Rogue's Gallery II: Now Brought to You by Google

You may recall how Flickr (which is owned by Yahoo) took down the photo gallery of Egyptian State Security officers put up by Hossam al-Hamalawy.

Well, as I expected, they're back, but this time they're on Picasa, which is owned by Google. Also, here's a New York Times piece on the subject.

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The New Egyptian Security Chief

You will recall that last week Egypt's new Interior Minister, Mansur Eissawy, abolished the notorious State Security Investigations Service (Mubahith Amn al-Dawla), and the whole State Security Apparatus, (Jihaz Amn al-Dawla), the hated secret police of the old regime. Abolished. Kaput. Finis. Khalas.

In its place would be created a new "National Security Sector" (Qita‘ Amn al-Watani) devoted to the constitution, human rights, and respect of political freedoms. It sounded like a real improvement: it would be a mere "Sector," not an "Apparatus," and it would be in the service of the Nation, not the "State." It sounded as if it might go around handing out ice cream to kids instead of torturing people.

Of course General Eissawy himself came from State Security, like most Interior Ministers (but he was of course one of the good cops and if anything bad happened he was only following orders), and soon it was noted that "a large number" of former State Security officers would be recruited to the new agency, which would otherwise of course be completely different, of course.

Well, the Interior Minister has just named the new head of the "National Security Sector." Mother Teresa being dead and the Dalai Lama apparently being busy elsewhere, he has chosen, for want of a better candidate, (surprise, surprise!) a Major General from the old (abolished, totally gone, not there anymore, we promise) State Security.

Major General Hamid ‘Abdullah (photo above right) had been serving as security chief for the northern Sa‘id (Upper, that is, southern, Egypt), and before that had been chief of security in the Cairo suburb of Helwan, and before that, a Deputy Chief for Cairo.

Some press: English summary in Al-Masry- Al-Youm here; longer Arabic version here; Al-Shorouk in Arabic here; Al-Dostour here. While these are all independent papers few of their reports go beyond a press release. A Facebook group discussing the appointment, though still sparse last night when I read it, sees him as an old guard security man unpopular with Christians due to his service in Upper Egypt.

Stay vigilant, everyone: the Egyptian Revolution is a work in progress. The new bosses still look a bit like the old bosses.

I hope I don't sound too cynical. Skepticism, though, is appropriate here, I suspect.

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A "Large Number" of SSI Officers to Be Recruited for "New" Agency?

The Egyptian independent paper Al-Shorouk is reporting that a large number of officers from the dissolved State Security Investigations will be incorporated in the new National Security Agency. As I noted yesterday, the credibility of the new agency will depend on its being something new, not a renamed SSI. If the "high level security source" Al-Shorouk claims to have talked to knows whereof he speaks, that doesn't augur well. Blogger 3arabawy (Hossam al-Hamalawy), who published the pictures of SSI officers only to see Flickr take them down, doesn't like it one bit. I can't say I blame him.

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Egypt: An End to State Security Investigations

Egypt's new Interior Minister Mansur Eissawy has issued a decree abolishing the State Security Investigations Service "and all its administrative units, sections and offices in all the governorates of the Republic." The Arabic announcement is here.

In its place will be a new service, to be named the "National Security Sector," which will prtec intrernal security and fight terrorism "in accordance with the constitution and laws and the principles of human rights and freedom," and recruitment of officers will begin soon so that the new service can conduct its duties "without interference in the lives of citizens or the exercise of their politial rights."

It goes without saying that this is encouraging news, provided that they aren't just renaming the old service so notorious for its human rights abuses. If there appears to be a mass transfer of personnel to the new service, there will be much suspicion about any real change. Will it take over the files on citizens kept by the old agency? I suspect those who fought for change will be cautiously optimistic but also vigilant.

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Rogue's Gallery: Protesters Publish Pictures of State Security Officers

When Egyptian State Security in Nasr City was stormed last weekend, protesters found two DVDs marked "Archive of Agency Officers," and including photos, files, and other information on officers of State Security Investigations. Amid demands they be tried for torture and other crimes, they have, of course, posted the pictures on Flickr.. Now I'm sure not everyone pictured engaged in torture, and generally I don't like exposing people in covert work, but then they didn't ask me, and they aren't all innocents, either.

Why do so many of them look like the KGB heavies in old James Bond movies?

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Sometimes, Who Dares, Loses: the SAS Gets Caught

Just over a week ago I did a "Who Dares, Wins" post about the British SAS' successful extraction of oil workers from Libya. Lest I be accused of enabling SAS mythology, I should note the massive screwup they've apparently delivered the British government this time round. What's fair is fair, and when you roll the dice, sometimes you lose. And unlike Mission Impossible, the Director can't always disclaim all knowledge of your operation.

Admittedly, the operatives involved fell into the hands of friendlies, instead of the bad guys, so they're already on their way home on a Royal Navy ship instead of being Qadhafi's prize trophy hostages, but they still screwed up. Here's a rather detailed account of the mission that seems pretty credible. A Guardian account here. And, for more fun, the always entertaining Daily Mail has its account, the web version interspersed with many totally irrelevant photographs, but what the heck.

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The Strange Case of General ‘Asgari

Over the New Year's weekend a very strange story suddenly surfaced (sinking fairly quickly thereafter) when Iran protested to the United Nations the alleged murder, or alleged suicide, of Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps General ‘Ali Reza ‘Asgari in an Israeli prison.

The problem is, there is no particularly good reason to believe that General &lslquo;Asgari was in an Israeli prison, or even in Israel; Israeli refusal to comment on intelligence matters and allegations, combined with censorship that is at times ridiculous in refusing even to report things published abroad, may be adding mystery where there is little or none. I have no idea where General ‘Asgari is, or whether he is alive or dead, but until the recent wave of reports most speculation had him in a safe house somewhere in the West.

It's an odd, shadowy, spooky, Spy vs. Spy sort of saga anyway. Let's take it from the top. General ‘Asgari, who was an IRGC General and a Deputy Defense Minister under President Khatami, Supplanted when Ahmadinejad was elected, he disappeared in Istanbul in 2007. Iran has claimed he was kidnapped. Western speculation has generally been that he defected and is in the hands and under the protection of a Western intelligence service. Some have claimed he had been a double agent for some years, had run Iranian intelligence in Lebanon, and had extensive knowledge of Hizbullah. That would be the presumed motive for an Israeli involvement, if any. Iran protested, and there is confusion over whether he disappeared in December 2006 or January 2007, and Western and Iranian reports attribute different stories to his wife, or someone identified as his wife. Typical cloak and dagger stuff.

Now the current issue. Last June there was an Israeli report about a mysterious "Prisoner X" who was being held at Ayalon Prison under extreme secrecy. The story disappeared from the Israeli website that published it, Ynet (the Yediot Aharanot online site), presumably due to the censor's intervention, but a screen capture by blogger and peace activist Richard Silverstein preserved the report. Silverstein, a controversial figure whose blog, Tikun Olam, often claims to break stories about Israeli intelligence. In December, Silverstein claimed that a source had identified Prisoner X as ‘Asgari, though he admitted another source had denied this, claiming to know who Prisoner X really was.

If you're with me so far, here's where it gets stranger. On December 27, a Ynet report (again taken down; Silverstein has a screenshot), and Silverstein reported that an alleged suicide of a security prisoner was ‘Asgari, but also claimed that he had been murdered.

Iranian Defense Minister Vahidi denounced the alleged murder of ‘Asgari, and Iran is reportedly taking matters to the UN.

Ha'aretz correspondent Yossi Melman, who covers the Mossad beat as far as any Israeli journalist is allowed to, published a lengthy piece on "The Mossad Myth" in which he expressed doubt that ‘Asgari had ever been in Israel and suggested a cult of excessive secrecy was lending credibility to the claims. Of course, if you're a conspiracy theorist, you'll assume Melman is reporting the line Mossad is feeding him.

The fuss seems to have died down a little in the face of other events, and as I've said already, I don't know what happened to ‘Asgari. But I'm struck by the fact that a single blogger, Silverstein, who does seem to have sources inside Israel but who has sometimes been off the mark before, is the sole real reason to believe that Prisoner X is/was ‘Asgari. If Prisoner X wasn't ‘Asgari, there's no reason to think ‘Asgari's dead. And while I respect Silverstein's views and probably share many of them, there seem to be some leaps of faith going on here in the identification.

Homicide detectives (on TV and the movies anyway) always look for motive and opportunity. If indeed Israel snatched an IRGC general and has been holding him in solitary, what would the motive be for killing him now? Anybody? Assuming the suicide story is the real one, why were they holding him so long, if he'd cooperated? Melman may know more than he can post, but he's a lot closer (geographically and otherwise) than Silverstein.

I'll note that the Iranians in the past, while blaming the US in general for being behind the disappearance of ‘Asgari in our role as the patrons of Global Arrogance, have tended to blame not only Israel but also British and German intelligence for the actual operation. There are enough people saying ‘Asgari was never in Israel and isn't dead that I tend to believe this is probably the case. Then again, he's unlikely to turn up and say, "Here I am, I'm fine," because that would probably make him a target.

Or, it could all be true. But the shadowy world in which ‘Asgari moved is one in which a whole lot is going to remain unknown for years, if not forever. You could ask Ashraf Marwan.

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New Paramilitary Force for Saudi Intelligence

According to this story in Arab News, Saudi intelligence chief Prince Muqrin has announced the formation of a new force, apparently intended for counterterrorism, under the intelligence service. From the pictujre it looks like a paramilitary force, which is probably why the article notes that it will fully cooperate with the Interior Ministry. Without more information, it's hard to know why this isn't a redundant force to begin with: doesn't Saudi General Intelligence already cooperate with Interior, which has the police power?

Offhand I'm guessing this is the usual bureaucratic redundancy familiar to most security services in most countries: of course the Interior Ministry already has such forces, but Intelligence did not. Now Prince Muqrin has one, too.

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New Israeli Book on Ashraf Marwan Case

We've touched on the Ashraf Marwan story several times: Egyptian public figure and businessman, head of Egypt's defense industry for many years, son-in-law of Nasser, and long rumored to have been a Mossad informant who provided the crucial tip in the 1973 war, and then died in a mysterious fall from his London balcony in 2007. This past summer, a British inquest ruled out suicide but also said there was no evidence he was murdered. His widow Mona Nasser blames Israel for his death.

NOw there's a new book by an Israeli academic which concludes that he was not a double agent and blames Egypt rather than Israel for his mysterious death. Since the book is in Hebrew I can't judge it, and perhaps it's disinformation, but the linked Ha'aretz article adds to the confusion over Marwan.

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Wikileaks Reconsidered

Since my initial posting late last month, I haven't returned to the Wikileaks controversy, mostly since it's all over the blogosphere and unless I'm the only blogger you read (in which case, unless you're reading me only because you're a close relative, you may need to diversify a bit), you're getting plenty of it. The Arabist and Brian Whitaker and Juan Cole have featured a lot of the key posts on the Middle East; specialist sites like Syria Comment for Syria and Qifa Nabki for Lebanon (who raises some questions about the cables here and some criticism here), are also on the case, and so on. Now that this has metastasized into some kind of cyberwar, with ISPs and financial institutions shutting Wikileaks down while "Operation Payback" is crashing their sites, I guess it's time to say a bit more.

I'm not going to comment much on the content. There have been one or two genuinely disturbing releases, but I think they have made Wikileaks look worse than the US government: the "potential terrorist targets" release is obviously one such. This is a revelation? More like a plan of operations. It was a genuinely harmful leak, reprehensible in my view, and revealed nothing bad about the US government.

Other than that, though, most of the revelations so far have been on the order of Dog bites Man, rather than the other way around. Such stunning revelations! Saudi Arabia doesn't like Iran! Qadhafi sometimes behaves in thuggish or erratic ways! Al-Jazeera doesn't criticize the government of Qatar! Diplomats collect and transmit intelligence! The Moroccan military is controlled by the Palace! And those are the headlines.

Oh, to be sure, there's information. Conversations with key people, apparently well-informed speculation about succession in Libya, Tunisia, and other such places, and much more: but very little that a well-informed student of the region couldn't learn in a short time (sometimes from the very people who wrote the cables).

It's embarrassing, to be sure: no one wants their private assessments published on the Internet. Except for the glaring exception of the potential terrorist targets list, though, there are no great shockers here. This isn't the Pentagon Papers, which showed that the government itself did not actually believe what it was publicly saying. The cables I've read show that US diplomats are perspicacious, informed, discriminating, and can write a lot better than public government documents would suggest. Some folks seem shocked that diplomats gather intelligence. I'm reminded of Claude Rains' scene in Casablanca where he says, "I'm shocked, shocked! to learn that gambling is going on here!" just as he's being handed his winnings. This is either a reflection of a terribly naive view of what "gathering intelligence" means (I do it every morning to write this blog), or of what diplomats have done at least since Sir Francis Walsingham served the first Queen Elizabeth. You could ask Machiavelli, but anyone since the Renaissance will only be feigning shock. It's what they do, people. Ours, theirs, everybody's.

All this being said, I admit to really divided emotions in this whole affair. One reason I haven't posted lots of links is a discomfort with the whole idea of releasing confidential diplomatic correspondence, at least if it shows no malfeasance or crime. Occasional leaks of classified information are part of how national security journalism works. Without selective leaking, major newspapers and defense publications like Aviation Week wouldn't exist. But a huge dump of 250,000 documents defies any realistic vetting, and means that information like the list of potential terrorist targets will slip through even a serious scrubbing, which I doubt that Wikileaks is doing.

As for Julian Assange, he strikes me as an egotistical, self-centered ass. (I intended the last word to have two syllables but decided to keep this PG.) He seems motivated by an ideological dislike of the US, and Wikileaks has almost entirely concentrated on US documents. (Let's see some Chinese, or Russian, or Israeli, or Saudi documents? Oh: instead of some sex charges in Sweden and crashing of your website, you might get the old poisoned umbrella.)

On the other hand, as an Editor, Publisher, and former journalist, I also recognize that he has the same First Amendment rights I do, at least in countries with a first amendment, which at last check was one. In fact, if he doesn't, I don't either. Voltaire's "I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it," cliché though it may be, is appropriate here.

Even worse, the release is provoking what, to turn a Lincoln phrase on its head, might be called the worst angels of our nature. Our old Know-Nothing/Red Scare/McCarthyite vindictiveness is rearing its head, even in a liberal Democratic Administration. There's talk of prosecuting him under the Espionage Act of 1917. That's an act that led to mass arrests, and even the jailing of a Presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, in a fit of xenophobia. Basically, it can be construed as banning any publication of information related to national defense, if the government doesn't want you to publish it, regardless of its level of classification.

Let's not go there. If Wikileaks violated the Espionage Act (and on paper it did), then so have the New York Times and the Washington Post multiple times, including the Pentagon Papers case. (The Supreme Court decision, if I remember correctly as a non-lawyer, did not bar prosecution after publication; it forbade prior restraint. Once the barn door was open, no one chose to prosecute.) Using it against Assange would be a bad precedent. If the release of the potential targets cable — the most, and perhaps the only, real national security danger so far — causes real harm, it might be prosecutable under some more immediate statute, since it endangers life and property.

As an editor and publisher, I'll never cheer on censorship, but release of classified documents that do not reveal wrongdoing undercuts the whole system of diplomatic exchange which has endured since the Peace of Westphalia. The worst result of the release could be a major crackdown on all reporting on classified matters. The best might be a court case that sinks the Espionage Act of 1917, which is never enforced anymore but has enjoyed a new burst of popularity.

It's been reported that some universities are advising their students not to access the Wikileaks documents on the grounds the US government still considers them classified, and thus they could jeopardize future security clearances and employment. This is insane. The government may have the right to tell current US government employees lacking proper clearance not to access them, but I'm not even sure the courts will buy that. On government computers, sure. On your home computer? It's now, like it or not, in the public domain. Are you saying Usama bin Ladin can read something an American citizen can't, if he or she ever wants a government job? Think about that for a minute.

Often, I fear, our enemies paint us into a corner in which we seek to abandon our most fundamental freedoms. If the government wants to prevent publication of classified material, here's what you do: don't let anyone steal it. Once it's stolen, apologize to those offended, and make sure it doesn't happen again. But once it's out there, it's out there. The Supreme Court in the Pentagon Papers case banned prior restraint. This sounds like post-restraint: once it's out you can't read it or reprint it even if everyone else in the world is reading it. That won't stand in even a conservative Supreme Court, so please just stop talking about it. You failed to keep this data secret. Everyone on earth can access it. To bar US government employees from reading it is an incredibly Third World move. They're going to learn what's in it. This policy is incredibly counterproductive.

I have no idea whether the charges against Assange are justified or not; let the Swedish courts sort it out. The idea that it's some kind of setup or honeytrap seems a bit strained since the charges originated before the present flap, but whether justified or not, it's still closing the barn door after the horses are out.

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New Mossad Chief: Tamir Pardo

Mossad's new chief, replacing Meir Dagan, has been named: Tamir Pardo.

Yeah, you've never heard of him. Neither have I. He's not one of the known names recently bandied about (Yuval Diskin, Amos Yadlin, even Ehud Barak). He's a former Deputy Director (never known except by initial) who stepped down in 2005 and has been an advisor to the IDF in the interim. That's why you haven't heard of him, unless you're in the loop. But Mossad wanted someone from within the organization, and he appears to have been the only internal candidate.

But since he's a career Mossad guy, you've never heard of him. That's kind of the idea. Only for a decade or so has the name of the Director been public.

Haaretz' profile here. Jerusalem Post's here.

Controversial blogger Richard Silverstein leaked the name early, though not by much. He notes that the Spanish name Pardo suggests he may be the first Sephardic director of Mossad.

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Wikileaks and Potential Blowback in the Arab World

I'm not going to try to get deeply into the whole Wikileaks issue, but the release of a huge collection of US diplomatic cables clearly has policy implications in the Middle East. There's more than enough commentary on the overall diplomatic embarrassment caused, and on the question of how to stop these sorts of leaks. And I certainly haven't read all 250,000 cables, but the ones spotlighted so far seem more embarrassing than revelatory. But the issue has some region-specific implications in the Arab world.

Issandr El Amrani and Marc Lynch both address this issue today. As Issandr notes:

There is so much information flowing around about US policy — and often, a good deal of transparency — that a smart observer with good contacts can get a good idea of what's happening. Not so in the Arab world, and the contents of the conversations Arab leader are having with their patron state are not out in the Arab public domain or easily guessable, as anyone who reads the meaningless press statements of government press agencies will tell you. Cablegate is in important record from the Arab perspective, perhaps more than from the US one.

Lynch echoes this and then raises a key dilemma for the Arab media:

But, as Issandr el-Amrani pointed out earlier today, the real impact may well be in the Arab world, where rulers go to great lengths to keep such things secret. The Arab media thus far is clearly struggling to figure out how to report them, something I'll be following over the next week. One of the points which I've made over and over again is that Arab leaders routinely say different things in private and in public, but that their public rhetoric is often a better guide to what they will actually do since that reflects their calculation of what they can get away with politically. Arab leaders urged the U.S. to go after Saddam privately for years, but wouldn't back it publicly for fear of the public reaction. It's the same thing with Iran over the last few years, or with their views of the Palestinian factions and Israel. But now those private conversations are being made public, undeniably and with names attached.

So here's the million dollar question: were their fears of expressing these views in public justified? Let's assume that their efforts to keep the stories out of the mainstream Arab media will be only partially successful -- and watch al-Jazeera here, since it would traditionally relish this kind of story but may fear revelations about the Qatari royal family. Extremely important questions follow. Will Arab leaders pay any significant political price for these positions, as they clearly feared? Or will it turn out that in this era of authoritarian retrenchment they really can get away with whatever diplomatic heresies they like even if it outrages public opinion? Will the publication of their private views lead them to become less forthcoming in their behavior in order to prove their bona fides -- i.e. less supportive of containing or attacking Iran, or less willing to deal with Israel? Or will a limited public response to revelations about their private positions lead them to become bolder in acting on their true feelings? Will this great transgression of the private/public divide in Arab politics create a moment of reckoning in which the Arab public finally asserts itself... or will it be one in which Arab leaders finally stop deferring to Arab public opinion and start acting out on their private beliefs?

All countries are more candid in private diplomatic exchanges than in public statements, of course; that's why diplomatic exchanges are not published until years after the fact. But the disconnect between public positions and private assessments is usually not as great in the West, where there is plenty of public debate about policy issues, as in the Arab world. (There are exceptions; the release of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War showed such a divergence between public statements and actual policy as to provoke scandal.) But the culture of secrecy in the West is nowhere near as pervasive as in the Middle East, where even things that are well-known are routinely denied.

One of the most-headlined revelations, that Saudi Arabia is so concerned about Iran that it urged a US attack, is not a huge revelation to most Westerners who follow the region, but it no doubt comes as a surprise to many Saudis, since it doesn't reflect official statements. Certain realities that "everybody knows" or at least suspects, may not in fact be known to Arab populations back home. Some things, especially surreptitious cooperation with Israel, are absolutely taboo and always resolutely denied. Exact details of military cooperation with the United States are equally sensitive, even if details are easily learned from US military veterans returning home.

The US has always honored these local sensitivities, and thus certain questions remain unanswered. Certain aspects of the US air war against Iraq in 2003 have never been fully documented because of sensitivity over where the sorties originated. The Wikileaks documents apparently address the not-so-secret US role in air strikes in Yemen, also never publicly acknowledged.

As Lynch notes, the Arab media face a dilemma here: secrets that were fairly openly known in the West have just been publicly released, with names and direct quotes. Some in the West may say, "Oh, I knew that already, or strongly suspected it." But what in the past was coolly denied is more credible when a Ruler is being quoted by a US Ambassador. The tendency to distrust the US and question its reliability as a partner may be the first instinctive response. While the excessive culture of secrecy in the Arab world is easy to deplore, it is, for now, a fact of life in the diplomacy of the region. The harm created by these leaks is less likely to be a direct unraveling of policy than a growing unwillingness of diplomatic partners to confide their true thoughts for fear of reading them in the newspapers.

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Stuxnet More Subtle than First Thought?

Remember the flap over Stuxnet? The alleged computer worm that may have deliberately targeted the Iranian nuclear program? (If not, click the link.) While the usual suspects (the US and Israel) plead that they know nothing (nothing!) this report in Wired suggests Stuxnet was a very subtle program aimed at introducing gradual, undetectable changes into a system.

The technical details are way beyond me, so I merely refer you to the article, since we've dealt with this story before. It does sound increasingly like Iran may have been the target.

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Should Ehud Barak Head Mossad?

With Meir Dagan approaching the end of his term as chief of Mossad, there's been considerable speculation about his replacement. Under Dagan, there's been considerable turnover among the deputies, with several senior figures resigning or being reassigned, and now, according to Amir Oren in today's Ha'aretz, neither Shin Bet Chief Yuval Diskin or Military Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin is eager to take the job. So Oren, after discussing the strengths and weaknesses of Diskin and Yadlin, suggests (perhaps with some encouragement?) another candidate: Ehud Barak. Barak, the current Defense Minister, was an intelligence professional and special operator before he was a politician.

This may just be a trial balloon, but I thought I'd call it to your attention.

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A New Mossad Controversy

Ha'aretz is reporting a new controversy involving Mossad. Chief Meir Dagan is in a dispute with the legal advisor of the agency, a woman identified only as H., over whether the legal advisor has a right to intervene on issues involving operational activities. The article is detailed and deserves a read, though there seems to be a lot left unsaid. (They refer to US blogger Richard Silverstein at one point in the article; I believe the post they mean is this one.

Israeli reporting on intelligence issues is better than it was 30 years ago, but it still leaves out far more than the reporter probably knows. Dagan's tenure and his successor (both who and how soon) are in play, so the issue is an important one. Read the links.

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Prince Bandar bin Sultan Resurfaces after Mysterious Absence

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former almost-permanent Saudi Ambassador to the US, has returned to Saudi Arabia after having dropped from sight for nearly two years. This English-language Saudi report doesn't say where he's been; others say he's been undergoing medical treatment in London involving at least four surgeries and a long recovery. Arabic accounts are here, here, and here, among others, all saying the same thing. For the non-Arabists, here's an account in Italian, since there are few in English. As The Gulf Blog notes, and as I have noted previously, there has been no shortage of rumors and speculation: he's ill; he's in jail; he's in trouble. Officially, at least, it was the former. But given his high international profile, why was his whereabouts so closely held?

Ah, when you combine royalty, intelligence matters, and backroom diplomacy, things get murky. Anyway, he's back.

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