U.S. Top Spy's Curious Committee Report

By Jeff Stein

When Steven Aftergood read Adm. Dennis C. Blair's written responses to a Senate Intelligence Committee questionnaire the other day, something looked familiar.

And indeed, it was.

The Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), had given the committee a statement about Russian attacks on American spy satellites that "was simply lifted, almost word for word," from a Moscow newspaper, Aftergood reported Thursday in Secrecy News, the must-read newsletter he's edited for many years.

"The DNI repeated the Nezavisimaya Gazeta item nearly verbatim, presenting it as an established fact, with no attribution at all," Aftergood wrote.

But was it plagiarism?

Blair's spokesman heatedly rejected the allegation.

You be the judge:

Blair - or most certainly an aide -- wrote over his signature:

"In 2003, the Russian military prepared for an exercise that included attacking U.S. satellites to disrupt the NAVSTAR global positioning system, the Keyhole optical-electronic reconnaissance satellites, and the Lacrosse radar reconnaissance system with the intent of 'blinding' the Pentagon and denying it the opportunity to use precision weapons against Russia."

Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported on May 14, 2003, that the Russian military was preparing exercises that would include:

"destroying the US satellite group in order to neutralize the NAVSTAR global navigation system, the Keyhole optoelectronic intelligence satellites, and the Lacross radio-locating intelligence satellites. Under actual conditions of a war this would 'blind" the Pentagon and does not let the US use high-precision weapons against Russian military groups."

But what made Aftergood suspicious about Blair's statement?

"The giveaway," he told me later in an e-mail, "was the use of the (obsolete) terms Keyhole and Lacrosse, which are not normally mentioned in public by intelligence officials. In fact, the term Lacrosse is nominally still classified."

As it turned out, the online Newsmax news service had picked up on the Russian report back in 2003. The DNI did not cite that, either.

Aftergood was even more nonplussed that Blair's office seemed to have lifted the material and presented it to the Senate Intelligence Committee as a fact - without any independent corroboration.

"The Russian story lazily attributed its claim regarding the anti-satellite exercise to 'certain reports,'" Aftergood wrote.

Blair's statement didn't cite any sources whatsoever.

"I wouldn't call it plagiarism exactly, but I wouldn't call it intelligence either!" Aftergood joked in an e-mail.

But he was willing to give Blair's crew a bit of a break.

"A reporter colleague, whom I will leave unnamed," he said, "contacted ODNI for further background on the Russian anti-satellite exercise, and ODNI to its credit dug up the Russian article. So they weren't trying to hide their sources."

"But left unexplained," he added, "is how an anecdotal Russian news account could be presented to Congress as the authoritative view of the U.S. intelligence community."

Blair spokesman Michael G. Birmingham objected to Aftergood's characterization of the similar language.

None of the items Blair provided to the committee cited sources, he said.

As for the Russian anti-satellite exercise, Birmingham maintained that Nezavisimaya Gazeta was not the DNI's only source of information on the issue.

"We're not going to provide classified information in an unclassified document," he said in a brief interview late Thursday night.

Birmingham also said there was ample, additional open-source information about the Russian anti-satellite exercise elsewhere.

The principle source he cited, however, a report by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) had none of the specificity regarding Russian anti-satellite exercises that Blair used in his committee presentation.

"NTI doesn't mention any satellites by name but it mentions the exercise and the intent of the exercise," Birmingham responded. "And it cites multiple sources."

The relevant paragraph, he said, was this one:

"Russian ships in the Arabian Sea (the group consisted of nine ships from the Pacific and Black Sea Fleets) simulated a search-and-destroy mission vis-à-vis American Los Angeles class SSNs and launched sea-based cruise missiles. Simultaneously, strategic submarines from the Northern and the Pacific fleets conducted SLBM launches while Russian Space Forces simulated disruption of U.S. satellite communications."