CIA Baked Birthday Cake for Suicide Bomber in Afghanistan

Search him? Hell, they baked a cake for him!

CIA officers in Afghanistan were so keen to meet the double agent they believed would give them valuable intelligence on al Qaeda, they planned a birthday celebration for his arrival at their U.S. military base, AP reported Thursday.

But before Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al Balawi could eat his cake and share his sources during the meeting on Dec. 30, he blew himself up, killing seven Americans and a Jordanian intelligence officer in the deadliest attack on the CIA since 1983.

The report of the planned birthday gathering is the latest indication that CIA officers trusted and wanted to engage al Balawi, a Jordanian double agent who was invited to Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan's eastern province of Khost after promising to share his knowledge on al Qaeda.

...

Did the CIA test LSD in the New York City subway system?

Whew. Albarelli's book is really turning up the beets.

Albarelli spent more than a decade sifting through more than 100,000 pages of government documents and his most startling chestnut might be his claim that the intelligence community conducted aerosol tests of LSD inside the New York City subway system.

“The experiment was pretty shocking — shocking that the CIA and the Army would release LSD like that, among innocent unwitting folks,” Albarelli told The Post.

A declassified FBI report from the Baltimore field office dated Aug. 25, 1950 provides some tantalizing support for the claim. “The BW [biological weapon] experiments to be conducted by representatives of the Department of the Army in the New York Subway System in September 1950, have been indefinitely postponed,” states the memo, a copy of which the author provided to The Post

An Olson colleague, Dr. Henry Eigelsbach, confirmed to Albarelli that the LSD subway test did, in fact, occur in November 1950, albeit on a smaller scale than first planned. Little, however, is known about the test — what line, how many people and what happened.

The purported experiment occurred nearly a year before a more infamous August 1951 incident in the small town of Pont St. Esprit, in the south of France, when the citizens were hit by a case of mass insanity.

More ...

Ah, Pont St. Esprit, where have we heard that before?

/>

CIA Target a "Gift From Allah"

That inside suicide job that took out seven CIA operatives: Allah takes a vengeful whack the CIA with a double agent fitted with a "martyrdom belt."

In a posthumously released video message, the suicide bomber who killed seven C.I.A. employees on Dec. 30 said that his original target had been his handler from Jordanian intelligence, and that an invitation to meet C.I.A. officers at a remote base in Afghanistan had been an unexpected boon.

“We planned for something but got a bigger gift, a gift from Allah, who brought us, through his accompaniment, a valuable prey: Americans, and from the C.I.A.,” said the bomber, Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian physician who carried out the attack, in a 44-minute video posted on extremist Web sites Sunday.

“That’s when I became certain that the best way to teach Jordanian intelligence and the C.I.A. a lesson is with the martyrdom belt,” Mr. Balawi said in the video, as translated by IntelCenter, a Virginia company that monitors online postings by extremist groups. The Jordanian officer who had introduced him to the C.I.A. was also killed in the attack.

Mr. Balawi, who had told the C.I.A. he could get access to top Qaeda leaders but turned out to be a double agent, called for more attacks on Jordanian intelligence, noting its cooperation with the United States.

In an earlier video, released 10 days after the attack, Mr. Balawi was shown seated with Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, and described the attack as revenge for the killing last year by a C.I.A. drone of the Pakistani Taliban’s previous leader, Baitullah Mehsud.

CIA Requests Own Documents

Told ya' it was "a keeper."

Thanks to Millegan Stews for this one! Though, I confess, I don't know quite what to make of it.

CIA Requests Its Own Documents From Author

In a bizarre about-face, the secretive Central Intelligence Agency has requested documents from an investigative journalist, even though the writer had earlier obtained them from the CIA itself under the Freedom of Information Act.

The strange request was made last week to author H.P. Albarelli Jr., whose recently published book A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, details a myriad of CIA drug experiments and exposes a large number of previously anonymous physicians and business officials who contracted with the agency. The experiments resulted in the deaths of a number of people and sent hundreds more seeking medical help.

“The caller, an agency official, who identified himself by a name I was quite familiar with from past requests,” explained Albarelli, “asked if I would be so kind as to send by fax two documents my book referenced in its narrative and footnotes. I suppose I should have been bowled over by the request, but I wasn’t. It happened once before.”

“The crazy thing,” added Albarelli, “is that all of the requested documents came from my FOI requests to the agency in the early 1990s.”

The documents requested from Albarelli centered on two subjects. The first top-secret CIA document details a meeting between an official of the Sandoz Chemical Company and an undercover CIA operator. The document reveals a close relationship between the firm and the agency, and provides stunning details about a mysterious 1951 outbreak of “insanity” in a small French town, Pont St. Esprit. In a covert experiment, the village was surreptitiously administered the powerful hallucinogen LSD in an attempt to see if there was a viable method of waging war without killing people or destroying property. A related document appears to reveal that famed LSD inventor, Albert Hoffmann, maintained a close relationship with the CIA.

Ahh, some juicy bits...

The second document requested reveals intelligence links between one of the criminals who murdered Frank Olson and the assassination of JFK, including a possible working relationship with suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

The CIA, the ISI, and Johnnie Walker Blue

Who cannot help to laugh at the "warily" part? Really? The CIA and the ISI find each other suspect? Wonder whatever led to that?

C.I.A. and Pakistan Work Together, but Do So Warily

Inside a secret detention center in an industrial pocket of the Pakistani capital called I/9, teams of Pakistani and American spies have kept a watchful eye on a senior Taliban leader captured last month. With the other eye, they watch each other.

The C.I.A. and its Pakistani counterpart, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, have a long and often tormented relationship. And even now, they are moving warily toward conflicting goals, with each maneuvering to protect its influence after the shooting stops in Afghanistan.

Yet interviews in recent days show how they are working together on tactical operations, and how far the C.I.A. has extended its extraordinary secret war beyond the mountainous tribal belt and deep into Pakistan’s sprawling cities.

Beyond the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, C.I.A. operatives working with the ISI have carried out dozens of raids throughout Pakistan over the past year, working from bases in the cities of Quetta, Peshawar and elsewhere, according to Pakistani security officials.

The raids often come after electronic intercepts by American spy satellites, or tips from Pakistani informants — and the spies from the two countries then sometimes drive in the same car to pick up their quarry. Sometimes the teams go on lengthy reconnaissance missions, with the ISI operatives packing sunscreen and neon glow sticks that allow them to identify their positions at night.

Successful missions sometimes end with American and Pakistani spies toasting one another with Johnnie Walker Blue Label whisky, a gift from the C.I.A.

More ...

CIA Operation Azorian: "New Details" Released

More declassification.

In 1974, far out in the Pacific, a U.S. ship pretending to be a deep-sea mining vessel fished a sunken Soviet nuclear-armed submarine out of the ocean depths, took what it could of the wreck and made off to Hawaii with its purloined prize.

Now, Washington is owning up to Project Azorian, a brazen mission from the days of high-stakes - and high-seas - Cold War rivalry.

After more than 30 years of refusing to confirm the barest facts of what the world already knew, the CIA has released an internal account of Project Azorian, though with juicy details taken out. The account surfaced Friday at the hands of private researchers from the National Security Archive who used the Freedom of Information Act to achieve the declassification.
...
In it, the CIA describes in chronological detail a mission of staggering expense and improbable engineering feats that culminated in August 1974 when the Hughes Glomar Explorer retrieved a portion of the submarine, K-129. The eccentric industrialist Howard Hughes lent his name to the project to give the ship cover as a commercial research vessel.

Despite the declassified article, the greatest mysteries of Project Azorian remain buried three miles down and in CIA files: exactly what parts of the sub were retrieved, what intelligence was derived from them and whether the mission was a waste of time and money. Despite the veil over the project, its existence has been known for decades.

"It's a pretty meaty description of the operation from inception to death," said Matthew Aid, the researcher who had been seeking the article since 2007, when he learned of its publication thanks to a footnote he spotted in other documents. "But what's missing in the end is, what did we get for it? The answer is, we still don't know."

CIA Asset Erik Prince: Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy

Well, I'm sure it is "not all," but a fascinating tale from this century's privatized version of Oliver North. A venerable CIA asset has been "thrown under the bus," and he just can't quite believe it.

I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions,” says Erik Prince as he surveys his heavily fortified, 7,000-acre compound in rural Moyock, North Carolina. “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.” Prince—the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military contractor—is royally steamed. He wants to vent. And he wants you to hear him vent.

Venting ...