"What's really disturbing is that some of those people the vice president was curious about were people who worked at the White House or the State Department," one former counterterrorism official said. "There was a real feeling of paranoia that permeated from the vice president's office and I don't think it had anything to do with the threat of terrorism. I can't say what was contained in those taps that piqued his interest. I just don't know."
An NSA spokesperson would not comment for this story. Because of the level of secrecy at the agency, it's impossible to ascertain for the record how far the agency has gone in its domestic surveillance.
James Bamford, the author of the bestselling books The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, which blew the door wide open by first revealing the NSA's covert activities, said he doesn't believe terrorism was a priority for the administration before 9/11 and he doesn't think the agency targeted specific Americans as it is doing now.
"I looked into that theory," Bamford said in an interview. "And I was assured that domestic surveillance was a black area the NSA stayed away from before 9/11. The NSA was sort of a side agency before 9/11. At that point they were looking for a mission. Terrorism was not a big priority. (American) names may have been picked up but I was told they dropped them immediately after. That's the procedure."
But Bamford said it's possible the NSA may have conducted the type of spying prior to 9/11 that the former NSA officials described. "It's hard to tell" if that happened, Bamford said. "It's a very secret agency."
In the summer of 2001, the NSA spent millions of dollars on a publicity campaign to repair its public image by taking the unprecedented step of opening up its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland to reporters, to dispel the myth that the NSA was spying on Americans.
In a July 10, 2001, segment on "Nightline," host Chris Bury reported that "privacy advocates in the United States and Europe are raising new questions about whether innocent civilians get caught up in the NSA's electronic web."
Then-NSA Director Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, who was interviewed by "Nightline," said it was absolutely untrue that the agency was monitoring Americans who are suspected of being agents of a foreign power without first seeking a special warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
"We don't do anything willy-nilly," Hayden said. "We're a foreign intelligence agency. We try to collect information that is of value to American decision-makers, to protect American values, America - and American lives. To suggest that we're out there, on our own, renegade, pulling in random communications, is - is simply wrong. So everything we do is for a targeted foreign intelligence purpose. With regard to the - the question of industrial espionage, no. Period. Dot. We don't do that."
But, when asked "How do we know that the fox isn't guarding the chicken coop?" Hayden responded by saying that Americans should trust the employees of the NSA.
"They deserve your trust, but you don't have to trust them," Hayden said. "We aren't off the leash, so to speak, guarding ourselves. We have a body of oversight within the executive branch, in the Department of Defense, in the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which is comprised of both government and nongovernmental officials. You've got both houses of Congress with - with very active - in some cases, aggressive - intelligence oversight committees with staff members who have an access badge to NSA just like mine."
One former NSA official said in response to Hayden's 2001 interview, "What do you expect him to say? He's got to deny it. I agree. We weren't targeting specific people, which is what the President's executive order does. However, we did keep tabs on some Americans we caught if there was an interest" by the White House. "That's not legal. And I am very upset that I played a part in it."
James Risen, the New York Times reporter credited with exposing the NSA's covert domestic surveillance activities that came as a result of a secret executive order President Bush issued in 2002, wrote in his just-published book, State of War, that the administration was very aggressive in its intelligence gathering activities before 9/11. However, Risen does not say that means the administration permitted the NSA to spy on Americans.
"It is now clear that the White House went through the motions of the public debate over the (2001) Patriot Act, all the while knowing that the intelligence community was secretly conducting a far more aggressive domestic surveillance campaign," Risen wrote in State of War.
Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t.
Jason Leopold is editor of the online investigative news magazine The Public Record, http://www.pubrecord.org, and the author of the National Bestseller, "News Junkie," a memoir. Visit www.newsjunkiebook.com for a preview. He is also a two-time winner of the Project Censored award, most recently, in 2007, for an investigative story related to Halliburton's work in Iran. He was recently named the recipient of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation's Thomas Jefferson Award for a series of stories he wrote that exposed how soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been pressured to accept fundamentalist Christianity.
