------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Missile crisis
Shell's Nuclear Crimes
I won't jump to conclusions: Sushil Kumar
Windmill Project Propels a Quixotic Quest
Chernobyl victims demand 'dues'
First Wedding At Chernobyl Since Nuclear Disaster
Chernobyl Victims Demand Support
For the eventual winner, the nation's nuclear 'football' awaits
Fire damages Air Force missile facility
The Whiz Kid Vs. the Old Boys
Bunker? What Bunker?
13 days that stopped the world
Transition: The Changing of the (786) Guards

MILITARY
The Submarine Next Door
The Disappeared
Conneticut
Militant attacks kill 1 in Kashmir
Astronauts Begin Solar Installation
Shuttle Joins Space Station; Solar Wings Await
Astronauts begin solar wings spacewalk
Amid the Relics of Combat, Veterans Recall Flights and Flak and Friends
Cole Attack Rooted in Afghan War

OTHER
Environment Groups' Ratings Rile Ski Industry
Paths for Our Warming Planet
States
An Inside Story of Racial Bias and Denial
Commissioner Reorganizing Police Anti-Gang Efforts Into a Single Unit
Dead Men Talking
Maryland
A Selected Web Guide
SALIENT FACTS: FREEDOM OF INFORMATION
What Secrets Tell
CHART Top Secrets
Secret plan to spy on all British phone calls
In Terrorism Trial, Just Picking the Jurors Is a Challenge
U.S. Considers Array of Actions Against Bin Laden

ACTIVISTS
Bus Boycotters Are Celebrated in Montgomery
200 injured in Bangladesh exam protest


-------- NUCLEAR

Missile crisis

Bergen Record
Sunday, December 3, 2000
Florida notes
http://www.bergen.com/travel/flonote03200012038.htm

Beginning Dec. 15, the Florida International Museum highlights the events surrounding the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. "The Cuban Missile Crisis: When the Cold War Got Hot" will run through spring, conveying to visitors the threat of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. (800) 777-9882 or www.floridamuseum.org

-- DANIEL WARCHOL

-------- britain

Shell's Nuclear Crimes
http://www.nuclearcrimes.com/

Prior to publication of the enclosed allegations, I John Alfred Dyer, gave specific and clear prior notice to the Royal Dutch Shell Group, following the sending of CD copies of this site, its contents and allegations, to Shell's appointed lawyers in this matter-D J Freeman, the Groups legal head Richard Max Wiseman, Shell Transport & Trading's chairman Mark Moody-Stuart, Royal Dutch Shell's chairman Jeroen van der Veer. All have declined to commence/issue proceedings, despite their specific (legal) threats.

-For the past thirteen years, I, John Alfred Dyer, have been researching the decommissioning, in 1968, of Shell's -Thornton Research Centre's -research (Shell/military) nuclear reactor/testing cell. My research primarily concerns the fact that Shell's decommissioning turned from a pre-planned criminal act, into a criminal disaster (this is an understatement, of some proportions). The decommissioning turned into the said disaster, as Shell unable to separate, and retrieve 'its' mandatory high-level, and other, materials/waste, from the reactors biological shield, ordered and sanctioned the wholesale (mass) disposal/dumping, of its top-secret nuclear reactor/testing cell's materials/waste. The fact that the said nuclear materials/waste was disposed/dumped onto some of the most densely populated sectors of the United Kingdom. In 1993, my research resulted in the commissioning of a television programme, for Carlton Television. Shell responded, by knowingly fabricating, at the highest level, a fraudulent, sham 2900 word Narrative (defence), as part of the Group's attempt(s)/campaign to cover-up the truth of its nuclear dumping, and other, crimes. Shell's fraudulent, sham Narrative resulted in the 'killing' of the said television programme.

· In 1988, I came to comprehend the significance of the nuclear dumping allegation(s), first made to me in/from 1971. The personnel making the allegation(s) had allegedly been employed to decommission 'nuclear facilities' in 1968, at Shell Research Limited's-Thornton Research Centre, Cheshire, England.

· The individuals made the most shocking, series of allegation(s), concerning wholesale nuclear dumping, which (allegedly) included the nuclear isotope Strontium-90.

· In 1993, following five years of research, my findings resulted in the commissioning of a television program for 'Carlton Television'. Shell quickly responded. Investigators kept me under surveillance, my telephone was tapped, my mail intercepted. At the same time, Shell filed a seemingly endless line of complaints, concerning my 'alleged' conduct.

· Having instigated the above strategy, Shell, within a few days of the proposed transmission date (10 February 1994), produced an extensive, detailed, 2900 word 'Narrative' to set-out its official defence/position. Briefly, the Narrative was to the effect that: - 'Yes, a nuclear facility had been demolished at Shell Thornton, in 1968. However, it was, Shell claimed, a low-level (radiation) Cobalt-60 nuclear labyrinth/building- not the nuclear reactor/testing cell that I had alleged.' In short, I had got it wrong!

· I have now established that Shell (perfectly aware of the truth of the proposed programme, i. e. the witness/evidence (and I) had not got it 'wrong'), knowingly fabricated a fraudulent, sham Narrative (7 February 1994), to cover-up the Group's wholesale nuclear dumping(s) crimes.

· Shell's fraudulent sham, Narrative (along with its media contacts, and campaign of personal vilification) resulted in the 'cancellation' of the said television programme. A programme that would have exposed Shell's wholesale nuclear dumping(s) crimes.

· In consequence, the illegal mass disposal/dumping of Shell's nuclear materials/waste onto some of the most densely populated sectors of the United Kingdom, was 'successfully' covered up.

· In continuance of the Shell Group's policy of suppressing the truth of its nuclear dumping and other crimes, a mere matter of days after this WEB Site's inauguration, Shell, instructed D J Freeman, the Group's lawyers in this matter, to contact my (former) WEB host 'easyspace'. Having refused to issue proceedings, in an outrageous act of censorship, Shell, connived with my former WEB host to 'silence' this site, by taking it off the Internet (1/11/00). I am pleased to inform that I now have a more ethical/robust host. However, Shell not content with its unethical record/behaviour, in censoring this site, instructed the Group's lawyers, D J Freeman, who have now (22/11/00) sent/written a 'warning' letter to my present (ethical) WEB host. Following Freeman's (unsuccessful) letter signed by Sajjad Nadi, Shell unable to frighten off my present WEB host, is now desperately, attempting to have the entire WEB domain closed down, involving hundreds of sites, in order to stop the contents of this site becoming public knowledge! To threaten perfectly innocent people/parties, while refusing to sue me, is truly outrageous, unethical, and cowardly. I now give Shell clear notice that if they do not desist from harassing perfectly innocent, decent people, solely in order to stop the Group's nuclear dumping crimes being exposed, I shall have no other option but to distribute leaflets to those sectors of the UK, most affected by Shell's illegal mass nuclear dumping(s). This will entail the leafleting of hundreds of thousands of households. I am determined that Shell's (continuation of its) policies of concealing/censoring its nuclear crimes is not going to succeed.

· Rather than carry out these reprehensible acts Shell, if it disputes that;

1. It hired known criminal(s), with a history of illegal disposal of nuclear materials/waste, to decommission its 'Thornton' nuclear reactor/testing cell.

2. It paid the said 'criminals' a six-figure CASH sum (at to-days prices), to secretly, and illegally, decommission its secret 'Thornton' nuclear reactor/testing cell.

3. It ordered and sanctioned the wholesale illegal mass dumping(s) of 'Thornton's' nuclear materials/waste.

4. That the said nuclear materials/waste, was disposed (dumped) onto some the most densely populated sectors of the United Kingdom.

5. That Shell, at director level, fabricated a knowingly fraudulent, sham Narrative, to 'kill' a television programme and hence, cover up its nuclear dumping(s), and other, crimes.

6. Furthermore, if Shell disputes the other enclosed allegations, as set out.

(Shell) will now issue legal proceedings -as per its issued threats:

'They (Shell) would however, have no hesitation in protecting their reputation from defamatory attacks.'

'If you believe Shell to have been guilty of a cover up of the events in 1968, you are free to make the allegation public subject to the warning that Shell will take whatever action it sees fit in order to protect its reputation from false attacks.'

Shell's threats, panic and desperation, arise precisely because the Group is aware that the allegations are true, hence it will not risk its 'files' (the truth) being exposed. Consequently, no legal proceedings have been issued by Shell and 'associates', nor will they. Despite clear prior notice of this WEB site, and its contents, Shell's specific threats-that it 'would not hesitate' to issue 'writs', should I publish the allegations, proved worthless. For the issuing of 'writs' involves the revealing, or the risk of revealing, Shell's own documents via discovery (legal process). Accordingly, Shell will not sue, and thereby risk exposing/defeating the Group's 'brazen it out-admit nothing' strategy.

Background

From the early 1950's, Shell was engaged in an serious, extensive, and secret programme of nuclear research in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere). The said research was primarily military-based. The UK research programmes necessitated the construction of a nuclear research reactor/testing cell at Shell's Thornton Research Centre, Cheshire, (part of the Group's Stanlow oil refinery complex). The programs and the reactor/testing cell's construction, location and operation, were all carried out under the highest level of security. In 1968 (for reasons not appropriate for disclosure at this juncture), the reactor was decommissioned, i.e. demolished.

A relatively small amount (in tonnage terms), of the most dangerous elements of the waste, was planned to have been retrieved and safely reprocessed. Scientists' from the United Kingdom's 'Atomic Energy Authority' (UKAEA) Harwell, were on Shell's Thornton site to 'collect' and remove the most highly toxic elements (high-level waste), as per plan. The residue of the waste was planned, and was, to have been illegally dumped. To achieve this, a contractor with a history of illegal disposal of nuclear material, was specifically sought and engaged to decommission Shell's nuclear reactor/testing cell, and, dump the remainder of the nuclear materials/waste. The chosen contractor(s), who had/have known criminal records, were paid a six figure sum (at today's prices), and in cash!

In fact, the reactor's decommissioning did not go to plan, as it actually proved impossible to separate, and, consequently retrieve the most highly toxic/dangerous (high-level) waste, from its 'vast' biological shield. In short, it was a disaster. As Shell and Harwell's 'scientists' became increasingly desperate to obtain the (mandatory) nuclear 'materials', without success, the position grew increasingly frantic. As a result, of the (total) failure to separate and retrieve the said nuclear waste, Harwell's staff left, empty handed. Shortly after Harwell's 'departure', and only after Harwell's complete departure with its remote retrieval equipment, and protective gear, Shell ordered the wholesale mass dumping, involving many thousands of tonnes, of its nuclear material/'waste', which included, amongst others, the nuclear isotope Strontium-90. Almost unbelievably, parts of this waste was subsequently utilised in the construction of a housing estate, medical facilities, shops, schools and leisure facilities, which were built on either the waste or its surroundings. Furthermore, part of the said nuclear materials/waste was 'stored' and later sold on, by the haulage contractor engaged to transport/remove the waste-off Shell's Thornton site. Tragically, Shell's nuclear materials/waste is/are dumped/located in some of the most densely populated sectors of the United Kingdom. The implications for countless tens of thousands of people who reside, or have resided, in those areas were the materials/waste is 'dumped', are devastating.

The demolished reactors' 'waste' included the nuclear isotope Strontium-90. Radioisotopes such as Sr.-90 and Caesium 137 occur in irradiated fuel elements-nuclear reactors. The nuclear isotope Sr-90 (half-life 28 years) is one of the most dangerous of all nuclear products. Strontium 90, due to its long-life, remains hazardous for centuries!

I further established that the wives of both, the sub-contractor and his foreman, employed to decommission Shell's nuclear facilities gave birth to a number of 'deformed' children, following the said decommissioning. The condition of the said newborn was such that both sets of parents were independently advised that not only would their newborn not survive; furthermore, they were informed that viewing would only prove distressing. Following a number of such births the sub-contractor demanded to see his newborn child. He was distraught beyond words to discover that the newborn child's head had not 'properly' formed. The child, as per the others, was allowed to die within hours of its birth. The decommissioning 'workers', and others, were offered neither advice nor protection, by Shell at its secret nuclear decommissioning.

In view of the seriousness of the allegations, I undertook, following Shell's success in having 'my' television programme 'dropped', in 1994, to continue establish the truth, hence I continued my research.

In light of my experience with Shell- its shameless and effortless ability to lie, combined with its media contacts, influence, its power and ability to threaten and pursue legal means to silence 'critics'- demanded a level of evidence far beyond that which could be considered reasonable. Consequently, the volume of evidence (hence research), required would need to be overwhelming. I had to establish whether, or not, Shell's Cobalt-60 labyrinth was the 'building' that had been decommissioned in 1968- as Shell claimed. If not, I needed to uncover what had been decommissioned at Thornton in 1968. Its history, purpose and the reasons for selecting and employing known 'criminals', and paying them enormous cash sums to carry out the nuclear decommissioning and (pre-planned) wholesale dumping of the nuclear materials/waste'.

I had established, by 1988, that Shell's (Cobalt-60) Narrative of the 7 February 1994, was 'a tissue of lies from start to finish'.

In late 1998, I (re) contacted Shell, with the hope they would now react to my research findings/disclosures with, at least, a degree of responsibility. Initially, Shell's policy was to ignored me. When I started to reveal, parts of, my evidence, the strategy quickly changed. In the face of my revelations (findings), Shell's 1994 Narrative became untenable. As a consequence, Shell's legal head/director (Richard Max Wiseman) conceded/informed that Shell's 1994 narrative was 'a mistake'. After two years of endeavouring to 'persuade' Shell to face up to the consequences of its '1968' criminal acts, i.e. act responsibly to the victim's of its nuclear dumping, I am forced to conclude that I have no other alternative than to publish and sue, (as I informed the multinationals heads):

'Shell ordered and sanctioned the 'dumping' of thousands of tons, let me repeat it once again so there can be no possible misunderstanding-thousands of tons of nuclear, nuclear contaminated, radioactive and other 'waste', as a deliberate act of policy. Furthermore, you (Shell) employed known criminals, with a record of illegally 'disposing' of nuclear 'materials', to carry out the demolition-or to use the more widely accepted term decommission-and subsequently, as per your design and instructions, illegally dispose/dump the resulting 'waste'.' Letter to Shell' s legal head.

'Countless tens of thousands of our fellow citizens are about to receive just about the most devastating news possible, and in the most improper manner without any warning or counselling. Mindful of this, I have endeavoured to behave in the most responsible manner and consequently treated all parties equally and fairly, only to find I am confronted with a deeply cynical and corrupt multinational corporation. Despite this, you will recall in my very first letter to you, I once again offered to hand over my evidence; this was contemptuously rejected without concern expressed or otherwise, for Shell's victims.' Letter to Shell's 'newly' appointed lawyers.

'Statement of Claim' ' and 'John Dyer' button(s) give a more detailed account of events.

Following the Shell's lawyer's 'button(s)' (Wiseman first) is instructive.

John Alfred Dyer is solely and entirely responsible for the research findings and consequent allegations against the Shell Group, contained in this/my WEB site.

johndyer@nuclearcrimes.com

It appears, for some unknown reason, that I have not received a number of e-mails. Consequently, I am, presently, personally responding to all e-mails. Should you have either sent, or are sending an e-mail and did/do not receive a response, please note it is either because I have not received it, and/or my return mail is not being delivered. If you do/have not received a reply, by the following day, please re-send your e-mail(s) until you do.

(C) 2000 The contents of this WEB site are the sole property of John Alfred Dyer and cannot or may not be communicated, copied or transmitted, for commercial gain, without my expressed prior agreement.

-------- india / pakistan

I won't jump to conclusions: Sushil Kumar

The Hindu
Sunday, December 03, 2000
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/2000/12/03/stories/0203000l.htm

NEW DELHI, DEC. 2. Mystery continues to surround yesterday's firing incident inside the residence of the Chief of the Naval Staff on Rajaji Marg here in which a member of his security staff sustained a bullet injury.

To a question at a press conference this morning, Admiral Sushil Kumar said he would not ``like to jump to any conclusion''.

``The matter is being investigated by several agencies including the police, Intelligence Bureau and the Crime Branch.''

He did not think the shooting was the result of any misunderstanding between the guards on patrol duty in his bungalow.

Highly placed sources in the Navy, however, acknowledged that Admiral Kumar had indeed received some ``threats'' to his security, possibly related to deployment of marine commandos in the Kashmir Valley. Asked for his comment, Admiral Kumar said ``threats in a profession like mine are part of the job.''

The press conference was called on the eve of Navy Day, which will be celebrated on Monday. Committed to deepening its capacity to deter maritime threats, the Navy was set to acquire nine new warships in the next one year, he said.

The Navy would also extend its surveillance reach to enhance its credibility as a fighting force in the Indian Ocean. It was paying considerable attention to the Andaman Sea, besides the Indian Ocean, which describes as ``the Ocean of the next century''. Turbulence in Indonesia, which shared a maritime border with India, and the use of these waters for piracy and gun-running demanded a ``robust presence'' by the Navy in this area.

There was no change in the Navy's philosophy to configure its force structure around aircraft carriers. It was going ahead with developing an indigenous carrier whose design had been frozen. Admiral Kumar pointed out that India, which has decided to acquire the Russian aircraft carrier, Admiral Gorshkov, would have to wait for three years before to getting this ship operationalised.

The destroyer Mumbai and missile frigate Kirch, a corvette Kulish and six other ships would be commissioned in 2001.

The other ships to be commissioned in the coming year were the frigate Betwa, the Tilian Chang, Teressa and Tarmugli.

The Navy would also induct four TU-22 long-range maritime patrol aircraft.

The Indian Navy, like all other navies, aspired to develop a nuclear submarine. Admiral Kumar, however, declined to make any comment on the Advance Technology Vessel (ATV) programme or the nuclear submarine project.

India, according to the draft nuclear doctrine, is committed to acquiring a retaliatory second strike capability, which will have to involve the presence a nuclear submarine.

-------- korea

Windmill Project Propels a Quixotic Quest
Asia: Berkeley visionary brings alternative energy to North Korea in a bid to discourage the regime from building reactors that could be used to develop nuclear arms.

Los Angeles Times
Sunday, December 3, 2000
By ROBIN WRIGHT, Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/20001203/t000115911.html

BERKELEY--Peter Hayes is a Don Quixote for the 21st century, a tall, dashing dreamer with a mission that some find foolhardy and others farfetched, but that all deem noble in spirit and purpose. With a lot of imagination and a little money, Hayes has set out to rid the world of its deadliest weapons.

And he's trying to do it with windmills. To counter a well-financed campaign to build a U.S. missile defense system, Hayes is putting up wind turbines and windmills--"like right out of Kansas in the 1930s," he says--in Communist North Korea.

The graceful towers with their spinning wheels are already providing water for dozens of North Korean homes and fields. The tall, spindly turbines, planted in fields of cabbage cultivated for the Korean dish kimchi, produce electricity for kindergartens, clinics and homes in the village of Unhari, about 60 miles southeast of the capital, Pyongyang.

The goal is to demonstrate the viability of alternative energy sources, particularly in rural areas, so the government will feel less need to build nuclear power plants that could, in turn, be used to develop nuclear weapons.

To some arms experts, it is indeed a Quixotic quest. And Hayes concedes that his project is not a solution for the entire country--nor a guarantee that a potential nuclear foe will soon become a peaceful neighbor. "North Korea is not a windy place. Windmills won't work everywhere," he said in an interview in a modest Berkeley office crammed with books on everything from the metaphysics of war to North Korean politics.

But to others, the groundbreaking collaboration between American and North Korean scientists represents a new kind of "alternative defense" that might reduce pressure for multibillion-dollar programs to block Pyongyang's ability to fire a nuclear-tipped missile at the United States.

Idea Wins 'Genius' Grant

In recognition of his imaginative approach, Hayes this year was awarded one of the prestigious "genius" grants given to thinkers, scientists, writers and other innovators by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

At its heart, Hayes' windmill project underscores a brewing debate over the best way to defend a nation in the 21st century.

"The missile defense argument is like saying the solution to America's handgun problem is for everyone to wear body armor. It doesn't work. There are too many handguns and bullets, and it isn't possible to get everyone to wear armor on every part of their body," said Hayes, founder of the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development, one of America's smallest think tanks.

"Besides, the issue really isn't about missiles and warheads. It's about strategic rivalry and distrust and perceptions at a much deeper level. And that's what we're trying to deal with."

An energy specialist who's worked for the United Nations and the World Bank, Hayes began looking for ways to reverse tensions when North Korea crossed the nuclear threshold a decade ago by building reactors that it said would be used to generate electricity. By 1994, the government's suspected ability to siphon off fissile material to make nuclear weapons had prompted the Pentagon to devise plans to attack the reactors.

The United States pulled back from "the brink of war," according to a recent book by former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, after Perry advised the Clinton administration that it might ignite a wider conflict. Former President Carter then mediated an agreement that froze North Korea's nuclear program in exchange for U.S.-orchestrated aid and technology to build two "safe" nuclear reactors.

But the danger remains. For one thing, North Korea does not have to give a full accounting of its nuclear program until the reactors are built and working. Meanwhile, it may have in reserve enough plutonium for one or two bombs.

Because the reactors won't be ready for several years, Pyongyang still feels vulnerable. Fuel supplies ended after the Soviet Union's demise. North Korea's electrical grid has been devastated by natural disasters. Millions of people have been left without regular electricity, contributing to the collapse of industry, communications, agriculture, transportation and the economy.

So Hayes and a small crew of energy experts set out to find an interim source of energy--and to plant the seeds of a relationship between the nations.

"A lot of what drives the military is fear or uncertainty. We're willing to embrace uncertainty. Otherwise we'll keep developing the same old world with the same old problems," said Hayes, who grew up on a farm--with windmills--in Australia but has lived in the United States since finishing his doctorate at UC Berkeley in 1988.

With funding from American foundations, the Hayes team took the first seven wind turbines to Unhari in 1998. In October, on his sixth trip, he took a team to build two windmills to channel water for crops and human consumption to ease a famine that has killed an estimated 2 million people.

Both windmills and wind turbines have appeal because of their low cost ($2,500 to $12,000 each), low maintenance, readily accessible technology, environmental safety and sustainability, even in rural areas. The next step is designing a windmill using local materials.

The project illustrates the evolution of ideas about national security policy.

Throughout history, military might has been the key to defending a nation. But after World War II, with the development of apocalyptic weapons, President Truman proposed nuclear disarmament. President Eisenhower created the first nuclear power monitoring agency. And President Kennedy, who warned that 25 nations could have nuclear arms by the end of the 1960s, launched the first major treaty banning tests of nuclear weapons in the water and in the atmosphere.

Half a century of treaties on weapons of mass destruction--nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missiles--has led to destruction of existing arms, and agreements to halt new weapons, and has limited the spread of nuclear arms to only eight countries.

By 1996, former Defense Secretary Perry dared to say that the first line of defense was no longer weaponry but pieces of paper--an interlocking network of treaties.

"Paper has been more effective in intercepting and destroying more missiles than other weapons," said Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "And the military has increasingly become the second line of defense, as a deterrent threat against those who use these weapons against you."

Others disagree. "Treaties codify the status quo. But pure military power is still the key to influence, the coin of the realm," said Mitchell Reiss, former chief U.S. negotiator with North Korea and member of the National Security Council during the Reagan and Bush administrations.

Lines of Defense

As the 21st century dawns, two other visions are shaping ideas about defending a nation.

One is a national missile defense shield, a popular idea of uncertain capability projected to cost tens of billions of dollars. Some arms experts call it the third line of defense; others say it should become the first.

Building a national missile defense will mean renegotiating the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty or scrapping it altogether. Because of widespread opposition from Paris to Moscow to Beijing, changing the treaty could begin to unravel the entire network of arms treaties, since each builds on the previous one, most experts agree.

It could also trigger a new arms race by escalating the level of armament to a new plane.

A fourth line of defense is the emerging effort by disparate organizations, from the International Monetary Fund to the Nautilus Institute, to unravel the causes of tension before they become conflicts.

"The IMF does it with economic factors on a global scale with billions of dollars," Cirincione said. "Peter Hayes does on a local scale what big institutions can't or won't."

Even skeptics agree that Hayes has been an effective ambassador in helping to convince North Korea that the outside world is not necessarily hostile. But they doubt that his approach will replace traditional means of defense.

"Peter Hayes does amazing work, and the more interaction that you can have with countries like North Korea is probably good. But giving all the windmills in the world is not going to convince the North Koreans to dismantle their nuclear weapons program," Reiss said.

"At best, cooperative efforts are helpful on the margins," he said. "No one should be under the illusion that they're a main motive for a country to change course."

Criticism like that doesn't faze Hayes' team.

"We have lofty goals for a group of 15 people," said Tim Savage, a Nautilus specialist.

"The fact we chose windmills, which have a connotation of dreaming the impossible dream, is appropriate for the kind of work we're trying to do. We're trying to help end the single longest conflict on Earth. The Cold War ended in 1990, but the Korean conflict began a half-century ago and still has no formal end."

-------- ukraine

Chernobyl victims demand 'dues'

CNN
December 3, 2000
http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/europe/12/03/ukraine.chernobyl/index.html

KIEV, Ukraine -- Victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and their relatives have marched through the Ukrainian capital Kiev, protesting that authorities were letting them die in poverty.

Chernobyl is due to be shut down permanently in on December 15.

Fourteen years after one of its reactors exploded in the world's worst peacetime nuclear disaster, one in sixteen Ukrainians is suffering from cancer and other diseases caused by radiation.

Many victims of the disaster now rely on small state pensions for their livelihoods, which are often paid late or only in part.

Waving banners saying: "We protected Ukraine, now Ukraine must protect us" and "We are dying," around 2,000 protestors joined veterans of the Soviet Afghan war to mark an international day for the disabled.

Widows wearing black shawls held up photographs of husbands who died after working on clean-up crews in the aftermath of the accident.

They were joined by half a dozen children in wheelchairs whose parents had received large doses of radiation.

Nina Kharchenko, bearing a portrait of her late husband Boris, said: "We want them (the government) to give us our dues. We have nothing to live on."

She said a 50 percent reduction on utilities bills for Chernobyl victims and their relatives had been cancelled.

Speakers at the protest called on the government to plan more generous social spending in a draft 2001 budget.

The government has been fighting to get a lean budget approved, due to go before parliament for a final vote on Thursday, in an effort to persuade the International Monetary Fund to resume a blocked $2.6 billion lending programme.

Chernobyl's number four reactor exploded in 1986, sending a radioactive cloud across Europe which has been blamed for thousands of deaths.

Ukraine still uses the plant's third reactor, which had to be switched off for most of last week when cold weather downed power lines. The reactor was re-started on Friday.

Western countries have pledged to fund the completion of two nuclear reactors elsewhere to replace Chernobyl's lost capacity.

But the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has not yet made a final decision on disbursing the loans and some Ukrainian officials have said they will renege on closing down Chernobyl if no cash is found.

Ukraine still relies on the reactor for around five percent of its electricity.

---

First Wedding At Chernobyl Since Nuclear Disaster

Russia Today
Dec 3, 2000
http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=226499

KIEV -- (Agence France Presse) A Ukrainian couple have got married in the town of Chernobyl, in the first wedding there since a massive nuclear disaster 14 years ago turned the place into a ghost-town, press reports said Saturday.

Facti daily reported that 19-year-old Marina Pachina wanted to get married in the church where she was born and lived for the first five years of her life, before reactor number four at the Chernobyl's nuclear plant exploded in April 1986.

She and 100,000 other people living around the reactor, including Chernobyl's 13,000 residents, were evacuated as nuclear radiation was spewed into the atmosphere in the world's worst civilian nuclear accident.

The groom, 26-year-old Mikhailo Nalepa, who comes from a small town near the capital Kiev, did not mind getting married in Chernobyl, Facti reported.

It did not give the date of the wedding.

The only people who have returned to Chernobyl since the disaster are some 600 elderly former inhabitants who said they wanted to come back there to die.

An estimated 15,000 to 30,000 people have died as a result of the disaster.

The crippled nuclear plant, which still provides around five percent of Ukraine's electricity, is due to close on December 15 under an internationally-brokered agreement.

---

Chernobyl Victims Demand Support

Associated Press
December 3, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Ukraine-Chernobyl-Protest.html

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- Some 10,000 Chernobyl victims protested Sunday in the capital Kiev, marking the international day of disabled people and demanding more government spending on social care and support.

The demonstrators, many of whom took part in the Chernobyl cleanup operations and suffered disabilities as a result, held a mass meeting in the center of Ukraine's capital, Kiev.

Chernobyl was the site of world's worst nuclear accident on April 26, 1986, when the plant's reactor No. 4 exploded and caught fire, sending a radioactive cloud over much of Europe.

The disaster is believed to have eventually killed some 8,000 people. Hundreds of thousands suffered from its aftereffects.

Currently, Chernobyl operates only one reactor, which has been the focus of disputes between international groups concerned about safety and energy-strapped Ukraine.

President Leonid Kuchma has promised to close Chernobyl on Dec. 15.

``These people were liquidating the accident, these people were deactivating the exclusion zone, the sarcophagus (over reactor No. 4) was built with their hands,'' said Yuriy Andreyev, president of Ukraine's Chernobyl Union which organized the demonstration.

Some disabled war veterans and other handicapped people also joined the protest.

``I have a pension like other people, but receive also a compensation for health loss,'' said Heorhiy Shaposhnikov, 50, who took part in the cleanup. His face was swollen and looked unhealthy. ``I lost 90 percent of my health, who may restore it?''

Earlier in November, victims of the Chernobyl nuclear accident and people who cleaned up after the disaster protested against government plans to cut their benefits in the budget for 2001.

More than 2.2 million of Ukraine's 50 million people are eligible for benefits stemming from the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant.

-------- u.s. nuc weapons

For the eventual winner, the nation's nuclear 'football' awaits
Security aides say the transfer of the missile codes will be seamless. In the past, there have been a few fumbles.

Philadelphia Inquirer
Sunday, December 3, 2000
By Steve Goldstein INQUIRER WASHINGTON BUREAU
http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/12/03/national/CODES03.htm

WASHINGTON - It's football season in the nation's capital, but it has nothing to do with the Redskins.

This is the time in a presidential election year when the incoming commander in chief begins to receive briefings on national emergency preparedness, culminating in the transfer of 'the case containing the actual launch codes for the nation's nuclear arsenal - the nuclear "football."

No president-elect so far; therefore no briefings.

And no crisis, either.

"This can all be done in fairly short order," said a calm, cool P.J. Crowley, spokesman for the National Security Council. "Once there is a transition team in place, we will brief them on how this process works, so that on Jan. 20 we will have a seamless transfer from one commander in chief to another."

The football is in the custody of the White House Military Office, which does not change with administrations. While Vice President Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush have been jockeying for the title of president-elect, the military office has been reviewing the transition procedures of eight years ago.

"There's not a lot to say at this point," Crowley said. "Much of what we do will be determined by the incoming transition team. There could be regular briefings as early as next week."

Neither Gore nor Bush should require the basic nuke 101 seminar, experts said. Gore has been in the White House bubble for eight years, receiving many of the same briefings as President Clinton. Bush is assembling a national security team from veterans of his father's administration, and Dick Cheney, his running mate, is a former secretary of defense.

The new president also will be invited over to the Pentagon for a security briefing in the "tank" - the super-secure war room.

On Jan. 20, the nuclear football will arrive at the Capitol with President Clinton, and will depart with his successor.

What is the "football" exactly? And how is it kept within the president's reach? Has it ever been fumbled?

What president's hobby required special saddlebags to be made to carry it? Which commander in chief sent his personal ID codes - needed to authorize a launch - to the dry cleaners?

The football is actually a leather-bound attache-size briefcase, much as one might find at a good luggage store, with a few slight modifications. It is not lead-lined to foil X-ray eyes, but the bag has a leather-covered steel cable that attaches to the bearer's wrist.

Inside is what is known as SIOP-ESI - Single Integrated Operational Plan-Extremely Sensitive Information. The guts of the football are scores of pages of the U.S. nuclear war plan, with detailed descriptions of attack options.

The choices are divided into limited and major attack options, said Bruce Blair, a nuclear arms expert and former congressional staffer who reviewed attack plans.

"There could be 65 limited attack options against Russia and 15 against China, and several major attack options," Blair said.

For instance, MAO4, the most extreme response, would launch 2,300 nuclear weapons immediately at Russian targets, ranging from nuclear sites to factories to army locations and missile silos.

Blair said the "15- to 30-minute briefing" on nuclear options usually takes place just before the new president's inauguration.

No one can recall when the leather case adopted the football nickname. It dates at least as far back as the administration of Richard M. Nixon, a well-known fan of the sport.

In addition to the attack codes kept inside the football, there is a series of identification codes that the president must use to prove that he is, in fact, the president.

The codes are in the form of the "challenge and reply" system used in the military, said Blair. For instance, the brigadier general in charge of the war room at the Pentagon will ask the president, "Are you ready to authenticate?" and then say a prompt, such as "alpha two."

The president will look in his codebook and see that the correct response to that challenge is "Zulu six."

Both Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan kept their ID codes on their person. Carter accidentally sent his codes in a suit to the White House dry cleaner, Blair said.

Reagan kept his codes in his wallet. After he was shot by John Hinckley in 1981, the codes wound up in a plastic personal-effects bag at the hospital, Blair said.

The nuclear football is carried by military officers assigned to the White House Military Office, which also is responsible for the operations of Air Force One, the Marine One helicopter, and Camp David. The military aides also carry secure communications devices.

Carter had two military aides who shared football duties, while under Reagan, the contingent expanded to four - one from each of the main service branches. President Clinton added a fifth aide from the Coast Guard.

John Kline, a 25-year veteran of the Marine Corps, had the unique distinction of carrying the football for both Carter and Reagan.

For Kline, it was the same job, except for the person he couldn't let out of his sight.

How stressful is that?

"I never thought of it as carrying the key to Armageddon," said Kline, who was born in Allentown, Pa., and has run for Congress from Minnesota twice, unsuccessfully.

"But working for the president in a political environment can be very challenging," he said. "When you're chosen for the job, they want to make sure you will be able to function properly and be helpful to the president, and not embarrass him."

The job requirements are straightforward - stay with the president at all times. In the motorcade, Kline always rode in a vehicle just behind or in front of the presidential limo, so he could get to the man in seconds.

Other than the limo, the president would never get in any conveyance without the football.

Kline recalled that Reagan once got stuck in an elevator for 10 minutes when too many people got on. Kline, of course, was on board. Reagan just told stories until they were rescued, he said.

Reagan's love of horseback riding posed a unique challenge. Finally, the military office had special saddlebags made so that an aide could follow Reagan on horseback. Kline knew how to ride, but other aides had to take lessons.

When Reagan went riding with King Hassan II of Morocco, Kline had to have a special set of military riding jodhpurs made for the formal state event.

The former aide recalled being very stressed when Reagan unexpectedly was invited to go riding with Queen Elizabeth in England, and they hadn't brought the saddlebags. A chase vehicle was finally used, but Kline fretted about the horses' ability to go where cars could not.

"The key is to never be where you can't get to the president in a matter of seconds," Kline said.

During the April 1999 NATO summit in Washington, President Clinton left his aide and the football behind when he unexpectedly left a session 45 minutes early. The aide walked the 41/2 blocks back to the White House without incident.

"I can't imagine that happening," said Kline. "I'd have nightmares for the rest of my life."

Steve Goldstein's e-mail address is sgoldstein@krwashington.com

---

Fire damages Air Force missile facility

Florida Today
December 3, 2000
http://www.flatoday.com/space/explore/stories/2000b/120300c.htm

PLAZA, N.D. (AP) -- A fire thought to have started near a diesel generator destroyed two buildings Thursday at a multimillion-dollar missile command center, officials said.

Air Force authorities said an underground missile control capsule with two men inside was sealed off, but the men were unharmed. Thirteen others escaped to the surface.

There are no missiles at the facility, which sits under a farm field.

"The two down there are probably the most comfortable of anybody right now," said Lt. Col. Les Miller, of the 91st Space Wing at the Minot Air Force Base. "At no time was there any threat to them, to national security or the missiles under their command. They've got enough food, water and oxygen to stay down there for 30 days."

Responsibility for missile management was transferred to another facility, officials said, during an investigation of the fire five miles north of Plaza. Dozens of similar missile facilities dot the North Dakota prairie.

Each missile command center consists of above-ground structures for security and missile control personnel, and self-contained capsules, about 100 feet below ground. The capsules are staffed round the clock by two people who oversee 10 Minuteman missiles in silos scattered through the countryside.

---

The Whiz Kid Vs. the Old Boys
John Deutch had the makings of a great C.I.A. director except for one thing -- he had no respect for the agency's classified culture.

New York Times
12/03/00
By THOMAS POWERS
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001203mag-powers.html

One of these days -- perhaps this year, perhaps next -- John M. Deutch is going to get a call from his lawyer. If he is lucky, he will learn that his "case" has been resolved. Of course, it may not be a "case" in the formal sense; he has not been charged with any criminal offense nor has he been informed by the Justice Department that he is the target of a criminal investigation. But "case" is probably still the best word to describe the slowly unwinding chain of events that began with the discovery in late 1996 that Deutch -- then the outgoing director of central intelligence, as the C.I.A.'s chief is formally known -- had placed classified files on an unclassified Apple computer provided to him by the agency for his use at home.

Security is taken very seriously at the C.I.A. The first person new recruits meet is a security officer, and the first course they take is C.I.A. 101, a how-to brief on protecting information. Everybody who works in the agency's headquarters in Langley, Va., has a security clearance, including the cleaning staff. "Security regulations apply to everybody," said one senior intelligence official who used to be second in command for security at the agency's directorate of administration. "It doesn't matter who they are or where they are."

Computer technology has made security a lot more challenging. The problem used to be limited to secrets people could carry away in their heads or on paper. Now, there are a multitude of ways for information to escape the building. To protect itself, the C.I.A. has isolated its classified computers, marking them with purple stickers and separating them from the rest of the world with an "air gap" -- no modems, no regular e-mail or surfing the Internet. A second precautionary measure has been the disabling of disk drives on classified computers to prevent wholesale downloading of information onto disks, which might leave the building in a briefcase.

Security officers at the C.I.A. have a special strategy for keeping their directors, or D.C.I.'s, out of trouble. The core of the strategy is to surround them with helpful assistants who make sure to do what busy senior officials might otherwise forget to do -- put classified documents into the safe, lock office doors, spin the dials of combination locks, retrieve copies of the classified President's Daily Brief from hotel rooms, make sure the classified laptop with its purple identifying sticker is not left in a car or a restaurant in Beijing.

The D.C.I. also gets drivers and bodyguards, a live-in security staff to protect his home, even a fully protected and equipped Special Compartmented Intelligence Facility, or SCIF (pronounced "skiff"), a room sealed and secured according to detailed regulations. The people who run the nation's major intelligence agencies -- the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency -- have been routinely provided for years with SCIF's at home where they can safely handle and store classified documents.

But not John M. Deutch. He was offered all the usual conveniences and protections after he was confirmed as D.C.I. in May 1995, but he did not want to surrender part of his house to security officers, he did not want a SCIF and he did not want a classified computer at home. Deutch, 62, can be as abrasive as sandpaper; he makes up his mind and says what he wants -- and what he wanted, combined with the mercurial forces of Washington politics, the security breakdown at American weapons laboratories and his uncanny ability to outrage the old boys at the C.I.A., has a lot to do with the trouble he is in today.

The oddest thing about the John Deutch case is that he never wanted to head the C.I.A. in the first place. Deutch's dream for 20 years had been to run the Pentagon. The seeds of desire were planted when a friend of his father's, the legendary clandestine warrior Edward G. Lansdale, helped him get a job in the Pentagon's office of systems analysis during the Kennedy administration. Still in his early 20's, Deutch became one of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's "whiz kids," a gang of supersmart, superconfident slide-rule wizards who worked the problem of "enough" -- how many nuclear weapons of what sort would be "enough" to protect the United States when we already had enough to kill everybody twice over. The early 1960's were the glory days of strategic planners; whole books were written applying game theory and other forms of analysis to the problem of fighting a nuclear war. "John loves nukes," his second wife once told a friend.

The whiz kids infuriated crusty airmen like Gen. Curtis LeMay (who told Los Alamos bomb designers back in the 1950's that he wanted one bomb big enough to destroy all of Russia), but they changed the way weapons were acquired by the Pentagon. The style of argument Deutch developed then -- mastery of technical detail, rigor of analysis and confident delivery -- never left him. When the war in Vietnam came along, Deutch supported it. When the war began to go badly and a growing opposition took to the streets in the United States, Deutch never wavered. He insisted the war was a problem like any other; if we made certain moves, the other side would respond in a rational way, and this thing could still be brought to a successful end. "If the kids would just let us alone," Deutch said, referring to the protesters, "we could handle it."

It was defense, not intelligence, that interested Deutch. In the 1970's, he left his job teaching chemistry at M.I.T. and returned to Washington under Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger, a man he greatly admired. In 1993, he came back yet again to work with one of his old friends from whiz-kid days, Les Aspin, President Clinton's first secretary of defense. Deutch defined power in Washington by the size of the budget an official controlled, and very few spent more money than Deutch as the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and technology.

Despite his budgetary clout, Deutch had an ability to undermine his best efforts. His relations with Congress were particularly bumpy. Even when committee members wanted the same thing he wanted -- like the Pentagon's ever-more-expensive C-17 cargo plane -- Deutch managed to ruffle feathers. After one contentious hearing on the C-17 before the House Armed Services Committee in the summer of 1993, two Deutch aides, Larry Caviola and Rudy DeLeon, had to take their boss back to the shop and give him a remedial course on how to testify.

A big part of the problem, according to someone who often watched him in action, was body language. Deutch is physically big, about 6-foot-3. He has a way of entering a room, including a hearing room. "There's a swagger to him," said the colleague, "a tilt and mass to his body. He exudes intellectual and physical vitality." When his argument is challenged -- by an aide in the privacy of his office or by a senator in the glare of television lights -- Deutch may monitor his words, but he finds it more difficult to control the hunching of his shoulders, the pained shifting of his bulk in his seat, the expression on his face. In smaller groups, the body language can be even more unmistakable: a nervous rolling of his hand back and forth rapidly on the table in front of him or turning away in his chair 90 degrees or more, a sign of deep impatience.

Deutch joked that the people he worked with fell into three categories: "people who are smart, people who disagree and people who are smart enough to know they are wrong when they disagree." He loved the daily encounter with people of power in Washington. He showed up often at restaurants like the fashionable Prime Rib with companions like Sen. Arlen Specter, and he even began a private campaign, vigorous but unsuccessful, to get his picture added to the caricatures painted on the wall of the Palm Restaurant, a dignity accorded only the great movers and shakers. The word for Deutch's way of pushing his way forward, spontaneously offered by many people interviewed for this article, was "arrogance."

But at the same time, he accomplished a great deal. The Pentagon in the 1990's suffered a radical shrinking and restructuring in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The process was almost entirely one of denial, taking away, cutting jobs, dropping programs -- all painful for those on the receiving end. If downsizing is like removing a bandage from a wound and quickest is best, then Deutch was the right man for the job.

He was rewarded for his work. When Aspin was replaced by William Perry, Deutch moved up to the No. 2 position in the Pentagon. In 1994, Deutch was right where he wanted to be: next in line for the big job. "The secretary of defense is the most important man after the president," Deutch had been telling friends for years, and he made no secret of the fact that he hoped to succeed Perry. It might well have happened, if not for the discovery of a Soviet spy inside the directorate of operations of the C.I.A., a career officer with a drinking problem named Aldrich Ames.

The shock of Ames's betrayal -- and the outrage when Congress learned it had taken the C.I.A. nearly 10 years to catch him -- gradually undermined the position of the C.I.A.'s director, R. James Woolsey. President Clinton didn't fire him; he simply turned his back, and by late December 1994, Woolsey, in effect banished from the White House and threatened with irrelevance, decided he had had enough. Deutch's was the first name on President Clinton's list for a new D.C.I., but Deutch begged off, and the White House picked an Air Force general who had everything going for him on paper. Not on paper was the fact that the general's Filipino house servant had entered the country improperly. The general did not want to put his family through the ordeal of trying to sort that out and withdrew his name. The second time around President Clinton refused to take no for an answer, and Deutch, despite deep misgivings, agreed to serve as director of central intelligence.

Before he arrived, he made two unorthodox requests. Deutch told the agency that he wanted Apple Macintosh computers, not PC's, for use both at home and in his offices at the C.I.A. and in downtown Washington. Deutch was late coming to the personal computer, and a friend who helped him buy his first said he was a slow study and frequently called on his children and those of friends for technical help. By the time he got to the C.I.A., only Macs would do, and the agency provided him with classified Macs, clearly marked with purple classified stickers, which he used in his two offices; unclassified Macs, marked with green unclassified stickers, which he used in his homes in Bethesda, Md., and Belmont, Mass., near M.I.T.; and a Mac laptop, also with a green sticker, which he used when traveling.

Deutch also took his own team to Langley: Nora Slatkin from the Pentagon as executive director; George Tenet from the National Security Council as deputy director of central intelligence; Jeffrey Smith, a West Point graduate and lawyer, as general counsel; and Michael O'Neil, a former staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The last D.C.I. to take his own staff to Langley had been Adm. Stansfield Turner under President Carter, and the officers in the directorate of operations still talked about how much they disliked him.

John Deutch was the fourth D.C.I. to arrive at Langley in as many years, and he made it clear from the outset he was going to fix whatever he thought broken, beginning with the directorate of operations -- the clandestine side of the house, commonly called the D.O., which has been the major source of glory and disaster throughout the history of the C.I.A. In a news conference shortly after taking over, Deutch confessed the spy business was something he knew "less well than, for example, the satellite business or the science and technology business." But he said he was going to insist on "accountability," and when someone asked if he was going to be "more or less tolerant" with failure in the future, Deutch's answer left little room for ambiguity: "Less tolerant. Less tolerant. Less tolerant."

Deutch's determination was immediately put to the test dealing with two pieces of unfinished C.I.A. business: charges that the agency had looked the other way when a Guatemalan Army colonel on the C.I.A.'s payroll was involved in the murder of an American citizen and the long-awaited, and dreaded, Ames damage report. His first day on the job, Deutch and his team spent six hours arguing about Guatemala. At the end of it, Deutch put Nora Slatkin in charge of a group to review a report on the matter by the C.I.A.'s inspector general, Frederick Hitz, the man who had pretty much ended Woolsey's career at the agency with a harshly critical, 400-page report on the Ames case. In it, Hitz named directorate of operations officers he thought should be dismissed, punished or reprimanded for incompetence in the nine-year spy hunt. Woolsey refused to be pressured and only reprimanded 11 senior officers. The storm of criticism aimed at Woolsey then served as a stark warning to Deutch a year later.

When the Guatemala report was submitted, Hitz did it again: he identified 26 "individuals who should be held accountable" for leaving the Guatemalan colonel on the payroll and for keeping it secret from the American ambassador in Guatemala, higher-ups in Langley and the intelligence committees in Congress. Slatkin's group protested that Hitz was tying the D.C.I.'s hands, but he said he was just doing his job; nobody had to follow his recommendations. "I thought that was nave," said one of those who argued the issue. "This report went to Congress, and if they read the names of 26 people who ought to be held accountable, they will expect to see 26 people disciplined."

In the end, Deutch took two major steps: he asked Jeffrey Smith, his general counsel, to carry out a worldwide "dirty assets scrub" to get rid of informants too rank for comfort and he fired two directorate of operations officers singled out by Hitz -- Frederick Brugger, the chief of station in Guatemala City from 1991 to 1993, and Terry Ward, the chief of operations for Latin America at the time. Neither action made Deutch lasting friends. Officers from the operations branch of the agency thought it unfair to fire Ward and Brugger for getting caught on the wrong side of a change in public sentiment. "We don't identify agents to ambassadors," said one longtime D.O. officer who has since left the agency. "That's standard operating procedure." Like many of his colleagues, he thought the explanation was simple: Congress wanted blood, and Deutch gave it to them.

But in some ways, dealing with the Ames damage assessment was even more difficult because it forced Deutch to confront a level of deep, careerist cynicism in what was being called "the clandestine culture" of the directorate of operations. The damage report, completed at the end of October 1995, included the familiar litany of disasters -- betrayed agents, including nine executed by the Russians; wholesale compromise of C.I.A. tradecraft in recruiting and running agents; identification of numerous American intelligence officers. But there was a new charge as well, painful to confess before Congress and the public: during the years Ames had been spilling secrets to the Russians, the K.G.B. had mounted many successful double-agent operations against the C.I.A. Still worse was the fact that the C.I.A. went on submitting reports based on their information to the White House and Defense Department, even after the spy-runners began to suspect the agents involved were Soviet-controlled. Deutch never said so publicly, but he himself had seen some of these reports while he was at the Pentagon, and he did not lightly forgive this betrayal of the C.I.A.'s most basic mission. "The most important value the intelligence community must embrace is integrity," he said later that year. "We engage in deception to do our job. . . . But we must never let deception become a way of life."

But the fact was that deception was already part of the clandestine culture. The problem was the blurring of the line between operational deception in the day-to-day business of collecting secret intelligence and the self-serving deception of superiors by intelligence officers in the field, who were judged, promoted and paid according to their "success" in running agents and writing reports. "Good case officers are manipulators," Jeffrey Smith said. "The temptation is to tailor information to protect their own cases." Everybody knew it happened. "Don't case-officer me," superiors might say when they suspected shading of the facts. It is all too easy, say D.O. officers, to fail to mention the signs of compromise -- a suspicious car, a too-familiar face -- that separate the bad cases from the good ones, but at the same time they can spell the difference between a dropped operation, tainted by signs of interference, and a "success" that brings the praise of superiors, a rise in grade, consideration for an important job or a better posting. The inherent difficulty of monitoring officers in the field is an abiding theme in the intelligence business, but sending up tainted reports -- treating bad agents like good ones when you knew better -- that was new.

The abiding theme of Deutch's tenure at the C.I.A. was a kind of ongoing guerrilla war between the D.C.I.'s office on the seventh floor and the clandestine folks, marked by disrespect on Deutch's side and increasing dislike on the D.O.'s. An officer still working at the C.I.A., who asked that he be identified as "a very old senior intelligence person," had much good to say about Deutch as D.C.I. but agreed that he should have taken time to absorb the culture. "A lot of people here felt he did not understand clandestine operations," the officer said. "You have to grow up with ops in your blood." As a result, "Deutch never developed a sense of trust with D.O. officers," and his tenure was marked by an "overall tension."

What particularly infuriated D.O. officers was Deutch's failure to understand the basic principals of secret operations, starting with the fact that they depend on people taking risks for you. The first obligation of the case officer is to protect his assets, but Deutch could treat the matter casually. During the Balkan crisis, a high-level official remarked in public that the United States had obtained a Yugoslav Army manual on placing mines. When William Lofgren, the manager of the operation that obtained the manual, heard about the indiscretion, he promptly sent a cable to Deutch saying, in essence, How can you do this -- endanger a spy who has gone out on a limb for us? When another covert officer heatedly supported Lofgren, Deutch laughed. "He laughed!" the officer repeated; he could still hardly believe it. It made him so mad he thought about quitting. He stayed on, but he remains angry today.

But even the people trying to run the operations directorate admitted things had slipped a long way since the glory days of the cold war. It wasn't just Ames, or Guatemala, or years of making excuses for screw-ups -- a deeper decay was spreading inside the directorate of operations. "By the time Deutch got there, the D.O. was in a tailspin," one D.O. officer admitted. "They're not first rate, "he said, referring to the decline in qualified operatives, which he attributed to low salaries, dreary postings and the pressure of nonstop counterintelligence investigations of C.I.A. agents, 300 of which were under way in 1997. "It's gotten so bad," the D.O. officer said, "that people are resigning only four or five years from retirement. The place is just rotting."

Still, it didn't help that Deutch, in 1995, made a tin-eared remark to Tim Weiner of The Times expressing something close to disdain for operations officers. "Compared to uniformed officers," Deutch said, "they certainly are not as competent or as understanding of what their relative role is and what their responsibilities are." The D.O. officer thought this "was like blaming the soldiers for losing the war." How could the D.C.I. ridicule his own men in public and still hope to lead them? Many others were infuriated as well; Deutch's halting attempt to suggest he hadn't really said or meant what he said satisfied no one.

The ethos of the directorate of operations is difficult to understand by outsiders; there is no way to sum up what the D.O. does. A company makes money, a bureaucracy processes paper, policemen make arrests, but attempts to count what the D.O. does -- and many have been made over the years -- invariably miss the point. One good operation outweighs a hundred failures, and a good operation is a thing of beauty -- it slips something away from a victim who never knows it is gone. Nobody understood the technical side of intelligence collection better than Deutch, but he was blind to the human side, and he compounded the failure by putting a novice, Nora Slatkin, in charge of approving covert operations. Operations has traditionally been a male preserve, but that has changed in recent years; the fact that Slatkin was a woman -- at the time, the highest-ranking woman ever at the C.I.A. -- was not the problem. It was the fact that she could say yea or nay to operations without any real idea what makes them succeed or fail.

Slatkin, though hard-working, fair-minded, serious to a fault, never won the trust of D.O. officers. The problem, one of them explained, was her psychological and emotional dependence on Deutch -- a thing so obvious and so intense that some people believed the two were having an affair, despite the fact Deutch had remarried only six months before coming to the C.I.A. A senior D.O. officer who worked closely with both said he was virtually certain there was no affair; in his opinion, the problem was "pathological," not romantic. "When Deutch dissed her, which he did all the time, Nora was shattered," he said. "She was just put out of business."

The D.O. officer remembered an occasion in 1996 when Slatkin "arranged a kind of birthday party to celebrate Deutch's first year as D.C.I., and it was a great party." That evening, the officer was in Slatkin's office with a group of C.I.A. officials when "all of a sudden Deutch comes barging into the room the way only D.C.I.'s can do and he went up to Nora and gave her a big kiss and said, 'Thank you for the wonderful party.' Then he left. And the tears began pouring out of Nora's eyes."

The D.O. officer liked Slatkin, despite her dependence on "approbation from John," but few others did. The opinion of the D.O. turned decisively against her, and against Deutch for giving her so much authority, when stories began to circulate about their trips to visit friendly intelligence services abroad. One was made to the headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service in London, the C.I.A.'s oldest ally and rival.

"I heard it from a Yank who was in the room," said the D.O. officer who described the behavior of Deutch and Slatkin most explicitly. "And I heard it from two M.I. 6 officers. In the middle of an official meeting -- Deutch's first state visit with the British -- Nora sat beside him, and while they were all talking, she was slipping her hand into his pocket, taking out jelly beans and feeding them to John."

He knew it was hard to believe, but that is what he had been told, and other D.O. officers heard the story, too. Slatkin had little chance with the D.O. after that; no one trusted her to worry first about the job at hand, not how Deutch might respond.

Deutch never took the time to understand secret operations, with one exception: for a year and a half he monitored the progress of counterintelligence investigators as they closed in on a spy in the C.I.A. who could have turned into a second Ames. Just what tipped off the investigators remains secret, but according to a C.I.A. official involved, Deutch was briefed on the case very early in his tenure -- probably the day he was sworn in" -- and it followed the classic pattern of accumulating clues and a shrinking list of suspects. From an initial 50 or so, the list shrank at last to one name with evidence enough implicating him for a F.I.S.A. warrant -- permission for a wiretap and other intrusive forms of surveillance from the seven-judge court established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Finding moles, however, was no longer left to the C.I.A. alone; in the wake of the Ames case, Congress had given the job to the F.B.I. At least once a month, a group of eight or 10 -- Deutch, Louis Freeh of the F.B.I. and half a dozen others -- would meet in Deutch's conference room for a progress report on all pending cases. "Everybody came to those meetings," said one of the participants. "It was their job to come, and counterintelligence was a high priority mission, but the reason they came was that those meetings were goddamned fascinating." Deutch, frequently impatient with routine briefings and eager to press every agenda forward, behaved quite differently at the counterespionage group meetings. He asked questions, he listened to the answers and he didn't meddle. Some D.C.I.'s, the participant said, aren't interested and can't be bothered. Others get so excited they want to run the show. Deutch struck the perfect balance. He paid attention, he gave the team whatever support it asked and he let them do their job.

By the spring of 1996, everybody in the monthly meeting group and on the "bigot list" -- those individuals cleared to know about a given case or operation, which in this matter included Slatkin, Tenet, Smith and Michael O'Neil -- understood that the long investigation had come down at last to one name: Harold James Nicholson, a 16-year veteran of the D.O. and a past chief of station in Eastern Europe.

One important clue to the mole's identity came inadvertently from the Russians, whose intelligence service under a post-cold-war agreement with the United States maintained a liaison officer at F.B.I. headquarters to work on matters of common concern like international terrorism. In March 1996, the Russian liaison asked F.B.I. officials for information about "terrorist groups" working on behalf of the rebellious republic of Chechnya. The sleuths interpreted this as a sign that Russian intelligence was tasking all its agents to check up on Chechnya; the obvious next step was to see who in the agency had exhibited an unusual interest in Chechnya. When investigators systematically checked the logs of C.I.A. computer users, they discovered that Nicholson was a "surfer" -- a browser of intelligence files outside the strict limits of his assigned job -- and that the key words he was using to sniff things out were "Russia" and "Chechnya." The F.B.I. also discovered a laptop computer during a search of Nicholson's van. At first glance the hard drive was clean -- no classified files. But technical experts copied everything on the hard drive with a technique known as "imaging" and later established that numerous classified files had been deleted.

Eventually this and much other evidence led to the arrest of Nicholson at Dulles International Airport as he was about to leave the country in November 1996. At a news conference the next day, Deutch and Louis Freeh praised the success of their joint effort, and Deutch told reporters that "the story here is that we have a very successful post-Ames counterintelligence effort." There was no mention of computers at the news conference, but if Deutch had been genuinely paying attention to his 18 months of briefings, he would have learned two things beyond doubt: that the security people routinely monitor in-house computer use and can look over someone's shoulder whenever they want to and that pushing the delete key, or dragging a file to trash on a Mac, does not permanently get rid of files.

Most observers of Deutch's tenure at the C.I.A. thought his failure to "fix" the directorate of operations was the whole story and graded him with a C-minus at best. The very old senior intelligence person saw things differently. He thought Deutch had done for the C.I.A. the sort of thing he had done for the Defense Department -- taken big, expensive programs cobbled together over the years and made sense out of them. "Deutch instituted a major reform of the way we build [collection] programs," he said. "Managers got firm D.C.I. guidance, learned to defend their programs, and in return they were given more authority. There was a wail of complaint, but today it's the way we do business."

What Deutch did for the C.I.A. -- bringing mission-based planning to the collection of intelligence -- was something he hoped to do for the intelligence community as a whole, and he was halfway there when his tenure at the agency abruptly came to an end. The short explanation of Deutch's departure, often cited by those who watched him come and go at the C.I.A., is that President Clinton played a game of musical chairs with his top national security advisers after his election to a second term at the end of 1996. When the music stopped, everybody had a seat -- Madeleine Albright as secretary of state, William Cohen as secretary of defense, Anthony Lake as the new D.C.I., Sandy Berger as Clinton's national security adviser -- everyone except Deutch. "That was just like Clinton," said a former D.C.I. who often saw Deutch during his year and a half at the agency. "He pulls the whole world out from under you."

Just how and by whom the bad news was delivered is known only to the principals. The announcement of the new team was made on Dec. 5, but Deutch had already been talking for several weeks like a man who knew he would be leaving. One C.I.A. officer remembers hearing Deutch discuss his return to M.I.T. over the phone with his good friend Strobe Talbott. When Talbott asked why he didn't take some other job in the administration, Deutch answered, "Well, nobody asked me."

Another colleague who worked for Deutch in the Pentagon thinks he orchestrated his own departure after Clinton told him in August that there would be no job for him in the second term. A few weeks later, on Sept. 19, Deutch appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee and openly broke ranks with the White House when he described "a strengthened position for Saddam Hussein in the region." In classic whiz-kid fashion, he ticked off five reasons, crisply contradicting the administration's upbeat official line that the noose was slowly tightening and Hussein's departure was only a matter of time. The colleague had often watched Deutch in the past as he trimmed a long-held position to get in line with the president; when he read the Hussein testimony, he concluded that Deutch had lost hope for a job in Clinton's second term. "Deutch was creating his own exit line," he said, pointing to news stories citing the remark about Hussein as the reason Deutch was the odd man out.

As it turned out, the Senate Intelligence Committee raised so many doubts about the confirmation of Lake that he withdrew his name and the job went to Tenet. But Deutch by that time was long gone; he had surrendered his ID badge on Dec. 14. That would have marked the end of public interest in the C.I.A. career of John Deutch if not for the discovery that he had been breaking security regulations virtually from the day of his arrival by routinely working on classified documents on his computers at home.

In every Washington story," said a Pentagon colleague of Deutch, "the problem is not the first error but the second error."

Deutch's first error came in two steps: putting classified files on his unclassified computer and then asking to keep the computers provided by the C.I.A. because he had used them for personal business like banking from home and sending e-mail. He soon dropped the request, but while the idea of retaining the computers was still alive, the C.I.A. sent an information security officer to Deutch's house to make an inventory of their contents. Using Microsoft Word, he opened six files, discovered what appeared to be classified information and called his boss for advice. He told him to sit tight and sought the help of Nora Slatkin. She in turn directed the caller to O'Neil, who had taken over as the C.I.A.'s general counsel when Jeffrey Smith returned to private practice. O'Neil asked to see printouts of the files in question, so word went back to the information officer in Deutch's home to print the files. He printed five of them; the sixth appeared to be a personal letter to Anthony Lake, Clinton's choice to replace Deutch, and it "contained Deutch's personal sentiments about senior agency officials," so the officer left it where it was -- on something in Deutch's computer called a PCMCIA card.

The PCMCIA card is important. (The initials stand for the attractively worded Personal Computer Memory Card International Association.) All personal computers purchased by the Defense Department since 1994 are equipped with PCMCIA card slots, which are part of a new, secure Defense Message System. The cards, which can hold 170 megabytes of information, are just the right size to fit into a shirt pocket, so a job begun at work might be continued at home. It was at the Pentagon that Deutch first started taking a card with him when he left the office at night. He continued this habit at the C.I.A. It was an unsecure habit, for every time Deutch used a PCMCIA card to work on classified documents at home, he was violating security regulations.

At this point in the story there is a Y in the road. One branch leads to the "classified documents" on Deutch's computer while the other tracks the official response to the discovery, a complex, detailed account of who said what to whom that defies easy summary or firm judgment. Here we encounter the raw material of the "second error" in every Washington story, the part called "the coverup."

The report by the C.I.A.'s inspector general released in unclassified form last February does not raise this matter explicitly, but it records in great detail the evidence suggesting that Deutch tried to delete the offending files from his PCMCIA cards before returning them to the C.I.A. and even called agency tech support for advice on how to reformat the cards -- apparently thinking, incorrectly, despite his tutoring on computer files during the Nicholson case, that all trace of the previous files would then be erased. As of this writing, nobody has been charged with anything, but the authors of the inspector general's report clearly feel a great deal was not done as it should have been done. Among the report's conclusions: C.I.A. officials should have treated the discovery of Deutch's errors as a potential violation of federal law, should have filed a "crimes report" with Janet Reno, should have investigated the whole matter immediately, should have briefed the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, should have considered Deutch subject to the independent counsel statute as a "covered person" and, above all, should have treated Deutch exactly as they would have treated any other C.I.A. employee.

The report is long and confusing because the leading officials of the C.I.A. at the time considered doing all these things, reconsidered them and re-reconsidered them before, in the end, they finally pretty much did them. By that time, a year had gone by, and Deutch was no longer a "covered person" under the independent counsel statute. Otherwise, what happened was what probably would have happened if everything had been done by the book at the outset. The inspector general's sharpest words were reserved for the numerous interventions in the handling of the case by Slatkin and O'Neil, which "had the effect of delaying a prompt and thorough investigation of this matter."

Deutch's violation of security regulations was reported to the Department of Justice and the House and Senate Intelligence Committees early in 1998. Attorney General Janet Reno formally declined to prosecute the case, but suggested the C.I.A. "determine Mr. Deutch's continued suitability" for clearance to handle secret materials.

Reno's suggestion was more damning than it sounds. A security clearance is the basic work permit for jobs in the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies and the defense contractors that work on classified projects for the government. At one time or another over the last 40 years Deutch had been granted just about every clearance there is. Even between official jobs, when he was at M.I.T., Deutch served on boards requiring access to secret information, some advising government agencies how to buy defense and intelligence hardware and others advising private companies how to sell it to them. Thus, it was no modest rebuke when, in August 1999, Tenet suspended Deutch's clearances, making him the first high-level government official to be publicly forbidden access to secrets since 1954, when J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, was formally declared a security risk and banished to private life.

Loss of his clearances did not bring Deutch's trouble to an end. Though no one has ever suggested that Deutch was engaged in espionage or that he intended to harm the national security of the United States, the Justice Department nevertheless felt compelled to reopen its investigation last spring; the Senate Intelligence Committee has reportedly sent a draft of its own exhaustive investigation to the C.I.A.

What explains the extraordinary degree of public attention already lavished upon his case is the heightened concern for security unloosed by the Ames case and fanned into open flame by a yearlong public battle over charges that spies for China have managed to spirit away a virtual library of classified designs for American nuclear weapons and missiles.

The chief victim of that clamor, Wen Ho Lee, the Taiwan-born computer scientist, recently settled his case by pleading guilty to one charge of mishandling classified information in return for a sentence of time served and an agreement to cooperate with investigators. But while the Lee case was at its height, his lawyers charged that their client was being unfairly treated because he was jailed under harsh conditions awaiting trial while John Deutch had gone unscathed after a perfunctory investigation for doing. . . .

At this point, the right language becomes tricky. Lee's lawyers and other defenders have generally charged that what Deutch and Lee did was really "the same thing," by which they appear to mean removing classified files from the workplace. But it was not really "the same thing." For reasons he has never publicly explained, Lee downloaded thousands of pages of genuine government secrets, the fruit of 50 years of research at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Deutch, by contrast, carried his own work back and forth between home and office.

This returns us to the actual "classified documents" found on Deutch's computers. News leaks have suggested these were vast, explosive and left wide open to access by foreign spies. And the I.G. report makes frequent reference to items that were classified at various levels of secrecy, including information at the "top secret" and "code word" levels, meaning that they came from a source so sensitive only individuals with a particular code-word clearance were allowed to know about them. But just about everything a D.C.I. writes is classified. And when the report finally gets around to citing the documents themselves, it turns out that every last one of them falls into one of three categories: classified documents Deutch brought home on PCMCIA cards, which he thought left no traces on his home computer's hard drive; memos and letters he wrote to the president and other officials; and 26 volumes of journals kept at the Defense Department and C.I.A.

Deutch's concern with privacy makes more sense once it is clear that his journals were far more than a simple office diary recording meetings and phone calls. Deutch kept a journal in the classic sense -- a daily record of whom he saw, what he was doing, what he was thinking. If he was planning a trip to the Middle East, it went into the journal, according to people who have seen it. If he played squash with one of his sons, it went into the journal. If he had a pungent opinion about an officer of the C.I.A., it went into his journal. He wasn't planning to write a book; he was simply trying to sort out his life -- keep things straight -- and he found that writing it down helped. He thought the journal was private, that it was his and that nothing in it was secret. But once the PCMCIA cards containing the journal fell into the hands of investigators, they combed its approximately 1,000 pages and found 32 fragments of information -- places, names, activities -- that fell into the category of classified information. That was clearly a violation of regulations, but whether it represented even a theoretical threat to the national security is hard to establish.

The danger, according to computer security experts, came from the fact that Deutch's home computer had a modem and that he used it to hook up to his e-mail account at AOL and to surf the Internet. The I.G. report says the computer was used to visit "high-risk" Internet sites, which news leaks report to include adult sites. These sites left "cookies" on Deutch's computer -- codes that can be read by Web sites when you revisit them. E-commerce sites routinely leave cookies that open the door to advertising messages. What worries the C.I.A. is the entrance of "malicious code" -- a term of art for any program intended to penetrate, manipulate or disable official computers. The ultimate security nightmare would be malicious code intended to bypass encryption and other protective systems. In theory, this could have happened to Deutch's computer, and in theory, he might have introduced the malicious code -- a kind of computer troll, much like a human mole -- into the C.I.A. system when he plugged in a PCMCIA card in his office. Many variables would have to line up for this to happen, in fact: Deutch's PCMCIA reader would have to be on while he was online, the site he was visiting would have to be hostile and it would have to know it was connected to Deutch. But it could happen. Last February, George Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee he could not "give you a definitive statement to say it absolutely didn't happen." But no one has claimed it did happen, either.

Why Deutch refused the offer of classified computers at home, he has never publicly said. But he told investigators later that one reason was his desire for privacy -- he didn't want the C.I.A., which monitors the use of classified computers, looking over his shoulder while he was working. That was one way the sleuths caught Nicholson, and Deutch had watched it happen. Asked if C.I.A. officers would actually monitor the work files of the agency's own director, one retired D.O. officer hesitated and then said, "Well, if he was worried about that, he should have used pencil and paper."

But a clear understanding of Deutch's security violation -- that he created classified documents on unclassified computers -- was hidden until the release of the C.I.A.'s I.G. report earlier this year, and by that time his case had been firmly joined to Wen Ho Lee's in the public mind, he had lost his clearances, favoritism in his treatment had been widely charged in Congress and elsewhere and the Justice Department had reopened the case in a way that would make it difficult to dismiss later with a shrug. The danger, say friends who feel Deutch has been treated unfairly, is that the obvious punishment has already been imposed: loss of his clearances. That means the Justice Department may feel compelled to go on to the next step and insist on a legal sanction, and there is a possibility legal charges may be brought against others as well, for the "second error" -- failing to treat his sloppy computer habits as a crime. If he is prosecuted and convicted, Deutch's sentence could result in fines or even imprisonment.

The Greeks believed that character is fate, and Deutch's character includes love of teaching, of debate, of activity in groups, of pronouncing his opinions, of taking charge and making things happen and of promoting talent. But Deutch's character also includes impatience, dismissing the concerns of others, roughness in argument, refusing to listen as soon as he disagrees -- all of those attributes summed up as arrogance by the people who worked with him at the Pentagon and the C.I.A. Every last one of them said it was arrogance that got him into trouble: he knew the rules, but he didn't think they applied to him.

"His confidence was strong indeed," said the very old senior intelligence person. "There were a lot of powerful and influential people in this town who thought Deutch had a tremendous amount to offer. But he had no talent for dealing with people."

One of the few people who saw Deutch often and liked him without reservation was Paul Redmond, the C.I.A.'s counterintelligence chief, now retired, who worked with him on the Nicholson case. "I really liked dealing with Deutch," said Redmond. "He liked to battle it out, and so do I."

Redmond paused. "But his career at the C.I.A. was a sort of a tragedy. He came here with all the things that made John McCone a great director -- he had brains, energy drive, his own money, even experience with intelligence, which McCone didn't have. He could have been a great director."

But it didn't happen. Many people believed Deutch was made for great things, for pushing through huge public ventures like the Manhattan Project. Now, like Oppenheimer, he has been banished from the secret work that used to be his life. Oppenheimer never got his security clearance back, and few believe Deutch will succeed where Oppenheimer failed. "No chance," said one of Deutch's defenders. "The publicity makes it difficult or impossible."

A Pentagon colleague of Deutch's is even more emphatic: "In Washington, everything is negotiable -- except a security clearance."

For Deutch, his experience has been agonizing. On the advice of his lawyer, Terrence O'Donnell of the Washington law firm of Williams & Connolly, he has said nothing publicly about his troubles since regretting his "errors" before the Senate Intelligence Committee last February. Normally an ebullient, sociable and gregarious man, Deutch has shrunk back, chastened and hurt, according to friends. To one of the oldest, someone he has known since the 1960's, he said: "I can't talk about this. I'm dying here."

---

Bunker? What Bunker?
During the cold war, the presidential nuclear hideaway was built in a mountain in Pennsylvania. People nearby kept quiet about the place. They're still not talking.

New York Times
12/02/00
By BILL GIFFORD
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001203mag-gifford.html

Editors Picks Top Sites on Government Secrets

The man switches off his leaf blower and turns to regard the mountain rising behind his yellow-sided Cape house with its split-rail fence and immaculate yard. He has lived here more than 50 years, and in all that time, he swears, he has never learned what goes on inside the mountain, what lies behind the Warning: Restricted Area signs and the heavily guarded gates and the tall fence topped with barbed wire. Never wondered about the two obvious tunnel entrances across the valley from his front porch. Or about the helicopters thundering in and out of the area at all hours. Or about the elaborate antennas on the mountaintop. Sorry, he shakes his head. He can't help.

Inside Raven Rock, as the otherwise unremarkable little mountain is called, lies a vast underground complex that was meant to replace the Pentagon -- as well as shelter the president -- in case of nuclear war. Straddling the Maryland-Pennsylvania border in the Catoctin Mountains, Raven Rock is 12 miles from Gettysburg, 65 miles from Washington and about 6 miles from Camp David. Officially known as the Alternate Joint Communications Center, the "Underground Pentagon" was built in the early 1950's and has been waiting for Armageddon ever since.

The old man regards his leaf blower. "Aw, everybody knows about the hole in the hill," he says, softening. "It ain't no damn secret -- but it might be to someone who ain't from around here."

Outside the immediate area, Site R, as it is referred to by locals, is still almost unknown, especially compared with the three other key cold-war bunkers. The most famous is Cheyenne Mountain, home to Norad, just outside Colorado Springs. Then there is Mount Weather, the federal bureaucracy's nuclear retreat, hidden in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia; its existence was inadvertently revealed when a jetliner crashed into the mountain in the 1970's. Congress had its own underground hideaway, a relatively luxurious complex beneath the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, but when The Washington Post Magazine revealed its existence in 1992, an embarrassed Congress quickly put it in mothballs.

Only Site R remains out of the limelight, and the locals -- and the Army -- do their best to keep it that way. (The military will not allow visits and refuses to give out any information about the site.) Despite the fact that you can now find a Web page produced by the Federation of American Scientists that includes a map of the tunnels, residents still take the secret status very seriously. Another old-timer, whose property abuts Site R's eight-foot barbed-wire fences, studiously keeps waxing his GMC pickup while I ask questions. Finally, he mutters, "They don't let much outta there." Down the road, a woman in the Cove Hollow Enchantment gift shop allows that her ex-husband had been a military policeman assigned to guard the place. She had even been given a tour, along with other family members of soldiers stationed there, but she won't divulge details. "We had to walk and walk" is all she will say, and then refuses to give her name. "I don't know what the government would do to me if I did," she says.

Back in the 50's, when the government started building the structure, practically everybody in the area worked there. One laborer was Gene Bowman, now 68, who lives in a stone rancher right up against the compound's south gate. As a 17-year-old in 1950, he was paid $1.35 an hour to drill and blast his way into the superhard greenstone granite that made Raven Rock an ideal site for a bombproof underground bunker. Quarrying into the mountainside was the equivalent of building a structure with walls a thousand feet thick.

The locals, being naturally suspicious of outsiders, kept what they were doing pretty much to themselves. "They just said they were building a tunnel," he says. "Wasn't nobody interested in what they were doing." What are the tunnels like? "It's the same as a town in there," he says. "Streets and everything. And they have to pump the air in." Though residents are loath to give details, a second Web site indicates that the bunker can sleep 3,000 and has a large supply of M.R.E.'s on hand. It's a spartan place, except for a special presidential apartment nicknamed the Lucy and Desi Suite, thanks to its vintage furnishings. (According to the site, everything has remained the same for the last 40 years, including the soap.)

Though bits of information are now available, during the cold war, secrecy was of the utmost importance. "Figuring out where it was," says John Pike, a senior project director of the Federation of American Scientists, "was a major focus of Soviet intelligence in the early 1960's."

By the 70's, the Soviets had warheads capable of pounding Raven Rock to rubble (assuming they had found it). So Site R's mission changed, according to Pike, from bunker to garage, used in part to house the mobile communications units (trucks) that are supposed to fan out to remote areas in case of war or other disaster to ensure the continuity of government operations.

As the cold war wound down, even that part of Raven Rock's mission began to seem less urgent. Site R went off 24-hour alert in 1992, and nearby Fort Ritchie, whose main purpose was to supply Site R, was closed in 1998. (Command of the bunker was transferred to Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., 32 miles away.) Still, every working day, vehicles trickle into the unmarked gate on Harbaugh Valley Road: Army personnel, electricians and carpenters and truck drivers hauling light bulbs by the ton. And locals still respect the code of silence.

Claude Gladhill, 79, has lived on the back side of Raven Rock Mountain for 53 years; the government took some of his family's land for the complex. Now his son, Ralph, works at the site. He shows off a snapshot of Ralph with a 10-point buck he killed inside the fence.

But does he know what his son does inside Site R?

"Some things he can tell me -- some things he can't," Gladhill says. "I don't ask him."

---

13 days that stopped the world

The Age
Sunday 3 December 2000
TODD PURDUM
New York Times
http://www.theage.com.au/news/2000/12/03/FFXQHLRK7GC.html

It was a fortnight so fraught as to seem surreal, a standoff scholars have come to call the most dangerous moment in recorded history. Thirty-eight years ago, as the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear conflict over missiles in Cuba, John F. Kennedy and his men groped for a way to avoid the end of the world as they knew it.

Those two weeks in October 1962 are among the most analysed hours in American diplomatic and political history, the subject of reams of scholarly books and articles, memoirs, oral histories and a television docudrama, The Missiles of October (1974). Many of the deliberations among the president and his advisers were recorded verbatim. So recapturing the taste and feel and rhythms of that time in a way that seems both faithful and fresh is no easy effort. But that is the task that Thirteen Days, a big-budget Hollywood film (opening on December 20 in the US), sets for itself.

The movie has thrilling sequences of spy planes and enemy missiles, as well as period New Frontier atmosphere. It has scenes of drama on the high seas and in the Cuban jungle (actually shot in the Philippines). But mostly it has talk - tense, frustrated, articulate, suspenseful talk about what the Soviets are doing and why they are doing it, and what the United States can and should do to counter the threat of offensive missiles secretly placed just 159 kilometres from American shores.

The early and mid-1960s saw numerous cinematic treatments of the nuclear threat, from Fail Safe to Dr Strangelove, but the missile crisis must have seemed too close for comfort. Now the story is told obliquely, through the eyes of the president's friend and political adviser, Kenneth O'Donnell, who watched most of the deliberations. O'Donnell is played by Kevin Costner, who was also one of the producers.

"It's hard to do a movie like that in this climate of Hollywood," Costner said of the film, which went through a couple of studios and several potential directors over four-and-a-half years before finding financing. "People say: `What's going to happen? You mean, they don't blow up the world?' It was very difficult because the feeling was, `Who wants to watch people talking about saving the world?"'

But for Costner (who in 1991 played Jim Garrison in JFK) and the film's other producers, Armyan Bernstein and Peter O. Almond - former journalists who got their start in documentaries and public television - the challenge of doing something different was precisely the point. Bernstein, the chairman of Beacon Pictures, developed Thirteen Days from scratch. He had previously produced more conventional thrillers like End of Days and Air Force One.

"One of the things we were really struck by is that there are so many stories that are told about men fighting," Bernstein said. "But there are so few, if any, stories about men trying not to fight. We just felt when we actually explored the idea of men struggling not to fight, not to use the weapons they had developed, not to use the firepower, that it was very powerful."

At first blush, the idea of telling the tale through the prism of O'Donnell, a Harvard football teammate of Robert F. Kennedy's and a man not known for his involvement in foreign policy, may sound like telling the Monica Lewinsky story through the eyes of President Clinton's national security adviser. But in fact, O'Donnell, who died in 1977, was a fly on the wall in most of the deliberations of ExCom, the executive committee of President Kennedy's National Security Council, which met in secret to consider the crisis. Using the known record of those formal discussions, and imagining how O'Donnell and the president might plausibly have reacted afterward in the privacy of the Oval Office, the screenplay by David Self makes O'Donnell into a kind of Ishmael, surviving to tell the tale of the Kennedy brothers' grace under pressure.

Indeed, the film does its bit to return some lustre to the legend of Camelot, which has been so diminished by a generation of tell-all books, tawdry mini-series and tabloid surmise. In this treatment, Jack Kennedy (played by Bruce Greenwood) is palpably human, wincing in pain from his bad back, worrying privately that he will be seen as either weak or a warmonger. But he is the clear hero of the piece, along with his brother Bobby (played by Stephen Culp), whose 1967 memoir gives the film its title. Costner's O'Donnell is the audience's Everyman, drawing the brothers out and giving them the kind of honest counsel that only the oldest buddies can. At one point in the movie, when a Russian attache asks who he is, Costner replies simply, "The friend."

In fact, this device removed one of the moviemakers' biggest quandaries: How to tell the story without having to find a bankable star willing to play JFK, one of the most familiar faces and voices of the 20th century. Instead, Costner, in a period crewcut and essaying a Massachusetts accent, has what amounts to a meaty part in a rich ensemble stew.

"It seemed to me like an interesting way to go beyond the dramatised documentary," said the Australian-born director Roger Donaldson, who first worked with Costner in the 1987 political thriller No Way Out. "And then going behind the scenes to create, fiction's not the right word, but to extrapolate the things that might have been said and put them around the things that are known."

The producers initially struggled for a dramaturgical device, considering and rejecting a romantic subplot involving two young aides, before lighting almost by happenstance on the O'Donnell character. Bernstein is a social acquaintance of one of O'Donnell's sons, Kevin, a venture capitalist here and a founder of the Internet company Earthlink. The younger O'Donnell, who is also an investor in Beacon, mentioned a cache of tape-recorded interviews conducted in the 1960s with his father by the television journalist Sander Vanocur for a never-written book on Kennedy's "Irish mafia". Those tapes, and other voluminous historical records, became the basis of a film that, within the constraints of its genre, strives for considerable fidelity.

"Obviously, our standard has to be one of mass entertainment," said Almond, "It is, after all, a major motion picture, with all that that implies. But as filmmakers, we hope that we get the story and its big themes right, and that we get the rhythms of the crisis laid out in a way that might make a 15-year-old who's turned on by the rockets or the jets get a little bit interested in the political and diplomatic themes."

Bernstein, who also produced The Hurricane, about the legal travails of the boxer Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, was badly stung by the controversy over its loose handling of some facts. So to smooth the film's path with a Washington political and journalistic establishment whose greybeards remember the real thing all too well, Bernstein retained the former White House press secretary Michael McCurry to talk the film up. There have been screenings for historians, journalists and old Kennedy hands in an effort to spread positive word of mouth.

"I could give you a hundred quibbles," said Philip Zelikow, a historian at the University of Virginia. But "the fundamental structure of the narrative and the overarching themes of the narrative are sound". Zelikow, an expert on the crisis, is the author with Ernest May of The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Harvard, 1997), an annotated history of secret White House recordings. The filmmakers bought the rights to the book, and Zelikow, a member of the National Security staff in the Bush White House, watched a couple of days of filming, but he had no consulting role and no financial ties to the film.

In fact, the film condenses and conflates characters and dialogue (including that of correspondents and executives of The New York Times), builds up the real tensions between Kennedy and his more hawkish military advisers for dramatic effect (sometimes to near-cartoonish oversimplification), makes educated suppositions about private conversations no one now living can be sure of, and utterly invents one plot conceit in which O'Donnell personally telephones surveillance pilots on the president's behalf, imploring them not to get shot down.

"But basically if people remember a broad narrative, which is that it was really dangerous, that it was a close call, that there was a real argument between Kennedy and his military advisers, that the Russians were hard to figure out, that leadership really mattered - all those points are true," Zelikow said. "And the movie is never omniscient about the Russians, which is great."

Zelikow used to teach a course at Harvard on "The Uses of History", in which students were asked to study historical films and write essays about how they reflected the climate and politics of the periods in which they were made. "Because you feel a lot of the suspense of the movie derives from that puzzlement and bafflement that this was for these men."

The film faithfully recounts Kennedy's agonising over whether to launch a surprise, pre-emptive air strike to destroy the Soviet missiles before they become operational (as most of his military advisers urge) or impose a naval blockade (described at the time as a "quarantine" to sound less belligerent) with the threat of an American invasion hovering over the Russians' heads. In the back of his mind at all times is the biggest Cold War battleground, Berlin, and the fear that the Soviets might retaliate there and put the whole world at war.

Some of the most seemingly scripted moments come straight from the White House tapes. At one point, General Curtis LeMay, the bellicose chief of staff of the Air Force, reviews the options and tells JFK condescendingly, "You're in a pretty bad fix, Mr. President."

Kennedy pauses, eyes narrowing, and asks, "What did you say?" LeMay repeats himself, and the president says coolly, "Well, maybe you haven't noticed you're in it with me."

-------- us nuc politics

Transition: The Changing of the (786) Guards

New York Times
December 3, 2000
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/03/weekinreview/03SANG.html

WASHINGTON -- Very little in this city of power and ego is uglier than a presidential transition. Except, perhaps, a failed transition that condemns a new president to an even uglier first year in office.

But almost everyone, from lame-duck Clintonites to those angling for jobs in the new administration, concedes that a successful first year has nothing to do with how fast one moves into the official transition office, in the old Secret Service headquarters a few blocks from the White House.

Transitions, as one of Mr. Clinton's top aides said recently, "are all about people, about the deals you cut with Congress, about the rhythms of the city." The Clintonites should know, because they got all three wrong eight years ago. And there is plenty of reason to believe that, whoever emerges as the next president, he will pay a price for the fact that more than a third of the time between election and inauguration has already been frittered away - with both sides play-acting at transitions, but neither side doing much transitioning.

Why are presidential transitions so difficult? It's part the tyranny of numbers (the new administration will have to fill roughly 8,000 positions in all), part the escalating battle for prerogatives between the White House and Congress, part the fine filter of background checks in an era of hypersensitivity to nanny taxes and old indiscretions.

Thomas Donilon, who moved from the Clinton campaign to become Warren Christopher's chief of staff at the State Department, and Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, noted in a recent article in Foreign Affairs magazine that when John F. Kennedy was elected in what until last month was the closest presidential election of all time, "on average, the 196 top-level executive branch positions requiring Senate confirmation were filled less than two and a half months after the presidential inauguration."

By the time Bill Clinton arrived in Washington, the number of senior positions for the Senate to approve had swelled to 786, and it took an average of nine months to get an appointee approved or rejected. And that was with a Democratic Senate.

Mr. Clinton himself acknowledged last summer that the huge mess of his first two years in office was rooted in the fact that he was "not sufficiently sensitive to the way Washington works." More to the point, he took office on Jan. 20, 1993, without having filled many key White House positions. By the time he got around to it, he had used up his honeymoon with the Senate, and with it that body's willingness to rubber stamp presidential appointees.

"It's not so much when you get started that's important, it's really what you have in place on Inauguration Day," one veteran of the Clinton transition said last week, asking for anonymity because he is quietly trying to help Al Gore not to repeat history. "If you concentrate hard on getting a solid infrastructure around the president, then you are much advantaged. If you do it late, and you don't have your staff in place at the times of highest expectations, then you hurt yourself. Mistakes made in that first six months are amplified. First impressions matter."

It was, after all, in his first weeks that Mr. Clinton crossed the military's top brass with his "don't ask, don't tell" policy for gays in the armed forces. He spent the next eight years trying to convince the military of his fitness as commander in chief.

Of course, hitting the ground running may prove impossible this time around. The Senate is split down the middle, and one half may well regard the next president as illegitimate. Under such circumstances, all White House nominees are likely to be grilled mercilessly.

With that in mind, Mr. Gore enjoys at least one advantage: His staff members already have the highest-level security clearances. Not so for the Bush team. Even Gen. Colin Powell, the likely secretary of state in a Bush cabinet, and Condoleezza Rice, the odds-on national security adviser, would need new background checks before they got access to the most sensitive nuclear secrets and intelligence intercepts.

"The F.B.I. checks are quick if you have no financial holdings, you have never traveled and you have lived in the same place for 30 years," one aide to Mr. Bush said.

And there's always the problem of getting the new chief executive to focus on picking his people. As President Kennedy said during his transition, "For the last four years, I spent so much time getting to know people who could help me get elected president that I didn't have any time to get to know people who could help me, after I was elected, to be a good president."

-------- MILITARY

-------- drug war

The Submarine Next Door

New York Times
12/03/00
By KIRK SEMPLE
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001203mag-semple.html

Way up in the Andes and 440 miles from the sea, suspected drug runners in Colombia built a most unlikely vessel to transport their wares. The neighbors didn't see a thing.

Last July, eavesdroppers for the Colombian national police intercepted a series of radio conversations that Col. Jaime Enrique Bonilla describes as "very strange." "They were saying things like, 'Bring the flour for the party tonight,' and 'The foreigners are ready,"' recalls Bonilla, who oversees the division of the police force that operates in the mountainous central state of Cundinamarca, which includes Bogotá. "They didn't use names. Lots of farmers communicate with one another using radios, but they always use names. When people don't use names, that concerns us." Fourteen leftist rebel groups are based in Cundinamarca, and investigators suspected they were overhearing coded conversations about arms trafficking, cocaine processing or preparations to attack a village.

Technicians determined that the signals were coming from a region west of Bogotá, high in the Andes, where most of the country's roses, carnations and pompons are grown. They homed in on a village called Cartagenita, a poor farming community of brick-block houses dominated by a factory that produces flour to make arepas.

Undercover cops went to work in the area, and after several weeks they zeroed in on an unmarked warehouse behind a high wall fronting the region's main road, a well-traveled corridor that connects Bogotá and Medellín. The warehouse, topped by an aluminum roof, abuts a busy Texaco gas station and a three-story house.

"They asked what it was for and I told them: metal ornamentation," recalls Pablo Neira, whose family owns the warehouse as well as the adjacent gas station and house. Neira accompanied the police as they first inspected the building. "We knocked," he says. "No one was there. So we looked through a hole in the door and saw a big metal tank."

The investigators thought they had located the headquarters of a stolen-gasoline ring, a major coup. They began a stakeout of the place. But it appears they'd already blown their cover. After several days, no one returned, so the team closed in. What was on the other side of the door would turn out to be much stranger than they ever imagined.

The interior of the warehouse was about the size of a tennis court and contained three enormous steel cylinders. Two were sealed at one end, the other was open. Each was 10 1/2 feet in diameter and between 24 feet and 27 feet in length, sprayed with maroon paint. In several places on their smooth surfaces were mathematical computations and technical glyphs scratched in chalk and marker. One diagram depicted a Dr. Seuss-like array of tubing topped with a cartoonish puff of smoke.

The cylinders rested on a carriage system atop wheels and railroad ties, apparently for easy shifting. The room was cluttered with tools, mostly conventional stuff: hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, wrenches, drills, sanding devices, protractors, paintbrushes. More sophisticated pieces of technology included a welding unit, a soldering machine, a Taiwanese drill press and a compressor. Video cameras monitored activity inside the warehouse and around its perimeter. Several nudie posters adorned one section of a wall and, according to police, 8 to 10 mattresses had been left behind along with a cache of canned food. In a corner was a weight-lifting apparatus draped in plastic sheeting and, in an adjoining bungalow with direct access to the warehouse, police found some free weights, an abdominal exercise machine and a Rottweiler.

The police also found several pieces of paper with phrases in Spanish and Russian. "They were everyday phrases," Colonel Bonilla says. "How are you?' 'Hello.' 'Good-bye.' 'What can I offer you?"' Other documents revealed the names of two Russians. The property owner produced a lease, which, according to investigators, was signed in April 1999 by an American citizen.

At first, the police weren't sure what they were looking at. "It was something very odd," Bonilla says. "It wasn't a normal gas tank." But they had a theory, one that was hard to believe, so they called in an official from the Colombian Navy's headquarters in Bogotá.

Capt. Ismael Idrobo of the Colombian Navy knew what they had found: a half-built 78-foot submarine wedged in a warehouse, a mile and a half above sea level and a 440-mile drive from the nearest ocean port. "The guy who designed it knew exactly what he was doing," he says. "It took imagination and a lot of experience."

Colombian law-enforcement officials were practically giddy about their discovery. Within a few hours of the raid, the national police announced that they had uncovered "a submarine factory in the service of narcotrafficking," and that "it is believed a sector of the Russian mafia is behind this sophisticated system." The national police said that an investigation was under way to identify "the international narcotrafficking network, author of this project."

Their enthusiasm was understandable. Colombian cops have grown accustomed to being on the losing side of the drug war. About 90 percent of the world's cocaine and an increasing percentage of its heroin now come from inside the country's borders, and the task of stemming that flow has become ever more difficult. Smuggling techniques have evolved in frighteningly sophisticated ways; cocaine and heroin are concealed in the intestinal tracts of animals, children and the elderly, in musical instruments, food (real and fake), cement posts, prosthetics, tar, lumber, sculptures, bottles of wine and liquor, the handles of shoe-polishing brushes, brand-new horse saddles, children's toys, silicon bags surgically inserted in a woman's thighs and even in cadavers. Law-enforcement efforts are further hindered by leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary forces who protect coca crops and trafficking networks.

With one stupendous piece of evidence -- but no suspects they could put their hands on -- investigators had to fill in the picture with educated guesswork. There was some precedent for the case. In the mid-90's, government forces intercepted two homemade fiberglass minisubs and two more under construction. But even the largest of these vessels was less than half the size of what the Cartagenita submarine would have been. With a strong double hull, it could have descended to depths of 100 meters -- deep enough to evade many sonar devices -- and could travel 2,000 nautical miles and remain 13 days at sea with a crew of five, says Captain Idrobo.

By Idrobo's calculation, the sub was 50 percent completed and had already cost at least $5 million. He figures the designers planned to cart the craft out to the coast "naked" -- no motors, no electronics, no propeller, no periscope -- and then assemble it there. But which coast? The Pacific is closer to Bogotá and has calmer waters, and the coast isn't as closely monitored or densely populated as the Caribbean shoreline. On the other hand, the Caribbean offers access to smugglers' hideaways in the islands and a direct route to Europe.

The submarine probably would have ferried its load to a drop point -- a hidden port or at sea -- and smaller, speedier boats would then distribute the cargo. The former Colombian national police director, Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano, among others, says he believes that the submarine was financed by a consortium that intended to smuggle out cocaine and return with arms, dirty money, maybe even escaped convicts or guerrillas. Since the breakup of the monopolistic Medellín and Cali cartels, narcotraffickers have operated in smaller organizations and looked for ways to spread the risk, sometimes by pooling shipments. In a recent 2.5-ton cocaine haul in Venezuela, for instance, the police discovered that 12 different traffickers were involved.

Maj. Juan Carlos Montero, a former director of the investigative arm of the national police, offers another theory: the builder of the sub is not a narcotrafficker himself. "He builds the submarine, then sells the service," says Montero. "He doesn't sell the drugs, he doesn't know where the cargo is going. He just rents out the submarine to a variety of people."

As for the two Russians, police speculate they were providing the technological know-how. Their shadowy presence has stoked suspicions that Russian crime organizations are developing strong contacts with Colombian narcotraffickers and leftist rebels. Such talk has made the Russian Embassy in Bogotá very defensive. "We still don't have evidence of the presence of Russian criminals in Colombia," says an embassy spokesman, Dimitri Belov, who adds that there are only about 450 Russian residents in the country. "There are a lot of rumors, a lot of noise, but it always turns out to be an exaggeration."

Serrano, who was head of the Colombian national police from 1994 until earlier this year, admits that evidence of Russian criminal pres-ence in Colombia is thin, adding, "The Russians have been scared to come to Colombia because they are easily detected and because they have respect for the Colombia mafias and their violence." But he and other law-enforcement officials in Colombia and the United States say they've tracked a short but irrefutable history of Russians trading arms for Colombian narcotics. In the last several years, the Colombian national police have seized shipments of AK-47's, grenades and ammunition manufactured in former Soviet-bloc countries. There has also been a huge and suspicious surge in telephone traffic between Colombia and Russia.

One of the most celebrated intersections of Russian and Colombian criminal interests also concerned a submarine. In 1997, Ludwig Fainberg, the Russian owner of a Miami strip club, was indicted for trying to negotiate the purchase of a Soviet-era Russian submarine and eight Mi-8 milit