By Robert F. Kennedy Jr
WHITE PLAINS, New York, Jan 6 2015 (IPS)

I grew up in Hickory Hill, my family’s home in Virginia which was often filled with veterans of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. 

My father Robert F. Kennedy, who admired the courage of these veterans and felt overwhelming guilt for having put the Cubans in harm’s way during the ill-planned invasion,  took personal responsibility for finding each of them jobs and homes, organising integration of many of them into the U.S. Armed Forces.

Robert F Kennedy Jr

But as the process of détente unfolded, suspicion and anger were so widespread that even those Cubans who loved my father and were always present at my home when I was a boy, stopped visiting Hickory Hill.

To the CIA, détente was perfidious sedition.  Adlai Stevenson [at the time U.S. ambassador to the United Nations] had warned President John F. Kennedy that “unfortunately the CIA is still in charge of Cuba.”  The agency, he said, would never allow normalisation of relations.

JFK was involved in secret negotiations with Fidel Castro designed to outflank Foggy Bottom [Washington] and the agents at Langley [CIA], but the CIA knew of JFK’s back-channel contacts with Castro and endeavoured to sabotage the peace efforts with cloak and dagger mischief.

In April 1963, CIA officials secretly sprinkled deadly poison in a wetsuit intended as a gift for Castro from JFK’s emissaries James Donovan and John Nolan, hoping to murder Castro, blame JFK for the murder, and thoroughly discredit him and his peace efforts.

The agency also delivered a poison pen to hit man Rolendo Cubelo in Paris, with instructions that he use it to murder Fidel. William Attwood [a former journalist and U.S. diplomat attached to the United Nations asked by JFK to open up secret negotiations with Castro] later said that the CIA’s attitude was: “To hell with the President it was pledged to serve.”“There is no doubt in my mind. If there had been no assassination, we probably would have moved into negotiations leading to a normalisation of relations with Cuba” – William Attwood, U.S. diplomat asked by John F. Kennedy to open secret negotiations with Castro, speaking of JFK’s assassination

Many exile leaders openly expressed their disgust with the White House “treachery”, accusing JFK of engaging in “co-existence” with Fidel Castro.  Some Cubans remained loyal to my father, but a small number of hard, bitter homicidal Castro haters now directed their fury toward JFK and there is credible evidence that these men and their CIA handlers may have been involved in plots to assassinate him.

On April 18, 1963, Don Jose Miro Cardona, Chair of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, resigned in a fusillade of furious denouncements aimed at JFK and my father, saying that “the struggle for Cuba is in the process of being sabotaged by the U.S. government.”

Cardona promised: “There is only one route left to follow and we will follow it:  violence.”

Hundreds of Cuban exiles in Miami neighbourhoods expressed their discontent with the White House by hanging black crepe from their homes.  In November 1963, Cuban exiles passed around a pamphlet extolling JFK’s assassination. “Only one development,” the broadside declared, would lead to Castro’s demise and the return to their beloved country – “If an inspired act of God should place in the White House within weeks in the hands of a Texan known to be a friend of all Latin America.”

Santo Trafficante, the Mafia boss and Havana casino czar who had worked closely with the CIA in various anti-Castro assassination plots, told his Cuban associates that JFK was to be hit.

On the day JFK was shot, Castro was meeting with French journalist Jean Daniel, editor of the socialist newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur and one of JFK’s secret channels to Castro, at his summer presidential palace in Varadero Beach.  At 1.00 p.m. they received a phone call with news that Jack had been shot.  “Voila, there is the end to your mission of peace,” Castro told Daniel.

After JFK’s death, Castro persistently pushed Lisa Howard [ABC newswoman who served as an informal emissary between JFK and Fidel], Adlai Stevenson and William Attwood and others to ask Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson to resume the dialogue.  Johnson ignored the requests and Castro eventually gave up.

Immediately following JFK’s assassination, many clues appeared – later discredited – suggesting that Castro may have orchestrated President Kennedy’s assassination.

Johnson and others in his administration were aware of these whispers and apparently accepted their implication. Johnson decided not to pursue rapprochement with Castro after being told by his intelligence apparatus, including Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) boss J. Edgar Hoover, that Lee Harvey Oswald may have been an agent of the Cuban government.  This despite Oswald’s well-established anti-Castro bona fides.

After JFK’s death, my father continued to press Lyndon Johnson’s State Department to analyse “whether it is possible for the United States to live with Castro.”

“The present travel restrictions are inconsistent with traditional American liberties,” my father, then-U.S. Attorney General, argued in a behind-the-scenes debate over the ban on U.S. citizens traveling to Cuba.

In December 1963, the Justice Department was preparing to prosecute four members of the Student Committee for Travel to Cuba who had led a group of 59 college-age Americans on a trip to Havana. My father opposed those prosecutions, as well as the travel ban itself.

In a December 12, 1963 confidential memorandum to then Secretary of State Dean Rusk, he wrote that he favoured “withdraw[ing] the existing regulation prohibiting trips by U.S. citizens to Cuba.”

My father argued that restricting Americans’ right to travel went against the freedoms that he had sworn to protect as Attorney General. Lifting the ban, he argued, would be “more consistent with our views as a free society and would contrast with such things as the Berlin Wall and Communist controls on such travel.”

Secretary of State Dean Rusk thereafter excluded my father from foreign affairs discussions.  He was still Johnston’s Attorney General but the roaming portfolio that had previously empowered him to steer U.S. foreign policy during the Kennedy administration years was now revoked.

The CIA would continue its efforts to try to assassinate Castro during the first two years of the LBJ administration.  Johnson never knew it.  Castro provided Senator George McGovern with evidence of at least ten assassination plots during this period.

In 1978, Castro told visiting Congressmen, “I can tell you that in the period in which Kennedy’s assassination took place, Kennedy was changing his policy toward Cuba.  To a certain extent we were honoured in having such a rival.  He was an outstanding man.”

William Attwood later said: “There is no doubt in my mind. If there had been no assassination, we probably would have moved into negotiations leading to a normalisation of relations with Cuba.”

When I first met Castro in 1999, he acknowledged the recklessness of his brash gambit of inviting Soviet nuclear arms into Cuba.  “It was a mistake to risk such grave dangers for the world.”  At the time, I was lobbying the Cuban leader against Havana’s plans to open a Chernobyl-style nuclear plant in Juragua.

During another meeting with the Cuban leader in August 2014, Fidel expressed his admiration for John Kennedy’s leadership and observed that a nuclear exchange at the time of the Cuban missile crisis could have obliterated all of civilisation.

Today, five decades later and two decades after the Soviets left Cuba, we are finally ending a misguided policy that at times has done little to further America’s international leadership or its foreign policy interests. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

*             Robert F. Kennedy Jr serves as Senior Attorney for the National Resources Defense Council, Chief Prosecuting Attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper and President of Waterkeeper Alliance. He is also a Clinical Professor and Supervising Attorney at Pace University School of Law’s Environmental Litigation Clinic and co-host of Ring of Fire on Air America Radio. Earlier in his career, he served as Assistant Attorney General in New York City.

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James Bimen Associates of Virginia and Harris Corporation of Florida have contracts with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to hack into computers and phones of surveillance targets, according to Chris Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

“Bimen and Harris employees actively hack into target computers for the FBI,” Soghoian told CorpWatch.

James Bimen Associates did not return phone calls asking for comment. Jaime O’Keefe, a spokesman for Harris, and Jennifer Shearer, an FBI spokeswoman, both declined to comment for this story.

However, the FBI has not denied these capabilities. The agency “hires people who have hacking skill, and they purchase tools that are capable of doing these things,” a former official in the FBI’s cyber division told the Wall Street Journal recently. “When you do, it’s because you don’t have any other choice.”

Soghoian verified the information from other sources, after uncovering the information from Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) and other publicly available information.

“The government doesn’t have the resources to directly monitor every American or let alone every foreigner but they want to read the communications of every foreigner and they want to collect information on every American,” explains Soghoian. “What do you do when you don’t have the manpower to collect everyone’s communications?”

The answer, he says, is spy software. This is not unprecedented among government agencies. For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) bought commercial products from a company named SpectorSoft in Florida to track five staff whom they suspected of whistleblowing in 2009.

The software allowed them to capture “screen images from the government laptops of five scientists as they were being used at work or at home, tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted,” the New York Times reported last year.

Other companies like Gamma International from Germany and Hacking Team from Italy have also been aggressively marketing their products for purchase by local police officers. A number of national governments like Egypt and Mexico have also reportedly bought such systems that allow them to listen to regular phone and Skype conversations and read email.

But what agencies like the FBI are now worried about is that individuals are “going dark” by using freely available encryption software to prevent their email and phone conversations to be captured by law enforcement agencies.

In order to combat this, Soghoian says the FBI wanted custom designed products, so they turned to a little known internal team named the “Remote Operations Unit” inside the Operational Technology Division, which set up a project called “Going Dark”.

Eric Chuang, the head of the Remote Operations Unit in Quantico, Virginia, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and a law degree from Temple University in Philadelphia, was put in charge of this task.

Bimen Associates, which has its headquarters in McLean, Virginia, near the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, provided custom designed software tools developed exclusively for the FBI to crack encrypted conversations, says Soghoian. Agency staff and contractors access computers of suspects remotely to install this software to allow them to watch everything that the target types or says.

In February 2008, Bimen Associates hired Amanda Hemmila, a former U.S. Air Force computer technician, who was working on an online undergraduate degree in computer science with Grantham University in Missouri, to help test their new software.

Hemmila’s LinkedIn resume says that she was responsible for “building, testing, deploying, maintaining and tracking software kits and hardware deployed from the Remote Operations Unit Deployment Operations Center” as well as training them in “processing and viewing software and providing End User phone support.” She also helped write policies, guidance and training material to keep the software secret.

After spending a little over a year at Bimen Associates, Hemmila returned to her studies and graduated in 2012. A few months after she left, Mark Muller, who had an undergraduate degree in information technology from George Mason university, went to work for Bimen Associates in Quantico.

Muller says he wrote up the standard operating procedures for the FBI to use proprietary company software “we use to gain access to criminal subject machines in the field.”

He also conducted “pre-deployment meetings with the FBI agents and management to coordinate details of a case and implement an operational plan to track a subject(s).” After the agents completed monitoring of a target, Muller says he archived information on “previous implant(s) installed on subject’s machine, if any, as a knowledge base for the field agents.”

Bimen Associates does not appear to be a big or well known intelligence contractor – the only public contract that the company has been awarded lists zero income – but it is well connected.

Jerry Menchhoff, president of Bimen Associates, has been with the company since it was founded in 1998, after working for Booz Allen Hamilton, a company famous for two other employees – James Clapper and Michael McConnell, both of whom have worked as U.S. director of national intelligence, the top spy job in the country.

(Booz also made the news more recently when Edward Snowden, another former employee, blew the whistle on the surveillance activities of the U.S. National Security Agency).

The other company that supplies tracking software to the FBI is Melbourne, Florida-based Harris Corporation, which has been awarded almost seven million dollars in contracts by the agency since 2001, mostly for radio communication equipment. In 1999 Harris designed the software for the agency’s National Crime Information Centre database that keeps track of criminal histories, fugitives, missing persons, and stolen property.

Harris made it into the news a couple of years ago when the Wall Street Journal revealed that the company was selling a gadget called a “Stingray” to the FBI that allows the agency to track cellphone locations of users without their knowledge.

At the time Sherry Sabol, chief of the Science & Technology Office for the FBI’s Office of General Counsel, refused to provide any background on the subject because she said that information about Stingrays and related technology was “considered Law Enforcement Sensitive, since its public release could harm law enforcement efforts by compromising future use of the equipment.”

However, legal depositions by FBI agents, together with contract data dating back to 2002, confirmed the existence of the Stingray.

The big question is whether or not the FBI obtains warrants before using tracking software. In the case of the Stingray, the agency claimed that it was okay to use such devices without obtaining a warrant, on the grounds that it was like tracking down phone numbers, which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled is permissible.

But privacy advocates say that tracking the “metadata” of phone and computer communications and the information on it involves a far greater invasion of privacy, and should require a warrant from a judge. (This discussion is still ongoing in the courts, notably after a U.S. court ruled it was okay for the government to track cell phone location data without a warrant).

Soghoian believes there needs to be a public debate on the use and potential misuse of these tools.

“There hasn’t been a (Congressional) debate about the FBI getting into the hacking business,” Soghoian told attendees at DEFCON, an annual hacker convention that took place earlier this month in Las Vegas. “People should understand that local cops are going to be hacking into surveillance targets. Particularly for dragnet searches where they want to do a keyword search or a social network analysis, you need everyone’s communications.”

Pratap Chatterjee is executive director of CorpWatch. This story originally appeared on CorpWatch.org.

Earlier this month, Reuters revealed that a special division within the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has been using intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a mass database of telephone records to secretly identify targets for drug enforcement actions.

In the wake of these revelations, a former prosecutor tells IPS he believes he and his colleagues may have been unwitting pawns in the federal government’s effort to deceive defendants and the court system, thereby violating citizens’ constitutional rights.“This is changing the rules of the game so they can conceal the source and use tainted information." -- former prosecutor Patrick Nightingale

“None of us had any idea whatsoever there was a secret DEA programme that instructed DEA agents to conceal the source,” Patrick Nightingale, a former prosecutor for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, told IPS.

“My oath as an attorney and as a prosecutor was as an officer of the constitution, and not to win at all costs. This [programme] is a win at all costs mentality: whether it’s constitutional or not we’re going to use it and we can conceal it,” he said.

Called the Special Operations Division (SOD), it is comprised of some two dozen federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency (NSA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Department of Homeland Security.

Everything about the SOD is secret, including the size of its budget and the location of its offices.

Reuters has also identified the IRS as a recipient of the information, pointing to a former IRS training manual that referenced the SOD programme.

As a routine practice, the SOD secretly provides the information to local authorities across the U.S., allowing them to start investigations against U.S. citizens under false pretenses, in a practice known as “parallel construction”.

For example, under parallel construction, local law enforcement will be instructed to find a reason to stop a particular vehicle – for example, through a routine traffic stop – and then once the drugs are found, the government will falsely state the drugs were found in the traffic stop.

The IRS training document details how government officials are instructed to conceal – from prosecutors, defence attorneys, and even the courts – the methods by which a suspected drug criminal is identified and then targeted for apprehension.

“Special Operations Division has the ability to collect, collate, analyze, evaluate, and disseminate information and intelligence derived from worldwide multi-agency sources, including classified projects,” the 2005 and 2006 IRS training manual says, according to Reuters.

“SOD converts extremely sensitive information into usable leads and tips which are then passed to the field offices for real-time enforcement activity against major international drug trafficking organizations,” the document states.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a group that defends free speech and privacy issues, calls it “intelligence laundering“.

Since the revelations on Aug. 5, the Justice Department has said it is reviewing the programme, according to reports. But such a review does not address the constitutional violations that appear to have already occurred.

“Our criminal justice system is based on the presumption of innocence and our constitution demands fair play in criminal proceedings. It demands that prosecutors reveal to the defence both the good and the bad,” Nightingale said.

“If the source of this information is so sensitive that a law enforcement agency is told to keep the information from its own team [including federal and local prosecutors] because it knows members of its team are required to divulge it to the other side [the defence], then it’s a problem,” he said.

Nightingale told IPS he had no awareness of the programme as a prosecutor, even though he worked on many cases where he sought court approval for a Title 3 wiretap based on certain evidence. Now he does not know – nor does he have any way of knowing – how many of those cases originated from a secret SOD tip.

“This is changing the rules of the game so they can conceal the source and use tainted information, depriving… defence attorneys and defendants from being able to have a fair trial as defined by the Constitution,” he said.

Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney with EFF, told IPS, “The NSA data is being gathered on purpose, and then directed to a different purpose.” He said the information being gathered by the NSA “should” be something that the FISA Court has been approving, although there is no way to know.

“Those orders have a broad scope. The orders aren’t public, there isn’t insight into what the orders look like, or how the court operates really,” Fakhoury said.

“The big concern is they’re not being forthright about the fact that they’re using the information directed toward a purpose not related to national security, and they’re not telling the court or the defendants the true source of that information.

“It’s yet more proof what is being said publicly [by the NSA] is not all entirely accurate,” he said. “It’s another reason why we have to very carefully scrutinise the government’s justification for these types of programmes.”

Fakhouri says the SOD programme is unconstitutional because of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments combined.

Full and fair disclosure is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution as part of the Sixth Amendment, which states, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right… to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.”

The Fifth Amendment provides, “No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

The revelations also raise the possibility that individuals who have been convicted over the last 20 years on drug charges, or perhaps IRS-related charges, will challenge those convictions in court on the basis that secret evidence may have been used in the investigative process.

“I think we’re going to see a lot of those types of arguments. How successful those will be – will be a tough sell. I think it will be an interesting thing to watch,” Fakhoury said.

By Ignacio Ramonet
PARIS, Jul 12 2013 (IPS)

We were afraid this would happen. We had been warned by books (George Orwell’s “1984”) and films (Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report”) that with the progress being made in communication technology, we would all end up under surveillance.

Of course, we assumed that this violation of our privacy would be practised by a neo-totalitarian state. There we were wrong, because the unprecedented revelations made by Edward Snowden about the Orwellian surveillance of our communications directly implicate the United States, once regarded as the “country of freedom.”

Apparently this came to an end after the passage of the Patriot Act of 2001. President Barack Obama himself admitted, “You can’t have 100 percent security and then have 100 percent privacy.” Welcome to the era of Big Brother.

What has Snowden revealed? The 29-year-old former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) computer analyst who most recently worked for the private company Booz Allen Hamilton, subcontracted to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), leaked to The Guardian and to a lesser extent The Washington Post the existence of secret U.S. government programmes to scrutinise the communications of millions of citizens.

The magnitude of this incredible violation of our civil rights and private communications has been described by the press in precise and hair-raising detail. On Jun. 5, for instance, The Guardian published the order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court instructing the phone company Verizon to hand over to the NSA tens of millions of its clients’ phone records.

The order does not apparently cover the contents of phone communications nor the identity of the users of the phone numbers involved, but it does include the duration of calls and the phone numbers of callers and recipients.

The next day, The Guardian and the Post revealed the existence of a secret surveillance programme, PRISM, that enables the NSA and the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) to access servers of the nine main internet companies (with the notable exception of Twitter): Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.

By breaching communications privacy, the U.S. government can access users’ files, audio files, videos, e-mails or photographs. PRISM has become the NSA’s number one source of raw intelligence used for the reports it provides President Obama on a daily basis.

Over the last few weeks, both newspapers have been publishing new information on programmes for cyberespionage and surveillance of communications in the rest of the world, based on Snowden’s leaks.

Snowden told The Guardian, “The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time. Everyone is being watched and recorded.”

The NSA, headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, is the largest and least-known U.S. intelligence agency.

It is so secret that most U.S. citizens do not even know it exists. It has the lion’s share of the intelligence services’ budget and it produces over 50 tonnes of classified material a day.

The NSA, and not the CIA, possesses and operates most of the U.S. systems of covert gathering of intelligence material: from a global satellite network to dozens of listening posts, thousands of computers and forests of antennae in the mountains of West Virginia.

One of its specialties is spying on the spies, that is, the intelligence services of all world powers, friendly or unfriendly. During the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War, for example, the NSA deciphered the secret code of the Argentine intelligence services, making it possible to transmit crucial information about the Argentine forces to the British.

The NSA’s interception system can covertly intercept any e-mail, internet search or international telephone call. The complete set of communications intercepted and deciphered by the NSA constitutes the U.S. government’s chief source of clandestine information.

The NSA is in close partnership with the mysterious Echelon system, secretly created after World War II by five English-speaking countries (the “Five Eyes”): the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Echelon is an Orwellian global surveillance system reaching around the world, continuously monitoring most telephone calls, internet communications, e-mail and social networking sites. It can intercept up to two million conversations a minute. Its clandestine mission is to spy on governments, political parties, organisations and businesses.

Within the framework of Echelon, U.S. and British intelligence services have established a longstanding secret collaboration. And now we have learned, thanks to Snowden’s revelations, that British intelligence also clandestinely monitors fibre optic cables, which allowed it to spy on communications from the delegations that attended the G20 summit in London in April 2009.

Washington and London have set up a Big Brother-style plan capable of finding out everything we say and do in our communications. And when President Obama talks of the “legitimacy” of these practices that violate privacy, he is defending the unjustifiable.

Obama is abusing his power and undermining the freedom of all world citizens. “I don’t want to live in a society that does these sorts of things,” Snowden protested when he decided to blow the whistle.

Not by chance, Snowden’s revelations came just as the court martial was beginning of U.S. soldier Bradley Manning, accused of leaking secrets to Wikileaks, the whistle-blowing web site that released millions of confidential documents, and when the head of the site, cyber-activist Julian Assange, has spent one year in asylum at the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Snowden, Manning and Assange are champions of freedom of expression, and defenders of healthy democracy and of the interests of all citizens on the planet. Now they are being harassed and persecuted by the U.S. Big Brother.

Why did these three heroes of our time take such risks that could even cost them their lives?

Snowden, who has asked a number of countries for political asylum, replied: “If you realise that that’s the world you helped create and it is going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation, and extend the capabilities of this architecture of oppression, you realise that you might be willing to accept any risks and it doesn’t matter what the outcome is.”

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