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The New York Sun's Eli Lake reports today that the private intelligence group that had penetrated Al Qaeda's intranet -- and yes, the terrorist group has an intranet, named Obelisk -- is accusing the Bush administration of leaking the video they sent it and thereby compromising one of America's clearest views into the heart of terrorist organizing:
Al Qaeda's Internet communications system has suddenly gone dark to American intelligence after the leak of Osama bin Laden's September 11 speech inadvertently disclosed the fact that we had penetrated the enemy's system.The intelligence blunder started with what appeared at the time as an American intelligence victory, namely that the federal government had intercepted, a full four days before it was to be aired, a video of Osama bin Laden's first appearance in three years in a video address marking the sixth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001.The video was aired on television stations on Sept. 7, tipping off the terrorists. But the group that had penetrated the network and provided it to the government says it was the government that leaked the video to the press, tipping off the Al Qaeda forces that their network had been penetrated.
The head of the SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that monitors Jihadi Web sites and provides information to subscribers, Rita Katz, said she personally provided the video on September 7 to the deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter.Ms. Katz yesterday said, "We shared a copy of the transcript and the video with the U.S. government, to Michael Leiter, with the request specifically that it was important to keep the subject secret. Then the video was leaked out. An investigation into who downloaded the video from our server indicated that several computers with IP addresses were registered to government agencies."Yesterday a spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center, Carl Kropf, denied the accusation that it was responsible for the leak. "That's just absolutely wrong. The allegation and the accusation that we did that is unfounded," he said. The spokesman for the director of national intelligence, Ross Feinstein, yesterday also denied the leak allegation. "The intelligence community and the ODNI senior leadership did not leak this video to the media," he said.Ms. Katz said, "The government leak damaged our investigation into Al Qaeda's network. Techniques and sources that took years to develop became ineffective. As a result of the leak Al Qaeda changed their methods."Just how important was this window into Al Qaeda? Well, there are two basic ways in which the group communicates: through couriers and online. The courier method, which is how Al Qaeda tapes are generally delivered to the media, has geographic contraints, and, like any chain of secret communications, is only as strong as the weakest human link. The other method involves the now-compromised Obelisk network.
Obelisk is a series of sites all over the Web, often with fake names, in some cases sites that are not even known by their proprietors to have been hacked by Al Qaeda.One intelligence officer who requested anonymity said in an interview last week that the intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system. America's Obelisk watchers even saw the order to shut down the system delivered from Qaeda's internal security to a team of technical workers in Malaysia. That was the last internal message America's intelligence community saw. "We saw the whole thing shut down because of this leak," the official said. "We lost an important keyhole into the enemy."The disposition of the video provided to the National Counterterrorism Center would seem to be a fit matter for congressional oversight. I can hardly think of a bigger scandal than compromising America's security by leaking a terrorist video to the press for propaganda purposes in advance of Sept. 11, and the serious charges now being leveled at the Center deserve a factual assesment by an institution with subpoena power.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
