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Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Captured Libyan Documents and a Criminal Investigation

This is slightly belated, but I wanted to note briefly a significant development related to an earlier post regarding a U.K. civil suit based on documents captured in Tripoli that related to British (and U.S.) involvement in the rendition of individuals to Libya.  Earlier this month, a joint statement by the Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan Police Service announced that a criminal investigation had been initiated into the matter, noting that the services had jointly "decided that the allegations raised in the two specific cases concerning the alleged rendition of named individuals to Libya and the alleged ill-treatment of them in Libya are so serious that it is in the public interest for them to be investigated now."

The allegations relate to the renditions of Abdul Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi, both of which, as noted in the New York Times, "have cited a cache of secret documents recovered from the Qaddafi government's intelligence files after the fall of Tripoli to rebel forces, which included letters that appeared to implicate British officials in cooperating with Colonel Qaddafi's agents."

For copies of some of the captured Libyan documents see here and here.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Research Analyst Opening at Conflict Records Research Center

There is a new opening for a Research Analyst at the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) at the National Defense University.  The vacancy notes that the CRRC "was established to fulfill the Secretary of Defense's intent to enable research into captured records with 'complete openness and rigid adherence to academic freedom and integrity.'"

Duties include providing research support to Director and staff at CRRC, serving as "IT/digital archive expert and local network administrator," producing research finding aids, and working with "various U.S. government agencies and contractors on issues involving the transfer, translation, validation, and provenance of records."

Requirements and full description are here. Application period closes on February 10, 2012.

Friday, January 27, 2012

Iraq Memory Foundation Defense Contracts


I am posting below several defense contracts for the Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF) that cover the period from 2004 to 2008.  These are important because of their possible relevance to the debate over the Ba'ath party records the IMF collected in Baghdad that are now on deposit at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.  As one example of their potential relevance, in addressing allegations - such as in this 2008 open letter  from Iraq National Library and Archives Director Saad Eskander to the Hoover Institution - that the IMF violated Iraqi law by removing Ba'ath party records from Iraq, Bruce P. Montgomery's recent piece argues that the IMF's status as a U.S. defense contractor might have insulated it from liability under Iraqi law.

I had requested copies of the IMF contracts via FOIA in 2010 to see whether they expressly related to the IMF's collection and removal of the Ba'ath party documents.  Do they?

The first contract - W74V8H-04-P-0393 for $2.1 million for one year - was signed on June 18, 2004, so less than two weeks before legal sovereignty was transferred to the new Iraqi government. The meat of the contract begins at page 7.  The subject matter appears to be primarily the creation of video documentaries, including "victim/witness testimonies" about the Ba'ath regime that would be "broadcast to the people of Iraq" and, with U.S. government assistance, "to other global audiences to counter pro-Sadaam [sic], pro- Ba'thist propaganda."

An early provision, however, also notes that the "operational intent is to be apolitical; recording accounts of witnesses, collecting documents and relics" (emphasis mine). In addition, the stated "Scope" of the contract (provision 4.0) is also quite broad and provides the following (emphasis mine):
The government requires the contractor to collect documentary evidence of atrocities and crimes committed by the former Ba'athist regime of Iraq. The [sic] requires research involving first-hand testimonials, creation of video archives, editing of video footage for documentaries and collecting other documentary evidence of atrocities and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the former Ba'athist regime in Iraq against the people of Iraq.
Also note provision 6.0 which states:
The contractor will assume sole legal and contractual responsibility for acquisition of "other documentary evidence of atrocities and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the former Ba'athist regime in Iraq against the people of Iraq" as part of the contract, with the stipulation that it will only be required to purchase documentary evidence from legitimate copyright holders.
The other contracts consist of a one-year contract from 2005-2006 - W74V8H-05-P-0684 (for $1.1 million) - and two additional one year extensions of the contract from 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 (each of which adds approximately $1 million).  The primary contract here is expressly called "Iraq Oral History" and, again, it seems primarily focused on creating video testimonials, but it also includes a broad "Scope" stating "The government requires the contractor to collect documentary evidence of atrocities and crimes committed by the former Ba'athist regime of Iraq."

In the end, while all of the contracts seem primarily focused on video testimony and none expressly discuss the Ba'ath party documents collected by the Iraq Memory Foundation (that were transferred to the U.S. and, perhaps, copied by the U.S. government), one could fairly argue that those documents could fit within the scope of the contract.  But you can decide for yourself.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Still Secret U.K. Archives of the Malayan Emergency

The Guardian yesterday had an article called "Batang Kali relatives edge closer to the truth about 'Britain's My Lai massacre'" describing still secret archives relevant to the "Malayan Emergency."  The article notes:
Lawyers representing relatives of 24 unarmed victims who died at Batang Kali, Malaysia, in December 1948 have finally been provided with key Foreign Office correspondence about past investigations and Cabinet Office guidance on when inquiries should be held.
*   *   *   *
The Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence have always insisted the villagers were shot while trying to escape detention. The incident has been described by some as the "British My Lai massacre", after the US troop killings in Vietnam
*   *   *   *
The Foreign Office has refused, so far, to release any additional documents from its still unreleased colonial-era archive. The depository at Hanslope Park, near Milton Keynes, contains thousands of files not yet handed over to the National Archives.
*   *   *   *
On the question of making public the relevant files at the Hanslope Park archives, it said: "The Foreign Office . . . holds 8,800 files from 37 former British administrations, including Malaya. The government plans to make as much of this material as possible available to the wider public, and has confirmed that the files will be reviewed. This review process may take some time."
For more on other colonial records found at Hanslope Park, see this earlier op-ed.

DOMEX: Joint Intelligence Support to Military Operations

Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News had a recent post highlighting the new Joint Publication 2-01 "Joint and National Intelligence Support to Military Operations" published on January 5, 2012 (available from the Federation of American Scientists here and also on DTIC here).

The document was "prepared under the direction of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff" and "provides doctrine for joint and national intelligence products, services, and support  to joint military operations."

Document and Media Exploitation is mentioned in several places and Appendix C is devoted exclusively to the topic. While portions are annoyingly written in the military's acronym-heavy style ("The JDEC may be under the OPCON of the CCDR or in direct support of the CCDR and under the staff supervision of the CCMD J-2"), it is definitely worth reading. Aftergood notes in particular the introduction of the term BEI for "biometric-enabled intelligence." This also shows up in the appendix on Document and Media Exploitation, which notes:
The forensic and biometric exploitation of captured or acquired documents and media may also result in the development of FEI and/or BEI data and products to support urgent information needs and operational planning. 
To see the forensic exploitation of a captured document take a look at this report from an FBI lab that tests a number of seized documents for fingerprints.




A few other passages from the Joint Publication (all emphasis mine):
As a general rule, captured and acquired documents and media are considered unclassified unless they originated in the US and/or an allied nation and are marked as classified. Capturing units may classify document and media to protect sources and methods or on-going operations, however, such classification should be kept to the lowest level possible and with minimal use of caveats. Documents that bear foreign classification markings are handled according to US classification standards, regardless of their original foreign classification.
*    *    *    *  
Acquiring units need to protect material in its captured form and document and report the capturing unit, date, time, place (preferably grid coordinates), and circumstances of capture. 
*    *    *    *  
Original documents should never be altered, marked upon, or separated from the batch to which they belong. . . . When at all possible, DOMEX facilities should be fire-protected, have humidity and temperature control systems . . . . Once exploitation is complete, documents should be moved to a storage facility for long-term storage, returned to the capturing unite, or disposed of as directed by the supported command. Documents designated for destruction should be handled in the same manner prescribed for US classified documents to preclude compromise of US and multinational interests.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

PhD Scholarship and New DOMEX/DOCEX Job Openings

Benjamin Isakhan, whose work on the destruction of Ba'athist property in Iraq I noted in a recent post, sends word that he is currently advertising a PhD scholarship (here and here) for an aspiring PhD student to work with him on a fascinating project, funded by a grant from the Australian government, called "Measuring the Destruction of Heritage and Spikes of Violence in Iraq."  The description states:
Since the invasion of 2003, Iraq has suffered an extraordinary era of both heritage destruction and devastating spikes in violence. The core aim of this project is to empirically test the assumption that a significant relationship exists between these two phenomena. To do this, the project will develop the world's first database of heritage destruction in Iraq via interviews, archival research and fieldwork. This database will then be correlated with existing measures of violence in Iraq to determine the precise nature of their relationship. This will set the precedent for studies of both heritage and violence and enable policy formation towards the minimization of heritage destruction and spikes in violence during times of conflict.
Note that this is based at Deakin University in Australia. Deadline Feb. 13, 2012.

On the DOMEX/DOCEX front, there are also some interesting new job openings:

DynCorp is looking for a Staff Officer to lead and manage "coordination efforts for all NMEC's [National Media Exploitation Center] document and media exploitation (DOMEX) operations on both a domestic and global basis."  The Staff Officer would also act "as NMEC's sole representative when participating in policy discussions and working groups with senior DoD and intelligence senior leadership."

SAIC is advertising for a couple of different positions (here and here) working with the U.S. Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, NC providing, among other things, "Technical Exploitation (TECHEX) and Forensics support (including Document and Media Exploitation (DOMEX) of computers, data storage media/media devices and Cellular Phone Exploitation (CELLEX), including Satellite Phones."  SAIC is also looking for a an Assistant Program Manager to work at Camp As Saliyah, Doha Qatar - the ideal candidate should "understand the IC's (especially DIA's) working environment and the DOMEX process."

"Immortality in the Secret Police Files" now available

Here is the full-text of Bruce P. Montgomery's great new article "Immortality in the Secret Police Files: The Iraq Memory Foundation and the Ba'ath Party Archive" examining the debate over the Ba'ath party documents on deposit at the Hoover Institution. I recommended it earlier, but could only provide the link to the abstract. Thanks to Bruce for his permission to post the full article.

Monday, January 23, 2012

More on Finding Kuwait's Missing National Archives

I have a piece called "Finding Kuwait's Missing National Archives" this morning on JURIST that discusses the new Iraq's continuing responsibility under a Saddam-era U.N. Security Council resolution to find and repatriate Kuwait's national archives that have been missing since Saddam's 1990 invasion.  I wanted to add here a few brief thoughts on strategies for the continued search for the archives:

1. Kuwait Should Clarify What Archives are Still Missing

According to a Wikileaks cable, Ambassador Gennady Tarasov, the U.N. high-level Coordinator overseeing the issue of the missing archives, noted in 2009 that the Iraqi search was hindered by "the lack of a GOK [Government of Kuwait] inventory or description of what the missing archives look like." Back in 2000, Kuwait actually did provide this 2-page list that purported to describe the type and volume of the missing archives. Kuwait should nevertheless update this list given that documents have been returned in the interim (see 2 and 4 below). As further support, Security Council Resolution 687 required the Secretary-General to report on "a list of any property that Kuwait claims has not been returned by Iraq" (emphasis mine). As in other cases of displaced government records, there may be a disincentive for Kuwait to describe the missing archives in too much detail lest they lose the ability to deny the authenticity of documents that might surface.  Ambassador Tarasov's predecessor as U.N. Coordinator, Ambassador Yuli Vorontsov, for example, appears in a 2007 Wikileaks cable telling the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait that Kuwait remained "focused primarily on the return of missing Kuwaiti government archives" because the "Kuwaitis are nervous that sensitive government records may still emerge in Iraq with the potential to cause embarrassment to" Kuwait.

2. Access to Documents Seized in Iraq that Remain in Exclusive U.S. Custody


Were I representing Iraq, I would try to use the continuing Security Council mandate as a sword in its negotiations with the U.S. State and Defense Departments over the return of Iraqi documents seized by U.S. forces, which have thus far been unsuccessful.  As I argue in the JURIST piece, the best place to locate new leads on the missing Kuwaiti archives has to be in the records of Saddam's government, a significant portion of which remain in exclusive U.S. custody.  

Smoking gun evidence of a connection is this 2007 Wikileaks cable entitled "Repatriating Kuwaiti Documents to the GOK" noting that the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait had "received permission" to:
release to the GOK two boxes of Kuwaiti documents, ranging from UNCLASS to KUWAITI TOP SECRET, from the Combined Media Processing Center (CMPC) in Qatar. According to CMPC, all of the documents were gathered in Iraq during OIF and are from 1990 or before.
(this situation was briefly described in this U.N. Secretary-General Report (para. 17)).  Does this mean that the seized documents were thoroughly searched for any information about the Kuwaiti archives and these two boxes were the final result, or is this potentially the tip of the iceberg?  Support for the latter possibility is that this was 2007 and as of 2006 less than 15% of the seized documents had been fully translated. In 2009, Secretary of State Clinton stated in a letter (Wikileaks version here) to the U.N. that "at this time we have no information" about the Kuwait archives which is something less than a representation that the U.S. had exhaustively searched the seized documents from Iraq.  Also, even if they were thoroughly searched that doesn't necessarily mean the seized documents, when combined with other Saddam-era documents that remain in Iraq to provide relevant context, could not produce new information not apparent when the documents were examined independently.

At the very least, Iraq or Ambassador Tarasov should ask the U.S. whether they have Harmony database coversheets for the Kuwaiti documents previously located at the CMPC which could provide extremely specific details about where and when they were seized, like this:



3. Records of U.S. Interrogations of Detained Officials from Saddam's Government


Iraq should also demand from the U.S. copies of any relevant interrogation reports of Ba'ath officials.  Saddam Hussein's FBI interviews, for example, are freely available here (I found only one reference to the seized Kuwaiti documents in an interview in which Saddam claims Iraq captured documents showing that Kuwait and the U.S. were in a "conspiracy" against him prior to his 1990 invasion).  Note that in Wikileaks cables here and here the former U.N. high-level Coordinator, Ambassador Vorontsov, repeatedly requested that the U.S. interrogate detained former Ba'ath officials about the missing archives - he even provided names of specific individuals who might have had information. 

4. Kuwaiti-held Records of Saddam's 2002 Repatriation of Kuwaiti Documents

From Oct. 20-29, 2002, Iraq actually returned to Kuwait 425 boxes and 1,158 bags of documents or archives seized by Iraq.  The handover is described in extensive detail in this U.N. Secretary General Report (esp. paras. 36-75).  The exact content of these boxes and bags, however, were never independently verified.  Iraq provided the U.N. with this letter that listed in the annex the documents it claimed it was returning.  According to the U.N., Iraq also provided detailed packing lists to Kuwait. The questionable handover procedures, however, allowed neither U.N. nor Arab League representatives who were present to examine the documents.  Therefore, what Saddam's Iraq handed over was essentially a black box (or rather 425 of them), the contents of which no one, other than Iraqi officials under Saddam Hussein and Kuwaiti officials, could possibly confirm.

Kuwait later claimed, with precious little detail, that the returned documents were simply "routine papers" that could not be "regarded as the archives of the State," an arguably questionable assertion that the Security Council simply accepted without scrutiny on the basis that Kuwait was "uniquely positioned to ascertain whether Iraq had returned all the documents taken by Iraq, including the return of its national archives."  Kuwait should be asked to provide the Iraqi packing lists as well as provide Ambassador Tarasov with access to the hundreds of boxes and bags worth of "routine papers" to allow verification.

In short, all sides have repeatedly declared their support for the search for Kuwait's missing archives. In "intensifying" efforts to find them (as the Security Council demands), Iraq, Ambassador Tarasov, and the Security Council should make sure that the declared support from all possible sources is legitimately forthcoming.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

WWII German Captured Documents at the Library of Congress

Last month the Library of Congress put out a newly revised finding aid for its German captured documents collection.  The finding aid includes a brief history of the collection including the process of returning originals to Germany and the retention of microfilm copies.



The new finding aid is a revision of an earlier one from 1989. It notes that for many years before that the "sole access to the collection was Gerhard L. Weinberg's Guide to Captured German Documents (Columbia University, Bureau of Applied Social Research, 1952)."  Weinberg's guide is available in full-text online courtesy of the HathiTrust Digital Library here - it was produced following WWII as part of the War Documentation Project (WDP), which was "conceived to answer a long-standing requirement for the systematic research exploitation of the vast masses of captured documents which came into the hands of the United States Government." The WDP was part of the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, which continues to hold the archives of the WDP.

Weinberg's guide was also not confined to the Library of Congress collection - it includes information on German collections in, among other places, the "Hoover Institute and Library" - and was part of the WDP's efforts "to secure as accurate information as possible on the fate and location of freely accessible German documentary sources scattered by the fate of war."

Friday, January 20, 2012

Significance of Saddam's Buttock as Cultural Property

The Guardian has reported that a 66-year-old man was arrested in the U.K. based on the importation of a buttock from a statue of Saddam Hussein in purported violation of the U.K.'s 2003 Iraq Sanctions Order prohibiting the import of "Iraqi cultural property."  The interpretation of the law, if accurately reported, is also relevant to the question of whether captured Iraqi Ba'ath party records should also now be considered "cultural property."



The full title of the U.K. legislation is "The Iraq (United Nations Sanctions) Order 2003." It incorporated U.N. calls for restrictions on the importation of Iraqi cultural property referenced in Security Council Resolution 1483 from May 2003 (which also recognized the U.K. as a joint occupier of Iraq with the U.S.) into the U.K.'s domestic law.  Both the Security Council Resolution and the U.K. Iraq Sanctions Order refer to "Iraqi cultural property" and other items "of archaeological, historical, cultural, rare scientific, and religious importance illegally removed" from Iraq.

In 2003, however, neither the CPA nor the United States treated statues of Saddam Hussein as cultural property.  If they had been cultural property, U.S. involvement in the episode at Firdos Square (and others like it) might have constituted violations of international humanitarian law. Why weren't the statues treated as cultural property?  One argument is that, because they were powerful ideological symbols of the Ba'ath regime, different rules applied.



Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 1 "De-Ba'athification of Iraqi Society," for example, expressly prohibited "Displays in government buildings or public spaces of the image or likeness of Saddam Hussein" on the basis of an assertion of a "grave" threat to "Iraqi society" posed by Ba'ath party networks" and "the intimidation of the people by Ba'ath Party officials."  Another potentially colorable argument is that, even if the statues were cultural property, removing symbols of the former regime was justified by military necessity in order to prevent any Ba'ath Party resurgence.

Some Ba'ath party documents were treated similarly in 2003. Human Rights Watch noted, for example, that in Basra British officials:
publicly stated that they allowed the looting of Ba'ath party buildings, which house important archives, as a means of showing the population that the party had lost control of the city.
As I mentioned in an earlier article, whether Iraqi Ba'ath party documents should have been considered cultural property during the 2003 invasion could depend on a number of factors including whether Iraq was treating them as such (compare, for example, Ba'ath archives within the Iraqi National Archives with those in recently active government offices).  Regardless of what the answer to that question was in 2003, however, if the U.K. government is now taking the position that statues of Saddam have ripened into cultural property, it raises similar questions for various collections of captured Iraqi documents.  Have the 48,000 boxes of documents seized by U.S. forces in Iraq, for example, become, with the passage of time, archives constituting cultural property while sitting in a military warehouse in Qatar?

For more on the historical treatment of "ideological cultural property" see Duane M. Thompson's excellent thesis at p. 94 (comparing the treatment of Nazi cultural property) and for more on the destruction of Baathist property, see Benjamin Isakhan's "Destroying the Symbols of Baathist Iraq" and his longer article on the topic "Targeting the Symbolic Dimension of Baathist Iraq: Cultural Destruction, Historical Memory, and National Identity," behind a paywall here.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Stalin Digital Archive

Yale Daily News reports that Yale University Press will "likely make the Stalin Digital Archive, which will contain more than 28,000 documents related to former Soviet Union Premier Joseph Stalin, available for purchase by this summer."

The article notes that the Archive results from "over 20 years of collaboration between Yale University Press and the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI)"  Thanks to rainbyte.

Article on Terrorist Record Keeping

Jacob N. Shapiro and David A. Siegel have an interesting piece that will soon appear in World Politics called "Moral Hazard, Discipline, and the Management of Terrorist Organizations" (pre-publication drafts are available here and here - and "technical appendix" here).

The article explores why "covert" groups, including terrorist organizations, create and maintain so many records, which in many respects constitute a danger to their survival when those records are later captured. They state:
groups as diverse as the Polish Underground in Warsaw, Red Brigades, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), Aum Shinrikyo, Fatah, al-Qaida, and al-Qa'ida in Iraq generated paperwork that, were it not for their violent subject matter, could have come from any traditional organization.
They write that this "is all a bit puzzling in that covert organizations are commonly thought to screen their operatives very carefully and pay a particularly heavy price for such record keeping."  Their "core argument is that in small, heterogeneous organizations, longer institutional memory can enhance organizational efficiency" which helps provide
an explanation for the seemingly odd facts that terrorist groups repeatedly include operatives of varying commitment and often rely on a common set of security-reducing bureaucratic tools to manage these individuals.
The authors rely in part on captured documents available through West Point's Combatting Terrorism Center's Harmony Program and they reference the Conflict Records Research Center's "Al-Qaeda and Associated Movements (AQAM) Collection".

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Saddam on Document Preservation in War

While working on a longer post on the missing Kuwait National Archives that will be forthcoming, I came across an interesting passage in an audiotape of Saddam Hussein about preserving documents during war that was made available by the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC).  The audiotape is CRRC document SH-SHTP-A-000-630 (link to translated transcript), which is from a February 24, 1991 meeting of Saddam and senior advisors regarding the Coalition ground campaign.  In the meeting Hamid Hammadi is reading correspondence between Saddam and Mikhail Gorbachev.  After Hammadi finishes reading one of the letters there is the following exchange (at pp. 10-11):
Saddam Hussein: When we are in a war, important documents must have two copies in two different locations. What if this location is bombed or burned?
Hamid Hammadi: Sir, I have a file cabinet and a safe.
Saddam Hussein: They are still in the same location. What I want you to do is have two copies in two different locations.
Hamid Hammadi: Yes, Sir.
Saddam Hussein: You must have at least two copies for such materials. You should send one to the Office of the Presidency and have another with you.
Hamid Hammadi: Yes, Sir.
A policy of preserving multiple copies of government records is, of course, useful to both a besieged government seeking to preserve administrative continuity following attack as well as to invading forces who may have two locations at which they could capture the enemy records.

Monday, January 9, 2012

More Seized Bin Laden Docs are in Pakistan Custody

Several recent reports out of Pakistan indicate that 187,000 documents were recovered by the Pakistani government from the Abottabad compound where Osama bin Laden was killed in May 2011.  These would appear to be separate from the documents seized by U.S. forces.

Some reports indicate that the  Abbottabad Commission, which is tasked with investigating the U.S. military operation, retrieved the documents from the compound. Other reports indicate that the documents were in the custody of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and the Abottabad Commission has sought access to them.

The documents reportedly "include bin Laden's diaries, correspondence and other important material in black and white" as well as "five computer discs."  The Abottabad Commission ordered that the documents, which are reportedly "in Pashto, Persian, French, Arabic and other languages," be translated "into Urdu and English to learn more about the al-Qaeda network and its operations."

Monday, January 2, 2012

Debate Over Return of Stasi "Rosenholz" Files in Britain

The Guardian had an interesting piece last week called "Stasi files row as Britain refuses to return documents to Germany" (thanks to rainbyte) that describes a controversy over Stasi documents called the "Rosenholz" records that were obtained by the CIA "in murky circumstances shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall." The debate surrounds the return of a portion of those records that the CIA provided to Britain that were relevant to the Stasi's foreign intelligence operations there, including information on British citizens who worked with the Stasi.

One of the more detailed accounts of the fate of the Rosenholz files is Robert Gerald Livingston's "Rosenholz: Mischa's files, CIA's booty" in East German Foreign Intelligence: Myth, Reality and Controversy (for a more abbreviated, but fully accessible online, account see Livingston's "An Operation Called 'Rosenholz' - How the CIA bought the Stasi files for $75,000" in the Atlantic Times).  According to Livingston, the CIA supposedly purchased the files from a KGB archivist, who had brought them to the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw in the early 1990s, although he notes that the "question still remains open" as others have claimed that the files came directly from a German source. He discusses criminal convictions obtained in the United States and Germany as a result, in part, of information in the documents, including the case of  Theresa Marie Squillacote.  He also describes the negotiations between the United States and Germany for the return of the files as "not easy":
The CIA insisted that it would return only cards relating to German citizens. Information on the cards relating to other nationalities, such as Britons, Danes, Austrians, French, Norwegians, Dutch, and others, were withheld from Germany. They constituted useful "wampum" for the CIA to present as gifts to the "liaison services" with which it worked. British names, of which there were about 100, including possibly 28 IMs, were passed during the summer of 1993 to the United Kingdom's intelligence services, the most privileged partner of American intelligence since World War II
IM, by the way, stands for Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter or "unofficial co-workers" which, Livingston notes, is what foreign agents were "euphemistically designated." He describes the "381 CD-ROMS" that are now "reposing" in Germany's archives noting that the "first two of these are misspellingly emblazoned 'Rosenholtz' by the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), under whose supervision the discs were produced and who returned them to Germany between 2000 and 2003."   Livingston's account also discusses the familiar reluctance to return foreign records once obtained:
To visiting German intelligence officers who inquired about return of the files, the CIA gave the standard answer of all espionage services when pressed to disclose information in their possession: "We must protect sources and methods." In cases such as Rosenholz, which had not been meticulously examined, a service's worry is that the materials may include information about the service that the service itself has not detected but that those to whom the information is passed on may - unknown unknowns, to employ a favorite phrase of former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. 
The Guardian notes that several other governments, including "Norway, Denmark and Sweden recently indicated they were ready to hand over the Rosenholz files they were given by the CIA more than 10 years ago."

Sunday, January 1, 2012

DOCEX/DOMEX Job Openings

Two new DOCEX/DOMEX positions with defense contractor STG, Inc. in Reston, VA were recently posted online.  One is for a Program Manager and other for a Deputy Program Manager.  Both announcements note that they relate to
an upcoming opportunity for the Defense Intelligence Agency's (DIA's) National Media Exploitation Center (NMEC). The successful candidate will have an in-depth understanding and knowledge of NMEC's mission and operational execution of document and media exploitation (DOCEX/DOMEX) operations.