Newsweek blows lid off American 60,000-person strong “secret army”

 

An intensive two-year investigation by Newsweek that involved 600 resumes and 1,000 job postings, dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests, and scores of interviews with participants and defense decision-makers, discovered that the American military is running a massive 60,000-person strong secret army, many working under masked identities and in low profile, but all part of a broad program called “signature reduction.” According to Newsweek, Congress has never even held a hearing on the subject despite this secret army challenging U.S. laws, the Geneva Conventions, the code of military conduct and basic accountability.

The report discovered that as part of this secret operation, so-called “shadow warriors” operate globally, including in Pakistan and West Africa, but even behind enemy lines in North Korea and Iran. Newsweek described their actions as “nefarious operations [that] the United States decries when Russian and Chinese spies do the same.”

This is a significant shift in narrative. Traditionally Western media portrayed the U.S. as an innocent victim of overseas espionage emanating mostly from Russia and China. Despite the mountains of evidence that existed before this report, this is a rare public acknowledgement that the U.S. has secret operations being performed on a massive scale.

U.S. spying methods are so advanced that there are even various biometrics defeat systems used in the fake passports of these American operatives, some physical and some electronic. One such program, "Vault 7", was exposed by Wikileaks in early 2017 and revealed over 8,000 classified CIA tools used in the covert world of electronic spying and hacking, called ExpressLane. U.S. intelligence embeds malware into foreign biometrics and watchlist systems, allowing American cyber spies to steal foreign data.

One coder working for Wikileaks in Berlin, hesitant to use his real name because of fear of indictment to the U.S., explained that: “Imagine for a moment that someone is going through passport control. NSA or the CIA is tasked to corrupt – change - the data on the day the covert asset goes through. And then switch it back. It's not impossible.”  (more...)

Newsweek blows lid off American 60,000-person strong “secret army”

Background:

Exclusive: Inside the Military's Secret Undercover Army