The program was originally started because of U.S. suspicions of Saudi help to Pakistan after their first nuclear weapons test. MONARCH PASSAGE became a comprehensive communications spying program on Saudi businessmen and members of the Royal Family. The National Security News Service first reported on the program in a 2001 BBC television broadcast.
MONARCH PASSAGE was not the first time the U.S. shut down an investigation that could have yielded valuable information about terrorist activities. A week after 9/11, an FBI agent who worked on terrorism matters stopped by our office. NSNS had helped the bureau investigate previous terrorist incidents. We had passed on warnings about an Islamic attack against our embassy in Albania and an earlier incident of a planned attack during President Clinton’s visit to Bosnia. After the agent left our office, a file was found on our conference room table. From it we learned that the FBI had halted an investigation into bin Laden family members in the United States.
Taken together, these incidents raise questions about whether the cozy relationship between the Bush family and the Saudi royals and their friends resulted in the blinding of two government investigations that might have exposed Saudi funding of terrorism prior to 9/11. According to DIA sources, the administration ordered an end to the spying effort against the Saudi’s a few weeks after the Bush Presidency began in 2001.
One cannot help but wonder how the Saudis came to be exempt from U.S. eavesdropping. As it is now painfully clear Americans have no such clout in their own country. For those of us who quake at the idea of government spying on its own citizens without legal justification there is a sense of real sadness at what is happening to our country.
The lack of accountability in the NSA spying scandal is breathtaking. Our intelligence sources are telling us that millions of Americans may have had their conversations bugged illegally. For those few of us who are reporters, who talk to sources in the Middle East, and have written stories about U.S. policy, chances are that the bugging does not stop with incoming overseas phone calls according to these sources.
Sources calling from Iran use phone cards that often show a return number of a Los Angeles or New York area code. U.S. intelligence has pressured phone companies to switch as many overseas calls as possible through our phone systems for easy access by government spies.
Let me give you an example: I speak to a wanted Islamic terrorist named David Belfield several times a week. He is in Tehran. The last time he called me a Los Angeles number popped up as the originating number of the phone call. Because he never calls from the same number my number is monitored. To track his numbers the NSA would have to track my phones and hope they could trap his call. According to technical experts I have spoken to, this means that in the age of throwaway cell phones, phone cards and the internet, the spies best chance of getting a call is to monitor the phones of those who get repeated calls. Belfield has repeatedly supplied information that actually prevented attacks against Americans, including the U.S. military in Bosnia.
The spying policy against Americans means big brother gets to listen in on calls to family members, physicians, other sources – everything. The lack of outrage of many Americans over domestic spying demonstrates how little the fragility of freedom and democracy is really understood.
The road this administration has gone down is a familiar one to those who have followed the behavior of totalitarian regimes, including some the United States has gone to war against. Dictators declare a war and then suspend all civil liberties in the name of fighting the war. President Bush has said that the war on terrorism will be ongoing and I suspect the same is true of the spying on our own citizenry. Equally disturbing is the fact that much of the spying and review of the “take” is being done through private contractors. The war on terrorism has been an economic boon to the international communications industry.
We need to face up to what is being taken away from us in exchange for the security the administration claims these intrusions bring us.
Click to read the documents left by the FBI agent
Note: The deletions in the following documents were made by the National Security News Service to protect personal privacy. They do not appear in the original documents obtained by the News Service. The handwritten notes appear on the originals, as obtained by the News Service. One of those notes appears to be incorrect. Although the note refers to Abdullah bin Laden as “Omar’s brother” and suggests he “shares [a] mother” with Osama bin Laden, the News Service believes that the Abdullah bin Laden in question is actually Osama’s nephew, not his half-brother.
