- More on Firstfruits. The organization partly involved
in directing the National Security Agency program to collect intelligence
on journalists -- Firstfruits -- is the Foreign Denial and Deception Committee
(FDDC), a component of the National Intelligence Council. The last reported
chairman of the inter-intelligence agency group was Dr. Larry Gershwin,
the CIA's adviser on science and technology matters, a former national
intelligence officer for strategic programs, and one of the primary promoters
of the Iraqi disinformation con man and alcoholic who was code named "Curveball."
Gershwin was also in charge of the biological weapons portfolio at the
National Intelligence Council where he worked closely with John Bolton
and the CIA's Alan Foley -- director of the CIA's Office of Weapons Intelligence,
Nonproliferation, and Arms Control (WINPAC) -- and Frederick Fleitz
-- who Foley sent from WINPAC to work in Bolton's State Department office
-- in helping to cook Iraqi WMD "intelligence" on behalf of Vice
President Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby. In addition to surveilling journalists
who were writing about operations at NSA, Firstfruits particularly targeted
State Department and CIA insiders who were leaking information about the
"cooking" of pre-war WMD intelligence to particular journalists,
including those at the New York Times, Washington Post, and CBS 60 Minutes.
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- The vice chairman of the FDDC, James B. Bruce, wrote
an article in Studies in Intelligence in 2003, "This committee represents
an interagency effort to understand how foreign adversaries learn
about, then try to defeat, our secret intelligence collection activities."
In a speech to the Institute of World Politics, Bruce, a CIA veteran was
also quoted as saying, "We've got to do whatever it takes -- if it
takes sending SWAT teams into journalists' homes -- to stop these leaks."
He also urged, "stiff new penalties to crack down on leaks, including
prosecutions of journalists that publish classified information."
The FDDC appears to be a follow-on to the old Director of Central Intelligence's
Unauthorized Disclosure Analysis Center (UDAC).
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- NSA eavesdropping on journalists and their sources is
sending chills throughout Washington, DC and beyond.
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- Meanwhile, WMR's disclosures about Firstfruits have set
off a crisis in the intelligence community and in various media outlets.
Journalists who have contacted WMR since the revelation of the Firstfruits
story are fearful that their conversations and e-mail with various intelligence
sources have been totally compromised and that they have been placed under
surveillance that includes the use of physical tails. Intelligence sources
who are current and former intelligence agency employees also report that
they suspect their communications with journalists and other parties have
been surveilled by technical means.
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- http://waynemadsenreport.com/
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