Tener el don de ilusionarse hasta por un “hola”.

Intelligence Notes

October 30, 2011

On Friday, Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post published an article revealing that earlier this year, the U.S. Air Force established a secret base at the Arba Minch airport in southern Ethiopia, from where unmanned MQ-9 Reaper drones have been flying surveillance missions over southern Somalia with the knowledge and consent of the Ethiopian government. At the insistence of the Ethiopian government, these drones are unarmed, conducting only surveillance operations over the Somalia capital of Mogadishu and the strongholds in southern Somalia of the al Qaeda affiliated militia known as Al-Shabaab. To support these operations, the USAF has built a barbed wire-enclosed compound next to the passenger terminal at the Arba Minch airport, where 40+ USAF personnel as well as civilian security contractors in civilian clothes work maintaining the drones and processing the intelligence they collect over Somalia. Recent travellers to Arba Minch report that construction work at the airport is continuing, with the runway being lengthened to accomodate large transport aircraft and what appears to be a new concrete structure is being constructed north of the passenger terminal.

There is a fascinating article in the October 30, 2011 edition of Navy Times by veteran defense writer Sean Naylor on the secret intelligence gathering missions mounted by teams of U.S. Navy SEAL commandos against al Qaeda adherents in Somalia in November 2003. The purpose of these secret missions, which were mounted from a U.S. Navy attack submarine operating off the coast, was to emplace hidden cameras at selected spots along the Somali coast to monitor attempts by al Qaeda to covertly bring their personnel into the country to establish a sanctuary away from Pakistan. This article is a must-read for those interested in the clandestine behind-the-lines aspects of the War on Terrorism over the past decade.

The National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. has just put on its website a lengthy declassified history of the tenure of William E. Colby as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1973 to 1976. The history, written by Harold Ford, a veteran CIA intelligence analyst who also served a tour of duty as CIA Chief of Staff in Taiwan, is a fascinating document, although like most government produced histories, it sometimes reads like an engine maintenance manual. Still, there is gold buried in the document. The chapter describing the acrimonious relationship (if it can be called such) between Colby and the CIA’s counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, is particularly interesting, even though the CIA censors have deleted out all references to Angleton’s control of the intelligence liaison relationship with Israel.