President Goofy's Talk with Putin About "Magic Mountain"

NSA's overriding interest in a Soviet-era underground mountain complex apparently caught the interest of George W. Bush. In a closed zone near the city of Mezhgorye in the Russian Republic of Bashkortostan, north of the Kazakhstan border, is a huge underground facility embedded deep within Yamantau Mountain in the Urals Range. Yamantau is Bashkir for "Evil Mountain." What amazes NSA is the absence of noticeable telecommunications support facilities for the complex, believed to be an alternate "doomsday" command center for the Russian government and military in the event of a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack. Costing over $7 billion, the complex is supported by 60,000 workers who live in the nearby towns of Beloretsk and Tirlyanskiy.

The Yamantau Mountain Complex covers an area of some 400 square miles. Construction of the mammoth facility began during the 1970s and the Leonid Brezhnev administration. To maintain operational security and prevent future leaks, the Soviets hired workers from different parts of the USSR to perform individual tasks.

The neoconservatives in the Bush administration and Congress, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, UN ambassador nominee John Bolton, and Representatives Curt Weldon (R-PA) and Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), have been pressuring the NSA and other intelligence agencies to come up with the goods on Yamantau. Wasting precious resources that could be used to combat terrorism, the intelligence agencies have been ordered to make Yamantau a top priority. The secrecy of the complex's telecommunications methods has resulted in NSA coming up empty-handed.

For reasons of communications security, NSA routinely listens in on the communications of executive branch officials, including, at times, the president and the vice president. In a conversation between Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin, NSA operators overheard Bush asking in a rather inane manner, "You have a Yamantau, too?" Bush added, "It's like our 'Rock'?"

The "Rock" is a reference to the Joint Alternate Communications Center, or "Site R," bored into Raven Rock Mountain just across the Maryland border in Pennsylvania, near the town of Waynesboro. It is an underground alternate national command center constructed during the Cold War and the famous "secret undisclosed location" where Vice President Cheney is often transported during states of alert. Unlike Yamantau, Raven Rock is surrounded by a number of tell tale signs that it is a military-critical facility—satellite parabolic dishes, microwave towers, and various antennas sprout from the side of the mountain.

Apparently, Bush got nothing about Yamantau in his phone conversation with Putin, who is a former KGB officer.

Anyone "Butt" Him

Another prime NSA target is the Moscow-based Russian arms trafficker and human rights pariah Viktor Bout. Bout, pronounced "butt," has a long record of flying arms and various terrorist and mercenary ne'er-do- wells from one killing zone to another.

Bout, who has mysterious air cargo companies based in places as far a field as Burkina Faso, Sharjah, Ajman, and Ras al Khaima in the United Arab Emirates, Miami, Dallas, Swaziland, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gibraltar, Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, Uganda, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Central African Republic, Belgium, Gambia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and, under contract to U.S. forces, Iraq, has long been sought by the international community for being involved in busting United Nations arms sanctions in places like Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo, and Afghanistan.

Bout's clients have included Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, the Philippine Muslim extremist Abu Sayyaf Group, the Taliban government of Afghanistan, the Afghan Northern Alliance, Sierra Leone's brutal Revolutionary United Front guerrillas (who chopped off the hands and legs of children and other innocent civilians), and Zaire's dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

During the last year of the Clinton administration, Viktor Bout was a number one SIGINT target for NSA. However, after Condoleezza Rice took over as National Security Adviser under Bush, she issued a change in orders on Bout. "Look and listen but don't touch" was the new policy. Ever since, Bout has flouted INTERPOL and Belgian and French arrest warrants.

Although the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Bout's companies on April 26, 2005, and froze his corporate assets, one of Bout's airlines, Irbis, continued to operate from a U.S.-controlled airbase in northern Iraq.

Other Bout companies, which use a fleet of aging Soviet-era military cargo planes, are contracted to a network of seedy multinational private military contractors operating in Iraq. Bout's global enterprises closely intersect with the diamond, white slave trade, arms, and other illicit activities of Israel's Russian Mafia, made up of some 80 Russian and Ukrainian Jewish billionaires and millionaires who have escaped to Israel to avoid prosecution in and extradition to Russia and other countries. Considering the close association between leading neoconservatives like Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to fugitive Marc Rich, who is linked to the crime syndicates in Israel, a reason for Rice's diktat, "Look and listen but don't touch," with regard to Bout, becomes abundantly clear.

Suicide is Painless and Common

The U.S. intelligence community has suffered a spate of mysterious and surprising suicides since the onset of the Iraq war. State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research Iraq analyst John J. Kokal, former CIA officer Dr. Gus Weiss, and Washington's politically and diplomatically connected lobbyist Edward von Kloberg, who once counted Saddam Hussein among his clients, all jumped from the tops of buildings or out of window between November 2003 and May 2005. In addition, CIA officer Ben Miller was told to jump out of an open window at the National Security Council by Iran-contra felon Elliot Abrams, who is now an assistant national security advisor. In 2001, prior to the September 11 attacks, the DIA suffered a suicide in its Asia Area of Responsibility (AOR) unit.

NSA has apparently been no exception to the suicide epidemic. Before his departure from NSA to serve as Negroponte's deputy, Hayden sent a letter to all NSA employees in which he urged everyone to recognize "stress factors" at work. The letter also described the grief of losing a member of the NSA family from stress. NSA employees took the letter as an indication that there had been a recent suicide among the NSA ranks but no mention was made of the individual's identity. In fact, NSA insiders confirmed that an experienced NSA employee did commit suicide but the identity of the person remains a secret. In another mysterious case, a U.S. Air Force officer working clandestine SIGINT operations for NSA turned up missing with only a suicide note found.

NSAers are uniform in the way they describe Hayden and his team's tenure. The NSA is much worse now than it was seven years ago. Critical functions are being dispersed to incompetent contractors and distant military bases. Morale has plummeted to an all time low. Retired NSA veterans are hopping mad about what has become of their agency. What the neoconservatives and their ilk are doing to America's intelligence, military, economic, and foreign policy infrastructures is nothing more than treasonous. And in what will amount to the greatest demonstration of the law of unintended consequences, the damage done to NSA by Hayden and his neoconservative superiors will result in more and greater intelligence disclosures that will shine a bright light on the behind-the-scenes machinations of the Bush administration and may, hopefully, drive a final nail in the coffin of neoconservative politics.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington-based journalist and nationally distributed columnist. He served at the National Security Agency during the Reagan administration.

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