Probe of silencers leads to web of Pentagon secrets

[seemslikeadream]

Probe of silencers leads to web of Pentagon secrets


By Craig Whitlock October 12 at 7:30 PM
The mysterious workings of a Pentagon office that oversees clandestine operations are unraveling in federal court, where a criminal investigation has exposed a secret weapons program entwined with allegations of a sweetheart contract, fake badges and trails of destroyed evidence.

Capping an investigation that began almost two years ago, separate trials are scheduled this month in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., for a civilian Navy intelligence official and a hot-rod auto mechanic from California who prosecutors allege conspired to manufacture an untraceable batch of automatic-rifle silencers.

The exact purpose of the silencers remains hazy, but court filings and pretrial testimony suggest they were part of a top-secret operation that would help arm guerrillas or commandos overseas.

The silencers — 349 of them — were ordered by a little-known Navy intelligence office at the Pentagon known as the Directorate for Plans, Policy, Oversight and Integration, according to charging documents. The directorate is composed of fewer than 10 civilian employees, most of them retired military personnel.

Court records filed by prosecutors allege that the Navy paid the auto mechanic — the brother of the directorate’s boss — $1.6 million for the silencers, even though they cost only $10,000 in parts and labor to manufacture.

Much of the documentation in the investigation has been filed under seal on national security grounds. According to the records that have been made public, the crux of the case is whether the silencers were properly purchased for an authorized secret mission or were assembled for a rogue operation.


A former senior Navy official familiar with the investigation described directorate officials as “wanna-be spook-cops.” Speaking on the condition of anonymity because the case is still unfolding, he added, “I know it sounds goofy, but it was like they were building their own mini law enforcement and intelligence agency.”

The directorate is a civilian-run office that is supposed to provide back-office support and oversight for Navy and Marine intelligence operations. But some of its activities have fallen into a gray area, crossing into more active involvement with secret missions, according to a former senior Defense Department official familiar with the directorate’s work.

“By design, that office is supposed to do a little more than policy and programmatic oversight,” the former defense official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much of the directorate’s work is classified. “But something happened and it lost its way. It became a case of the fox guarding the henhouse, and I suspect deeper issues might be in play.”

Navy officials declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation and prosecution. “The Department of the Navy has fully cooperated with law enforcement since this investigation was initiated . . . and will continue to fully cooperate,” Cmdr. Ryan Perry, a Navy spokesman at the Pentagon, said.

Missing evidence
Prosecutors have said that the silencers were acquired for a “special access program,” or a highly secretive military operation. A contracting document filed with the court stated that the silencers were needed to support a program code-named UPSTAIRS but gave no other details.


According to court papers filed by prosecutors, one directorate official told an unnamed witness that the silencers were intended for Navy SEAL Team 6, the elite commando unit that killed Osama bin Laden.

But representatives for SEAL Team 6 told federal investigators they had not ordered the silencers and did not know anything about them, according to the court papers.

Sorting out the truth has been made more difficult by the elimination of potential evidence.

At one pretrial hearing, a defense attorney for the auto mechanic, Mark S. Landersman of Temecula, Calif., accused the Navy of impeding the investigation by destroying a secret stash of automatic rifles that the silencers were designed to fit. Prosecutors immediately objected to further discussion in open court, calling it a classified matter.

The destroyed weapons were part of a stockpile of about 1,600 AK-47-style rifles that the U.S. military had collected overseas and stored in a warehouse in Pennsylvania, according to a source familiar with the investigation.

If the foreign-made weapons were equipped with unmarked silencers, the source said, the weapons could have been used by U.S. or foreign forces for special operations in other countries without any risk that they would be traced back to the United States.

A different source, a current senior Navy official, confirmed that an arsenal of AK-47-style rifles in a warehouse in Mechanicsburg, Pa., had been destroyed within the past year. But that official suggested the issue was a smokescreen, saying the weapons were being kept for a different purpose and that no program had existed to equip them with silencers.


In a separate move that eliminated more potential evidence, Navy security officers incinerated documents last year that they had seized from the directorate’s offices in the Pentagon, according to court records and testimony.

Two Navy security officers have testified that they stuffed the papers into burn bags and destroyed them on Nov. 15, 2013 — three days after The Washington Post published a front-page article about the unfolding federal investigation into the silencers.

One of the security officers said it did not occur to her that the documents should be preserved, despite Navy policies prohibiting the destruction of records that could be relevant to lawsuits or criminal investigations.

The officer, Francine Cox, acknowledged that she was aware the Navy directorate was under scrutiny and that she had read the Post article shortly before burning the documents. But she said she did not think the papers were important.

“I didn’t think the information we had was pertinent,” Cox testified at a pretrial hearing in July. “If you don’t tell me to hold onto something, I don’t have to hold onto it.”

Lee M. Hall, a Navy intelligence official who is charged with illegally purchasing the silencers and whose trial is scheduled to begin this month, argued that the burned material was crucial to his defense. He said the documents included handwritten notes and other papers showing the undersecretary of the Navy at the time had authorized the project.

“My notes would show I acted in good faith,” Hall testified at the July hearing.


Stuart Sears, an attorney for Hall, declined to comment.

District Court Judge Leonie M. Brinkema rejected a bid by Hall’s attorneys to dismiss the charges against him but was incredulous that the Navy had destroyed the documents.

“I don’t find any nefarious evidence, or evidence of bad intent, but it sure does look to the court like negligence,” she said.

On other occasions over the past year, Brinkema has questioned whether prosecutors were fully aware of what the Navy directorate was up to and whether they really wanted to expose its activities by taking the case to trial.

“We’re getting deeper and deeper into a morass,” she said at a hearing in March. “One of the things the government always has to think about is the cost-benefit analysis. At the end of the day, is this particular criminal prosecution worth the risk of having to disclose or reveal very sensitive information?”

An investigation snowballs
Suspicions about the Navy directorate surfaced in January 2013 when one of its officials appeared at a Defense Intelligence Agency office in Arlington and asked for a badge that would allow him to carry weapons on military property, according to statements made by prosecutors during pretrial hearings.

The directorate official, Tedd Shellenbarger, flashed a set of credentials stamped with the letters LEO — an acronym for “law enforcement officer” — even though his office dealt primarily with policy matters and lacked law enforcement powers, the former senior Navy official said.

Shellenbarger’s request prompt­ed the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) to obtain a warrant to search the directorate’s offices at the Pentagon. Agents found badge materials and other documentation that led them to broaden their investigation, according to the former senior Navy official.


Shellenbarger and three other directorate officials were placed on leave, according to court records. Shellenbarger has not been charged and has since returned to work for the Navy. His attorney, David Deitch, indicated he might be called as a witness at Hall’s trial.

“Mr. Shellenbarger has cooperated fully in providing truthful information to the government about his conduct, which was undertaken at the direction of his supervisors,” Deitch said.

The badge inquiry led NCIS to discover e-mails and a paper trail pertaining to the $1.6 million contract to buy the silencers from Landersman, the California mechanic. Court papers describe him as a struggling small businessman who raced hot-rods and had declared bankruptcy in July 2012.

He is the brother of David W. Landersman, the senior director for intelligence in the Navy directorate.

Prosecutors have referred to David Landersman in court papers as a conspirator in the case, but he has not been charged. He is a combat-decorated retired Marine officer. His attorney has said he did nothing wrong.

Mark Landersman has been charged with manufacturing, selling and shipping the unmarked silencers without a federal firearms license. His trial is scheduled to begin Oct. 27. One of his attorneys, Cary Citronberg, declined to comment.

Ordinarily, a clandestine weapons program requires reams of paperwork and legal review. No documentation has surfaced in court to indicate that Navy officials formally signed off on the silencer project, although many pretrial motions have been filed under seal.


Hall, the directorate official charged with illegally purchasing the silencers, has asserted that he received verbal approval for the secret program from Robert C. Martinage, a former acting undersecretary of the Navy, according to statements made during pretrial hearings.

Martinage was forced to resign in January after investigators looking into the silencer deal found evidence that he had engaged in personal misconduct, according to Navy officials. The officials said the misconduct was unrelated to the silencer contract.

Martinage is expected to be a key witness at Hall’s trial. He declined to comment, saying, “I have been advised not to discuss any aspect of that matter while the case is pending.”

[Jerky]

Un-freaking-believable.

YOPJ

[seemslikeadream]

Coping: With “Right at last!”– After 13-Years
Posted on October 13, 2014 by George Ure
(Reader note: I promised shorter columns this week. Let’s see how we do. Our usual precisely timed reports may be somewhat off schedule due to lightning storms which are wandering through East Texas this morning. Our editor (Zeus the Cat) has taken the morning off to hide out in places unknown until the racket dies down. He showed me how to smell-check once, but I fergot.)

You may not remember the early Peoplenomics reports., But you’ll find this tale pretty interesting.

In one of the earliest of what are now around 600-back issues of Peoplenomics – December 1, 2001 to be exact – I hypothecated the existence of something called Directorate 153.

The concept was that somewhere in the West there would be a multi-purpose government tool (yeah, sort of like one of those Leatherman tools) so that governments could do what needed doing without being “found out.”

Secret agencies, which includes the likes of the NSA and CIA, are fine for large scale intelligence operations. But the military-intelligence operations have an “iffy” history of getting things right. Or, keeping secrets.

To be sure, operations like Iran-Contra were – at some level – well-intentioned. But they also were large enough that they had a considerable “footprint” and this is a very bad thing because it meant over time, their existence and operations were almost sure to leak out. They did.

Like the multipurpose tool, what government needs (or thinks it does) is something small that can be pliers, tweezers, pea shooter, futurists, high-level henchmen, and all more or less under wraps. Oh, and under budget, too.

The December 2001 “Inside Report” (the name Peoplenomics had not yet been cobbled together) was based on the reports that someone knew more than was being told to us about the events surrounding 9/11.

For one, there were a flurry of reports about a group of “5 Israelis” videotaping events on 9/11. Sure enough, we can find lots of references to this through a Google Search, but whether they were “genuine” or not is a little more ethereal.

In 2001 there were several incidents that suggested an “almost visible, but not quite” Invisible Hand was operating in the background not only of 9/11 but also the OKC bombing and other events as well. Even now, a conspiratorially open person might wonder about some of the claims of “others”.

And the HYPOTHECATED Directorate might have gone back even further. Remember, there are reports many people miss in the high-volume flow of the news that point to a “hidden hand” even going back to the Kennedy Assassination in 1963.

Besides the “grassy knoll” shooter, we also hear reports that Lee Harvey Oswald’s name was quietly added to the CIA wall of heroes. What to make of the report? I’ll leave that to you.

To me (back in 2001 and ever since) this “hidden hand” with future forecasting technology has been a real possibility.

Until this weekend. Now it may be real.

That’s as the Washington Post began to report on (loved the choice of words here) a hidden Navy Directorate in a case involving the manufacture of illegal silencers. From the Post report:

“The silencers — 349 of them — were ordered by a little-known Navy intelligence office at the Pentagon known as the Directorate for Plans, Policy, Oversight and Integration, according to charging documents”

The specifics of the Post story are less interesting to me than the generalities of it because it substantially “bulks up” our logical conclusion that there not only could be a few of these multipurpose tools, squirreled here and there, but they may have (and may still be) engaged in exactly the kinds of behaviors that would fit our Directorate 153 profile.

Burn bags of documents are missing. Someone doesn’t want anyone – including Navy brass by the sound of it – knowing exactly what was going on.
Fake law enforcement credentials were made available to the group.
The group (likely) had unlimited access to the highest levels of “national technical means”. This would mean Keyhole satellite data, data surveillance, and so forth.
And, by the time the Post gets done, I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t some angle of “futuring” that would come to light.
But this last is highly speculative. A little more background may be useful.

The December 2001 report sketched out a need for Directorate 153 on the basis of continuity of government and initially it was sited in the UK as an outgrowth of MI-6. This is because the British really had “the reins” of spy networks 30-years ago (and longer)., They’d been the “seat of empire” and so it would be logical for there to be a major foreign component to Directorate 153.

Most Americans don’t have a clue why this is so, but here’s what the British were so important.

American government officials are barred (courts and law problem) from wiretapping whoever they care to when they’re off sniffing our problems for the country’s future.

How do you “solved” the legal problem of blocked wiretaps without a court order?

Easy! You simply route the calls through a foreign-staffed telephone exchange and employ foreign nations to do the listening. In this way, while the intelligence so gathered might not be admissible in a court, the quality of the intel was above reproach.

And technically it was legal.

One of the better-know communications intercept sites is Menwith Hill RAF station in the UK (Yorkshire). Another is outside of Alice Springs, Australia. Known in the trade as Pine Gap and part of the Echelon arm of “national technical means.”

Even as the NSA operation up in Provo comes on line, the future of such earlier circumventions of strike constitutional law remains bright because two-way radio coms don’t always make it onto the PSTN (public-switched telephone networks) which is why from the KH-17 series and on, surveillance satellites have been equipped with broadband radio receivers that can frequency hop wherever needs in order to hear what’s being said behind pretty much whatever rocks you chose in the Middle East.

Even that is not perfect, however, which is why the graduates of Fort Huachuca (AZ) include folks who schlep computers and scanning radios into the front lines of conflict (and beyond front lines) in places like Afghanistan. (Thank you for your service, BTW.)

One of the real difficulties if my hypothecated Directorate 153 is real, is that compartmentalized intelligence is a real beast of a management problem.

Sure, you might cut up the functionality into multiple agencies (part of the group might be with the Navy, another part secreted into the Department of Agriculture, maybe Commerce, or the other uniformed services), but in doing so, there would be a huge level of trust required.

Still and all, even with congressional oversight of intelligence, there’s nothing to stop a group of super-patriots within government from creating their own “meta agency” and that may be the case in real life.

And sometimes the line between national interest and “that piece of paper” becomes a bit blurred.

So we’ll be watching the Post story develop and see how many of the pieces of our “hypothecated” Directorate 153 can be pieced together. Just one, though, is a damn good start.

Just maybe it’s just seeping into media….uh, what it it? 13-years behind the theoretical work. Not bad for a “nutter in the woods.”