Evading the NSA TCP/IP Traffic Analysis Program

The NSA TCP/IP traffic analysis program primarly focuses on the traffic analysis of WAN ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) cell header and payload data at IXPs (Internet Exchange Points) globally that employ Cisco Systems routing equipment.

Concerned persons should implement the following:

1. If possible, ensure that your network routing equipment’s’ ATM switched virtual connections and permanent virtual connections are disabled; AND
2. Tunnel your TCP/IP connections over a new SSH2 session for each and every new WAN TCP/IP routed connection (for EVERY transmission to any WAN address); AND
3. Create transmission latency for each of your new WAN SSH2-enabled TCP/IP routed connections through a modified SSH login command such as:

ssh -N -L 6000:localhost:4000 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4 -l User 1.2.3.4

Note that localhost is on port 6000 and remote web host proxy is on port 4000; username is User (if using SSH user authentication); and remote SSH server IP is 1.2.3.4; transmission latency is created with multiples of -l User 1.2.3.4.

More to follow on creating transmission latency when using remote port forwarding through OpenVPN.

If your server traffic is a specific collection target of NSA/Level 3 Communications Regional Security Center (NSA/CSS Georgia) at Fort Gordon Georgia USA or of one of NSA’s non-US affiliates, flagging of sniffed IXP traffic for subsequent analysis can only be triggered by your server’s SECOND or subsequent routing connection to one or more WAN addresses.

Perhaps surprisingly, if your server’s traffic is a collection target, your users’ use of the above SSH transmission latency will also actually increase users’ upload and download speeds during SSH2 sessions.
http://jollyblog.squarespace.com/updates/2008/9/30/evading-the-nsa-tcpip-traffic-analysis-program.html

U.N. whistleblower: expose corruption at your own peril

Posted By Colum Lynch Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - 6:42 PM

A U.N. disputes tribunal has awarded $65,000 in compensation to an American whistleblower in a landmark case that exposed failings in the U.N.'s Ethics Office and challenged the privileges of the U.N. secretary general to withhold sensitive internal documents from the U.N. administrative court.
The award was a fraction of the more than $3.8 million sought by James Wasserstrom, who was forced from his U.N. job in Kosovo after cooperating in an internal investigation of corruption by U.N. officials. He was subsequently stripped of his U.N. passport and treated like a criminal by his U.N. bosses.
Wasserstrom dismissed the award as paltry -- enough to purchase "half a dozen first class plane tickets for the secretary general and his senior staff" -- but too little to compensate for the "five years of legal battles and expenses" and the "degrading treatment" he endured.  
"I put them, the U.N. Ethics Office, the whistleblower protection machinery, and the internal justice system of the U.N. to the integrity test and they all failed," he told Turtle Bay. The "message to U.N. staff who might one day want to come forward and do the right thing: do so at your own risk. You have absolutely no protection. And those who retaliate against you suffer no consequences."
The U.N. did not respond to a request for comment this afternoon. (*See note below for U.N. response)
In February 2007, the American diplomat began cooperating with a U.N. inquiry into reports of kickbacks given to U.N. officials responsible for Kosovo's energy sector. Two months later, Wasserstrom was informed that the United Nations was shutting down his department, the Office for Coordination of Oversight of Publicly Owned Enterprises, and that his contract would expire by June 30. In May, Wasserstrom signed a consultancy contract to advise executives of Kosovo's main airport, triggering a conflict-of-interest investigation.
On June 1, 2007, Wasserstrom was detained by U.N. police. His home was searched: his office was cordoned off with police tape. A poster with his picture instructed officials not to permit him onto U.N. premises, effectively ending a 27 year career at the United Nations. The episode, he said, made it impossible for him to secure a new job within the U.N. system, killing off his prospects to gain full retirement benefits two years before he was scheduled to retire.
Wasserstrom -- who now works as a senior anti-corruption advisor at the U.S. embassy in Kabul -- filed a retaliation complaint in June 2007, with the U.N. Ethics Office. The office subsequently ruled that his treatment "appeared to be excessive" but that an investigation "did not find any evidence that their activities were retaliatory."
The case cast a troubling light on the U.N.'s internal safeguards for protecting whistleblowers. The presiding judge, Goolam Meeran, wrote  in his ruling that the U.N. Ethics Office, which bears responsibility for determining whether whistleblower retaliation has occurred, had failed to recognize "the significance of documentary evidence" showing he had suffered retaliation.
"There was clear and uncontested evidence, supported by the findings ... that the applicant's contractual rights were breached, which included clear evidence of severe human rights abuses," the judge wrote.
The breaches, however, were never addressed by the ethics committee, nor were the reasons for subjecting him to "such insensitive and degrading treatment," Meeran wrote. "In the absence of a cogent and satisfactory explanation, the inescapable inference must be that the underlying motive was retaliatory."
"The tribunal finds it difficult to envisage a worse case of insensitive, high handed and arbitrary treatment in breach of fundamental principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," Meeran added. "The failure of the ethics office to recognize such gross violations calls seriously into question its suitability and effectiveness as a body charged with" helping the U.N. secretary general ensure the "highest standards of integrity" among staff and fostering "a culture of ethics, transparency and accountability."
The judge also battered the U.N.'s lawyers for having delayed the disclosure of key documents, including a critical internal investigative report on the case. "The tribunal has unquestionable power to 'require any person to disclose any document or provide any information that appears to it to be necessary for a fair and expeditious disposal of the proceedings'," Meeran wrote.  "The tribunal finds that the [UN's] conduct of the proceedings in deliberately and persistently refusing, without good cause, to abide by the Orders of the Tribunal and not granting access to the full ID/OIOS's investigation report constituted manifest abuse of proceedings.
Meeran awarded Wasserstrom $50,000 in compensation for the mistreatment he endured in Kosovo and $15,000 in legal fees. But the judge did not compensate him for the loss of his job in Kosovo, citing insufficient evidence that his firing was the result of retaliation.
The low award reflected the fact that judges on the U.N. disputes tribunal have "no power to award exemplary or punitive damages" against the organization. But Judge Meeran also denied Wasserstrom's prospect of a larger award on the basis of a technicality.
Wasserstrom had argued that he was entitled to future compensation, including salary and benefits, because he would have expected to return to a job with his longstanding employer, the U.N. Development Program, after he concluded his stint in Kosovo. But he said the stain of the episode had made him unemployable.
The judge, however, ruled that irrespective of the merits of such a claim the U.N. Development Program was not a party to the dispute, and that Wasserstrom had no basis for raising a claim so late in the proceedings. "It is now too late to raise this matter," Meeran wrote. "Consequently, the tribunal dismisses all [Wasserstrom's] claims regarding compensation for lost earnings and associated benefits."
*The U.N. issued this response after the story was posted. Farhan Haq, a spokesman for the U.N. secretary general:  "Judgements of the U.N. Dispute Tribunal are not final until they have been confirmed by the U.N. Appeals Tribunal. The organization is examining this judgment to determine whether an appeal is warranted. Consistent with established policy regarding ongoing cases, which includes cases under appeal and cases that may be appealed, the organization is not in a position to provide any further comments at this time."

Mr. Pierre J. Falcone Sr.

Pierre Falcone, a French ...
www.mg.co.za, 11 Oct 2008 [cached]

Pierre Falcone, a French businessman who serves as Angola's representative to Unesco, and Arkady Gaydamak, an Israeli-Russian whose son owns Portsmouth football club, are at the heart of the affair dubbed Angolagate by the French media.

...

Most of the other defendants are alleged to have received "misused" funds from Brenco International, a Paris-based company run by Falcone, in the businessmen's alleged attempts to smooth over potential sticking points in the deals.

The conviction of Pierre ...
www.mpdaangola.com [cached]

The conviction of Pierre Falcone for arms trafficking is an embarrassing blow to Angola's president

...

The convictions of Pierre Falcone, Arcadi Gaydamak, ex-president's son Jean-Christophe Mitterrand and Charles Pasqua in a French court for arms trafficking to Angola have exposed the impunity with which arms traffickers supplied weapons to Angola during its 27-year civil war.

...

The Angolan government employed primarily the services of Pierre Falcone and Gaydamak to procure the arms, while the main arms dealer supplying Unita rebels was the infamous Ukrainian Victor Bout, who is currently sitting in jail in Thailand.

In order to understand the significance of these convictions it is important to focus on one key player, Pierre Falcone, and his relationship with the Angolan leadership.

...

It coincided with the period of arms trafficking for which Falcone has just been convicted.

In 2004, for instance, Dos Santos' office called for the prosecution of Falcone to be abandoned:

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During a difficult moment of the recent Angolan history, Mr Pierre Falcone, by his volition and at his own risk, made funds available to the Angolan government for it to exercise its right of sovereignty, a right that was almost denied by the international community.

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It is in this context that Falcone has also become a key player in Angola's state contracts with China, which are worth billions of dollars. His conviction is a serious blow to Dos Santos' arrogance as an untouchable political figure.

Three years of digging later, it ...
chieftain.com, 1 Jan 2008 [cached]

Three years of digging later, it says, they traced the apartment's ownership back to two men who have taken center stage in this legal drama: Arkady Gaydamak and Pierre Falcone.

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Falcone, 54, is an Algerian-born French businessman with oil industry ties.He now serves as Angola's representative to UNESCO, the United Nations' cultural agency, a post that provides him limited diplomatic immunity.He faces many legal cases in France, and spent 11 months in detention during the trafficking probe.

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The indictment says French and Russian intelligence services had suspected illegal activity by Falcone and Gaydamak as far back as 1996.

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French investigators say Gaydamak hooked up with Falcone, and the two enlisted Jean-Christophe Mitterrand to put them in touch with the Angolan leader.

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Via a Slovak company called ZTS-OSOS that they controlled, Gaydamak and Falcone arranged for military goods to be dispatched, mostly from Russian arms depots, to Angola starting in 1993, according to the indictment.

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Most are accused of ,,receiving misused funds'' from Brenco International, a company Falcone controlled.Investigators say these undeclared gifts came in the form of cash, armored cars, French Riviera real estate, trips to Las Vegas, even private medical care.

According to the indictment, Falcone told investigators the money was spent to ,,facilitate things, not to buy people.''

SUPERPOWER SILENCE IN CABINDA
www.cabinda.net, 1 Mar 1991 [cached]

Pierre Falcone and Sofremi 11

...

Jean-Christophe Mitterrand allegedly then introduced businessman Pierre Falcone to engineer a solution. Falcone headed a group of companies under the umbrella, 'Brenco International', whilst simultaneously working as 'key advisor' for Sofremi, a security export company that was controlled by the French Interior Ministry, then headed by Minister Charles Pasqua.

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According to the press, though Falcone had been brought into the discussion courtesy of the French Political left, he now received endorsement from Pasqua's team on the right, and was thus tasked to provide a solution to Angola's weapons and finance requirements, on the proviso that supplies did not come directly from France.

According to numerous French press articles, Falcone then formed a partnership with Russian émigré and businessman Arkadi Gaidamak (also spelt 'Gaydamac').

...

Interestingly, Gaydamac's (sic) signature appears to have been included alongside Falcone's on this 1995/6 ZTS-Osos contract, reproduced on page 16.

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Following a complex series of judicial investigations, described later in this report, Pierre Falcone was arrested on 1st December 2000. His arrest, together with interviews and searches at the offices and residences of other individuals allegedly connected to this scandal, precipitated press reports and speculation about Angolagate.

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After numerous legal challenges, Falcone was finally released on 1st December 2001, after spending precisely one year in prison. His release was accepted on a bail posting of 105 million French Francs (US$14,351,000),6 more than ten times France's previous highest bail demand. Nouvelle Observateur reports that the Court of Appeal reduced Falcone's bail demand to €5 million (US$4,309,000)7, which it says is to be paid by Angola's State oil company Sonangol, as a mark of Angola's solidarity with Falcone.8

The Brenco group and links to the United States

Reports in both Arizona Republic and in Newsweek Magazine suggested that Falcone is well established in the United States and that he has strong connections with the US political elite. In late 2000, Falcone purchased an immense mansion in Paradise Valley, Arizona, for a reputed US$10.6 million, the highest value personal property purchase in Arizonan history. Interviews in Arizona Republic with individuals claiming familiarity with Falcone and his Bolivian beauty queen wife Sonia, suggested that they led a dream life, circulating within the party circuit of Arizona's elite, and spending significant funds on a variety of philanthropic ventures.9

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The company was incorporated in Delaware on 6th April 1994, with Sonia and Pierre Falcone listed as directors.10 Essanté is also connected to the Brenco group in terms of shareholdings and common addresses, both in the UK, and for holding companies in the British Virgin Islands.

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This money was returned in January 2001, with the Arizona Republic quoting Newsweek 'the money was returned to avoid questions about whether an international weapons merchant was trying to buy influence with the new Bush Administration.' The Arizona Republic reported that Falcone family spokesman, Jason Rose, 'scoffed at that insinuation.' Newsweek's January 2001 article referred to both the donation and to Falcone's December 2000 arrest in France.9

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European Deputy Jean-Charles Marchiani, and Sonia Falcone, wife of the alleged arms dealer Pierre Falcone, are also on the list.'11 There are no suggestions of any charges against or wrong-doing by Sonia Falcone - it appears this request relates to the investigation into her husband.

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Michael Austin, an Arizona-based friend of the Falcone family and domain name holder of a website in support of Falcone wrote to Global Witness in an e-mail, '...Pierre derives a great deal of income from Exxon Block 33 located within the boundaries of Angola.' Given the apparent meetings between Falcone and Phillips, and given ExxonMobil's operatorship of Angola's Block 33, ExxonMobil should clarify what, if any role is, or has been played by Falcone in Block 33.

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In particular, ExxonMobil should clarify if it has also held meetings with Falcone, and if the latter played any role in advising, or facilitating the company's acquisition of its operatorship of Block 33.

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According to a February 2002 article in the Geneva publication Le Temps, 'in 1996, the pair [Gaidamak and Falcone] negotiated the re-purchase of Angola's debt to Russia: the latter was intended to receive US$1.5 billion instead of the US$5 billion owed by Luanda's Government.' The paper continued, 'the Angolans agreed to reimburse this amount, thanks to the country's oil revenues.' Commenting on those involved in the deal, the paper reported 'swiss-based companies took part in the operation: Glencore, in Zug, traded the oil; Paribas (Switzerland), together with other banks, advanced the money promised by Angola.'12

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Falcone wrote personally to President Chirac both in 1997 and in 1998, and these letters provided considerable detail about projects underway.

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Further, sources suggest that during President Chirac's state visit to Angola in 1998, at least one meeting was held in Luanda between Chirac and dos Santos in which Falcone was present.

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...that gentleman [Falcone] dealt with sensitive matters which had the consent of the French authorities and were very useful to Angola. We interpreted his action as a gesture of confidence and friendship by the French State and, for this reason, my Government took decisions that permitted spectacular growth of cooperation with France in the area of oil and economically and financially.

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Jean-Christophe Mitterrand's incarceration followed the earlier arrest on 1st December 2000 of the lesser-known Pierre Falcone, named in Global Witness' December 1999 report A Crude Awakening as a member of Angola's 'oiligarchy'.

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Falcone was also a key advisor to 'Sofremi' (the 'French Company for the Export of Goods, Systems & Services'),18 which was a part-private, part-state run organisation operating under the auspices of the French Interior Ministry that, at the time, was headed by Interior Minister Charles Pasqua.

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There are differing accounts regarding the first meeting of Jean-Christophe Mitterrand and Pierre Falcone. According to his lawyer, Mitterrand first met Pierre Falcone following his departure from the Elysée, but according to Le Monde, a former employee of Falcone places Mitterrand's first visit to Brenco International's offices, then at 56 Avenue Montaigne in Paris, prior to July 1992;18 in other words, when Jean-Christophe Mitterrand was still his father's African Advisor.

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By late 1994, according to Le Monde, Pierre Falcone had been involved in the selling of weapons to Angola worth some US$633 million.18 Sources indicate that although the face value of these contracts may have been as high as US$633 million, a significant proportion of the weapons listed in contracts were delivered much later than this date.

According to Le Monde, Falcone's Angolan contact in Paris was Elísio de Figueiredo who had become the 'third Angolan Ambassador' in Paris through a formal request by dos Santos, in addition to Angola's formal Ambassador and the UNESCO representative.18 This unorthodox arrangement provided for de Figueiredo,20 who had previously been Ambassador in Paris, to take on the role of roving Ambassador, without portfolio and act as dos Santos' go-between.

Pierre Falcone and Sofremi

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According to Le Monde, Pierre Falcone became one of the most significant advisors to Sofremi, between 1989 and 1997, with his introduction to the company coming through an intermediary of then director Philippe Melchior.

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Poussier also insisted that Sofremi did not mix its business interests with those of Pierre Falcone.

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One of his first acts as head of Sofremi had been to conduct an independent audit. 'The most significant point was the omnipresence of Pierre Falcone,'131 adding, 'the general rule was that for each market there was to be a different representative, but from 1992, Falcone became the only representative of the Sofremi. It is totally abnormal. He received outrageous fees for every operation.'131 When asked about the termination of Sofremi's relationship with Falcone in 1997, he said, 'Once I took my decision we had a long discussion. I do not think that he understood my determination.

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Reports suggest that Pierre Falcone did not manage this process alone. Falcone appears to have formed a partnership with Arkadi Gaidamak, a Russian émigré who had spent sufficient time in Israel to pick up an Israeli passport before moving to reside in France.

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According to Le Monde, Chirac had long been convinced that Pasqua would officially support his opponent, Edouard Balladur.18 The paper continued, 'if this were to happen, a grip on Angola would be a major asset,' and then taking the argument further stated 'as a r

Haaretz - Israel News - Ofer Brothers spurned Russian investor s bid for Israel Corp.
www.haaretz.com, 19 Aug 2004 [cached]

Gaidamak is suspected of being the main partner of Brenco's CEO, Brazilian arms dealer Pierre Falcone

The Arms Dealer Next Door

 

The Arms Dealer Next Door

 

International billionaire, French prisoner, Angolan weapons broker, Arizona Republican. Who is Pierre Falcone?

by Ken Silverstein

 

Pierre Falcone is out on $15 million bail.

n December 1, billionaire businessman Pierre Falcone walked out of the Fleury-Merogis prison near Paris after a judge opted not to prolong his provisional detention. Despite having spent a full year behind bars, it’s doubtful that Falcone felt a great sense of relief that day.
The key player in a huge scandal that has tarnished some of France’s best-known politicians, Falcone is still expected to stand trial later this year for his role in the sale of half a billion dollars worth of Eastern European weapons to Angola. He obtained his release only after paying a $15 million bail, turning over his passport to the court, and accepting severe restrictions on his movements and activities.
Falcone was initially charged with illegal arms dealing because he allegedly brokered the Angola sales without authorization from the French government agency that reviews weapons exports, but prosecutors later dropped that count due to a legal technicality. He remains accused of bribing numerous prominent parties to further his arms business—most notably Jean-Christophe Mitterand, son of ex-President Francois Mitterand—and of failing to pay tens of millions of dollars in taxes on profits from the Angola deals, legal or not.
Though largely unreported, the man at the center of “Angolagate,” as the French press has dubbed the scandal, has extensive American ties. Falcone’s primary residence is a mammoth estate in Paradise Valley, Arizona, where he and his wife, Sonia, a former Miss Bolivia International, are active in political and community affairs. Falcone’s American activities range from advising a major U.S. oil company to teaming with a Virginia-based arms dealer who has worked for both the CIA and Saddam Hussein. What’s more, a floundering health and beauty company run by Sonia Falcone made a controversial $100,000 donation to the Republican Party during the 2000 presidential campaign.
Beyond Falcone’s own stake in the legal outcome, Angolagate has significant geopolitical implications. Angola has emerged as one of the world’s leading oil producers—it is now America’s ninth-largest supplier, ahead of Kuwait and England and right behind Norway and Colombia—and is sitting on enormous untapped reserves. But civil war and rampant corruption in Angola, which serves as the backdrop to the Falcone affair, has kept the country isolated on the international stage and its economy in shambles. “Angola is going to remain a pariah as long as the government keeps cutting deals with people like Falcone,” says a former State Department official who has closely followed Angolagate. “It sends a terrible message to the rest of Africa, because if Angola can’t make it with all of its energy resources, there’s not much hope for the rest of the continent.”
hen I first heard about Pierre Falcone—and his beautiful Bolivian wife, vast wealth and jet-setting lifestyle—I imagined a dapper, handsome man straight out of a John Le Carré novel. It came as something of a surprise when I first saw his picture, which revealed him to be a plump, balding man who looked more like an upscale insurance salesman than a covert operator.
Falcone was born in 1954 in Algeria, which was then under French rule. His father, Pierre Sr., was the mayor of a town called Bou-Haroun-Alger, ran a fishing fleet and, according to Le Monde, was involved in the arms trade. After the Algerian Revolution of 1962, the family moved to France, where Falcone lived until he was 22. Since then, he has traveled the world, building a business empire that runs from advertising in China to oil in Africa.
Falcone bought a home in Arizona in the ’80s and met Sonia Montero at a 1990 Formula One auto race in Phoenix. They were married four years later at a church outside of Paris. Hundreds of guests attended the wedding and reception—the latter was held at the Chateau de Ferrieres, the 19th-century home of the Rothschilds—including the groom’s good friend, Jean-Christophe Mitterand.
The arms trade comprises a small, if notable, part of Falcone’s commercial activities. In France, he served as a consultant to a government agency known as SOFREMI, which exports military equipment under the auspices of the Interior Ministry. In that capacity, he reportedly arranged sales to Africa and Latin America. Through Arcadi Gaydamak—an immensely wealthy Russian émigré businessman and his chief partner in Angola—Falcone also had good contacts in Eastern Europe, which in the post-Cold War period has become a global weapons bazaar.
The deals that sparked the Angolagate scandal took place in 1993, when the Angolan government of Eduardo dos Santos was under siege by the right-wing guerrilla group known as UNITA, headed by Jonas Savimbi. During the Cold War, Angola could count on the Soviet Union for weapons—UNITA had been backed by Presidents Reagan and Bush, but was dumped by the Clinton administration—but its former ally had disappeared from the map. Furthermore, arms purchases by the government and UNITA remained prohibited under the 1991 Bicesse Accords negotiated in Portugal. Desperate, dos Santos contacted Jean-Bernard Curial, a friend and member of the French Socialist Party, to see if Paris would arm his regime.
Curial was dubious about the prospects. France was then in a period of political “cohabitation” with Socialist Francois Mitterand (who died in 1996) holding the presidency, but day-to-day governing was carried out by conservative Prime Minister Eduardo Balladur. Several key members of Balladur’s government, including the minister of defense, traditionally had been close to UNITA. Curial turned for advice to Jean-Christophe Mitterand, who had built up a network of contacts in Africa while serving as his father’s chief adviser and, despite having resigned his post the previous year, remained well-connected at the presidential palace. He suggested to Curial that his friend Falcone might be able to offer assistance to dos Santos through less formal channels.
n November 1993, Falcone and Gaydamak helped arrange the sale to Angola of $47 million in small arms. A second deal for $563 million worth of weapons, including tanks and helicopters, got underway early the following year. The supplier in both cases was ZTS-OSOS, a Slovakian company that rounded up the weapons from Russia, Bulgaria and Ukraine. The Angolans paid for the weapons with oil, which Falcone and Gaydamak sold with the help of Glencore—a company owned by Marc Rich, the fugitive financier who would later receive a controversial pardon from Bill Clinton during his last days as president.
Thanks to their sensitive role in Angola, Falcone and Gaydamak became intimate cronies of dos Santos, whose systematic pilfering of the state treasury has made him by some accounts one of the world’s 50 richest men. (On December 12, Reuters reported that $1.5 billion of the $3.5 billion that Angola earned in 2000 from oil exports was unaccounted for.) The two men were given a stake in virtually every key sector of the Angolan economy, from food to diamonds to oil. In 1999, the government picked Falcon Oil Holdings, a Falcone-owned firm registered in Panama, as a minority partner to ExxonMobil on a huge offshore site.
Beyond these economic privileges, Falcone and Gaydamak gained a remarkable degree of political influence in Angola. According to Gaydamak—a wanted man in France who now resides in Israel, where I reached him on his cell phone—both he and Falcone were granted Angolan citizenship and diplomatic passports, served as advisers to the government and were named employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Indeed, Falcone was so well-connected in Angola that before his arrest he had become a door-opener for companies hoping to do business there. In June 2000, top officials from Phillips Petroleum, which has been seeking to expand in Angola, made the pilgrimage from corporate headquarters in Bartlesville, Oklahoma to Arizona to seek Falcone’s counsel and assistance. (Phillips declined to discuss the meeting.)
The first vague details of Angolagate came to light five years ago when a highly regarded insider newsletter called La Lettre du Continent broke the story. French judicial officials later found that Brenco International, a Falcone firm involved in the Angola arms transfers, subsequently made payments to a number of his associates. Jean-Christophe Mitterand, who has been out on bail since early last year but remains under investigation, acknowledges receiving $1.8 million into his numbered Swiss bank account four years ago, but says that the money was for consulting work unrelated to Angolan arms sales.
There’s surely an element of hypocrisy in the French government’s prosecution of Falcone, for it’s clear that key officials viewed his arms transfers to Angola as serving French foreign policy objectives and approved of the deals. France depends on Africa for most of its petroleum needs, but traditional suppliers like Gabon and Cameroon have declining reserves. Angola—set to become one of the world’s major petroleum exporters in the next 20 years—has not traditionally had strong ties to France, but in recent years it has become an increasingly important source of its oil, and French energy companies have been awarded major contracts by the dos Santos regime. “There is a relationship between Falcone selling the weapons and the improved relationship between France and Angola,” says Sharon Coutoux of Survie, a Paris-based human rights group.
Falcone, too, has suggested that the French government endorsed his activities. In a 14-page letter to investigators, he denied paying off any government officials, saying his role in the Angolan arms sales was limited to selling the oil that paid for the weapons. The greatest indignity of all, he wrote, is that the French are the primary beneficiary of his activities. His work with SOFREMI enabled Paris to “penetrate delicate and complex markets” abroad, while his role in Angola helped France win favor with an energy-rich regime that “the entire world is interested in courting.” The accusations against him, Falcone said, are as “unjust as the charge of witchcraft [was] in the Middle Ages.”
n Washington, Falcone’s complex ties in Angola were well known among government Africa specialists. Four past and present officials told me they were acquainted with Falcone via diplomatic cables and intelligence reports. J. Stephen Morrison, who served on the secretary of state’s policy-planning staff until last year, says Clinton administration officials were aware that Falcone was a key player in Angola and that “most of what he did was not very transparent. The scandal caught people by surprise, but it was not a big shock.”
Falcone’s name is also familiar within the narrow world of international arms dealers. Sarkis Soghanalian, whose 40-year career in the arms business began when he armed Christian militias in Lebanon at the request of the CIA, says he met Falcone several times in Paris, where both had offices off the Champs-Elysées. Through Mark Geragos, his American attorney (whose other clients include Rep. Gary Condit), Soghanalian said that he and Falcone shared a mutual client, Mobutu Sese Seko, the former dictator of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). According to Soghanalian, Falcone brokered diamonds-for-weapons deals on behalf of Mobutu and was intimate with the dictator and his entourage.
Among Falcone’s closest contacts in the arms business is Stephen “Satch” Baumgart, who operates out of Reston, Virginia. A former Naval officer, Baumgart has been involved in the murkier fringes of the weapons trade since the ’70s, when he brokered sales to American allies such as Mobutu and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines—all apparently with a wink and a nod from U.S. intelligence. “A CIA agent would drop by our office and Baumgart would brief him about his overseas travels, particularly about his contacts in the Arab world,” recalls Gerhard Bauch, a one-time German intelligence officer who worked for Baumgart. “They knew about everything we did.”
During the mid-’80s, Baumgart—who did not return phone calls seeking comment—helped supply Saddam Hussein, who was then seen by the Reagan administration as a bulwark against the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. A prominent European arms broker who knows both Falcone and Baumgart says the two men first teamed up in the ’80s and worked together until at least a few years ago. This source says that Falcone and Baumgart had interests in Angola, among other places. (Gaydamak also confirms that Falcone and “Mr. Satch” worked together, though he denied knowing details of their business dealings.)
f it was an open secret in certain Washington circles, Falcone’s involvement in the arms trade was entirely unknown in Paradise Valley, an elite enclave wedged between Phoenix and Scottsdale. Reginald Ballantyne III, president of PMH Health Resources Inc., says the Falcones are highly regarded local figures and that he and other residents were stunned when Angolagate hit the press. “It didn’t make any sense to me then, and it still doesn’t make any sense to me,” Ballantyne said. “I just couldn’t connect the dots.”
One of the nation’s wealthiest communities, Paradise Valley is solidly conservative. The local government levies no property taxes, and services such as water and fire protection have been privatized. I received a tour of the town from Kathy Smith of Hague Partners, which sold $103 million worth of property here last year. As we drove along Lincoln Road in Smith’s cream-colored Cadillac, we passed one of the town’s few commercial properties, the newly renovated Applewood pet resort, where residents board their pets when they’re on vacation. A suite for a dog, which includes a bed and cable TV, goes for $38 a night, but extras—a fitness walk, “pupsicles,” a swim in the resort’s bone-shaped pool, topped off with a blow dry—can raise that rate quite a bit higher.

For brokering the arms deals, President Eduardo dos Santos gave Falcone a stake in everyting from oil to diamonds.

Far atop Mummy Mountain, Smith pointed to the estate of Leona Helmsley, which has been on the market for several years without attracting a buyer, despite a price cut from $24 million to $14 million. Smith used a magnetic card to pass through the gates of the El Maro neighborhood, where Chicago Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf erected a private playground for his grandchildren on a two-acre lot adjacent to his summer home. Just before his arrest, Falcone bought a new $10.6 million estate not far from the El Maro section—the most expensive home purchase in state history, according to the Arizona Republic. A post-sale real estate listing speaks in hushed tones of the property’s paneled library, theater, swimming pool, tennis courts, seven bedrooms and 11 bathrooms, and reveals that the Falcones don’t have a mortgage on the property. It was purchased outright by SPEP, a Turk and Caicos Island trust controlled by Pierre.
As members of the area’s upper crust, the Falcones occasionally pop up in local society pages. Based on nuggets that ran after Falcone’s arrest, their standing has not been tarnished by his legal difficulties. In the April 2001 issue of Arizona Trends, a magazine filled with ads for Feng Shui consultants, plastic surgeons, anti-aging treatments and day spas, then-publisher Danny Medina recounted his lunch with Sonia Falcone: “She was perfectly stunning with a great personality and rich, rich, rich. Oy! You should have seen the square cut diamond on her hand!”
In May, Scottsdale Life, a glossy freebie sent to selected area homes with an assessed value of $250,000 or more, featured a cover story on the Falcones’ new estate. It spoke of bedroom suites that “bear the imprimatur of Sonia’s exquisite taste,” of the Vera Wang evening gowns hanging in her 1,100-square-foot closet, and of her devotion to family and friends. (“And, yes, it does help to have a butler, cook, domestic help, chauffeurs and an army of nannies to help out.”)
Like many Paradise Valley residents, the Falcones are regulars on the local black-tie charity circuit and contribute generously to organizations such as the American Heart Association, Phoenix Children’s Memorial Center and the Kids in a Korner Foundation. During my stay in Arizona, Sonia attended a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society at Marriott’s Camelback Inn resort. After dining on pinenut-crusted filet of beef and wild-mushroom risotto, attendees bid at auction on donated items such as a week at the Hacienda del Mar in Cabo San Lucas, a variety of golfing packages and diamond jewelry.
Sonia, who declined to be interviewed for this story, was accompanied to the fundraiser by Jason Rose, a Phoenix PR man and Republican political consultant whom she has retained to tell her husband’s side of the Angolagate story. The son of a prominent area family, Rose is a rising star in GOP circles. He knows the Falcones from local social and political circles (“They’re cool people who you’d like to have a drink with”) and argues that Pierre is the victim of a French legal system that deems people “guilty until proven innocent.”
n addition to charity, the Falcones have also taken an interest in politics. In June 2000, the couple hosted a fundraiser at their home for Scott Bundgaard, a Republican state senator and close ally of President Bush. (Bundgaard endorsed Bush over native son John McCain during last year’s GOP primaries and was a major fundraiser for his campaign.) The affair attracted political luminaries such as Gov. Jane Hull and several members of Arizona’s congressional delegation, as well as Jean-Christophe Mitterand.
Sonia Falcone was also a donor to the Bush campaign, and pictures of her with the president and first lady, snapped at political functions in Arizona, hang in her home. During the summer of 2000, Bundgaard invited Sonia to join a small local entourage that greeted then candidate Bush at the Phoenix airport when he flew in for a campaign event. Most of Sonia’s political contributions came from the coffers of Essante, her Utah-based health and beauty firm. The company gave $20,000 to the Republican Party in May 2000 and another $80,000 in November. Sonia Falcone has insisted that her husband had no connection to Essante and that the company’s political contributions came out of corporate profits. She made the donations, she says, to increase Latino awareness in the Republican Party. (The GOP returned the contributions following Pierre’s detention—“to avoid the appearance of impropriety,” in the words of a statement issued by the Republican National Committee.)
Yet Essante was incorporated in Delaware on April 6, 1994 with Sonia as its founding president and one of two directors—the other was Pierre Falcone. He no longer holds that title, but the firm’s accountant until just recently was Henry Guderley, who fills the same position for the London offices of Brenco International. More significantly, Essante, which has been losing money for the past seven years, has no profits from which to make political contributions. Essante publicist Lee Solters—a legendary Hollywood PR agent whose clients have included everyone from Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand to Pia Zadora and Kato Kaelin—says Essante spent its first six years, and $6 million, developing its product line. Sales only began in earnest last September, after Essante threw a three-day launch party at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas.
So who’s been footing the bill? A source familiar with the company says Pierre has always provided the money for Essante. “The company has come a long way with Pierre’s generosity, but after a few years he’d like to see some profit,” this person says. “It rubs him the wrong way, but out of love for his wife he’s done it with a smile on his face.”
It’s possible that Essante’s political contributions were spurred by nothing more than Sonia’s open desire to be a player in state and national politics. Even after her husband’s arrest, she remains active on the Arizona scene and close to several state officials. Last June, Bundgaard accompanied her and several other friends to Washington for a gala affair at the Ritz-Carlton honoring Sharon Stone. A few months later, Sonia appeared at a campaign function for Matt Salmon, an Arizona congressman who’s running for governor on the GOP ticket. She called him a “true conservative” and said she planned to help his campaign “any way I can.”
But one of the American officials I interviewed suspects that Pierre may have been thinking about Angola’s interests when his wife sent $100,000 to the GOP. As the official noted, businessmen who operate in Angola are expected to support its government back home, and Luanda is eager to cement ties to Washington, which during the Clinton years became its chief international ally and biggest source of foreign investment. Furthermore, dos Santos has reason to be jittery about the policies of George W. Bush, whose father’s supported UNITA. In February 2000, just weeks after Bush’s inauguration and a few months after Essante sent its final payment to the RNC, two major lobby shops in Washington—Patton Boggs and Daniel J. Edelman— signed contracts that called for them to work to improve U.S.-Angola ties.
Of course, only Falcone himself can offer a full explanation of why his money went to the Bush campaign. Given his current circumstances, chances are he won’t be talking anytime soon.
Ken Silverstein is a Washington-based reporter who frequently writes about the arms trade. His latest book, Private Warriors, a look at the post-Cold War arms trade, was just released in paperback

Glimmerglass Intercepts Undersea Cable Traffic for Spy Agencies

Glimmerglass Intercepts Undersea Cable Traffic for Spy Agencies by Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatch August 22nd, 2013

Glimmerglass 2011 presentation on CyberSweep. Glimmerglass, a northern California company that sells optical fiber technology, offers government agencies a software product called “CyberSweep” to intercept signals on undersea cables. The company says their technology can analyze Gmail and Yahoo! Mail as well as social media like Facebook and Twitter to discover “actionable intelligence.” Could this be the technology that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is using to tap global communications? The company says it counts several intelligence agencies among its customers but refuses to divulge details. One thing is certain - it is not the only company to offer such capabilities - so if such data mining is not already taking place, that day is not far off. "Revolutions in communications technologies are usually followed by revolutions in collection capabilities," Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archives and the author of the definitive guide to the U.S. intelligence agencies, told CorpWatch. The recent leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden to the Guardian newspaper specifically suggest that the NSA is tapping undersea cables although no details on the specific technology have yet been published. Notably Snowden has revealed evidence that the NSA paid £15.5 million ($25 million) in 2009 to “radically” upgrade a listening station operated by its U.K. equivalent – the Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) in Bude, north Cornwall, England, where many of the cables surface. If GCHQ and the NSA installed Glimmerglass’s commercial optical fiber switching technology on the undersea cables to tap the torrent of data that crosses the Atlantic, they will be able to pair it up with CyberSweep to make sense of the information, according to advertising claims made in a treasure trove of documents on dozens of surveillance contractors released by Wikileaks. Privacy experts say that if the NSA is using this Glimmerglass technology, it will prove whistleblower Edward Snowden’s claim that the government is collecting everyone’s communications, regardless of their citizenship or innocence. Vanee Vines, a spokesperson for the NSA, declined to comment to CorpWatch on either Glimmerglass or the tapping of the undersea cables. Glimmerglass officials did not return multiple email and phone calls. CyberSweep On the Glimmerglass website, the company claims that CyberSweep can process optical signals to “extract the data source format” and aggregate the data for “probes” to uncover “actionable information from the flood of data on persons of interest, known and unknown targets, anticipated and known threats.” More details on what Glimmerglass claims CyberSweep can do are explained in “Paradigm Shifts” – a confidential 18 page Powerpoint presentation made in 2011 by Jim Donnelly, the Glimmerglass vice president of North American sales. The document was released by Wikileaks as part of the Spy Files series in December of that year. On page five of the presentation, Glimmerglass notes that CyberSweep is an “end to end cyber security solution” that can “select, extract and monitor” all “mobile and fixed line data, voice and video, internet, web 2.0 and social networking” with “probes and sniffers.” On the following page, it notes that its product can be used at “submarine landing stations” – a reference to the locations where the undersea cables are connected to terrestrial systems. On page eight, Glimmerglass provides specific examples of what it can gather – like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail as well as Facebook and Twitter. Over the next four pages it offers screenshots of these capabilities. One display of what CyberSweep is capable of is a visual grid of Facebook messages of a presumably fictional person named John Smith. His profile is connected to a number of other individuals with arrows indicating how often he connected to each of them. Each individual can be identified with images, user names and IDs. Another pane shows the detailed chat records. Yet another graphic shows Facebook connections between multiple individuals, presumably to identify networks. A third graphic is a grid of phone calls made by an individual with a pane that allows an operator to select and listen to audio of any specific conversation. Other images show similar demonstrations of monitoring webmail and instant message chats. Where is this product being used? In a product video on the company website, Glimmerglass states that their optical data management products have been used by the U.S. intelligence agencies for the last five years. The video specifically mentions data transmissions from Predator drones and well as the tapping of undersea fiber optic cables, but it does not go into any details. “The challenge of managing information has become the challenge of managing the light,” says an announcer. “With Glimmerglass, customers have full control of massive flows of intelligence from the moment they access them.” The description mirrors the technology described in documents provided by Edward Snowden to the Guardian newspaper. Collecting All the Signals The GCHQ Advantage Why go overseas to collect the data? Well, there are legal obstacles in the U.S. to collecting phone calls made by U.S. citizens – such a program would violate the fourth amendment to the U.S. constitution that protects individuals against invasion of privacy. (Exceptions are granted for communications with foreigners if government agencies suspect terrorism under a 1981 presidential executive order, although they still need approval of the U.S. Attorney General). But given that U.S. laws stop at the border, foreign spy agencies like GCHQ can legally pick up and store any and all information from data that travels outside the country, suggest reporters at the Guardian newspaper. “We know the NSA is forbidden from spying on American citizens; in the case of (Faizal) Shahzad (the would-be Times Square bomber in New York), this question remains – was GCHQ doing it for them?” ask the Guardian reporters, noting that the GCHQ now has the “opportunity to build such a complete record of someone's life through their texts, conversations, emails and search records” allowing it to make a "unique contribution to the NSA in providing insights into some of their highest priority targets.” In a document released by Snowden, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, the NSA director, was quoted on a June 2008 visit to an intelligence facility in the U.K., saying: "Why can't we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project." According to the leaked documents, a three year trial project was soon set up with a $25 million grant from the NSA to "radically enhance the infrastructure” at the Cyber Development Centre in Bude, Cornwall, as well as potentially at other sites like the GCHQ base in Cheltenham. Probes were installed on 200 undersea cables and in the fall of 2011, a project code-named Tempora was launched with the help of NSA analysts who came to help at the Bude site. At least seven companies took part in the project - British Telecom, Global Crossing, Interoute, Level 3, Viatel, Verizon Business and Vodafone Cable – according to the German paper Suddeutsche Zeitung, all of whom manage major undersea cable systems. Under Tempora, a three day buffer of global internet traffic was held at any given time - totaling some 600 million "telephone events" a day or as much as 21 petabytes (million gigabytes) of data. While much of it was deleted through a process called Massive Volume Reduction for reasons of space, the meta-data (such as the details of who called whom, and when, but not the content) was held for as long as 30 days. Snowden’s documents suggest that GCHQ now "produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA" which was being analyzed by 300 U.K. analysts in addition to 250 NSA analysts, as of last May. The U.K. analysts were encouraged to dig deep since they had a less onerous oversight regime compared to the U.S. "Over the last five years, GCHQ's access to 'light' (has) increased by 7,000%," a Tempora official is quoted as saying in another Powerpoint document cited in the Guardian. "We will have exploited to the full our unique selling points of geography, partnerships, the UK's legal regime and our skilled workforce." A recent interview of a “senior intelligence official” by the New York Times confirmed that “the N.S.A. is temporarily copying and then sifting through the contents of what is apparently most e-mails and other text-based communications that cross the border” by making a “clone of selected communication links.” The official did not state where the communications were being intercepted. Optical Tapping It so happens that the undersea cables are an extremely convenient place to collect all the signals all the time: An estimated 90 percent of trans-border telecommunications data travels along the transatlantic cables, even if they are merely connections between an individual in Asia and another in Africa, especially if they are using services like Skype. These cables date back in history to 1858 when they were first installed to support the international telegraph system, with the British taking the lead to wire the far reaches of its empire. Today a multi-billion dollar shipping industry continues to lay and maintain hundreds of such cables that crisscross the planet – over half a million miles of such cables are draped along the ocean floor and snaked around coastlines - to make landfall at special locations to be connected to national telecommunications systems. The original cables were made of copper but about 25 years ago, they were replaced by fiber-optic cables. The oldest undersea cable was Trans Atlantic-8 (installed in 1988 by AT&T to transmit data from Tuckerton, New Jersey to Bude, Cornwall) which transmitted data at 280 megabits per second. The latest cables like Yellow/Atlantic Crossing 2 (installed in 2000 and upgraded in 2007 by Level Three Communications from Brookhaven, New York to Bude, Cornwall) is capable of transmitting data at an astonishing 640 gigabits per second, which is roughly equal to 7.5 million simultaneous phone calls. In order to make sure that data and voice are transmitted quickly and accurately across the world even if cables break or equipment fails, cable companies break the data into separate tiny packets that are dispatched over what they call “redundant fiber optic paths” across the ocean before it is captured and re-assembled on the other side, where it also becomes easy to intercept the data unobtrusively. This is where Glimmerglass comes in. In September 2002, the company started to ship a pioneering technology to help transmit data accurately over multiple optical paths. Their patented “3D Micro-Electro-Mechanical-System (MEMS) mirror array” is composed of 210 gold-coated mirrors mounted on microscopic hinges, each measuring just one millimeter in diameter, etched on a single wafer of silicon. Each mirror can be individually managed by remote operators anywhere in the world to capture or bounce the light signals and even more importantly, communicate with the other mirrors to make sure that the rest of the array stays in place, allowing very accurate data transmission. This technology slashed the cost of optical switching by a factor of 100, and the company claims that the switches are very robust with an expected failure rate of once in 30 years. For telecommunication companies, Glimmerglass offers three hardware racks to handle optical data – the entry level “100” system which can handle as many as 96x96 fiber ports for traffic as high as 100 gigabits per second all the way up to the “600” system which can handle 192x192 fiber ports. It also offers the “3000” system which can hold up to 12 racks. Another major advantage of the Glimmerglass technology, according to the company, is that operators can “monitor and test remote facilities” at undersea cable landings from a central office and then select any one of multiple optical signals to distribute it to multiple recipients, as well as ability to redirect any signal. “With Glimmerglass Intelligent Optical Systems, any signal travelling over fiber can be redirected in milliseconds, without adversely affecting customer traffic. At a landing site, this connectivity permits optical layer connections between the wet side and dry side to be re-provisioned in milliseconds from the Network Operations Center with a few clicks of a mouse.” In another section of the public website the company also promotes a product named Glimmerglass Intelligent Optical System (IOS) that combines the 3D-MEMS switches with CyberSweep into an integrated product that has the ability to “monitor and selectively intercept communications.” “Service Providers can use the speed and flexibility of the IOS to select and deliver signals to Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA),” add company brochures uncovered by Wikileaks. “The agency gains rapid access, not just to signals, but to individual wavelengths on those signals (and) make perfect photonic copies of optical signals … for comprehensive analysis.” Glimmerglass does not deny that its equipment can be used to capture global internet traffic by intelligence agencies, in fact it assumes that this is probably happening. “If you are going to monitor (communications traffic), you need to do much of it optically. But clearly, the massive top of the (intelligence gathering) funnel is coming through optically and you need to manage that,” Robert Lundy, the CEO of Glimmerglass for the last nine years, told AviationWeek in 2010. “If we were (installed) at an operations center of some country, our systems could be used to look at all the international entry and exit points for fiber optics. Once you have extracted the wavelengths, you can dynamically select the ones you are interested in and do it all from a remote location.” Keith May, his deputy in charge of business development, has gone even further. “We believe that our 3D MEMS technology – as used by governments and various agencies – is involved in the collection of intelligence from sensors, satellites and undersea fiber systems,” May told the magazine. “We are deployed in several countries that are using it for lawful interception.” Cashing in on the Fiber Boom Lundy is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, with two degrees from Stanford University in the heart of northern California’s high technology Silicon Valley - a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and a Masters in Business Administration – making him well placed to ride the fiber optic boom. In addition to the right degrees from the right military and technology colleges, Lundy retired as an Army lieutenant colonel after working for the U.S. Army in Europe where his job was managing contracts for “tactical data systems.” He worked as the first general manager of IBM’s wireless business unit and then he helped found three successful start-ups: Wavtrace, a pioneer in manufacturing wireless broadband access systems for business; Optos, a company that builds optical switches for metropolitan networks; as well as Xtera, a company that provides equipment to push data via submarine cables. Lundy was hired as chief operating officer for Glimmerglass in 2004 when it was a five year old start-up that had patented dozens of 3D MEMS inventions, from its offices in Hayward on the eastern edge of Silicon Valley. Initially the company made its money selling testing and measurement equipment for what Lundy calls their “core optical switch or engine” to a couple of dozen customers in the telecommunications industry like Cisco and Sandvine, but was unable to expand in a major way because of the collapse of the telecommunications industry at the time. (Global Crossing, a major cable operator, had just gone bankrupt, as had WorldCom) The company branched out to make most of its profits from the software to manage the optical switches, rather than the physical hardware which sold for under $100,000 in competition with similar products from companies like Calient. Glimmerglass quickly landed contracts with AMS-IX, the largest internet exchange in Europe, and with Cable & Wireless in the UK. Eavesdropping On The Whole World Analysis of bulk telecommunications data to track as yet unknown targets has long been on the NSA wish list. For decades, the agency stuck to following specific individuals because there was no way to capture and analyze everything. In 2000, two rival projects were commissioned to try to collect “all the signals all the time.” Science Applications International Corporation, based in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, was given a contract to design a collection system called TrailBlazer, while the NSA’s in-house Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) Automation Research Center (SARC) worked on a project called ThinThread. Trailblazer was eventually jettisoned as unworkable after $1.2 billion had been spent. ThinThread was more successful, according to its proponents, because it was able to selectively process important information and dump the rest. The designers also created controls to anonymize the data collection to avoid violating privacy laws. ThinThread could "correlate data from financial transactions, travel records, Web searches, G.P.S. equipment, and any other 'attributes' that an analyst might find useful in pinpointing 'the bad guys,'" writes Jane Mayer in the New Yorker magazine, based on her interviews with former NSA staff. Unfortunately for the SARC team, ThinThread was vetoed by upper management at the NSA in August 2001. But after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the NSA is believed to have returned to the drawing board. Rumor has it that the project was restarted, stripped of any privacy controls. Recently William Binney, a former NSA staffer who helped design ThinThread and has now become a whistleblower, says that the project was a mistake. “I should apologize to the American people,” Binney who was once the technical director for the 6,000 employees of the NSA's World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group told Mayer. “It’s violated everyone’s rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world.” In May 2005, Lundy was promoted to CEO of the company. Four months later - on September 21, 2005 - Glimmerglass Networks was awarded a no-bid contract of $769,600 for telecommunications support equipment for the U.S. Navy Sea Systems Command. Lundy’s experience managing data contracts for the U.S. Army in Europe would not have hindered the sale. Nor would the deep connections of Glimmerglass board member Alan Rogers, a retired U.S. Air Force Major General, who had previously been in charge of planning for the Pentagon at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) headquarters in Brussels. By 2010, Lundy had successfully expanded Glimmerglass’ business by marketing “lawful interception systems” to seven international customers outside the U.S., which appear to include Germany, Israel and the UK as well as two unnamed countries in Asia. “We've become as a result a gold standard in the intel and defense community … they're managing these optical signals so they can acquire, split, move and obtain the necessary information to protect the country,” Lundy told Fierce Telecom, an industry blog, in an interview about global malware threats. “At their undersea landing locations, their major points of presence, on a selective basis they need to acquire and monitor those optical signals … rather than wait to get it off somebody's, when it hits a PC or cellphone.” Questions remain as to how well the Glimmerglass product works. Ed Loomis, who worked on the NSA’s ThinThread signal collection and monitoring project in the 1990s, (see box: Eavesdropping On The Whole World) told CorpWatch that the company claim that they can extract "actionable information" would be limited to little more than selecting from a customer-supplied list of phone numbers, IP addresses, and DNS email addresses. “In order to replicate an analyst's deductive reasoning process to create an artificial intelligence equivalent requires an immense amount of cooperation by an analyst and an understanding of analytic processes by the programmer,” said Loomis. “Unless the two have acquired years of experience in the intelligence production business, I doubt the ‘target analytics’ is as robust as Glimmerglass would have its clients believe.” Are Companies Helping Invade Privacy? Civil liberties experts have denounced the practice of wholesale data collection. “By injecting the N.S.A. into virtually every crossborder interaction, the U.S. government will forever alter what has always been an open exchange of ideas,” says Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Such collection would also violate numerous legal principles that safeguard individual privacy. In addition to the fourth amendment to the U.S. constitution, human rights experts say that it would violate Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The big questions now are what role did the telecommunication companies play in the data interception and are intelligence contractors like Glimmerglass helping to design the collection and analysis system? "Tempora would not have been possible without the complicity of these undersea cable providers," says Eric King, head of research at Privacy International. “What we, and the public, deserve to know is this: To what extent are companies cooperating with disproportionate intelligence gathering, and are they doing anything to protect our right to privacy?” The Glimmerglass brochures can be downloaded here: http://www.wikileaks.org/spyfiles/docs/glimmerglass/55_glimmerglass-cybersweep.html and http://www.wikileaks.org/spyfiles/docs/glimmerglass/275_transparent-signal-access-and-monitoring.html

MOZAMBICAN BUSINESSMAN TALKS OF CORRUPTION AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT

MOZAMBICAN BUSINESSMAN TALKS OF CORRUPTION AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT
Date: 2010 January 28, 06:21 (Thursday)	Canonical ID: 10MAPUTO86_a
Original Classification: SECRET,NOFORN	Current Classification: SECRET,NOFORN
Handling Restrictions: -- Not Assigned --	Character Count: 10749
Executive Order: -- Not Assigned --	Locator: TEXT ONLINE
TAGS: EINV - Economic Affairs--Investments; Foreign Investments | KDEM - Democratization | KMCA - Millennium Challenge Account | MCC - Millennium Challenge Corporation | MZ - Mozambique | PGOV - Political Affairs--Government; Internal Governmental Affairs | PREL - Political Affairs--External Political Relations | SNAR - Social Affairs--Narcotics	Concepts: -- Not Assigned --
Enclosure: -- Not Assigned --	Type: TE
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S E C R E T SECTION 01 OF 03 MAPUTO 000086 NOFORN SIPDIS E.O. 12958: DECL: 01/28/2020 TAGS: PREL, PGOV, KDEM, KMCA, MCC, SNAR, EINV, MZ SUBJECT: MOZAMBICAN BUSINESSMAN TALKS OF CORRUPTION AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT REF: A. MAPUTO 80

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B. 07 MAPUTO 1395 MAPUTO 00000086 001.2 OF 003 Classified By: Charge d'Affaires Todd Chapman for reasons 1.4 (b+d) 1. (S/NF) SUMMARY: The Charge recently met with a Mozambican businessman of European descent--and a longtime friend of the U.S. Embassy--("the source") who described his frustrations with FRELIMO, President Guebuza, and Mohamed Bashir Suleiman (MBS). He complained that they exercise complete control over the licit and illicit economy of Mozambique. The source, who has excellent connections within the Government of Mozambique (GRM), including the private number of the President, as well as a personal relationship with MBS, said "I do not want to do business anymore in Mozambique" because of this triumverate of control. He is liquidating his assets and leaving Mozambique, and says that he now sees the "malaise" in Mozambique as if "he had cataracts, but now see it all." 2. (S/NF) The source describes President Guebuza, who he has known and befriended for the past twenty years as a "vicious scorpion who will sting you," and has an even more grav assessment of MBS. He cautions that FRELIMO is not interested in bettering the life of Mozambique's citizens, but rather its self-enrichment. In the licit economy, the ruling party, FRELIMO, and MBS work in tandem to control the legal and illegal economies and restrict the space for private sector growth by demanding a cut of all significant business transactions. In the illicit economy, MBS dominates money laundering and drug transshipment, providing kickbacks to FRELIMO. Other key players involved in pressuring the business community for bribes or percentage stakes, according to the source, are Domingos Tivane, head of Customs, and former Prime Minister Luisa Diogo. END SUMMARY. ----------------------------------- MOHAMED BASHIR SULEIMAN AND GUEBUZA ----------------------------------- 3. (S/NF) The source is a well-known multi-millionaire businessman with a wide-ranging empire, which according to him is being liquidated to finance his final departure from Mozambique in June 2010. He speculated that over the next term Guebuza would use his business proxies to amass a still larger personal fortune. Guebuza manages his business interests through several front companies, including Celso Ismael Correia's Insitec and Salimo Abdullah's Intelec Holdings. The source said that MBS meets directly with President Guebuza, who has direct knowledge of MBS' funding to both the FRELIMO party (underwriting the recent election campaign) and Guebuza's front companies. The source, who described Correia as a "30 year-old pipsqueak," stated that Correia has no business experience or university degree, but shows great loyalty to Guebuza. 4. (C) Guebuza's business interests in Mozambique are legion. They include stakes in Mocambique Gestores (MG), Maputo Port Development Company (MPDC) which runs Maputo Port, Focus 21, Navique, Vodacom, and SASOL. Guebuza also has a share in Maputo Corridor Logistics Initiative (MCLI) which controls the toll road from Maputo to South Africa, according to the source. Guebuza has shares in a significant number of banks, including BCI Fomento (where Correia is Chairman), Mocambique Capitais, Moza Banco, and Geocapital. Through family members, Guebuza also controls Intelec Business Advisory and Consulting, Beira Grain Terminal, MBT Construction Ltd, Englob Consultants Ltd, Mozambique Power Industries, Macequece Ltd, and Mozambique Natural Resources Corp. 5. (S/NF) One new area that Guebuza appears to be interested in is the gaming industry. The source says that Guebuza forced the Constitutional Council (CC) to review and declare a recent law liberalizing the gaming industry as "constitutional" even though it calls for all casino assets to revert to the state after a defined period of time, in direct contravention of private property laws enshrined in the Constitution. The judges of the CC, who also ruled in favor of decisions during the elections to invalidate large numbers of opposition candidates in the legislative and presidential races, complained of the unconstitutionality of the new law, but were told to give it a favorable ruling, which they did. 6. (S/NF) The source elaborated on the depth of Guebuza's business interests, which range across the economy. He said MAPUTO 00000086 002.2 OF 003 that Guebuza is in on almost all of the "mega-project" multi-million dollar deals via contractual stipulations to work with the Mozambican private sector. One example is Guebuza's involvement in the 2007 purchase of Cahora Bassa Hydroelectric Dam (HCB) from the Portuguese Government for $950 million. $700 million of this was paid by a private consortium of banks, which was arranged by a Guebuza proxy, for which Guebuza received, while he was a sitting president, an estimated commission of between $35 and $50 million. The Portuguese bank which arranged the financing turned over its shares in BCI Fomento, one of the largest Mozambican commercial banks, to a Guebuza-controlled company. --------------- MBS AND FRELIMO --------------- 7. (S/NF) The source, says that FRELIMO brazenly squeezes the business community for kickbacks. As an example, the source said that he has personally seen Manuel Tome, former FRELIMO Secretary General, senior member of the National Assembly, and relative of President Chissano, in MBS' office receiving pay-offs quite openly. Head of Customs Domingos Tivane openly demands and receives payoffs from importers, including MBS. The source stated that one business contact remarked to him that when visiting Tivane's expansive home to deliver a bribe he noticed that the bureaucrat had solid gold fixtures in his bathroom. The source also stated that former Prime Minister Luisa Diogo, until she was removed from the Cabinet (septel), was heavily involved in taking bribes for FRELIMO, of which she kept a percentage. Similar allegations were raised in the 21 January issue of Zambeze, regarding soft loans paid to Diogo's husband Albano Silva, purchases of houses and buildings for a fraction of their value, as well as Diogo's close ties to officials such as Diodino Cambaza, whose corruption trial is ongoing. 8. (S/NF) At the ports, the source commented that FRELIMO has its own clearing agent that handles FRELIMO and MBS business. The clearing agent chronically under-invoices items, avoids the 17% VAT, and also has an arrangement with Tivane's Customs authorities to bypass the ports' mandatory scanning. The source has documentary proof of the under-invoicing by MBS, and poloff has seen MBS' trucks drive through the port without being scanned. Nonetheless, the source said that Government of Mozambique (GRM) officials routinely describe MBS as an "untouchable" due to his connections to Tivane and Guebuza, a situation which is reported to irk a cash-strapped Tax Authority (AT) President Rosario Fernandes. ------------------------- MBS AND OTHER BUSINESSMEN ------------------------- 9. (S/NF) Regarding MBS' retail operation, the source states that MBS does not tolerate competition. The source's milk processing facility was threatened by MBS who used VAT-avoidance and under-invoicing to dump vast quantities of imported condensed milk on the market in order to put the source out of business. Only after the source made an agreement with MBS for exclusive distribution of his milk products, with a 10% kickback on all sales to MBS, did MBS stop his dumping practices. Other businessmen have complained about similar practices in other commodities to include edible oil. The source complained that "even those who bribe" MBS or FRELIMO cannot make a profit under such conditions. ------------------------------ NARCOTICS AND MONEY LAUNDERING ------------------------------ 10. (S/NF) The source says he only has second hand knowledge of drug trafficking and money laundering in Mozambique. He said that "MBS and the 'Nacala dealers' all have offices in Dubai" to facilitate money laundering operations in Mozambique. It is through these operations that after 15 years in business in Mozambique, MBS was able to pay $30 million in cash to establish his shopping plaza downtown, Maputo Shopping, which opened in 2007. The source said that he asked prominent Ismaili/Aga Khan businessman Mustaque Ali how MBS became so rich so fast, and Ali's wry answer was "Johnson's baby powder," a euphemism for drugs. The source noted that the sometimes erratic changes in MAPUTO 00000086 003.2 OF 003 Mozambique's foreign exchange position are due to sudden multi-million dollar transfers of cash overseas tied to money laundering. The source commented that in the past few years there have been several embarrassing situations in which shiploads of drugs, primarily hashish and heroin have washed ashore; however, the media is usually afraid to report on such incidents because no one wants to become another Carlos Cardoso, the courageous Mozambican journalist who was murdered in 2000 while investigating a massive bank fraud tied to then-President Chissano's family. --------------------------------------------- COMMENT: CANDID COMMENTS FROM A CONNECTED MAN --------------------------------------------- 11. (S/NF) The source, a defeated man, has decided to pack his bags and leave his homeland. While he has an axe to grind because he is frustrated with the scope and depth of corruption in Mozambique, his statements corroborate what we have learned from other sources (Ref A). Ties with MBS and other known money launders and narcotraffickers by senior GRM officials are disturbing and demonstrate a short-sighted focus on self-enrichment. The source cautions against building long term relationships with FRELIMO, and fears that, having allowed the illicit economy to prosper, and having advertised Mozambique as a money laundering destination and drug transshipment hotspot, the ruling party will no longer be able to control the nefarious activities within its borders. Rumors and stories of corruption abound in Mozambique, but rarely will a successful well-connected business person be willing to share specific practices based on first-hand knowledge and participation in these practices. CHAPMAN