intelligence assessment brings additional psychological comfort for decision makers. The seductive power of code-word classification and the need-to-know exclusivity of intelligence product enhances its power to persuade. Ministers can become spell bound and swayed by secret knowledge.

Cooperation between Australian intelligence agencies and their Five Eyes partners is not new, and reciprocal posting of individual officers is not uncommon. However, the CIC-A initiative is different. It appears to create an unnecessary institution in Australia’s intelligence community over which America will have at least partial control. Opportunities will arise to skew the focus of intelligence gathering and shape its construction, in turn influencing the formation of Australian national strategic policy.

Generally, nations jealously guard sovereign control over the intelligence product that goes into policy making. But when Marles uses the term “seamless”, as when he uses the term “interchangeable” in force structuring, it sounds very much like the sound of national control being surrendered.

Why is this concerning? Two recent articles in the journal International Politics address the general problem. In 2021 William D. James asked “How do junior allies seek to leverage US foreign policy to their advantage?” In 2022, Andris Banka asked “How can powerful states best extract domestic concessions from their junior allies?” Both point to the reality that hegemonic nations are never altruistic, and are alway pursuing their own interests.

The CIC-A initiative cannot be assessed in isolation from Australia’s asymmetric alliance with a hegemon. The benefits gained from an alliance with vastly larger power with global interests always come with the risk of being manipulated and the expectation of pressure to become an obedient client state. In the manoeuvring between major and minor allies the ability to shape conceptually and linguistically the interpretation of events is not lost on the Americans. The involvement of DIA is evidence of this.

Already, recent AUSMIN communiques and other joint Australian-American national security and foreign policy documents are replete with jargon, phrases and concepts of American origin. The words used to describe situations have a material effect on how their nature and significance are understood by decision makers.

Much of Australia’s strategic narrative is already shaped by the intelligence product that lands on ministers’ desks. Now the American military lexicon will become even more the language of the Australian intelligence community and the American perspective of the world further dominate the thinking of Australian policy makers.

This concern might appear exaggerated to anyone who has not been involved in the closed world of intelligence or observed ministers obsessing over intelligence products. But to be able to shape the language of intelligence products and devise the concepts employed is formidably powerful. Australia must be able to make an independent and objective assessment of its national interests in a region which includes America as well, and not written by the DIA.

The Americans possess the largest and most capable intelligence capability ever developed and their ability to gather intelligence on the Asia Pacific is unrivalled. Why does America need the CIC-A? The fact is it doesn’t, not for intelligence purposes anyway.

The proposed CIC-A is more likely directed at being able to seamlessly command Australian forces and for influencing Australian policy development. And ensuring Australia remains a compliant ally and reliable home to US forces preparing for a war.

A repost from August 3, 2023.

https://johnmenadue.com/abandoned-sovereignty-australias-intelligence-function-colonised-by-us/

 

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friendly spying.......

 

How the US and its ‘friends’ keep stealing each other’s secrets

Western spooks targeting Russian industry have long indulged in a spying orgy among themselves

 

BY Rachel Marsden

 

“There is an active hunt not only for promising research, the data and parameters of our weapons, but also for our specialists who are especially valuable,” Russian Industry and Trade Minister Denis Manturov recently said, referring to Western spies and their efforts to seek information about Russian defense production by targeting industry experts.  

Well, approaching “soft target”experts for info is certainly a better bet for spies than trying to chat up a soldier whose BS-detector is more finely tuned to espionage. And Western spooks know this better than anyone else since they’ve been busy practicing – among themselves. 

Ultimately, all spying is about getting an economic advantage – whether in conflict or war, where the outcome determines the prominence of any future economic foothold, or more directly through theft of economically valuable secrets or the subversion of trade or competition. The current focus on the military conflict between Russia and the Western military alliance via Ukraine obscures the fact that for all the public proclamations of unity and solidarity by Western leaders, they’d all screw each other over economically if given even the slightest chance.

The Ukraine conflict has really underscored the American view of Germany as an economic rival, which once translated into Washington’s systemic criticism of Germany’s Nord Stream economic lifeline of Russian gas (before it was mysteriously blown up). Now, it’s seen in the form of Uncle Sam’s enticing of German companies to US shores with green tax breaks and plentiful energy as limited and pricey replacement American liquified natural gas sold to Europe has sparked German deindustrialization. It was a longtime dream come true for the US, having considered Germany a key competitor on the global stage since the early ’90s. 

In 1995, the Los Angeles Times reported that President Bill Clinton’s administration directed the CIA to “take economic espionage off the back burner,” and that even before Clinton, “it became clear that economic rivalry with industrial superpowers such as Japan and Germany was being viewed by the White House and Congress as a critical national security issue following the collapse of the Soviet Union.” 

By 1999, the European press was reporting the theft of wind turbine blueprints from German company Enercon, to the benefit of an American rival. The US electronic espionage service (the National Security Agency) was blamed for it, and for targeting at least 30 German firms. 

Berlin was apparently so outraged by US spying that its BND foreign spy service actually helped the same NSA industrially spy on German business interests and on its neighbor and fellow US ally, France, for over a decade in the wake of this incident, as the German press reported in 2015. It’s no secret that the Franco-German-led Airbus Group (the known as EADS) is really the only major global rival to Pentagon contractor and commercial jet maker Boeing, yet Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported at the time that Germany helped the US spy on it, too. So when current German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stood beside Biden before the Ukraine conflict and smiled while the latter mused like a mafioso about taking care of the Nord Stream pipeline of cheap Russian gas, it wasn’t the only time that Berlin appeared enthusiastic about bending over for Washington. 

Washington also long considered France to be an industrial powerhouse, particularly under former President Charles de Gaulle, whose official policy of nuclear power development turned the country into a cheap energy powerhouse to rival American industry – and therefore into a target for US industrial spying. The CIA station in Paris was rolled up and expelled in a 1995 French domestic intelligence operation that ended with Paris publicly accusing the US of economic espionage. While the details of that spy operation still remain murky after all these years, it appears to be the same kind of trade-related espionage that the US also practiced during the Clinton administration on another ally, Japan, amid automobile-related trade negotiations, as the Los Angeles Times reportedin 1995. 

More recently, acquisitions of French industrial knowledge by US competitors have been the visible tip of the iceberg of Washington’s cut-throat methods of securing industrial advantages – like when France’s nuclear know-how division of Alstom was acquired by Pentagon contractor General Electric, as the heat was turned up on Alstom executives, including the CEO, jailed and charged in the US under American extraterritorial law for alleged corruption in developing countries.  

Of course, what remains unseen is far more egregious. About 100 French companies were targetedby NSA spies, Wikileaks reported in 2015 – “including almost all of the CAC 40” index of the country’s top businesses, according to France’s Liberation newspaper. 

Not that the French have been immune from dabbling in a little ami-on-ami spying. In 1993, two French officials were sent back to Paris after being caught spying on US industry under diplomatic cover. Around the same time, a French intelligence report leaked to the press cited “49 high-technology US companies, 24 financial services companies and US officials handling sensitive trade talks… which are being targeted by spies for their negotiating strategies,” Britain’s Independent reported at the time.  

These days, no one with even two brain cells who attends the Paris Airshow, or the Milipol internal security summit, leaves their computer or phone in their hotel room. Just like back in the days of France’s Concorde supersonic jet, Canadian and American intelligence services warned their executives to treatthe plane as though it was bugged to pick up any conversations. 

Not to be forgotten is America’s “best ally,” Israel, cited by the US government in targeting American business people for research and development intelligence as far back as 1992 – and more recently through its military-grade Pegasus spyware and its larger cyber-surveillance industry, whose separation from the state is highly questionable at best and nonexistent at worst. 

Moscow’s public acknowledgement that it’s now actively the target of the West’s orgy of industrial espionage means that it now has the same choice as every cat owner. It can interpret any bite as an act of aggression, or just do what the West does among themselves and chalk it up to a love bite, all while plotting how to step on the offending cat’s tail – with plausible deniability, of course.

https://www.rt.com/news/589823-us-keep-stealing-secrets/

 

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