James Bamford, the NRO, and 9/11
ÒThe big motion covers the little motion.Ó ThatÕs how the magicians put it when
theyÕre among themselves, explaining how the audience is misdirected from what
is actually happening on the stage.
ItÕs where the Òlittle motionÓ is that the really important things are going
on. These days it seems that all we
hear about among the governmentÕs clandestine organizations is the National
Security Agency, the NSA. At the
other end of the spook spectrum, we hear next to nothing about the massive
super-secret National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Might that fact not suggest, considering
the magiciansÕ dictum, that we ought to be directing
our attention toward the NRO if we want to know where the really important
action is?
The NRO did make the news in 2002. Roughly a year after the event, it came
to light that they had been planning to conduct a drill on September 11, 2001, at
their headquarters in Chantilly, Virginia, near Dulles Airport that was eerily
similar to what actually took place in New York City at almost exactly the same
time. In the drill, an
airplane from Dulles Airport was to have been ÒflownÓ into one of the buildings
of the NRO complex. When the actual incident happened, the drill was canceled,
but nearly all the NRO employees were sent home for the day. According to Christopher Bollyn writing for the American Free Press, the story
of the drill disappeared from most national news organsÕ websites shortly after
it appeared.
Something else of importance occurred at that
NRO headquarters building some eight years before, on November 6, 1993, even
before the building was open for business.
Young security guard Tina Ricca was mysteriously murdered. The murder has not been solved to this
day. That incident interested the
mainstream press even less than did the strange coincidence of the NRO drill on
9/11. After all, the story still
believed by everyone at that time was that the new buildings—as announced
by signs by the property—were the property of the Rockwell International Corporation,
a major military contractor. Only a
year later did it come to light that, in fact, the buildings were the new
headquarters of the top secret NRO.
At that point, one would have thought that a re-examination of the Ricca
murder was in order. As it
happened, the only re-examination appeared in a short article in a local free
weekly newspaper, the CentreView,
which has since gone out of business:
The Tina Ricca Murder
by Bonnie Hobbs. excerpted from the CentreView (Centreville, Va.) 8/11/94
Right from
the start, said John Ricca, the investigation into his daughter's Nov. 6 murder
at the construction site of the Rockwell International building
in Westfields was "shrouded in
secrecy."
He received
little information about how she died and nine months after her murder the
police have still not found her killer.
Now, says
Ricca, it all makes sense.
It was
revealed this week that the Rockwell site where his daughter Tina worked as a
security guard was actually a front for the headquarters of the
super-secret
National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The CIA and the Defense Department
jointly oversee the NRO—which manages America's spy satellites—and
its existence was kept top secret until two years ago.
On Monday,
President Clinton declassified the NRO headquarters' existence, after many
senators complained no one had told them of the project's
magnitude and
cost. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was upset to discover the
building was estimated to cost $350 million—nearly twice what they'd been
told it would.
Ricca has
little sympathy for them, saying they "only lost money—I lost a
daughter."
Fairfax
County Police Lt. Dennis Wilson with the homicide squad said Ricca's body was found in a temporary construction trailer
not part of the NRO
complex. He said police didn't know then that the
complex was anything but a Rockwell facility, but said that fact has no bearing
on the investigation.
But to
Ricca, of Falls Church, it does have bearing, and "makes it even more
believable why things have gone the way they have. It's making more sense by
the minute why I haven't gotten any information."
Tina Ricca,
27, was employed as a security guard by Vance International of Oakton and had
worked at the Rockwell site on Chantilly's Lee Road almost two years. She'd
just been offered a job by Rockwell in Australia and was looking forward to
beginning it.
She'd
already finished her own eight-hour shift and was filling in for a co-worker
away on National Guard duty when her life was ended by a
bullet to the upper part of her body.
Police
decline to reveal the type or caliber of weapon used or specify exactly where
she was shot. But she wasn't wearing the bullet proof vest she usually
wore,
and both her gun and radio were missing.
Police have
not ascribed a motive for her murder, but the ClA's
involvement in the building, Ricca said, brings possible scenarios to mind.
Perhaps, he
said, his daughter saw something she shouldn't have. It also
might explain, he said, why there was an approximately 2 1/2-hour gap between
the time she
was shot and the time Vance
reported it.
"It
gave the CIA plenty of time to destroy whatever evidence there was before the
police got on the scene," said Ricca.
CIA
spokeswoman Suzanne Wheeler Klein said Wednesday,
"We don't have any information and don't have any comment on
it."
There's also
a question whether the FBI was involved in the murder investigation. Although
FBI officials have denied they're a part of it, Ricca said he understands the
FBI was on the scene before the police and later questioned some possible
suspects. After the murder, he said, both the police and Vance had difficulty
getting into the site.
If you've
got the CIA and a real top-secret thing like the NRO," he said, "why
in the world did they have one guard out there? There was only one guard
on
duty besides her, and there was supposed to be four. They should have had
more." He also plans to contact the Senate, Congress and President Clinton,
but doubts if, ultimately it'll get him
anywhere.
Ricca said
"If [the CIA] doesn't want Congress and the Ways and Means Committee to
know what happened," he said, "they're surely not going to
tell
me─especially if they're involved
in it."
Although
police are saying the slain guardÕs body was found in a construction trailer,
Ricca said they told him she was actually found in a blue, modular
building.
If she was in the trailer, he said, the other guard would have been with her.
He also said
the room she was in had working computers in it, and he believes, "at the
very minimum, those computers contained the drawings of the building, and that
was top secret." Yet, he said, police told him when the FBI let them in,
there was nothing on the computers.
To get
through each day, he focuses on his job (ironically, he's a general manager for
a construction company that's a prime contractor to the federal government)É.
The building
complex, by the way, has a quite high, secure fence around it. It
would
not have been easy for an intruder to make it in over the fence. The evidence that it was an inside job
is simply overwhelming.
Living in
the CentreView reading area, I was one of those people
who had seen the article, but at that point I was not even online and there was
little I could do with the information.
The mainstream press ignored it, and I filed it away. The next time the information saw the
light of day was when I posted the excerpt above on September 26, 1998. The CentreView had had no follow-up.
My next
opportunity to make use of the information came sometime later, the exact date
of which I cannot recall. Here is a
slightly revised version of how I reported it on my web site on May 20, 2002:
A few years
ago the Fund for Constitutional Government organized a panel discussion in a
large room of the Capitol Building of a book whose late author they had
partially funded. The book was Secrets, the CIA's War at Home, by the
deceased Angus MacKenzie and David Weir, who finished
it up for him. On the panel were Bob Woodward of Watergate fame; Scott
Armstrong, his co-author of The Brethren
and founder of The National Security Archive; Tim Weiner, who writes on spook
matters for The New York Times, and
Bill Clinton's first National Security Adviser, Anthony Lake. I would estimate
that 100 or so people were in attendance, virtually all of whom
were spooks and/or "journalists." I had been given a heads-up about
the program by its organizer and my friend at the Fund, Ernest Fitzgerald. (The
days when regular citizens like me can just show up at a gathering in the
Capitol Building, alas, appear to be long gone.) I was told later that when
they opened the floor for questions, the first person recognized was the stooge
standing next to me in the back of the room. I conveniently thought they were recognizing
me and beat the stooge to the punch with my question. I asked Woodward why his Washington Post had never written
anything about the unsolved murder of the young female security guard at the
super secret National Reconnaissance Office complex shortly before the purpose
of the new buildings was revealed. I'm sure the panel was made uncomfortable by
the question, and Woodward looked more pained than usual. He pleaded ignorance
and asked me to fill him in after the meeting. I did so, giving him by mail
later the clipping that is excerpted as the "Tina Ricca Murder."
I
asked Woodward to alert me when The Post
did its own story, but I'm still waiting. Interestingly, of the large number of
writers and journalists present, the only one to approach me afterward and ask
for more details was James Bamford. To my knowledge,
he never wrote anything about the murder and apparent cover-up either. Upon
reflection, I think it's a very good thing for me that the only information I
had about the Ricca case was already out in the public arena. It has become
clear to me that the role of these supposed journalistic critics of the spook
world is not that of a watchdog on these agencies but
that of a bird dog on the citizenry, pointing out to the corrupt authorities
the ones they might have a problem with. * After all, suppose I had some
private information that pointed to, say, the CIA as the culprits. Who would I
go to, the FBI, the local cops? Carol Valentine speculates that
convicted FBI agent Robert Hanssen might have gone to
rotten FBI higher-ups with advance warning of 9-11. Maybe his friend, the
Òinvestigative reporter,Ó Bamford was among those he
went to, and that was his big mistake. The odd cozy relationship they had
reminds me of the cozy relationship between the Washington Post's CIA-beat reporter, Walter Pincus,
and the late Vincent Foster. Pincus' revelations
about Foster, as I point out in part 1 of my "America's Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death
of Vincent Foster," represented "the first instance of anyone publicly
saying that he noticed any behavior in Foster that one might describe as, at
most, agitated." As such, it played a very large role in planting in the
public mind the notion that Foster had been "depressed" enough to
commit suicide. These are the kinds of friends our journalists make these days.
According to
the argument made by Valentine, who was among the very
first people on the Net to voice suspicions about the 9/11 incident and to
offer a plausible explanation as to how it might have been pulled off, Bamford is one of the biggest creators of the magicians
Òbig motionÓ that anyone is ever likely to see. He is probably best known for having
ÒunearthedÓ the extraordinarily incriminating Operation Northwoods
memorandum of March 13, 1962, in which the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed the
creation of a series of false flag incidents that would serve as a pretext for
attacking Cuba. Valentine finds BamfordÕs story—not to mention Bamford
himself—questionable as to how he came upon this document. She might have gone further and
questioned the likelihood that the things proposed would have ever been put
into writing in the first place.
Her biggest reason for simply declaring the document a counterfeit, though,
revolves around a remarkable discovery she made while reading it
carefully. The memo contains a
British expression that Americans simply do not use.
... create an incident which will demonstrate
convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil
airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or
Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan
route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students
off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support
chartering a non-scheduled flight.
People donÕt Ògo off on a holidayÓ in this country. They take vacations. As Valentine observes, it would never
have occurred to an American to write it that way, and if by some fluke he had,
the construction would never have survived the organizational editing
process.
So whatÕs with this shocking revelation of the proposed Operation Northwoods, made public by Bamford
some four months before 9/11 and publicized by the mainstream news media? This is ValentineÕs take on it:
Here is a professional NSA flack currying favor for
the NSA by blowing the whistle on the Pentagon with counterfeit
documents. The documents, presented as authentic, certainly put the
Pentagon in a terrible light.
Of course we know that elements with the FAA and
the US Air Force worked in cooperation with the terrorists. The failure
of NORAD to intercept the errant planes on September 11, and the continued
cover-up, proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
But the Northwoods
documents suggest that if 911 was an inside job -- and
it had to be -- then the Pentagon was the ARCHITECT. The Northwoods expose was ready and waiting for the inevitable
9-11 skeptics to show up, seize upon the plan, and point the finger of
suspicion at the Pentagon. However, the Northwoods
British-isms show that another hand, not an American hand, was guiding those
planes into the WTC towers, and that the Operation Northwoods
documents are a misdirector.
Northwoods was
doubtlessly hatched by a foreign intelligence service and inserted into US
national records. The discovery of the Northwoods
documents reminds one of the incident in "Wag The
Dog" when a newly composed song was inserted into the Library of Congress
records to give the impression it had been written decades earlier; then the
song, "Old Shoe," was conveniently "discovered" and
popularized at the right time. Rent "Wag The Dog" at your local
video store and watch it happen.
Let's see now ... What nation is peopled by masters of
deception? Who has been using the US military as a cat's paw? Using 9-11
as a pretext, whose enemies is the US annihilating right now? Lemme think ...
LetÕs think
a little more about the NRO as well.
The coincidence of its 9/11 drill is really quite a large load to
swallow. What is more likely is
that it was up to its eyeballs in the whole sorry business. Many years of planning go into such
things. Who knows what Tina Ricca
might have stumbled upon that got her killed, but her murder certainly suggests
that the NRO with its huge budget and staff is into lots more than interpreting
the information obtained by observation satellites. The complete lack of interest in the
Òlittle motionÓ of RiccaÕs unsolved murder also
speaks volumes. Maybe itÕs more
than a coincidence, as well, that the Bilderberg conference has been held more
than once at the Westfields Marriott, which is just a
short walk from the NRO complex, or perhaps even that the home of the Virginia
Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, is only about a mile
away.
*Pat
Tillman, as it turns out, before he was very suspiciously killed by Òfriendly fireÓ in
Afghanistan, had turned strongly against the war and had been in touch with
Ògovernment criticÓ Noam Chomsky.
See the addendum to ÒChomsky, the Fraud, on 9/11.
David
Martin
November
8, 2013