G. Gordon Liddy - in 1988 he described how terrorists could cripple the U.S. with a few cheap tricks

G. Gordon Liddy is now 84 years old and he's enjoyed a very full life.  A former FBI agent and lawyer,  he served 4 and 1/2 years in prison for his part in the Watergate Scandal during the Nixon administration.  His life after prison was even more interesting.  He wrote books, performed in movies and television, and was host of a nationally syndicated Talk-Radio program. He must be content with all of that.

In 1988 OMNI magazine commissioned him to write a fictional projection of what happen to America if it were hit by a team of well trained and motivated terrorists. (It was published in their January 1989 edition.)  By coincidence, Mr. Liddy was writing his piece just about the time Osama bin Laden was founding "The Base" or Al-Qaeda, and it would be years before the young Saudi would appear on anyone's radar. Liddy's tale has the Soviets assisting in the attack, and at the time Liddy shared in America's total preoccupation with the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. This background dates the story, and as a result it will likely never be reprinted. That is a shame because on my recent second reading I found that it still holds up.  As a public service I thought I would take the time to extract the text from amid the vintage ads and other clutter.

It takes only fifteen minutes to read. I will meet you at the bottom.  (click on photos to enlarge)

"Liquid Metal Embrittlement (LME) agent"

"EHV  transformers"

Many Americans love putting up Girls and Guns type calendars.

Gordon Liddy was a master of self-promotion, and having served both 

in the FBI and in prison, he was a natural fit for the genre.

"The EMPG, cruder and more bulky than our own classified device..."

"the prayer of public officials has always been..."

"The Capital Hill Riot"

There you have it.  What is unique in this fiction is that the author resisted the temptation to describe the American retaliation, which is inevitable and is which is always disproportionally greater than the original offence against the Stars and Stripes. Of course we now know that it would be a cunning band of Saudi Arabians which would execute the most effective surprise attack on the Americans since Pearl Harbour. But there was no way at all for Liddy to know, in mid-1988, what the geo-political fallout would be to United States pro-insurgency in Afghanistan. 

And finally, the one thing in the story which seemed bogus, turns out to be true.  Liquid Metal Embrittlement or LME.  I had never heard of it, but there is a Wikipedia page and much more on the Internet.   In a few minutes I found plenty to catch up on, including a recent U.S. Army study on LME which might further improve the lethality of U.S. munitions by "making a round with selectable fragment distribution".  Just what the word needs. Improved lethality.

Liquid Metal Embrittlement (LME) for improving

the fragmentation properties of U.S. explosive ordnance.

+

Aurora Cyber-Attack - destroyed $Million dollar generator

Generator room at the Idaho National Laboratory was remote accessed by a hacker and a $1 Million diesel-electric generator destroyed. (U.S. Homeland Security photo)

A dozen or so newspapers yesterday (September 27) published a story on a simulated cyber attack on U.S. power grid infrastructure which succeeded in destroying the test generator. The "Aurora Generator Test" was
conducted in March 2007 by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and involved the remote accessing of a generator control station by a foreign hacker. It resulted in the partial destruction of a $1 million dollar large diesel-electric generator. The Associated Press based its story on a copy of an official videotape it obtained on Wednesday. The full A.P. story can be found at the CHINA DAILY website http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2007-09/27/content_6139437.htm

The simulated cyber attack was at the Idaho National Laboratory which is principally a nuclear powerplant testing facility. The massive diesel generator used in the test was removed from the Alaska power grid and transported to the vast testing complex located in the desert near Idaho Falls. Details of the Aurora test were leaked within a few days of its completion by a loose-lipped Homeland Security employee who showed it to a conference in Atlanta. The A.P. persisted for six months until they secured a copy of the tape.

Vancouver Incident:
Coincidentally, Vancouver, B.C. suffered its own "Aurora" attack yesterday, which is alleged to have been perpetrated by one of the 5,000 striking members of C.U.P.E., the civic employees union that has been picketing the employer for 71 days. The municipality's central computer system was hacked and the control of dozens of downtown traffic signals was sabotaged. The computer's clock was reset by seven hours, and it began to direct Left Turning signals downtown to revert to shorter night time intervals. The saboteur then called to an All Traffic AM radio station to boast. He identified himself as "C.U.P.E." and warned that traffic snarls would continue until the strike is over.

This is the type of emerging crime which will interest cyber-security experts here at the campus of B.C.I.T., where they maintain British Columbia's premier database on cyber-attacks on industrial and public infrastructure. [It's called the Industrial Security Incident Database] An interesting PowerPoint presentation was prepared by Eric J. Byres, B.C.'s leading expert on SCADA threats and it is a quick read. It can be found at: http://cansecwest.com/slides06/csw06-byres.pdf Back in 2003 Mr. Byres provided expert testimony to an investigatory panel of the U.S. Congress on "Security of Industrial Control Systems in National Critical Infrastructures", and he is likely consulting on critical U.S. research initiatives such as the Aurora tests.

Experts in Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system vulnerability have long believed that the major threat was internal - disgruntled employees seeking revenge or perhaps staff who recklessly share access data with political activists or criminals. That was the case between 1982 - 2000 but changes have arrived along with commonality of software used in control systems and the greater reliance on employee remote access. Many attacks are now arriving via the Internet but there are other vulnerabilities managers do not like to discuss. More interesting, the B.C.I.T. team has noted a new vulnerability. Specialized I.T. equipment mated to equipment at point of manufacture - compressors, cooling units, valves, and electric generators, are being sniffed out by hackers and in some cases tampered with. (As demonstrated in the Aurora Generator Test) Foreign or domestic terrorists will employ the same knowledge as hackers, and as we saw with the recent Russian cyber-assault on Estonia, an entire country country can live in misery for weeks before the intruders are overcome.

Update Oct13 - I had crossposted this to a MILnews site... I just checked and saw it got 1,350 reads. Goes to show I should crosspost more often.

Update: Jan. 13, 2008 - Since writing this blog I've collected many examples but
a new (January 11/08) story out of Poland is my favorite. "A Polish teenager allegedly turned the tram system in the city of Lodz into his own personal train set, triggering chaos and derailing four vehicles in the process. Twelve people were injured in one of the incidents. The 14-year-old modified a TV remote control so that it could be used to change track points..." Described as an electronics buff and an exemplary student, the lad had notebooks full of observations made of the tram system. In other words he picked his target, did his reconn, and then modified a simple household device which gave him control over a public utility.

Cowboy without a gun, PM invites Sikhs to run

Canada's Tory Prime Minister - the unarmed cowpoke.

Earlier this week Canadians watched the Air India Inquiry go into sudden recess because key witnesses had refused to appear and testify. The startling reason they gave was that they were afraid for their lives and for the lives of their families. To many that sounded like nonsense and we were disappointed that they could not trust in the abilities of the RCMP and the Vancouver Police to serve and protect. Today we know that they were smart not to testify, and they must never testify. In fact it seems that someone (a journalist?) must have leaked word to the victim families that the Prime Minister of Canada was about to send a message to Vancouver making peace with the Sikh terrorists. They seem to have had some sort of advanced notice. The evidence is in today's Vancouver SUN.

In a stunning capitulation to criminal violence, Tory politician Stephen Harper yesterday bowed down to his political masters in British Columbia, and informed the Sikh community that there will be no prosecution of the terror bombers who blew up the Air India 747 twenty-two years ago. Yesterday he invited a staffer at the SUN into his healing circle, and sat for a prearranged interview. What a betrayal of the justice system!

Harper said: "The reality is we will probably never see justice truly done in the sense of people being held responsible for
these actions and we may not know everything that we should know, but I think through the inquiry process, we will learn everything that there still is to be learned and that that will hopefully provide not only some measure of comfort..."

Of course what Harper is really seeking is not a healing process but to build electoral support among the Sikhs of the Lower Mainland, among whom his Tory party is still mocked and disdained. By throwing in the towel and capitulating to political terror, (and to the racist editorial writers in the Punjabi English language newspapers) Harper is signaling that he is actively seeking Sikh candidates for the next federal election, and that he will give them priority status in his government. The "healing process" will of course include a few Sikh cabinet ministers if they deliver the electoral boost the Harperites need in urban B.C.

Harper's government has been holding terrorism in check only because our Intelligence is good and the first wave of Muslim conspirators have been T-shirt terrorists... loud mouths who boast of actions they are largely incapable of committing. When the man-pack claymores start going off in Eaton Centre, the Go-Trains start melting, and the Canadian Forces recruiting centres get shot up, lets see how tough our hapless PM looks wearing an ill fitting pair of six-guns. I for one won't be impressed by the contingency-rhetoric his handlers are already stuffing into his three ring briefing binder.

"Don't bother."

Tory, Tory Pants on Fire

Gordon Smith - truth teller

Wow, what an interesting month April was! On every front imaginable - Science, Literature, Military Affairs, Politics, Technology, Law Enforcement, Education, you name it… there were wonderful developments. Too bad I was so busy with other projects that I couldn’t spare more time for Blog articles. Regrets... there are a few.

Terrorism Investigation was Sabotaged

And what do we find in this morning’s fish basket? The Commission of Inquiry into the [Sabotaged] Investigation of the Bombing of Air India Flight 182, yesterday heard from an aging ex-Tory bureaucrat who attempted to heap scorn on the bombshell revelation offered last week from James Bartleman, Ontario’s Lt. Governor. Bartleman recall, testified that he was riffling through a 100 page daily stack of electronic intercepts prepared by Canada’s super-secret monitoring agency, the CSE, when one transcript seized his attention.
It was very specific about a threat to an AIR INDIA flight originating in Canada. As there was a top level meeting underway in the building of an ad hoc task force specifically assembled to deal with Sikh terrorism (CSIS, RCMP, External Affairs and Solicitor General) Bartleman ran down the hall with the document in hand to share it with the players. The RCMP careerist he handed it too wasn’t thrilled to see him. Let’s refresh our memory of how Bartleman’s recollection was reported in the press last week.

1) “Bartleman told the inquiry he took the classified document, an electronic intercept, and showed it to an RCMP officer who "hissed" at him that of course the RCMP had seen the report and taken appropriate action. Within five minutes of seeing that document, I was showing it by hand, to a senior RCMP officer in a position to take action.”

2) “The man flushed and, according to Mr. Bartleman, replied that "of course" he had seen it and he didn't need to be told how to do his job. Believing the matter to be in hand, Mr. Bartleman returned to his office.” He added that he had embarrassed at the time, because he had never in his career in public service been spoken to like that.

3)“He asked a senior Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, whose identity he cannot recall, if he was aware of the threat. His reaction startled me. He flushed and told me that, of course he had seen it, and that he didn't need me to tell him how to do his job."

4) Asked at a news conference why he had offered to testify, Bartleman said: "I thought that as I was director general of intelligence analysis and security at the time of the terrible event, I believed I could be of assistance to the inquiry. …I thought it was my civic duty to tell the commission what I knew, whatever the consequence." It was!

Now here is where the basket starts to smell. Yesterday Mr. Gordon Smith, now a university lecturer, did his utmost to discredit Bartleman’s testimony. "I think it's possible ... that he has conflated several events and run them together and his memory in that sense is playing tricks on him." More astonishing, he implied inaction on Bartleman’s part! "I would have thought he would have come forward immediately," Smith said of Bartleman. "That would have been a very relevant piece of information for a lot of us to have." Is this guy for real??

Is there any thinking person in this country who doesn’t understand what happened following the terrorist bombing in 1985 which massacred people? The careerist in Law Enforcement, Intelligence and assorted bureaucracies weighed the value of a genuine, balls to the wall investigation – against their pension points, and selfishness won out.
Yesterday the head of this Inquiry, Supreme Court Justice John Major, stated the obvious. Gordon Smith had been bought in to discredit his old “friend” Bartleman. Major noted the government is losing control of the official story line is making an “effort to discredit Mr. Bartleman”. Smith, predictably, stepped outside the hearing room to express his outrage that his rendition of events is not believed. Boo Hoo!

I am reminded of another man named Major who investigated the case. Bernard Major, a former Scotland Yard detective, investigated the case for the insurance adjusters on the case. His views were reported in the Vancouver SUN in 1994 – “Police failed to act on Bomb Tip, prober says”. I’m also reminded of a PROVINCE story around that time which revealed that RCMP officers had shredded transcripts and tapes of thousands of wiretaps, before giving carefully weeded material over to investigators. So determined were they to destroy the evidence of what they overheard Sikh terrorists discussing that they pulled hard drives from computers which contained transcripts, took them into the RCMP garage on Heather Street and busted them up with metal grinders.

Truth is dead in this country. As dead as the 327 bombing victims of flight 182. This photo shows the wreckage of the Air India 747 jumbo on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. This picture doesn't lie but everyone with a tongue in their mouth has.

BREACH - A Psychological Thriller - and a Parliamentary Melodrama in Ottawa

Bramptom M.P. Bains with former Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin

I live in a city where nearly every person of social consequence has a multiple identity, be they office holders, natural born celebrities or one of the legion of networking wannabes. It is not merely that so many individuals here are “on the make” or “on the take,” ever conscious of the need to cover their tracks. Add to these a few hundred thousand Vancouverites who have widely divergent identities, able to slip easily back and forth between their particular ethnic enclaves into the so-called “mainstream” community. That complicating reality has contributed much to the failure of Canadian law enforcement to succeed in prosecuting the Air India terrorists. Every suspect, every witness, and certainly a whole generation of politicians, (civic-provincial-federal), who exploited the AIR INDIA case for electoral gain... all have multiple identities.

Last year I did some valuable reading on the problem which mass scale multiple-identity phenomenon poses to law enforcement in North America. Elizabeth Loftus in EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY (Harvard 1979) makes it very clear that people are very poor at making “cross-racial identification” and that a whole battery of cultural assumptions throw off the accuracy of sworn testimony in court. Here in Vancouver we solved that problem by dispensing with a jury, letting one magistrate sit in judgement of police evidence. The accused went free.

Even more important is that we, as active viewers, inject so much of our own prejudice or faulty logic into what we observe people doing around us. Consequently we often create substance where it did not exist. Cooper & Redlinger remind us of that fact in their book CATCHING SPIES (Bantam 1990). "Is not identity, then, in the last resort, a fiction at least, a social construction at best, based upon different sets of assumptions? However rigorous our procedures and investigations, regardless of the tests we apply, acceptance rests on an act of faith.”

These two realities about identity and eyewitness testimony are what sprang to mind this morning when I read Kim Bolan’s latest investigative piece in the VANCOUVER SUN. She discusses the background of Navdeep Singh Bains, an M.P. from Brampton, whose father-in-law, Darshan Singh Saini, seems to have material knowledge which would assist the police in pursuing the investigation of Sikh militants involved in terrorism in British Columbia. Will Darshan Saini testify? He is quoted by Bolan as responding with "If they call me, I will see. I don't know about that," he said. "It is not that I hide anything. If something comes up again, that is that." It sounds like Saini will be a perfectly atrocious witness. I read a few minutes ago that our Prime Minister referred to Bolan’s article in the House of Commons this afternoon. We shall see if the story has legs. The Liberals were looking to cover their tracks as they fled from the debate on Anti-Terrorism provisions. They will now torture us with their childish rhetoric.

Also this morning, I read a wonderful response to the new Universal movie BREACH, written yesterday by Ron Rosenbaum for his Blog. http://ronrosenbaum.pajamasmedia.com/

Actor Chris Cooper plays renegade FBI agent Robert Hannsen in BREACH

BREACH explores the craft and craftiness of Robert Hannsen, former FBI counter-intelligence officer who betrayed his country to the Soviets. The role of Hannsen is brilliantly played by veteran actor Chris Cooper. (I’ve been a grinning Cooper fan since the 80’s, so getting out to see BREACH is on my list.) Ron Rosenbaum is an old-hand at espionage (non-fiction and fictional) and he uses a comparison with the new Matt Damon flic THE GOOD SHEPHERD, to make his point.

“Let me begin the comparison between Matt Damon in and Chris Cooper in by saying I admire reticence in film acting when it’s done well. But there’s reticence and there’s reticence.
The reticence of Matt Damon, an actor I ordinarily admire, in was virtually catatonic. He was supposedly playing a buttoned up WASP based mainly on James Angleton the legendary CIA counter-spy. But if that was the intent he was playing the wrong stereotype. Angleton was no pure WASP silent type. He was half-Mexican and there was a Latin and Latinate flair to his rhetoric. Damon played Angleton as if he were Rainman.
Meanwhile Chris Cooper in Breach: wow, what a treat to see someone at least play at underplaying in a film. The guy is really convincing in conveying the mixed motives, or the incoherency (something slightly different from mixed) of his motives. Someone who doesn’t even fathom his own profound split and masks his incomprehension in reticence as he methodically goes about selling the most super-sensitive U.S. spy secrets to the Soviet Union. Selling out the lives of our agents in the KGB. For cash, not conviction.
It offers us something that we rarely see in films: non transparency. Someone who is not clear even to himself. Someone who is an apparently sincere devout Catholic who becomes a traitor for…merely money? For ego? So that he “matters”. He is essentially a multiple murderer; the information that he passed to the Soviets led to at least three deaths perhaps many more. And yet he goes about his business grimly but methodically. It’s haunting, chilling. In a way he reminds one of the kidnapper/murderer in the original Dutch version of The Vanishing. We don’t understand him because he doesn’t understand himself, and this is what touches on a nerve and makes the performance great.
So many film roles over-explain their characters. Make everything transparent. That’s why a performance that renders a character fascinating but opaque, a mystery to him and us is so rare and so riveting to watch. The most difficult espionage is our attempt to spy on ourselves. It’s not always successful, but it’s fascinating to watch. “

I hope I don’t get roasted for quoting almost the entire Rosenbaum piece. It’s just so useful intact that I could not cut it down. I dare not quote at length from Bolan's piece, but suffice it to say that she is the most courageous reporter working in Canada. Hers is the only testimony I can trust. I can think of several men who would kill her tonight, if they thought they had a chance of pulling it off. This is a dangerous city, and the mountains make a lovely backdrop to the cemeteries. It's an unhappy boast that I have actually met many people in Vancouver who fit the Hanssen profile – rotten and ruthless, and who never troube to question their motives or instincts. They seem to assume that everyone else is hearing the same voices or perhaps think we are suckers for not joining them at the table. I have a creepy feeling that BREACH is going to leave me sitting in a cold sweat. That’s what evil does.

WHY IS MAHER ARAR TORTURING US?

Before dawn today I checked my three favorite news aggregate sites. Bourque.com knows how to provoke we bleary-eyed morning readers. "Jackpot Day For Arar" was a taunt. I used the hot link to jump to the story. I dreaded this day, but now it's come. Today we learn that the feds are going to give Maher Arar $12.5 million bucks! This is the fellow who was initially demanding $437 million from the Canadian taxpayers because CSIS provided U.S. anti-terror agencies with their Arar investigation file;
this lead to his "rendition" (a form of legal extradition) to his place of birth - Syria. Recall that an American federal court dismissed Arar's suit against the U.S. government last February. We're made of softer stuff, aren't we?
I lost what little sympathy I had for Arar and his family, when his wife used their massive publicity for political gain. She joined the NDP and tried to win a Parliamentary seat in the 2004 National election. They were playing our generosity and our system against us, and have no intention of ever stopping.
I have never believed Arar's story about being "tortured" for ten months. He isn't missing any teeth or fingernails. He doesn't stutter. He doesn't claim to have been buggered. Whatever the trauma, it left no evidence. I'm no expert on torture mind you, but I've read up on it. You can get someone
to "talk" in two minutes flat if they have information that is vital to you. For example, take the old Soviet Spetsnaz method. You want to get a Mujihadin to gush? Just pull a rat tail metal file out of your boot and run it once across the top of his teeth, exposing all the nerves. Resistance as they say, is futile.
Arar deserted his homeland at age 17, to avoid compulsory military service.
If the Syrian's had a grudge about that, it's not Canada's fault. I have never before expressed my opinion on this case, but I did attempt to once. That was on September 23, 2006 when I sent a letter to the Toronto SUN. It was my response to a piece written by one of their columnists, which challenged Arar's assertions about being tortured in his native Syria. The U.S. believes Arar is at minimum, a terrorist sympathizer, and keeps him on the Watch List. My letter was never published in the SUN. I guess the Orwellian power of editorial filtering is one reasion that Blogging has been made available to us. My short letter read in full:

"Thanks to Peter Worthington we have a dissenting view on Arar... at last!
"Why would Syria Torture Arar?" Exactly. And before the anointed begin to shovel our cash into the "victims" prize bag, let us as force him to answer just one skill testing question, on camera. (He likes cameras. Great teeth.) But force in some tricky Canadian way. For gawd sake don't hurt him! Mr. Arar, Sir, answer only "Yes it does" or "No it does not" to the question "Do Israel and the Israeli people have the right to exist?" If he answers "No it does not," put him back on the list. Immediately."

I haven't changed my mind. I don't think becoming a millionaire is going to shut this guy up, and as a taxpayer I resent it. Hell, for $10 million you can cut my balls off. I already have kids, and I don't need my nuts to type with. Just supposing for a minute Arar was tortured. Does that give him the right to turn around and put the boots to us? He thinks so. See, he's smiling!
_______________________________
Update: February 24, 2007 - Yesterday there was a meeting in Ottawa of the Prosperity and Security Partnership, a tri-lateral commission which fosters cooperation between Canada, Mexico and the U.S.A. Peter Mackay, M.P. said that Canada has "exonerated" Maher Arar. The response of Condolezza Rice, the U.S. Secretary of State was that Arar stays on the U.S. security Watch List. "The United States, of course, makes decisions based on information that we have and based on our own assessment of the situation." The Mexican Foreign Minister concurred. Mackay has nothing to fear from the Canadian public. If we cannot put the Sikh terror bombers behind bars, what does one pipsqueak anti-Semite matter?