NSA spied on state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela. (photo: Jorge Silva/Reuters)
Snowden
Leak Reveals Obama Government Ordered NSA, CIA to Spy on Venezuela's State Oil
Company
By teleSUR
19 November 15
U.S.
intelligence agents posing as diplomats in Caracas helped an NSA analyst try to
crack open PDVSA’s computer network.
The
U.S. National Security Agency accessed the internal communications of
Venezuela's state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela and acquired
sensitive data it planned to exploit in order to spy on the company’s top
officials, according to a highly classified NSA document that reveals the
operation was carried out in concert with the U.S. embassy in Caracas.
The
March 2011 document, labeled, “top secret,” and provided by former NSA
contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden, is being reported on in an
exclusive partnership between teleSUR and The Intercept.
Drafted
by an NSA signals development analyst, the document explains that PDVSA’s
network, already compromised by U.S. intelligence, was further infiltrated
after an NSA review in late 2010 – during President Barack Obama’s first
term, which would suggest he ordered or at least authorized the
operation – “showed telltale signs that things were getting stagnant
on the Venezuelan Energy target set.” Most intelligence “was coming from
warranted collection,” which likely refers to communications that were
intercepted as they passed across U.S. soil. According to the analyst, “what
little was coming from other collectors,” or warrantless surveillance, “was
pretty sparse.”
Beyond
efforts to infiltrate Venezuela’s most important company, the leaked NSA
document highlights the existence of a secretive joint operation between the
NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency operating out of the U.S. embassy in
Caracas. A fortress-like building just a few kilometers from PDVSA
headquarters, the embassy sits on the top of a hill that gives those inside a
commanding view of the Venezuelan capital.
Last
year, Der Spiegel published top-secret documents detailing the
state-of-the-art surveillance equipment that the NSA and CIA deploy to
embassies around the world. That intelligence on PDVSA had grown “stagnant” was
concerning to the U.S. intelligence community for a number of reasons, which
its powerful surveillance capabilities could help address.
“Venezuela
has some of the largest oil and natural gas reserves in the world,” the NSA
document states, with revenue from oil and gas accounting “for roughly one
third of GDP” and “more than half of all government revenues.”
“To
understand PDVSA,” the NSA analyst explains, “is to understand the economic
heart of Venezuela.”
Increasing
surveillance on the leadership of PDVSA, the most important company in a South
American nation seen as hostile to U.S. corporate interests, was a priority for
the undisclosed NSA division to which the analyst reported. “Plainly speaking,”
the analyst writes, they “wanted PDVSA information at the highest possible
levels of the corporation – namely, the president and members of the Board of
Directors.”
Given
a task, the analyst got to work and, with the help of “sheer luck,” found his
task easier than expected.
It
began simply enough: with a visit to PDVSA’s website, “where I clicked on
'Leadership' and wrote down the names of the principals who would become my
target list.” From there, the analyst “dumped the names” into PINWALE, the
NSA’s primary database of previously intercepted digital communications,
automatically culled using a dictionary of search terms called “selectors.” It
was an almost immediate success.
In
addition to email traffic, the analyst came across over 10,000 employee contact
profiles full of email addresses, phone numbers, and other useful targeting
information, including the usernames and passwords for over 900 PDVSA
employees. One profile the analyst found was for Rafael Ramirez, PDVSA's
president from 2004 to 2014 and Venezuela's current envoy to the United
Nations. A similar entry turned up for Luis Vierma, the company’s former vice
president of exploration and production.
“Now,
even my old eyes could see that these things were a goldmine,” the analyst
wrote. The entries were full of “work, home, and cell phones, email addresses,
LOTS!” This type of information, referred to internally as “selectors,” can
then be “tasked” across the NSA’s wide array of surveillance tools so that any
relevant communications will be saved.
According
to the analyst, the man to whom he reported “was thrilled!” But “it is what
happened next that really made our day.”
“As I
was analyzing the metadata,” the analyst explains, “I clicked on the 'From IP'
and noticed something peculiar,” all of the employee profile, “over 10,000 of
them, came from the same IP!!!” That, the analyst determined, meant “I had been
looking at internal PDVSA comms all this time!!! I fired off a few emails to F6
here and in Caracas, and they confirmed it!”
“Metadata”
is a broad term that can include the phone numbers a target has dialed, the
duration of the call and from where it was placed, as well as the Wi-Fi
networks used to access the Internet, the websites visited and the times
accessed. That information can then be used to identify the user.
F6 is
the NSA code name for a joint operation with the CIA known as the Special
Collection Service, based in Beltsville, Maryland – and with agents posing as
diplomats in dozens of U.S. embassies around the world, including Caracas,
Bogota and Brasilia.
In
2013, Der Spiegel reported that it was
this unit of the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy that had installed, within the
U.S. embassy in Berlin, “sophisticated listening devices with which they can
intercept virtually every popular method of communication: cellular signals,
wireless networks and satellite communication.” The article suggested this is
likely how the U.S. tapped into German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cellphone.
SCS at
the U.S. embassy in Caracas played an active role throughout the espionage
activities described in the NSA document. “I have been coordinating with
Caracas,” the NSA analyst states, “who have been surveying their environment
and sticking the results into XKEYSCORE.”
XKEYSCORE, as reported by The
Intercept, processes a continuous “flow of Internet traffic from fiber optic
cables that make up the backbone of the world's communication network,” storing
the data for 72 hours on a “rolling buffer” and “sweep[ing] up countless
people's Internet searches, emails, documents, usernames and passwords.”
The
NSA’s combined databases are, essentially, “a very ugly version of Google with
half the world’s information in it,” explained Matthew Green, a professor at
the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, in an email. “They’re
capturing so much information from their cable taps, that even the NSA analysts
don’t know what they’ve got,” he added, “an analyst has to occasionally step in
and manually dig through the data” to see if the information they want has
already been collected.
That
is exactly what the NSA analyst did in the case of PDVSA, which turned up even
more leads to expand their collection efforts.
“I
have been lucky enough to find several juicy pdf documents in there,” the NSA
analyst wrote, “one of which has just been made a report.”
That
report, dated January 2011, suggests a familiarity with the finances of PDVSA
beyond that which was public knowledge, noting a decline in the theft and loss
of oil.
“In
addition, I have discovered a string that carries user ID's and their
passwords, and have recovered over 900 unique user/password combinations” the
analyst wrote, which he forwarded to the NSA’s elite hacking team, Targeted
Access Operations, along with other useful information and a “targeting request
to see if we can pwn this network and especially, the boxes of PDVSA's
leadership.”
“Pwn,”
in this context, means to successfully hack and gain full access to a computer
or network. “Pwning” a computer, or “box,” would allow the hacker to monitor a
user’s every keystroke.
A
History of US Interest in Venezuelan Affairs
PDVSA
has long been a target of U.S. intelligence agencies and the subject of intense
scrutiny from U.S. diplomats. A February 17, 2009, cable, sent from the U.S.
ambassador in Caracas to Washington and obtained by WikiLeaks, shows that PDVSA
employees, were probed during visa interviews about their company's internal
operations. The embassy was particularly interested in the PDVSA’s strategy
concerning litigation over Venezuela's 2007 nationalization of the Cerro Negro
oil project – and billions of dollars in assets owned by U.S. oil giant
ExxonMobil.
“According
to a PDVSA employee interviewed following his visa renewal, PDVSA is
aggressively preparing its international arbitration case against ExxonMobil,”
the cable notes.
A year
before, U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters that the
U.S. government “fully support the efforts of ExxonMobil to get a just and fair
compensation package for their assets.” But, he added, “We are not involved in
that dispute.”
ExxonMobil
is also at the center of a border dispute between Guyana and Venezuela. In May
2015, the company announced it had made a “significant oil discovery”
in an offshore location claimed by both countries. The U.S. ambassador to
Guyana has offered support for that country’s claim.
More
recently, the U.S. government has begun leaking information to media about
allegations against top Venezuelan officials.
In
October, The Wall Street Journal reported in a piece, “U.S. Investigates Venezuelan Oil Giant,”
that “agents from the Department of Homeland Security, the Drug Enforcement
Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies” had
recently met to discuss “various PDVSA-related probes.” The “wide-ranging
investigations” reportedly have to do with whether former PDVSA President
Rafael Ramirez and other executives accepted bribes.
Leaked
news of the investigations came less than two months before Dec. 6
parliamentary elections in Venezuela. Ramirez, for his part, has rejected the
accusations, which he claims are part of a “new campaign that
wants to claim from us the recovery and revolutionary transformation of PDVSA.”
Thanks to Chavez, he added, Venezuela’s oil belongs to “the people.”
In its
piece on the accusations against him, The Wall Street Journal notes that during
Ramirez’s time in office PDVSA became “an arm of the late President Hugo
Chavez’s socialist revolution,” with money made from the sale of petroleum used
“to pay for housing, appliances and food for the poor.”
IN
DEPTH: The War on Venezuela’s Democracy
The
former PDVSA president is not the only Venezuelan official to be accused of
corruption by the U.S. government. In May 2015, the U.S. Department of
Justice accused Diosdado Cabello,
president of the Venezuelan National Assembly, of being involved in cocaine
trafficking and money laundering. Former Interior Minister Tarek El Aissami,
the former director of military intelligence, Hugo Carvajal, and Nestor
Reverol, head of the National Guard, have also faced similar accusations from
the U.S. government.
None
of these accusations against high-ranking Venezuelan officials has led to any
indictments.
The
timing of the charges, made in the court of public opinion rather than a
courthouse, has led some to believe there’s another motive.
“These
people despise us,” Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said in October. He and his
supporters argue the goal of the U.S. government’s selective leaks is to
undermine his party ahead of the upcoming elections, helping install a
right-wing opposition seen as friendlier to U.S. interests. “They believe that
we belong to them.”
Loose
Standards for NSA Intelligence Sharing
Ulterior
motives or not, by the NSA’s own admission the intelligence it gathers on
foreign targets may be disseminated widely among U.S. officials who may have
more than justice on their minds.
According
to a guide issued by the
NSA on January 12, 2015, the communications of non-U.S. persons may be captured
in bulk and retained if they are said to contain information concerning a plot
against the United States or evidence of, “Transnational criminal threats,
including illicit finance and sanctions evasion.” Any intelligence that is
gathered may then be passed on to other agencies, such as the DEA, if it “is
related to a crime that has been, is being, or is about to be committed.”
Spying
for the sole purpose of protecting the interests of a corporation is ostensibly
not allowed, though there are exceptions that do allow for what might be termed
economic espionage.
“The
collection of foreign private commercial information or trade secrets is
authorized only to protect nation the national security of the United States or
its partners and allies,” the agency states. It is not supposed to collect such
information “to afford a competitive advantage to U.S. companies and U.S.
business sectors commercially.” However, “Certain economic purposes, such as
identifying trade or sanctions violations or government influence or direction,
shall not constitute competitive advantage.”
In May
2011, two months after the leaked document was published in NSA’s internal
newsletter, the U.S. State Department announced it was imposing sanctions on
PDVSA – a state-owned enterprise, or one that could be said to be subject to
“government influence or direction” – for business it conducted with the
Islamic Republic of Iran between December 2010 and March 2011. The department
did not say how it obtained information about the transactions, allegedly worth
US$50 million.
Intelligence
gathered with one stated purpose can also serve another, and the NSA’s already
liberal rules on the sharing of what it gathers can also be bent in times of
perceived emergency.
“If,
due to unanticipated or extraordinary circumstances, NSA determines that it
must take action in apparent departure from these procedures to protect the
national security of the United States, such action may be taken” – after
either consulting other branches of the intelligence bureaucracy. “If there is
insufficient time for approval,” however, it may unilaterally take action.
Beyond
the obvious importance of oil, leaked diplomatic cables show PDVSA was also on
the U.S. radar because of its importance to Venezuela’s left-wing government.
In 2009, another diplomatic cable obtained
by WikiLeaks shows the U.S. embassy in Caracas viewed PDVSA as crucial to the
political operations of long-time foe and former President Hugo Chavez. In
April 2002, Chavez was briefly overthrown in a coup that, according to The New
York Times, as many as 200 officials in the George W. Bush administration –
briefed by the CIA – knew about days before it was carried out.
The
Venezuelan government was not informed of the plot.
“Since
the December 2002-February 2003 oil sector strike, PDVSA has put itself at the
service of President Chavez's Bolivarian revolution, funding everything from
domestic programs to Chavez's geopolitical endeavors,” the 2009 cable states.
Why
might that be a problem, from the U.S. government's perspective? Another
missive from the U.S. embassy in Caracas, this one sent in 2010, sheds some
light: Chavez “appears determined to shape the hemisphere according to his
vision of 'socialism in the 21st century,'” it states, “a vision that is almost
the mirror image of what the United States seeks.”
There
was a time when not so long ago when the U.S. had an ally in Venezuela, one
that shared its vision for the hemisphere – and invited a U.S. firm run by
former U.S. intelligence officials to directly administer its information
technology operations.
Amid a
push for privatization under former Venezuelan President Rafael Caldera, in
January 1997 PDVSA decided to outsource its IT system to a joint a company
called Information, Business and Technology, or INTESA – the product of a joint
venture between the oil company, which owned a 40 percent share of the new
corporation, and the major U.S.-based defense contractor Science Applications
International Corporation, or SAIC, which controlled 60 percent.
SAIC
has close, long-standing ties to the U.S. intelligence community. At the time
of its dealings with Venezuela, the company’s director was retired Admiral
Bobby Inman. Before coming to SAIC, Inman served as the U.S. Director of Naval
Intelligence and Vice Director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. Inman
also served as deputy director of the CIA and, from 1977 to 1981, as director
of the NSA.
In his
book, “Changing Venezuela by Taking Power: The History and Policies of the
Chavez Government,” author Gregory Wilpert notes that Inman was far from the
only former intelligence official working for SAIC in a leadership role.
Joining him were two former U.S. Secretaries of Defense, William Perry and
Melvin Laird, a former director of the CIA, John Deutsch, and a former head of
both the CIA and the Defense Department, Robert Gates. The company that those
men controlled, INTESA, was given the job of managing “all of PDVSA’s data
processing needs.”
In
2002, Venezuela, now led by a government seeking to roll back the privatizations
of its predecessor, chose not to renew SAIC’s contract for another five years,
a decision the company protested to the U.S. Overseas Private Investment
Corporation, which insures the overseas investments of U.S. corporations. In
2004, the U.S. agency ruled that by canceling its contract with SAIC the
Venezuelan government had “expropriated” the company’s investment.
However,
before that ruling, and before its operations were reincorporated by PDVSA, the
company that SAIC controlled, INTESA, played a key role in an opposition-led strike aimed
at shutting down the Venezuelan oil industry. In December 2002, eight months
after the failed coup attempt and the same month its contract was set to
expire, INTESA, the Venezuelan Ministry of Communication and Information
alleges, “exercised its ability to control our computers by paralyzing the
charge, discharge, and storage of crude at different terminals within the
national grid.” The government alleges INTESA, which possessed the codes needed
to access those terminals, refused to allow non-striking PDVSA employees access
to the company’s control systems.
“The
result,” Wilpert noted, “was that PDVSA could not transfer its data processing
to new systems, nor could it process its orders for invoices for oil shipments.
PDVSA ended up having to process such things manually because passwords and the
general computing infrastructure were unavailable, causing the strike to be
much more damaging to the company than it would have been if the data
processing had been in PDVSA’s hands.”
PDVSA’s
IT operations would become a strictly internal affair soon thereafter, though
one never truly free from the prying eyes of hostile outsiders.
C 2015
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