Gray Lady Shines a Little Light on the Deep State

Two stories over the last two days show the ease with which the Gray Lady can illuminate the Deep State rumbling beneath our tattered democracy when she so chooses.

Today Ron Nixon has an informative expose, "Report Reveals Wider Tracking of Mail in U.S.,"
on the hoary practice of mass surveillance by the United States Postal Service. There were 50,000 requests to secretly record the information on the outside of the envelope, a surveillance program called mail covers, in 2013 alone. This information was the result of USPS audit posted without fanfare, in the spirit of Poe's "The Purloined Letter," on the Office of the Inspector General, United States Postal Service web site at the end of last May.

What makes the USPS mail covers surveillance program noteworthy is that seemingly anybody can request one, from a county sheriff to Mephistopheles himself, the National Security Agency; the request does not have to be made for national security reasons, as Nixon explains:

The mail cover surveillance requests cut across all levels of government — from global intelligence investigations by the United States Army Criminal Investigations Command, which requested 500 mail covers from 2001 through 2012, to state-level criminal inquiries by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which requested 69 mail covers in the same period. The Department of Veterans Affairs requested 305, and the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security asked for 256. The information was provided to The Times under the Freedom of Information request.

Postal officials did not say how many requests came from agencies in charge of national security — including the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection — because release of the information, wrote Kimberly Williams, a public records analyst for the Postal Inspection Service, “would reveal techniques and procedures for law enforcement or prosecutions.”

Defense lawyers say the secrecy concerning the surveillance makes it hard to track abuses in the program because most people are not aware they are being monitored. But there have been a few cases in which the program appears to have been abused by law enforcement officials.

Particularly interesting is how postal surveillance was used by anti-immigrant politician Sheriff Joe Arpaio to harass a political opponent:

In Arizona in 2011, Mary Rose Wilcox, a Maricopa County supervisor, discovered that her mail was being monitored by the county’s sheriff, Joe Arpaio. Ms. Wilcox had been a frequent critic of Mr. Arpaio, objecting to what she considered the targeting of Hispanics in his immigration sweeps. 

The Postal Service had granted an earlier request from Mr. Arpaio and Andrew Thomas, who was then the county attorney, to track Ms. Wilcox’s personal and business mail. 

Using information gleaned from letters and packages sent to Ms. Wilcox and her husband, Mr. Arpaio and Mr. Thomas obtained warrants for banking and other information about two restaurants the couple owned. The sheriff’s office also raided a company that hired Ms. Wilcox to provide concessions at the local airport.

“We lost the contract we had for the concession at the airport, and the investigation into our business scared people away from our restaurants,” Ms. Wilcox said in an interview. “I don’t blame the Postal Service, but you shouldn’t be able to just use these mail covers to go on a fishing expedition. There needs to be more control.” 

She sued the county, was awarded nearly $1 million in a settlement in 2011 and received the money this June when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling. Mr. Thomas, the former county attorney, was disbarred for his role in investigations into the business dealings of Ms. Wilcox and other officials and for other unprofessional conduct. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office declined to comment on Mr. Arpaio’s use of mail covers in the investigation of Ms. Wilcox. 

In another instance, Cynthia Orr, a defense lawyer in San Antonio, recalled that while working on a pornography case in the early 2000s, federal prosecutors used mail covers to track communications between her team of lawyers and a client who was facing obscenity and tax evasion charges. Ms. Orr complained to prosecutors but never learned if the tracking stopped. Her team lost the case. 

“The troubling part is that they don’t have to report the use of this tool to anyone,” Ms. Orr said in an interview. The Postal Service declined to comment on the case. 

Frank Askin, a law professor at the Rutgers Constitutional Rights Clinic, who as a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union successfully sued the F.B.I. nearly 40 years ago after the agency monitored the mail of a 15-year-old New Jersey student, said he was concerned about the oversight of the current program. 

“Postal Service employees are not judicial officers schooled in the meaning of the First Amendment,” Mr. Askin said.

Besides mass postal surveillance another hoary aspect of the Deep State trotted out by the Gray Lady for a jog in the national consciousness was Eric Lichtblau's "In Cold War, U.S. Spy Agencies Used 1,000 Nazis." This of course has been the stuff of well-researched books, Hollywood movies and comic books for decades, so much so that it is taken for granted by most citizens, but it is nice to see the "newspaper of record" weigh in with confirmation.

Lichtblau opens his story by framing the U.S.-Nazi collaboration as a memento of the Cold War:

WASHINGTON — In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show. 

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich. 

The agency hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of “minor war crimes.” 

And in 1994, a lawyer with the C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, according to a government official.

That CIA spy, Aleksandras Lileikis, according to Lichtblau, was implicated in

[T]he machine-gun massacres of 60,000 Jews in Lithuania. He worked "under the control of the Gestapo during the war," his C.I.A. file noted, and 'was possibly connected with the shooting of Jews in Vilna.” 

Even so, the agency hired him in 1952 as a spy in East Germany — paying him $1,700 a year, plus two cartons of cigarettes a month — and cleared the way for him to immigrate to America four years later, records show. 

Mr. Lileikis lived quietly for nearly 40 years, until prosecutors discovered his Nazi past and prepared to seek his deportation in 1994. 

When C.I.A. officials learned of the plans, a lawyer there called Eli Rosenbaum at the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit and told him “you can’t file this case,” Mr. Rosenbaum said in an interview. The agency did not want to risk divulging classified records about its ex-spy, he said. 

Mr. Rosenbaum said he and the C.I.A. reached an understanding: If the agency was forced to turn over objectionable records, prosecutors would drop the case first. (That did not happen, and Mr. Lileikis was ultimately deported.) 

The C.I.A. also hid what it knew of Mr. Lileikis’s past from lawmakers. 

In a classified memo to the House Intelligence Committee in 1995, the agency acknowledged using him as a spy but made no mention of the records linking him to mass murders. “There is no evidence,” the C.I.A. wrote, “that this Agency was aware of his wartime activities.”

There it all is, sort of the grand prize of Deep State skullduggery -- shielding a genocidal Nazi asset from prosecution and lying to Congress.

Lichtblau also tells the story of how the CIA employed and protected the SS official, Otto von Bolschwing, who mentored Adolf Eichmann:

One SS officer, Otto von Bolschwing, was a mentor and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, architect of the “Final Solution,” and wrote policy papers on how to terrorize Jews. 

Yet after the war, the C.I.A. not only hired him as a spy in Europe, but relocated him and his family to New York City in 1954, records show. The move was seen as a “a reward for his loyal postwar service and in view of the innocuousness of his [Nazi] party activities,” the agency wrote.

Though Lichtblau's story is tainted by framing the CIA-Nazi collaboration as a thing of the past, a "boys will boys" historical curio of the Cold War, what shines through is an account of "invisible" government, the CIA and FBI, addicted to criminality and murder.  As Lichtblau says,

Evidence of the government’s links to Nazi spies began emerging publicly in the 1970s. But thousands of records from declassified files, Freedom of Information Act requests and other sources, together with interviews with scores of current and former government officials, show that the government’s recruitment of Nazis ran far deeper than previously known and that officials sought to conceal those ties for at least a half-century after the war.

Lichtblau could have drawn the government's recruitment of Nazis right up to now and what is going on in Ukraine where the U.S. worked with neo-Nazis to stage a Kiev putsch in February, setting that country on a course for civil war. We are now experiencing a New Cold War with Russia.

Institutions are organic. They have a memory. Old habits die hard, particularly when elected officials do nothing to change the offending behavior.

Hopefully now after the failed Obama presidency there is a greater appreciation of the inviolability of the Deep State. We can elect supposedly transformational popular leaders in landslide elections and nothing will change. You know the scorecard: Guantanamo Bay remains opens, domestic oil and gas consumption and extraction is soaring, U.S. troops are bombing Iraq, the entire planet is under surveillance.

Where we go from here -- Hillary vs. Jeb? -- is hard to imagine.