“The anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks began publishing on Monday more than five million emails from a U.S.-based global security analysis company that has been likened to a shadow CIA,” Reuters reports.
Here’s what WikiLeaks has to say on this massive release:
The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods…
My only comment so far (on Twitter):
From what I’ve read of the #GIfiles, it’s virtually impossible to determine the veracity of either Stratfor’s sources or its collecters.
UPDATE: At The Nation, Greg Mitchell is blogging coverage of the WikiLeaks/Statfor story almost minute by minute.
UPDATE II: “WikiLeaks Goes Inside Corporate America’s Wannabe CIA.” The Mother Jones take on this story.
I’ve been reading some of these cables and was interviewed last Monday about them for ZAPP, a news show produced by ARD, the largest public broadcaster in Germany (here’s the link – all in German).
For reporters and researchers seeking information and analysis on the secret world of outsourced intelligence, please read my book SPIES FOR HIRE (Simon & Schuster/2008). Here’s some other resources from my work:
- The Corporate Intelligence Community: A Photo Exclusive.
- A database of the dominant U.S. intelligence contractors, including Raytheon, BAE, Lockheed Martin and CACI International.
- Blackwater’s BAE connection.
- America’s New Mercenaries (Afghanistan) – Daily Beast.
- My analysis in Democracy Now! of the 2010 Washington Post series “Top Secret America” on the national security industrial complex and the intelligence contracting industry.
