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En matière de services secrets et renseignements, le journaliste Gordon Thomas fait partie des références. Né au Pays de Galles, il écrit 53 livres, vendus à 45 millions d'exemplaires à travers le monde. C'est sur un bureau ayant appartenu à Laurence d'Arabie, cadeau de son père, que Gordon Thomas a écrit tous ses livres. Expert du Mossad israélien, le service le plus craints, respecté et haï, il nous a reçu dans sa maison de Bath, en Angleterre, pour évoquer la mort à Dubaï d'un des leaders du Hamas, Mahmoud al Mabhouh.

L'agence de renseignement vient d'ouvrir ses archives sur un projet ultra-secret mis au point durant la Guerre froide, pour renflouer un sous-marin soviétique en plein océan Pacifique.

C'est le genre de scénario bon pour les films d'espionnage, dont la CIA a toujours nié l'existence. Trente-cinq ans plus tard, l'ouverture partielle des archives de l'agence américaine de renseignement prouve que ce n'était pas qu'un fantasme. En 1974, les Etats-Unis ont mis au point une ambitieuse opération à hauts risques, baptisée «projet Azorian», qui visait à renflouer un sous-marin soviétique dans l'océan Pacifique, comme l'indiquent des documents nouvellement déclassifiés, publiés vendredi par l'organisation indépendante National Security Archive.

Un enregistrement vidéo prouve l'implication de la CIA dans la mort de deux personnes, une mère et sa petite fille adoptive âgée de 7 mois, dont l'avion a été abattu au Pérou en 2001.

Le chasseur péruvien était guidé par un avion de surveillance de la CIA. Officiellement, le renseignement américain a toujours nié être impliqué dans l'attaque de l'avion de tourisme. Durant 9 années, la CIA a clamé son innocence au cours des commissions d'enquêtes avec comme argument que les pilotes de la CIA parlaient mal espagnol et que les soldats péruviens s'exprimaient mal en anglais. Les pilotes péruviens auraient pris seuls la décision d'ouvrir le feu.

Mais un enregistrement vidéo provenant de la caméra embarquée de l'avion de la CIA et diffusée mardi par la chaîne américaine ABC News infirme définitivement cette version des faits.

Alors qu'au-delà des amabilités diplomatiques, un certain froid s'installe entre Barack Obama et Benyamin Nétanyahou, une étrange affaire jette le trouble entre Israël et les États-Unis, alliés constants au Moyen-Orient depuis plus de 60 ans.

Bien qu'elle repose sur des éléments sérieux, nul ne l'a relatée en France, alors qu'elle faisait, dès février 2009, la une du New York Times (« Spy case reverberates in Lebanon »).

À son origine, la féroce guerre secrète qui, sur le champ de bataille libanais, oppose, depuis deux ans, les services spéciaux du Hezbollah à ceux d'Israël - lequel garde, depuis cette première fuite médiatique, un silence de plomb sur toute l'histoire.

Le directeur de la CIA, Leon Panetta, a fait installer des logiciels en langues étrangères sur les ordinateurs de ses agents situés au siège de l'agence, à Langley (Virginie). Objectif : améliorer leur maîtrise des langues étrangères.

Selon le porte-parole de l'organisation, George Little (qui parle anglais, français et espagnol), moins de 1 agent sur 3 sait s'exprimer dans une langue autre que l'anglais. Panetta entend développer surtout les cours de chinois, de russe et d'arabe.

The CIA is adopting Web 2.0 tools such as blogs and collaborative wikis, but not without a struggle in an agency with an ingrained culture of secrecy, CIA officers said Friday.

"We're still kind of in this early adoptive stage," said Sean Dennehy, a CIA analyst and self-described "evangelist" for Intellipedia, the US intelligence community's version of the popular user-curated online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

"There's a lot of cultural issues we have to encounter with bringing this kind of open source ethos into the intelligence community," Dennehy said during a panel discussion organized by the Washington office of Internet giant Google.

Le président sortant George W. Bush laisse à son successeur Barack Obama une grande latitude d'action dans les pays avec lesquels les Etats-Unis ne sont pas en guerre, des pouvoirs spéciaux que le nouvel élu pourrait remettre en question.

Mais ce n'est pas certain.

Obama a déjà exprimé sa volonté d'utiliser ces moyens de guerre souterraine s'il le juge nécessaire. Dans un discours en août, il a indiqué qu'il poursuivrait les terroristes les plus dangereux au Pakistan, même sans l'accord de ce gouvernement.

"Si nous avons des renseignements utilisables concernant des terroristes qui en valent la peine, et si le président Musharaff n'agit pas, nous le ferons" avait alors déclaré le candidat Obama.

Revenir sur les décrets concernant les services secrets limiterait les possibilités d'action du nouveau président et les capacités américaines à riposter au terrorisme par des moyens militaires ou non, a estimé un responsable du renseignement interrogé par l'Associated Press.

Les nouveaux pouvoirs du président trouvent leur base dans une directive de sécurité nationale de 2001. Le contenu est secret, mais elle permet notamment "des opérations contre les talibans en Afghanistan, avec des composantes de direction, commandement, défense aérienne, force terrestre et logistique" a reconnu en 2004 la Maison Blanche.

The famed chef Julia Child shared a secret with Justice Arthur Goldberg of the Supreme Court and the Chicago White Sox catcher Moe Berg at a time when the Nazis threatened the world.

They served in an international spy ring managed by the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA created in World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt.

The full secret was to come out Thursday, all of the names and previously classified files identifying nearly 24.000 spies who formed the first centralized intelligence effort by the United States. The National Archives, which this week released a list of the names found in the records, will make available for the first time all 750.000 pages identifying the vast spy network of military and civilian operatives.

They were soldiers, actors, historians, lawyers, athletes, professors, reporters. But for several years during World War II, they were known simply as the OSS. They studied military plans, created propaganda, infiltrated enemy ranks and stirred resistance among foreign troops.

Some of those on the list have been identified previously as having worked for the OSS, but their personnel records never have been available before. Those records would show why they were hired, jobs they were assigned and perhaps even missions they pursued while working for the agency.

Among the more than 35.000 OSS personnel files are applications, commendations and handwritten notes identifying young recruits who, like Child, Goldberg and Berg, earned greater acclaim in other fields - Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a historian and special assistant to President John F. Kennedy ; Sterling Hayden, a film and television actor whose work included a role in "The Godfather" ; and Thomas Braden, an author whose "Eight Is Enough" book inspired the 1970s and early '80s television series.

The release of the OSS personnel files uncloaks one of the last secrets from the short-lived wartime intelligence agency, which for the most part later was folded into the CIA after President Harry Truman disbanded it in 1945.

The CIA had resisted releasing OSS records for decades. But William Casey, the former CIA director and an OSS veteran, cleared the way for the transfer of millions of OSS documents to the National Archives when he took over the agency in 1981. The personnel files are the latest to be made public.

Source du texte : HERALD TRIBUNE

The agency spent millions setting up front companies overseas to snag terrorists. Officials now say the bogus firms were ill-conceived and not close enough to Muslim enclaves.

The CIA set up a network of front companies in Europe and elsewhere after the Sept. 11 attacks as part of a constellation of "black stations" for a new generation of spies, according to current and former agency officials.

But after spending hundreds of millions of dollars setting up as many as 12 of the companies, the agency shut down all but two after concluding they were ill-conceived and poorly positioned for gathering intelligence on the CIA's principal targets : terrorist groups and unconventional weapons proliferation networks.

The closures were a blow to two of the CIA's most pressing priorities after the 2001 terrorist attacks: expanding its overseas presence and changing the way it deploys spies.

The companies were the centerpiece of an ambitious plan to increase the number of case officers sent overseas under what is known as "nonofficial cover," meaning they would pose as employees of investment banks, consulting firms or other fictitious enterprises with no apparent ties to the U.S. government.

But the plan became the source of significant dispute within the agency and was plagued with problems, officials said. The bogus companies were located far from Muslim enclaves in Europe and other targets. Their size raised concerns that one mistake would blow the cover of many agents. And because business travelers don't ordinarily come into contact with Al Qaeda or other high-priority adversaries, officials said, the cover didn't work.

Summing up what many considered the fatal flaw of the program, one former high-ranking CIA official said, "They were built on the theory of the 'Field of Dreams': Build them and the targets will come."

Officials said the experience reflected an ongoing struggle at the CIA to adapt to a new environment in espionage. The agency has sought to regroup by designing covers that would provide pretexts for spies to get close to radical Muslim groups, nuclear equipment manufacturers and other high-priority targets.

But current and former officials say progress has been painfully slow, and that the agency's efforts to alter its use of personal and corporate disguises have yet to produce a significant penetration of a terrorist or weapons proliferation network.

"I don't believe the intelligence community has made the fundamental shift in how it operates to adapt to the different targets that are out there," said Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.

The cover arrangements most commonly employed by the CIA "don't get you near radical Islam," Hoekstra said, adding that six years after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, "We don't have nearly the kind of penetrations I would have expected against hard targets."

Trying to get close

Whatever their cover, the CIA's spies are unlikely to single-handedly penetrate terrorist or proliferation groups, officials said. Instead, the agency stalks informants around the edges of such quarry -- moderate Muslims troubled by the radical message at their mosques ; mercenary shipping companies that might accept illicit nuclear components as cargo ; chemists whose colleagues have suspicious contacts with extremist groups.

Agency officials declined to respond to questions about the front companies and the decision to close them.

"Cover is designed to protect the officers and operations that protect America," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said. "The CIA does not, for that very compelling reason, publicly discuss cover in detail."

But senior CIA officials have publicly acknowledged that the agency has devoted considerable energy to creating new ways for its case officers -- the CIA's term for its overseas spies -- to operate under false identities.

"In terms of the collection of intelligence, there has been a great deal of emphasis for us to use nontraditional methods," CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in November 2006 radio interview shortly after taking the helm at the agency. "For us that means nontraditional platforms -- what folks call 'out of embassy' platforms -- and we're progressing along those lines."

The vast majority of the CIA's spies traditionally have operated under what is known as official cover, meaning they pose as U.S. diplomats or employees of another government agency.

The approach has advantages, including diplomatic immunity, which means that an operative under official cover might get kicked out of a country if he or she is caught spying, but won't be imprisoned or executed.

Official cover is also cheaper and easier. Front companies can take a year or more to set up. They require renting office space, having staff to answer phones and paying for cars and other props. They also involve creating fictitious client lists and resumes that can withstand sustained scrutiny.

One of the CIA's commercial cover platforms was exposed in 2003 when undercover officer Valerie Plame was exposed in a newspaper by columnist Robert Novak. Public records quickly led to the unraveling of the company that served as her cover during overseas trips, a fictitious CIA firm called Brewster Jennings & Associates.

Official cover worked well for the duration of the Cold War, when holding a job at a U.S. Embassy enabled American spies to make contact with Soviet officials and other communist targets.

But many intelligence officials are convinced that embassy posts aren't useful against a new breed of adversaries. "Terrorists and weapons proliferators aren't going to be on the diplomatic cocktail circuit," said one government official familiar with the CIA's cover operations.

Under intense pressure

After the terrorist strikes, the Bush administration ordered the agency to expand its overseas operation by 50%. The agency came under intense pressure from Congress to alter its approach to designing cover and got a major boost in funding to expand the nonofficial cover program, which is commonly referred to by the acronym NOC, pronounced "knock."

Although the agency has used nonofficial cover throughout its history, the newer front companies were designed to operate on a different scale. Rather than setting up one- or two-person consulting firms, the plan called for the creation of companies that would employ six to nine case officers apiece, plus support staff.

The NOC program typically had functioned as an elite entity, made up of a small number of carefully selected case officers, some of whom would spend years in training and a decade or more overseas with only intermittent contact with headquarters. But the new plan called for the front companies to serve as way stations even for relatively inexperienced officers, who would be rotated in and out much the way they would in standard embassy assignments.

"The idea was that these were going to be almost like black stations," said a former CIA official involved in the plan to form the companies. "We were trying to build something that had a life span, that had durability."

In the process, the agency hoped to break a logjam in getting post-Sept. 11 recruits overseas. Thousands of applicants had rushed to join the CIA after the attacks, and many were sent to Afghanistan and Iraq. But outside of those war zones, open slots were scarce.

"The embassies were full," said a former CIA official involved in deployment decisions. "We were losing officers by the dozens because we didn't have slots for them overseas."

In separate interviews, two former CIA case officers who joined the agency after the attacks said that 15% to 20% of their classmates had quit within a few years. Among them, they said, was one who had earned his master's degree in business administration from Harvard University and was fluent in Chinese and another who had left a high-paying job at the investment firm Goldman Sachs.

The front companies were created between 2002 and 2004, officials said, and most were set up to look like consulting firms or other businesses designed to be deliberately bland enough to escape attention.

About half were set up in Europe, officials said -- in part to put the agency in better position to track radical Muslim groups there, but also because of the ease of travel and comfortable living conditions. That consideration vexed some CIA veterans.

"How do you let someone have a white-collar lifestyle and be part of the blue-collar terrorist infrastructure?" said one high-ranking official who was critical of the program.

But the plan was to use the companies solely as bases. Case officers were forbidden from conducting operations in the country where their company was located. Instead, they were expected to adopt second and sometimes third aliases before traveling to their targets. The companies, known as platforms, would then remain intact to serve as vessels for the next crop of case officers who would have different targets.

'A very bitter fight'

The concept triggered fierce debate within the agency, officials said.

"This was a very bitter fight," said a CIA official who was a proponent of the plan because it insulated the fictitious firms from the actual work of espionage.

"When you link the cover to the operation, the minute the operation starts getting dicey, you run across the screen of the local police, the local [intelligence service] or even the senior people in the mosque," the official said. "I saw this kill these platforms repeatedly. The CIA invests millions of dollars and then something goes wrong and it's gone."

But critics called the arrangement convoluted, and argued that whatever energy the agency was devoting to the creation of covers should be focused on platforms that could get U.S. spies close to their most important targets.

"How does a businessman contact a terrorist?" said a former CIA official involved in the decision to shut down the companies. "If you're out there selling widgets, why are you walking around a mosque in Hamburg ?"

Rather than random businesses, these officials said, the agency should be creating student aid organizations that work with Muslim students, or financial firms that associate with Arab investors.

Besides broad concerns about the approach, officials said there were other problems with the companies. Some questioned where they were located. One, for example, was set up in Portugal even though its principal targets were in North Africa.

The issue became so divisive that the agency's then-director, Porter J. Goss, tapped the official then in charge of the CIA's European division, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, to lead an in-house review of the NOC strategy.

Mowatt-Larssen sided with critics of the approach and began pulling the plug on the companies before he left the agency to take a senior intelligence post at the Department of Energy, officials said. Mowatt-Larssen declined to comment.

The agency is in the midst of rolling out a series of new platforms that are more narrowly targeted, officials said. The External Operations and Cover Division has been placed under Eric Pound, a veteran foreign officer who was CIA station chief in Athens during the 2004 Olympics.

But the agency is still struggling to overcome obstacles, including resistance from many of the agency's station chiefs overseas, most of whom rose through the ranks under traditional cover assignments and regard the NOC program with suspicion and distrust.

In one recent case, officials said, the CIA's station chief in Saudi Arabia vetoed a plan to send a NOC officer who had spent years developing credentials in the nuclear field to an energy conference in Riyadh.

The NOC "had been invited to the conference, had seen a list of invitees and saw a target he had been trying to get to," said a former CIA official familiar with the matter. "The boss said, 'No, that's why we have case officers here.' "

Information relevée par LE FRONT ASYMÉTRIQUE

Source du texte : LOS ANGELES TIMES