This article is an autobiography or has been extensively edited by the subject or by someone connected to the subject.(February 2019) |
James Bamford | |
---|---|
Born | James Bamford September 15, 1946 Atlantic City, New Jersey, U.S. |
Occupation | Author, journalist, documentary filmmaker |
Nationality | American |
Education | |
Genre | Authority on the United States intelligence agencies |
Notable works |
|
Notable awards |
|
James Bamford (born September 15, 1946) is an American author, journalist and documentary producer noted for his writing about United States intelligence agencies, especially the National Security Agency (NSA). [1] The New York Times has called him "the nation's premier journalist on the subject of the National Security Agency" [2] and The New Yorker named him "the NSA's chief chronicler." [3]
In 2006, he won the National Magazine Award for Reporting [4] for his writing on the war in Iraq published in Rolling Stone .
In 2015 he became the national security columnist for Foreign Policy magazine [5] and he also writes for The New Republic. His book, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America , became a New York Times bestseller and was named by The Washington Post as one of "The Best Books of the Year." [6]
Bamford was born on September 15, 1946, in Atlantic City, New Jerseyand raised in Natick, Massachusetts. During the Vietnam War, he spent three years in the United States Navy as an intelligence analyst assigned to a National Security Agency unit in Hawaii. Following the Navy, he earned a Juris Doctor Degree in International Law from Suffolk University Law School in Boston, Massachusetts; a post graduate diploma from the Institute on International and Comparative Law, University of Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne; and was awarded a fellowship at Yale Law School. [7]
While in law school as a Navy reservist, Bamford blew the whistle on the NSA when he learned about a program that involved illegally eavesdropping on US citizens. He testified about the program in a closed hearing before the Church Committee, the congressional investigation that led to sweeping reforms of US intelligence abuses in the 1970s. [8]
In 1982, following graduation, he wrote The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America's Most Secret Intelligence Agency (Houghton Mifflin) which became a national bestseller and won the top book award from Investigative Reporters and Editors, the professional association of investigative journalists. Washingtonian magazine called it "a monument to investigative journalism" and The New York Times Book Review said, "Mr. Bamford has uncovered everything except the combination to the director's safe." [9]
During the course of writing the book, Bamford discovered that the Justice Department in 1976 began a secret criminal investigation into widespread illegal domestic eavesdropping by the NSA. As a result, he filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) [10] [11] for documents dealing with the investigation and several hundred pages were eventually released to him by the Carter administration. However, when President Ronald Reagan took office, the Justice Department sought to stop publication of the book and demanded return of the documents, claiming they had been "reclassified" as top secret. When Bamford refused, he was threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act. In response, Bamford cited the presidential executive order on secrecy, which stated that once a document had been declassified it cannot be reclassified. As a result, President Reagan changed the executive order to indicate that once a document has been declassified it can be reclassified. However, due to ex post facto restrictions in the US Constitution, the new executive order could not be applied to Bamford and the information was subsequently published in The Puzzle Palace. [12] [13] [14]
Following publication, however, the NSA continued its efforts against Bamford. While writing The Puzzle Palace, the author made extensive use of documents from the George C. Marshall Research Library in Virginia. These included the private correspondence of William F. Friedman, one of the founders of the NSA. Although none of the documents was classified, following the book's release the NSA sent agents to the library to order their removal. The action led to a lawsuit (631 F.Supp. 416 (1986)) by the American Library Association (ALA) against the NSA, charging that the agency had no right to enter a private library and classify and remove Friedman's private papers. Although the court criticized NSA, saying it "does not condone by any means NSA's cavalier attitude toward its classification determination," it nevertheless found in the agency's favor and dismissed the suit. [15] The ALA appealed the dismissal to the U.S. Court of Appeals but Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was at that time a judge on that court, ruled that the ALA lacked standing in the case. At the library, Bamford also had access to the private papers of Marshall S. Carter, a former director of the NSA whom he had interviewed. But after the book was published, agency officials met with Carter at a secure location in Colorado, where he was in retirement, and threatened him with prosecution if he did not immediately close his collection and refrain from further interviews. Carter reluctantly agreed to the demands. [16] [17]
In 2001, Bamford released Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret NSA, From the Cold War to the Dawn of a New Century (Doubleday). The second in his trilogy, it also became a national bestseller. A cover review[ clarification needed ] in The New York Times Book Review called it "an extraordinary work of investigative journalism" and it won the Investigative Reporters and Editors Gold Medal, the highest award given by the association.
In 2002, during the lead up to the war in Iraq, Bamford was one of the few journalists arguing that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and therefore the country should not go to war. He made his arguments on the editorial pages of USA Today where he was a member of the newspaper's Board of Contributors. And in 2004 he released A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq. and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies (Doubleday), which became a bestseller. Time , in a two-page review, said, "A Pretext for War is probably the best one-volume companion to the harrowing events in the war on terrorism since 1996." [18] The Washington Post listed the book as one of "The Best of 2004" and in a cover review said, "Bamford does a superb job of laying out and tying together threads of the Sept. 11 intelligence failures and their ongoing aftermath." [19] Bamford also wrote on the war in Iraq for Rolling Stone magazine and his 2005 article, "The Man Who Sold the War," [20] [21] won the National Magazine Award for reporting, the highest award in magazine writing, [22] and was included in Columbia University's The Best American Magazine Writing. [23]
In 2006, following revelations in The New York Times that the NSA had been conducting illegal domestic eavesdropping for decades, Bamford joined writer Christopher Hitchens and several others as plaintiffs in a lawsuit ( ACLU v. NSA , 493 F.3d 644) brought by the American Civil Liberties Union that challenged the constitutionality of the agency's surveillance. On August 17, 2006, District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor granted summary judgment for Bamford and the other plaintiffs, ruling that the surveillance was unconstitutional and illegal, and ordered that it be halted immediately. However, she stayed her order pending appeal. [24] Later the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the District Court ruling on the grounds that the plaintiffs could not show that they had been or would be subjected to surveillance personally, and therefore they lacked standing before the Court.
In 2008, Bamford released the third book in his trilogy, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to The Eavesdropping on America, which became a New York Times bestseller and was named by The Washington Post as one of "The Best Books of the Year."
Bamford also writes and produces documentaries for PBS and in 2010 was nominated for an Emmy Award for his program, "The Spy Factory," [25] which was based on his book, The Shadow Factory. [26] Earlier he spent a decade as the Washington investigative producer for ABC's World News Tonight , covering the White House as well as reporting from much of the world, including the Middle East during the Gulf War. Among his awards was the Overseas Press Club Award for Excellence and the Society of Professional Journalists Deadline Award for the Best Investigative Reporting in Television.
Bamford has served as a defense consultant in a number of espionage cases, including U.S. v. Thomas Andrews Drake. [27] A former senior NSA official, in 2011 Drake was charged under the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking classified documents to the Baltimore Sun . However, Bamford was able to show that all the materials the government claimed to be classified were actually freely available in the public domain, and placed there by the government itself. As a result, the government was forced to throw out the charges against Drake in exchange for a misdemeanor plea for abusing his computer, with no jail time or even a fine. [28] It was one of the very few times the government had been forced to dismiss charges in an espionage case.
Additionally, Bamford has testified as an expert witness on intelligence issues before committees of the Senate and House of Representatives as well as the European Parliament in Brussels and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He has also been a guest lecturer at the Central Intelligence Agency's Senior Intelligence Fellows Program, the National Security Agency's National Cryptologic School, the Defense Intelligence Agency's Joint Military Intelligence College, the Pentagon's National Defense University and the Director of National Intelligence's National Counterintelligence Executive. And he has been an invited speaker at colleges and universities in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East, including Oxford, Harvard, Yale, the American University of Beirut and many others.
During the 2010s, Bamford wrote a number of cover stories for Wired magazine as a contributing editor, including "The Most Wanted Man in the World," [8] [29] the result of three days in Moscow with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the longest any journalist has spent with him there.
Bamford is a strong supporter of the "USS Liberty Veterans Association" and has written many articles in support of survivors of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty. [30] [31] He spoke on behalf of Liberty survivors at a 2004 U.S. State Department symposium that was convened in about the Six-Day War in response to the findings of the 2003 Moorer Commission and the 2004 release of Captain Ward Boston's affidavit pertaining to the USS Liberty incident. [32] He spoke alongside Marc J. Susser (the State Department's official historian), A. Jay Cristol (who had just released his first book excusing the Liberty attack), and Michael B. Oren (a Middle Eastern historian and Israeli politician). [33] [34] One of the chapters in Body of Secrets is titled "Blood" and is about the Liberty. [35] He dedicates part of this chapter to discussing how U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer Marvin E. Nowicki, a linguist aboard a Navy EC-121 that was flying overhead during the attack, intercepted Israeli communications that seemed to indicate they knew or suspected the ship they were attacking was American. [36] [37] He goes on to posit that the motivation for the Israeli attack on the Liberty was to cover-up the Ras Sedr massacre, which occurred the same day. He postulates that the Israeli Defense Forces attacked the signals intelligence collection ship to destroy any evidence of the massacre that it may have collected. [38] [39] [40] [41] [42]
Bamford's 2023 book, Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America's Counterintelligence has received criticism due to its focus on acts of espionage against the United States by the state of Israel. Modern Diplomacy, for example, calls it "the most venomous anti-Israel polemic published since Mearsheimer and Walt's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy in 2007. All the more concerning is that Bamford utilizes his gift for exaggeration as a classic Yellow Journalist to spin the deeply problematic narrative of Israeli (and explicitly Jewish) puppet-masters pulling the strings of world affairs from the behind the scenes". [43] However, according to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs , Bamford's book "ruffles all the right feathers." The latter review points to a negative assessment of the book written by the Central Intelligence Agency and praises it for its critical view of Israel's intervention in United States politics. [44]
ECHELON (Also known as Echelont), originally a secret government code name, is a surveillance program (signals intelligence/SIGINT collection and analysis network) operated by the five signatory states to the UKUSA Security Agreement: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, also known as the Five Eyes.
Industrial espionage, also known as economic espionage, corporate spying, or corporate espionage, is a form of espionage conducted for commercial purposes instead of purely national security.
The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for global intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, specializing in a discipline known as signals intelligence (SIGINT). The NSA is also tasked with the protection of U.S. communications networks and information systems. The NSA relies on a variety of measures to accomplish its mission, the majority of which are clandestine. The NSA has roughly 32,000 employees.
The USS Liberty incident was an attack on a United States Navy technical research ship, USS Liberty, by Israeli Air Force jet fighter aircraft and Israeli Navy motor torpedo boats, on 8 June 1967, during the Six-Day War. The combined air and sea attack killed 34 crew members, wounded 171 crew members, and severely damaged the ship. At the time, the ship was in international waters north of the Sinai Peninsula, about 25.5 nautical miles northwest from the Egyptian city of Arish.
David Kahn was an American historian, journalist, and writer. He wrote extensively on the history of cryptography and military intelligence.
The Puzzle Palace is a book written by James Bamford and published in 1982. It is the first major, popular work devoted entirely to the history and workings of the National Security Agency (NSA), a United States intelligence organization. The title refers to a nickname for the NSA, which is headquartered in Fort Meade, Maryland. In addition to describing the role of the NSA and explaining how it was organized, the book exposed details of a massive eavesdropping operation called Operation Shamrock. According to security expert Bruce Schneier, the book was popular within the NSA itself, as "the agency's secrecy prevents its employees from knowing much about their own history".
The Black Chamber, officially the Cable and Telegraph Section and also known as the Cipher Bureau, was the first peacetime cryptanalytic organization in the United States, operating from 1917 to 1929. It was a forerunner of the National Security Agency (NSA).
The United Kingdom – United States of America Agreement is a multilateral agreement for cooperation in signals intelligence between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The alliance of intelligence operations is also known as the Five Eyes. In classification markings this is abbreviated as FVEY, with the individual countries being abbreviated as AUS, CAN, NZL, GBR, and USA, respectively.
Operation Ivy Bells was a joint United States Navy, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and National Security Agency (NSA) mission whose objective was to place wire taps on Soviet underwater communication lines during the Cold War.
Keith Brian Alexander is a retired four-star general of the United States Army, who served as director of the National Security Agency, chief of the Central Security Service, and commander of the United States Cyber Command. He previously served as Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2 (Intelligence), United States Army from 2003 to 2005. He assumed the positions of Director of the National Security Agency and Chief of the Central Security Service on 1 August 2005, and the additional duties as Commander United States Cyber Command on 21 May 2010.
The Terrorist Surveillance Program was an electronic surveillance program implemented by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. It was part of the President's Surveillance Program, which was in turn conducted under the overall umbrella of the War on Terrorism. The NSA, a signals intelligence agency, implemented the program to intercept al Qaeda communications overseas where at least one party is not a U.S. person. In 2005, The New York Times disclosed that technical glitches resulted in some of the intercepts including communications which were "purely domestic" in nature, igniting the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy. Later works, such as James Bamford's The Shadow Factory, described how the nature of the domestic surveillance was much, much more widespread than initially disclosed. In a 2011 New Yorker article, former NSA employee Bill Binney said that his colleagues told him that the NSA had begun storing billing and phone records from "everyone in the country."
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency is a book by James Bamford about the NSA and its operations. It also covers the history of espionage in the United States from uses of the Fulton surface-to-air recovery system to retrieve personnel on Arctic Ocean drift stations to Operation Northwoods, a declassified US military plan that Bamford describes as a "secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba."
The Special Collection Service (SCS), codenamed F6, is a highly classified joint U.S. Central Intelligence Agency–National Security Agency program charged with inserting eavesdropping equipment in difficult-to-reach places, such as foreign embassies, communications centers, and foreign government installations. Established in the late 1970s and headquartered in Beltsville, Maryland, the SCS has been involved in operations ranging from the Cold War to hunting Al-Qaeda after the September 11 attacks.
The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America is a book on the National Security Agency by author James Bamford.
Vint Hill Farms Station (VHFS) was a United States Army and National Security Agency (NSA) signals intelligence and electronic warfare facility located in Fauquier County, Virginia, near Warrenton. VHFS was closed in 1997 and the land was sold off in 1999. Today the site hosts various engineering and technology companies, as well as two Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) air traffic control facilities, and the Cold War Museum.
Turbulence is a United States National Security Agency (NSA) information-technology project started c. 2005. It was developed in small, inexpensive "test" pieces rather than one grand plan like its failed predecessor, the Trailblazer Project. It also includes offensive cyberwarfare capabilities, like injecting malware into remote computers. The U.S. Congress criticized the project in 2007 for having similar bureaucratic problems as the Trailblazer Project.
Perry Fellwock is a former National Security Agency (NSA) analyst and whistleblower who revealed the existence of the NSA and its worldwide covert surveillance network in an interview, using the pseudonym Winslow Peck, with Ramparts in 1971. At the time that Fellwock blew the whistle on ECHELON, the NSA was a nearly unknown organization and among the most secretive of the US intelligence agencies. Fellwock revealed that it had a significantly larger budget than the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Fellwock was motivated by Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers. Today, Fellwock has been acknowledged as the first NSA whistleblower.
The practice of mass surveillance in the United States dates back to wartime monitoring and censorship of international communications from, to, or which passed through the United States. After the First and Second World Wars, mass surveillance continued throughout the Cold War period, via programs such as the Black Chamber and Project SHAMROCK. The formation and growth of federal law-enforcement and intelligence agencies such as the FBI, CIA, and NSA institutionalized surveillance used to also silence political dissent, as evidenced by COINTELPRO projects which targeted various organizations and individuals. During the Civil Rights Movement era, many individuals put under surveillance orders were first labelled as integrationists, then deemed subversive, and sometimes suspected to be supportive of the communist model of the United States' rival at the time, the Soviet Union. Other targeted individuals and groups included Native American activists, African American and Chicano liberation movement activists, and anti-war protesters.
The origins of global surveillance can be traced back to the late 1940s, when the UKUSA Agreement was jointly enacted by the United Kingdom and the United States, whose close cooperation eventually culminated in the creation of the global surveillance network, code-named "ECHELON", in 1971.
Global surveillance refers to the practice of globalized mass surveillance on entire populations across national borders. Although its existence was first revealed in the 1970s and led legislators to attempt to curb domestic spying by the National Security Agency (NSA), it did not receive sustained public attention until the existence of ECHELON was revealed in the 1980s and confirmed in the 1990s. In 2013 it gained substantial worldwide media attention due to the global surveillance disclosure by Edward Snowden.
For 30 years, on a sometimes lonely hunt, James Bamford has pursued that great white whale of American intelligence, the National Security Agency. It has been a jarring ride at times.