By PHK
If you missed the chilling piece of investigative reporting in the Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2006 by Cassell Bryan-Low on a cell phone eavesdropping scandal that broke into the public in Athens, Greece earlier this year and has just escalated to a new level, it’s time to tune in.
This story is already an embarrassment to the conservative pro-American Greek government and, if it turns out badly, could negatively impact U.S.-Greek relations for years to come. Meanwhile, the Greek government is understandably doing its best to keep the lid on – but its leaders must be privately livid. Opposition parties PASOK and KKE charge cover-up; but who is being covered up and, if so, why?
The fallout from this scandal – regardless of the reality or the outcome - represents just one more unneeded credibility problem for the troubled Bush Administration in this southeast tip of the Balkan Peninsula whose people have been wary of U.S. intentions and involvement in their domestic politics since the end of World War II.
The WSJ report is the only one I’ve seen on this story in the asleep-at-the-switch American MSM. A search of the New York Times, WaPo and LA Times archives suggest that for these three illustrious newspapers, cell phone tapping of a European ally is, well, a non-story. The story is, however, one elsewhere and it is just one more nail in the U.S. Government’s already poor image in a country where the US invasion of Iraq and occupation are detested and where America’s image has been in trouble for years.
Reports of the Greek cell phone tapping scandal can be found in English and/or Greek on the BBC website as well as in the online Sunday Times of London and various Athens newspapers across the political spectrum. I found these via GOOGLE. I also found a report in Greek News online and Wikipedia. These stories date back to February.
They suggest that the WSJ article is, in many ways, a cautious first sighting of the tip of an iceberg that has just met global warming.
Here’s the chronology in a nutshell. It's an expanded and updated version of the one in the WSJ.
• Summer 2004: “eavesdroppers activate” prepaid cell phones able to intercept calls from over 100 targeted cell phones most likely in relationship to security preparations for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens;
• January 2005: Vodafone asks Ericsson to look into problems Greek cell phone users are having sending text messages;
• Early March 2005: Ericsson finds highly sophisticated software on Vodafone’s network able to monitor illegally cell phone calls of over 100 people “throughout the year of the Olympics.” They include those belonging to the prime minister, his wife, senior cabinet ministers, police and military officials as well as journalists and businessmen of Middle Eastern origin.
• March 9, 2005: Kosta Tsalikidis, a 38 year old Vodafone network manager, is found dead hanged in his apartment after having committed suicide.
• February 2, 2006: The Greek Government publicly revealed the bugging and admitted failure in finding the culprits. This triggered an investigation by Greece’s telecommunications authority. According to BBC, the government spokesman said at the time that “the phone tapping was carried out by unknown person or persons using high technology.”
• June 22, 2006: The Greek Supreme Court prosecutor linked Tsalikidis’ suicide with the secret phone tapping. His file will now be included in the “main investigation into the phone tapping” as his family had requested and as Vodafone had denied. The family claimed their son had been murdered; the court investigators, however, found no such evidence.
The story raises more questions than it answers.
First things first: Who were the likely cell phone tapping culprits and what were their motives?
What the WSJ June 21, 2006 report omits is the February 5, 2006 story in the Sunday Times of London that quotes the Greek government as saying: “four antennae near the US embassy in Athens were used to transmit the conversations recorded.” Also according to the Times, the Athens daily To Vima (centrist) claimed that MI6 had secret surveillance operations in the area, but security experts said the Americans have more advanced and discreet equipment.”
So who did it?
A part of the over-sized US intelligence apparatus and/or an overzealous private contractor in its pay (perhaps – but not necessarily - SAIC) that the Bush administration has encouraged to expand by leaps and bounds since 9/11 and lacks international experience let alone basic political savvy? MI6 – after all Vodafone is a British company? Or another country’s intelligence service that might have had particular concerns about the welfare of its Olympic athletes in this country where Middle Eastern terrorists of different stripes have come and gone for the years?
Yet what makes little sense is if the cell phone tapping affair represents another US intelligence operation gone awry, why U.S. intelligence would resort to such an amateur and redundant game since it’s rather well known that the National Security Agency headquartered in Laurel, Maryland has had the ability to intercept communications anywhere and everywhere for years. Whether the NSA has the capacity to understand them and in a timely fashion is a a different matter for conjecture.
NSA’s immense and sophisticated communications intercept capability, for instance, is -I thought I read somewhere - a major reason why Al Qaeda has apparently stopped relying on cell phones and gone back to reliance upon age-old trusted two-legged messengers.
But, what also makes no sense is that if the goal of the Vodafone cell phone taps in Athens was enhanced security protection during the 2004 Summer Olympic Games why 1) the taps were continued indefinitely - until an Ericsson trouble-shooter discovered them in March 2005 and 2) why the cell phones of the Greek leadership were their object?
And finally, what is the basis for the relationship that Greek Supreme Court prosecutor Dimitris Linos publicly linked on June 22, 2006 between the 38 year-old Vodafone manager Kosta Tsalikidis’ suicide just two days after Ericsson discovered and disabled the secret bugging equipment?
Answers to these and other questions should form the crux of the ongoing Greek judicial investigation. I hope Greek justice unearths the truth – whatever that proves to be.
Another piece of unneeded anti-American ammunition
Meanwhile, the cell phone tapping scandal provides just another piece of ammunition for anti-American elements in Greece, an unnecessary headache for Charles Ries, U.S. Ambassador since December 2004 (a well respected career diplomat – but with a specialty in economics not politics and someone who is not a Greek hand) as well as the Embassy’s public affairs staff.
Maybe, if push comes to shove, our uber-intelligence czar John Negroponte, Director of National Intelligence, can help get to the bottom of this sordid affair – whoever is behind it. Or maybe Negroponte is already trying to sort things out. Since Negroponte was not appointed to the DNI osition until 2005, he would not have been in on a “take off” but he must surely know now something about “a landing.”
Negroponte is, after all, the scion of a London-based Greek ship owning family. In the early 1970s, he served as U.S. Consul General Thessaloniki, Greece’s second city, so his connections to Greece and the Greeks run very deep. It’s hard to imagine this problem and the potential ramifications escaping his eye.
MIA American journalism - yet again
Where, however, are America’s investigative reporters? Napping on the beach? Sipping ouzo under the stars? Smashing plates in the Plaka? Whatever. . . wherever . . . apparently missing in action. Or have they been warned off? After all even the WSJ failed to mention or question parts of the story previously reported elsewhere and potentially explosive in the US. And it also ignored a variety of tough questions that need to be raised whatever truth comes to light.