Research Assistance by Team8
DATELINE - WASHINGTON
"It SPIES ON TERRORISTS ... GUIDES WAR FIGHTERS TO
THEIR TARGETS ... ALL WITH AN ARRAY OF SPACE-AGE
TECHNOLOGY ...."
- CNN, December 13, 2002
"There are reports that the indiscriminate
spying on Americans is even wider, and that
the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
has brought satellite surveillance to bear on
the US for domestic spying ...."
- Rowan Wolf, "A Slow Motion Coup"
Like so many others in this history, Lieutenant General James R. Clapper, too, had a dream - of omnipresence. After the Gulf War, the DIA director was driven to upgrade the handling and communication of intelligence - particularly "pictures, not reports" - in the hot zone.
"The ultimate ideal," he said, "is to have a constant God's-eye view of the battlefield. Anywhere, anytime, all the time."1
Clapper, like Hayden, was a military careerist. After 32 years in the Air Force, he retired with the rank of lieutenant general in 1995. In civilian drag, Clapper moved on to executive corporate positions and directorships at several private military intelligence contracting concerns, including Booz Allen Hamilton, until, on August 8, 2001, Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenet jointly announced that he would take over the reins at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), succeeding NIMA's first director, James C. King.2
This secret apparat, established in 1996, headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, rechristened the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in 2003, produced and fed intelligence images and geospatial data to military forces and federal policymakers. NIMA was a bureaucratic omelot of existing agencies, including the Defense Mapping Agency and the CIA's satellite photo analysis division.
"If you think about it, everything and everybody has to be someplace," Clapper told CNN in 2002. "We try to create the setting, the geographical setting if you will, and help determine where things and people could be."3
In the same segment, Patrick Eddington, a former CIA photo analyst, told CNN's David Ensor that merging the CIA's satellite imagery division with NIMA was a drastic error: "It creates a corporate culture," he said. "And that is absolutely death. It guarantees intelligence failures."
Clapper wouldn't hear it, of course: "I think we do a very good job of satisfying all of our masters." To be completely precise, some the agency's masters have not been altogether pleased with its performance - particularly congressional oversight committees. Accountability requirements in government are a necessity. Without them, congressional monitors of the intelligence community are only briefed by intelligence officials when compelled by leaks and scandals. But Clapper doesn't see it that way: ‘‘Oversight has become too complicated,’’ he has complained. ‘‘There are too many jurisdictions, too much paperwork.’’4
James C. King, a retired three-star Army general, outgoing director of NIMA, is an interesting study in his own right. King was born on March 18, 1946, in Salt Lake City. He entered the Army as a military graduate of Utah State University's Reserve Officer Training Corps program, with assignments in Vietnam, Japan, Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere. His corporate profile at Gestalt LLC, where he is on the advisory board, reveals that King is "an acknowledged expert in the development of intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance," and so forth. "During his 33 years in the U.S. Army, he was involved in foreign and national security policy formulation and implementation, intelligence operations, and leadership of large organizations. King joined NIMA in March 1998 [under] the Department of Defense and National Intelligence Agency, comprised of 13,000 employees and contractors."
Before joining MZM, Inc. in December 2001, King served under General Hayden as the NSA's associate deputy director for operations - not for long, but long enough to execute his role in the 9/11 operation. MZM Inc. is based in Washington, D.C. Mitchell J. Wade started up the high-tech security firm in 1993, but was forced to step down in June 2005 after news reports that he did financial favors for Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.), who lobbied to fund programs that retained MZM on contract.5
On May 8, 2006, Justin Rood at TBM Muckraker reported that the relationship between Hayden and King continued after the latter left the NSA: "King worked at NSA Headquarters in Ft. Meade, Maryland, in 2004 and 2005." Not only was King under contract, he was "working on same floor as Hayden.... He was doing special projects for Hayden as an MZM employee." What was this about special projects? "As an MZM employee, King was involved in a number of controversial projects. In 2002, he was a key adviser to the team creating CIFA, the Pentagon's domestic surveillance operation. In 2004, he was one of three MZM staffers who worked on the White House Robb-Silberman Commission, which recommended expanding CIFA's powers." King has made generous campaign contributions to congressional candidates Wade smiled upon, including Virgil Goode (D-Va., $6,000) and Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla., $4,000).6
But it wasn't his first taste of bad press. In May, 2001, King was a subject to a fraud investigation involving an Indian-owned company in Alaska. NIMA director King was accused of conducting a cost-benefit analysis as part of the sweeping privatization program. Instead, he exercised an option permitting him to forego the cost study if the agency selected a contractor owned 51 percent by an American Indian tribe. Pentagon reporter Bill Gertz reported, "NIMA´s conversion of government employees to contractors [is] expected to increase taxpayer costs, not reduce them, we are told by an agency source."7 Perhaps this is why King avoided the cost-benefit study.
The Team8 investigation of “Project Trailblazer” found that NIMA was allied with the NSA in the execution of 9/11. Nico Haupt of Team8 writes that press reports that the Trailblazer program under the NSA has been a dismal failure are "hogwash - 'Trailblazer' is a huge satellite spy surveillance program" that has been in operation since 1998/99, "with big contracts to defense contractors like Titan Corporation (James Woolsey, PNAC, ex-CIA, BTG Inc.)" The eavesdropping program that cursed Hayden's confirmation as CIA director in May 2006 was a Trailblazer sub-operation, the code-name a cover for "Ronald Reagan’s STAR WARS and its intelligence surveillance tools. These folks know exactly what they’re doing, under the cover of 'negligence.' The irony is that 'Trailblazer' also is a scripted analogy and official secret service code-name for George Bush."
But the word has other clandestine meanings: “'Trailblazer' is nothing other than the operation of 9/11."
Two of the core conspirators, Haupt says, were Stephen Cambone and James King, "who left NIMA two days after Bush’s alleged Bin Laden 9/11 memo," jumping to MZM Inc. - "the very same company immediately close to Hayden, and now linked to the bribery scandal."
"The privatization of CIA and Pentagon started BEFORE 9/11, in awareness of 9/11." The same can be said for the NSA and NIMA. The privatization of intelligence and space surveillance were primary objectives of the 9/11 operation.
"Homeland Security was also already established with help of ANSER Institute," Haupt observes ... BEFORE 9/11!!"
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NOTES
1) Loch K. Johnson, Secret Agencies: U.S. Intelligence in a Hostile World, Yale University Press, 2004.
2) "JAMES R. CLAPPER NAMED DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL IMAGERY AND MAPPING AGENCY," DoD press release no. 363-01.
http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/2001/b08082001_bt363-01.html
3) David Ensor, "Secretive map agency opens its doors," CNN report, December 13, 2002.
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/12/09/map.makers/
4) Accountability and America’s Secret Foreign Policy: Keeping a Legislative Eye on the Central Intelligence Agency,
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1743-8594.2005.00005.x?cookieSet=1
5) http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=MZM_Inc.
6) Justin Rood, "CIA Nominee Hayden Linked to MZM," TPM Muckraker.com, May 8, 2006.
http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=140537
7) Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough, "NIMA under fire," Inside the Ring column.
http://www.gertzfile.com/gertzfile/ring051801.html
