Harold P. Ford, right, received the Studies in Intelligence Award from his boss at the CIA, Robert M. Gates.
By T. Rees Shapiro
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 13, 2010 [FONT=&]Harold P. Ford, 89, a senior CIA analyst who made an early and accurate prediction of the outcome of the Vietnam War and drew headlines in the early 1990s when he spoke out against the nomination of his old boss Robert M. Gates as director of central intelligence, died Nov. 3 in Gaithersburg. He had pneumonia.
He was a longtime Bethesda resident before moving to Asbury Methodist Village retirement community, where he died.
Dr. Ford's studies on the Vietnam War shaped his reputation as an indispensable source of wisdom and objectivity. At the time, he was a significant contributor to the National Intelligence Estimates on the war.
According to his family, Dr. Ford staunchly believed that the CIA's duty was to present intelligence analysis to the president that was free of bias and did not feed the ideological appetite of whichever political party was in power.
Dr. Ford was an early proponent of withdrawing U.S. troops from combat in Vietnam. In journalist Tim Weiner's 2007 book on the CIA, "Legacy of Ashes," Dr. Ford is quoted advising John McCone, who was director of central intelligence, in 1965 that "we are becoming progressively divorced from reality in Vietnam" and "proceeding with far more courage than wisdom."
After serving as chief of station in Taipei, Taiwan, among other assignments, Dr. Ford left the CIA in the mid-1970s to serve as a consultant to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He later served as a legislative assistant on foreign and military affairs to Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.).
Dr. Ford returned to the CIA in 1980. He was vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, a senior analysis advisory group, and retired in 1986 after briefly serving as the council's acting director. He continued to work for the CIA as a contractor in the agency's history department until the mid-1990s.
In 1991, Dr. Ford was among a few of the CIA's most veteran employees to speak publicly against Gates's nomination as director of central intelligence. They had worked together for years at the CIA, where Gates had been a senior manager.
In testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Dr. Ford said Gates was unfit to lead because he had purposely "skewed" intelligence analyses during his years at the CIA, particularly exaggerating threats from the Soviet Union.
"My view that Bob Gates has ignored or scorned the views of others whose assessments did not accord with his own would be okay if he were uniquely all seeing," Dr. Ford said in testimony. "The trouble is he has not been. Most importantly, he has been dead wrong on the central analytic target of the past few years - the outlook for change, or not, in the fortunes of the U.S.S.R. and the Soviet-European bloc."
Gates, who denied he had misled his superiors, won the nomination. Dr. Ford continued to speak out against Gates when he was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2006 to succeed Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense.
"It was tough for me because he'd been my boss and our personal relations were fine," Dr. Ford told the New York Times in 2006. "But the problem was the skewing of intelligence by him to suit what the consumer wanted to hear. I think there was no question about it."
Harold Perry Ford was born March 23, 1921, in Los Angeles. He received a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Redlands in California before joining the Navy during World War II. He served in the Pacific as a signal officer.
In 1949, he received a doctorate from the University of Chicago. He wrote his dissertation on Sino-Soviet relations.
Dr. Ford joined the CIA in 1950 - three years after its inception - and was responsible for providing support to covert operations arming anti-communist forces in China during the Korean War.
Later, he was among the first intelligence analysts to successfully predict that the relationship between China and the Soviet Union would turn increasingly frosty by the 1960s.
Quote:I am about twenty four hours behind on debunking the "evidence" of Russian hacking of the DNC because I have only just stopped laughing. I was sent last night the "crowdstrike" report, paid for by the Democratic National Committee, which is supposed to convince us. The New York Times today made this "evidence" its front page story.
It appears from this document that, despite himself being a former extremely competent KGB chief, Vladimir Putin has put Inspector Clouseau in charge of Russian security and left him to get on with it. The Russian Bear has been the symbol of the country since the 16th century. So we have to believe that the Russian security services set up top secret hacking groups identifying themselves as "Cozy Bear" and "Fancy Bear". Whereas no doubt the NSA fronts its hacking operations by a group brilliantly disguised as "The Flaming Bald Eagles", GCHQ doubtless hides behind "Three Lions on a Keyboard" and the French use "Marianne Snoops".
[ATTACH=CONFIG]8799[/ATTACH]
What is more, the Russian disguised hackers work Moscow hours and are directly traceable to Moscow IP addresses. This is plain and obvious nonsense. If crowdstrike were tracing me just now they would think I am in Denmark. Yesterday it was the Netherlands. I use Tunnel Bear, one of scores of easily available VPN's and believe me, the Russian FSB have much better resources. We are also supposed to believe that Russia's hidden hacking operation uses the name of the famous founder of the Communist Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, as a marker and an identify of "Guccifer2" (get the references Russian oligarchs and their Gucci bling and Lucifer) to post pointless and vainglorious boasts about its hacking operations, and in doing so accidentally leave bits of Russian language script to be found.
The Keystone Cops portrayal of one of the world's most clinically efficient intelligence services is of a piece with the anti-Russian racism which has permeated the Democratic Party rhetoric for quite some time. Frankly nobody in what is vaguely their right mind would believe this narrative.
It is not that "Cozy Bear", "Fancy Bear" and "Guccifer2" do not exist. It is that they are not agents of the Russian government and not the source of the DNC documents. Guccifer2 is understood in London to be the fairly well known amusing bearded Serbian who turns up at parties around Camden under the (assumed) name of Gavrilo Princip.
Of course there were hacking and phishing attacks on the DNC. Such attacks happen every day to pretty well all of us. There were over 1,050 attacks on my own server two days ago, and many of them often appear to originate in Russia though more appear to originate in the USA. I attach a cloudfare threat map. It happens to be from a while ago as I don't have a more up to date one to hand from my technical people. Of course in many cases the computers attacking have been activated as proxies by computers in another country entirely. Crowdstrike apparently expect us to believe that Putin's security services have not heard of this or of the idea of disguising which time zone you operate from.
One Day's Attempts to Hack My Own Server Happens Every Single Day
Pretty well all of us get phishing emails pretty routinely. Last year my bank phoned me up to check if I was really trying to buy a car with my credit card in St Petersburg. I don't know what the DNC paid "Crowdstrike" for their narrative but they got a very poor return for their effort indeed. That the New York Times promotes it as any kind of evidence is a truly damning indictment of the mainstream media.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Tracy Riddle Wrote:Those unnamed CIA sources are supposed to be more reliable than the MSM's unnamed CIA sources? How?
Except they are not un-named.
Tracy Riddle Wrote:David you do understand that hacking the emails is one process (done by one party), and then the handing off of them to Wikileaks is another process (probably done by another party). There could very well be evidence for the first event, and not for the second.
The emails were not 'hacked'. No email server had their password protection busted and was then entered by unauthorised persons. Did not happen.
What did happen was that some one with authorised access, either from the DNC or the NSA or other intel agency, downloaded the emails.
Tracy Riddle Wrote:Yes, and you're saying that the emails were leaked by a disgruntled insider, yet provide no real evidence to support this.
Quote:Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' Murray said. The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.'
He said the leakers were motivated by disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.'
Murray said he retrieved the package from a source during a clandestine meeting in a wooded area near American University, in northwest D.C. He said the individual he met with was not the original person who obtained the information, but an intermediary.
And further clarification from Murray in the comments section at his blog:
Quote:Yes I did not tell the Mail I was the guy who carried the emails back though. I think they were already with WikiLeaks before I went to Washington. Interestingly I also did not say it was an intermediary I said I did not know if I knew the person's real identity or they were operating under an alias, or if they were themselves the principal.
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
Tracy Riddle Wrote:Those unnamed CIA sources are supposed to be more reliable than the MSM's unnamed CIA sources? How?
Except they are not un-named.
Tracy Riddle Wrote:David you do understand that hacking the emails is one process (done by one party), and then the handing off of them to Wikileaks is another process (probably done by another party). There could very well be evidence for the first event, and not for the second.
The emails were not 'hacked'. No email server had their password protection busted and was then entered by unauthorised persons. Did not happen.
What did happen was that some one with authorised access, either from the DNC or the NSA or other intel agency, downloaded the emails.
Peter Janney's uncle was Frank Pace, chairman of General Dynamics who enlisted law partners Roswell Gilpatric and Luce's brother-in-law, Maurice "Tex" Moore, in a trade of 16 percent of Gen. Dyn. stock in exchange for Henry Crown and his Material Service Corp. of Chicago, headed by Byfield's Sherman Hotel group's Pat Hoy. The Crown family and partner Conrad Hilton next benefitted from TFX, at the time, the most costly military contract award in the history of the world. Obama was sponsored by the Crowns and Pritzkers. So was Albert Jenner Peter Janney has preferred to write of an imaginary CIA assassination of his surrogate mother, Mary Meyer, but not a word about his Uncle Frank.
Tracy Riddle Wrote:Those unnamed CIA sources are supposed to be more reliable than the MSM's unnamed CIA sources? How?
From the article:
[FONT=&]"Instead, it hinged on what unnamed lawmakers had supposedly been told"
The lawmakers were the members of the intelligence committees in both parties in Congress. Some of them were named, like Mitch McConnell.
Again from the article:
"On Monday, The Washington Post began the week attacking General Michael Flynn Sr., Trump's nominee for National Security Advisor for supporting a True Pundit story in early Nov. which the Post said detailed allegations that Hillary Clinton and her campaign director John Podesta were part of a child trafficking ring in D.C. and beyond dubbed "Pizzagate."Sounds quite intriguing except True Pundit never wrote any such story. Flynn on Twitter, had backed a True Pundit story detailing an active FBI investigation into Clinton and her foundation. "
NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes with Children, Child Exploitation, Pay to Play, Perjury
I completely agree with you that there was an unamed CIA analyst quoted in that story and therefore little to no credibility in what he said.
Thanks for that. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. No one can, without being totally hypocritical, argue that the above story has no validity and yet maintain that the Russian did it meme does have credibility based on.... unnamed sources and zero factual evidence.
'Nuff said.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
15-12-2016, 09:30 AM (This post was last modified: 15-12-2016, 10:20 AM by Magda Hassan.)
Sorry Tom but the Crowdstrike report is regarded as a joke in the hacking and infosec community. It is ridiculous and not taken seriously except by the usual suspects at the NYT and WaPo.
Just one issue about it: https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/the-yand....sro8tmxhk
Edited to add:
The hacking groups you referenced do exist Tom. Russia has tons of hackers. Some state run some just the proverbial kiddies in the basement. So does the USA. So does China. So does Israel. So does Germany. So does Iceland. It is a wild and borderless world out there. Lots of people exploring it for all sorts of reasons. Almost all websites/servers get lots of traffic from all sorts of cyber entities. Professional and canny players know how to do 2 things. One leave no traces of their own presence. 2. Make it look like some one else. If it was a 'Russian' hack by the Russian government they would be smart enough no to use IP addresses that tract to Moscow and keep Moscow business hours. Even I can use a VPN. Can only imagine the resource available to state players if they want to make mischief.
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
And further clarification from Murray in the comments section at his blog:
Quote:Yes I did not tell the Mail I was the guy who carried the emails back though. I think they were already with WikiLeaks before I went to Washington. Interestingly I also did not say it was an intermediary I said I did not know if I knew the person's real identity or they were operating under an alias, or if they were themselves the principal.
I also noted the supremely arrogant and usually calamitously inaccurate Trowbridge H Ford - who used to be a member here - waded into to Murray in the comments section regarding Snowden and curiously also argues for the leaker to be identified by Murray. Mmmm.
I also had to laugh at the Daily Blackshirt's article that he received the email trove from the "intermediary" when Murray clearly says he did not tell them that. He told them that "I did not know if I knew the person's real identity or they were operating under an alias, or if they were themselves the principal." The inability to accurately report what they are clearly told is astonishing.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
David Guyatt Wrote:I also noted the supremely arrogant and usually calamitously inaccurate Trowbridge H Ford - who used to be a member here - waded into to Murray in the comments section regarding Snowden and curiously also argues for the leaker to be identified by Murray. Mmmm.
Yes, a ludicrous demand.
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
Would accept these guys explanations over so called un-named sources in the NYT.
Quote:
US Intel Vets Dispute Russia Hacking Claims
December 12, 2016
As the hysteria about Russia's alleged interference in the U.S. election grows, a key mystery is why U.S. intelligence would rely on "circumstantial evidence" when it has the capability for hard evidence, say U.S. intelligence veterans. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity MEMORANDUM Allegations of Hacking Election Are Baseless
A New York Times report on Monday alluding to "overwhelming circumstantial evidence" leading the CIA to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin "deployed computer hackers with the goal of tipping the election to Donald J. Trump" is, sadly, evidence-free. This is no surprise, because harder evidence of a technical nature points to an inside leak, not hacking by Russians or anyone else. Seal of the National Security Agency
Monday's Washington Post reports that Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has joined other senators in calling for a bipartisan investigation of suspected cyber-intrusion by Russia. Reading our short memo could save the Senate from endemic partisanship, expense and unnecessary delay.
In what follows, we draw on decades of senior-level experience with emphasis on cyber-intelligence and security to cut through uninformed, largely partisan fog. Far from hiding behind anonymity, we are proud to speak out with the hope of gaining an audience appropriate to what we merit given our long labors in government and other areas of technology. And corny though it may sound these days, our ethos as intelligence professionals remains, simply, to tell it like it is without fear or favor.
We have gone through the various claims about hacking. For us, it is child's play to dismiss them. The email disclosures in question are the result of a leak, not a hack. Here's the difference between leaking and hacking:
Leak: When someone physically takes data out of an organization and gives it to some other person or organization, as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning did.
Hack: When someone in a remote location electronically penetrates operating systems, firewalls or any other cyber-protection system and then extracts data.
All signs point to leaking, not hacking. If hacking were involved, the National Security Agency would know it and know both sender and recipient.
In short, since leaking requires physically removing data on a thumb drive, for example the only way such data can be copied and removed, with no electronic trace of what has left the server, is via a physical storage device. Awesome Technical Capabilities
Again, NSA is able to identify both the sender and recipient when hacking is involved. Thanks largely to the material released by Edward Snowden, we can provide a full picture of NSA's extensive domestic data-collection network including Upstream programs like Fairview, Stormbrew and Blarney. These include at least 30 companies in the U.S. operating the fiber networks that carry the Public Switched Telephone Network as well as the World Wide Web. This gives NSA unparalleled access to data flowing within the U.S. and data going out to the rest of the world, as well as data transiting the U.S. Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. (Photo credit: The Guardian)
In other words, any data that is passed from the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) or of Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) or any other server in the U.S. is collected by the NSA. These data transfers carry destination addresses in what are called packets, which enable the transfer to be traced and followed through the network.
Packets: Emails being passed across the World Wide Web are broken down into smaller segments called packets. These packets are passed into the network to be delivered to a recipient. This means the packets need to be reassembled at the receiving end.
To accomplish this, all the packets that form a message are assigned an identifying number that enables the receiving end to collect them for reassembly. Moreover, each packet carries the originator and ultimate receiver Internet protocol number (either IPV4 or IPV6) that enables the network to route data.
When email packets leave the U.S., the other "Five Eyes" countries (the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and the seven or eight additional countries participating with the U.S. in bulk-collection of everything on the planet would also have a record of where those email packets went after leaving the U.S.
These collection resources are extensive [see attached NSA slides 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]; they include hundreds of trace route programs that trace the path of packets going across the network and tens of thousands of hardware and software implants in switches and servers that manage the network. Any emails being extracted from one server going to another would be, at least in part, recognizable and traceable by all these resources.
The bottom line is that the NSA would know where and how any "hacked" emails from the DNC, HRC or any other servers were routed through the network. This process can sometimes require a closer look into the routing to sort out intermediate clients, but in the end sender and recipient can be traced across the network.
The various ways in which usually anonymous spokespeople for U.S. intelligence agencies are equivocating saying things like "our best guess" or "our opinion" or "our estimate" etc. shows that the emails alleged to have been "hacked" cannot be traced across the network. Given NSA's extensive trace capability, we conclude that DNC and HRC servers alleged to have been hacked were, in fact, not hacked.
The evidence that should be there is absent; otherwise, it would surely be brought forward, since this could be done without any danger to sources and methods. Thus, we conclude that the emails were leaked by an insider as was the case with Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Such an insider could be anyone in a government department or agency with access to NSA databases, or perhaps someone within the DNC.
As for the comments to the media as to what the CIA believes, the reality is that CIA is almost totally dependent on NSA for ground truth in the communications arena. Thus, it remains something of a mystery why the media is being fed strange stories about hacking that have no basis in fact. In sum, given what we know of NSA's existing capabilities, it beggars belief that NSA would be unable to identify anyone Russian or not attempting to interfere in a U.S. election by hacking.
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)
Mike Gravel, former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence Service; special agent of the Counter Intelligence Corps and former United States Senator
Larry Johnson, former CIA Intelligence Officer & former State Department Counter-Terrorism Official
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East, CIA (ret.)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA (ret.)
Magda Hassan Wrote:Sorry Tom but the Crowdstrike report is regarded as a joke in the hacking and infosec community. It is ridiculous and not taken seriously except by the usual suspects at the NYT and WaPo.
Just one issue about it: https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/the-yand....sro8tmxhk
Edited to add:
The hacking groups you referenced do exist Tom. Russia has tons of hackers. Some state run some just the proverbial kiddies in the basement. So does the USA. So does China. So does Israel. So does Germany. So does Iceland. It is a wild and borderless world out there. Lots of people exploring it for all sorts of reasons. Almost all websites/servers get lots of traffic from all sorts of cyber entities. Professional and canny players know how to do 2 things. One leave no traces of their own presence. 2. Make it look like some one else. If it was a 'Russian' hack by the Russian government they would be smart enough no to use IP addresses that tract to Moscow and keep Moscow business hours. Even I can use a VPN. Can only imagine the resource available to state players if they want to make mischief.
On the Crowdstrike "analysis" Sam Biddle's article at the Intercept it up pretty well:
Quote:For one, a lot of the so-called evidence above is no such thing. CrowdStrike, whose claims of Russian responsibility are perhaps most influential throughout the media, says APT 28/Fancy Bear "is known for its technique of registering domains that closely resemble domains of legitimate organizations they plan to target." But this isn't a Russian technique any more than using a computer is a Russian technique misspelled domains are a cornerstone of phishing attacks all over the world. Is Yandex the Russian equivalent of Google some sort of giveaway? Anyone who claimed a hacker must be a CIA agent because they used a Gmail account would be laughed off the internet. We must also acknowledge that just because Guccifer 2.0 pretended to be Romanian, we can't conclude he works for the Russian government it just makes him a liar.
Placing any reliance on the handles "Fancy Bear" and "Cozy Bear" as indicators they are Russian involvement is ludicrous, of course. Using that irrationality I could just as easily finer point at Elton John as a Russian agent because he used the handle "Sugar Bear" in his song "Someone Saved my Life Tonight". The fact that Sugar Bear was the nickname of Elton John's now deceased friend Long John Baldry reveals just how ludicrous and grasping at straws this idiocy is. But hey, I guess they had their brief and had to justify their invoice.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
![[Image: PH2010111206627.jpg]](http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2010/11/12/PH2010111206627.jpg)
![[Image: NSA_seal-2-300x300.png]](https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/NSA_seal-2.png)
![[Image: edwardsnowden-guardian-300x180-300x180.jpg]](https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/edwardsnowden-guardian-300x180.jpg)
![[Image: pdf.png]](https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/plugins/pdf-print/images/pdf.png)