'Secrecy Kills' CIA 9/11 Cover-Up Conspiracy Theory

STARpod.org Exclusive: FBI Was Told Senior Official Had "Prior Knowledge"   

In September 2001, Dan Smith, the son of Eisenhower and Nixon White House Advisor Dan Throop Smith, reported on his friend from CIA to Baltimore FBI. Now former national terrorism adviser Richard Clarke comes forward with a conspiracy theory of CIA cover-up over al Qaida operatives. 'Secrecy Kills' now under threat by CIA for revealing covert CIA identities.

UPDATED WITH NEW INFORMATION AND VIDEO

September 23, 2011

This page was last updated 01/21/2012 04:37:21 AM -0000

(STARpod.org) -- Who exactly in the CIA knew about two al Qaida operatives arriving in California, and why did they withhold the information from the FBI?

That appears to be the core question underlying the CIA conspiracy theory of Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism advisor. Daily Beast orignally broke the story of Clarke's CIA theory, after hearing part of an interview Clarke made for a 9/11 tenth anniversary documentary.

During the interview Clarke suggests CIA deliberately withheld information from the FBI concerning two Saudi-born terrorists who had entered the United States. Clarke suggests CIA may have been trying to recruit the terrorists to become CIA operatives, and when the recruitment failed, senior CIA officers ordered that the information be withheld from the FBI and members of the Bush White House.

Some of Clarke's interview has been posted on-line by the makers of the documentary, "Who is Rich Blee," at the Secrecy Kills website.

The investigative team for Secrecy Kills was threatened by the CIA. A statement posted at the website concerning the incident explains, "The CIA is protecting two employees at the heart of the 9/11 intelligence failures, threatening journalists John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski -- yours truly -- with a possible unprecedented federal prosecution under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. The incident concerning the two in the run up to the Sept 11th tragedy has become infamous."

The CIA employees in question -- alleged to be "a former staff operations officer at the CIA’s Al Qaeda unit in 2000, called Michael in the Commission Report, and her immediate supervisor at the time, referred to by her middle name, Frances, in an AP story about CIA accountability in February."

According to Secrecy Kills, "Likely candidates for their [real] names were discovered through savvy internet research conducted based on minimal background details provided from various sources and previously published stories. When we were not corrected after using the names in conversations with people in a position to know, we had a sort of confirmation. The real confirmation came on Thursday via CIA’s reaction to our email informing them that the names would be included in an investigative podcast."

CIA's threat -- to use the Intelligence Identities Protection Act -- has never been used against researchers basing their information on open-sources and materials. STARstream Research has conducted similar investigations of known intelligence persons in the past. 

Secrecy Kills noted, "This possible expansion of precedent fits an ongoing pattern of intimidation and redefining precedent regarding leaks and whistleblowers from the White House. The Obama administration has used the Espionage Act to prosecute more whistleblowers in one term than all previous Presidents combined, as the New York Times noted last month."

Among the most prominent whistle-blower cases was the Justice Department's attempt to prosecute former senior NSA official Thomas A. Drake, which fell apart, allegedly to protect national security. The Justice Department case blew Drake's cover with a source he had worked with for seven years, a man named Christopher Robinson, who had been recruited by military intelligence to spy against targets using anomalous mental phenomena.

Terrorists may not have been the only targets of recruitment.

As first reported by STARpod.org and reprinted in the book Spies, Lies, and Polygraph Tape, the son of the late Eisenhower and Nixon White House advisor, Dan Throop Smith, reported to the FBI in September 2001 that his friend, a well-placed analyst from the CIA, appeared to have had prior knowledge of the September 11 attacks.

According to Pulitzer Prize winning articles from the New York Times, Dan Smith's friend, Ronald (Ron) S. Pandolfi, was previously at the center of another White House controversy over the sharing of rocket science with China.

Smith claims that Pandolfi called a meeting of "The Aquarium" -- allegedly a loosely organized group of like-minded individuals in and out of government circles with an agenda focused on the alleged impending end of modern civilization -- days prior to the September 11 attacks. Smith claims Pandolfi seemed to have been aware of an imminent major event.

Smith reported Pandolfi's apparent "prior knowledge" of the 9/11 attacks to the FBI.

Based upon the series of Pulitzer Prize winning articles by Jeff Gerth in the New York Times, and a handful of documents mined from government-related Internet sources, it appears that Smith's claim -- that CIA's Ronald Pandolfi worked out of the CIA/DNI National Intelligence Council, writing National Intelligence Estimates -- is correct. Smith claims to have called for Pandolfi at his office, and NIC National Intelligence Officer for Military Issues Major General John R. Landry answered the phone. Later, in a 2005 video interview made by physicist Dr. Jack Sarfatti, Smith claimed Pandolfi had departed for MASINT intelligence at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, following the rejection of a National Intelligence Estimate made for President George W. Bush. According to the story as told by Smith, the original intelligence estimate was rejected by Senior CIA leadership when it concluded there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. A similar story was revealed two years later in an article by Sidney Blumenthal published in Salon, based upon unnamed sources.

The question of exactly what, if anything, Pandolfi knew about the 9/11 plot prior to the events of that fateful morning, remains unknown.

Smith reflected on the apparent conspiracy of coincidences at his blog.

"I had a series of rather interesting communications with Ron [Pandolfi] between Sept.1st and 16th of 2001, including extended meetings on each of the specified days. The general nature of these interactions led me, in accordance with my long established 'Chicken Little' protocol, to, subsequently and publicly, raise the issue of prior knowledge [of the 9/11 attacks]. No one, even including myself, took this terribly seriously...until now? The abortive reactivation of the Aquarium around 9/11 seemed like a fluke, suspicious though it was."

A few days later, Smith felt compelled to make an official report concerning his suspicions, and contacted the local field office of the FBI in Baltimore, where he met with a female Special Agent. STARstream Research was contacted by a Special Agent of the Minneapolis FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force in 2004, after we inquired about on-going contact with CIA's Ron Pandolfi and his intelligence associates over the Internet.

On the morning of September 11, Smith's sister, a good friend of Nancy Bush Ellis, the sister of President George H. W. Bush, arrived at Logan International Airport -- unaware that the 9/11 hijackers had boarded American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, with the intention of taking control of the planes and crashing them into the World Trade Center in New York City. Shortly after the planes hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, Smith says his sister was on the phone to the senior President Bush, after the flight she was on was diverted by the emergency shutdown of US air space.

But when the phone rang at the Smith household, it was CIA's Ron Pandolfi, not his sister, on the other end of the line.

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Smith would later attempt to clarify the details of that morning phone conversation with Pandolfi.

"Ron now denies that the FBI has ever called him, concerning these allegations, contradicting what I have stated many times, since," wrote Smith, following his 'outing' of Pandolfi on the popular late night Coast to Coast AM talk radio program. "He did spend about half an hour reviewing the events of 9/11, from his personal perspective. You'll recall that he claimed, in his 10:30am call to me, that he was the last person in an evacuated building, and was watching the smoke rise over the Pentagon. This claim always seemed somewhat contradictory to me, but I made no great effort to surmise any more detail, and it never occurred to me that it might be the [CIA] Langley/McLean HQ. Too far to where the smoke was, and very unlikely to be so evacuated. True on the first count, wrong on the second!"

Smith continues, "While Ron was on the phone with me, he could hear other phones ringing nearby, but did not attempt to run to answer them. Not long after he got off the phone with me, a call did come through on his phone from the White House. The person identified himself as the director of the White House situation room. Neither one knew the other. The Director asked him to identify himself. Ron gave his position on the National Intelligence Council, working for [General] Landry under [Deputy CIA Director John] Gannon who came under [Director of Central Intelligence] George Tenet, at that time. The Director asked what he was doing. Ron said that he refrained from telling him that he had just gotten off the phone with the CIA's eschatologist [Smith views himself as an official consultant to Pandolfi], and said that he was by himself in the CIA situation room, watching the government monitors -- thus the smoke that he reported to me."

According to Smith, based upon the alleged account given by Pandolfi, "The White House Director asked him [Pandolfi] to relay the President's instructions to [DCI] Tenet. It happened that Ron was sometimes driven by Tenet's driver, and had his cell phone number. This was the only line of communication between the POTUS and his Intelligence Director, on that crucial day."

Smith mused in his blog about the odd circumstances connecting Pandolfi, who had been reported to be a senior intelligence official in the mainstream media, with the Aquarium group, and other unofficial groups of intelligence persons, like the UFO-related group, The Aviary.

"The loop now is much bigger than the [US government anomalous] phenomenology network," wrote Smith. "Every intelligence organization in the world could simply run his [Pandolfi's] name against the Internet and immediately come up with the Aviary and Aquarium. Might they not easily conclude that this otherwise inexplicable breach in protocol would likely be a signal relative to these other strange links? Every intelligence agency in the world has now been put on notice. And then comes 9/11. Ouch! This is a tough one. Or is it? By now, should it not be a no-brainer? On 9/1/01 Ron calls for an urgent meeting of the Aquarium to be held at the zoo on 9/16. And it comes off, right on schedule. And then there is Deborah [Smith's sister] on the tarmac at Logan at 8am on the day in question. It does seem that someone is dabbling in more than just politics. At what point does mere conspiracy morph into choreography? How may they overlap? And who is the Choreographer? Last month we are back again at the zoo, this time with a bodyguard, and I'm being told that my remarks on the previous occasion had been recorded via the security cameras and underground mikes. It does give one pause."

In 2006, Pandolfi leaked a series of email messages concerning the use of a UFO-related cover story to conduct espionage against US national security sites. Among the various allegations discussed was the fingering of another Pandolfi CIA colleague, former head of the National Intelligence Council John Gannon, as the source of SERPO -- a bizarre UFO human-alien exchange tale that had gone viral on the Internet and was the topic of discussion at conspiracy forums. Pandolfi later informed STARstream Research of his intention to use the leaked messages to protect Gannon from the outrageous claims allegedly sourced from Rick Doty, a former USAF counterintelligence officer, who was then working for the New Mexico State Police Department. CIA's Publication Review Board has thus far failed to respond to a request from STArtream Research concerning the publication of the messages released by Pandolfi -- a CIA source. STARstream Research is currently considering a larger release of material if the CIA review board fails to respond to our request.

The allegation raised by former White House counterintelligence advisor Richard Clarke of a CIA cover-up might include Ronald Pandolfi, who built a reputation at the agency for his unusual sources and methods. Following an investigation of unauthorized technology sharing with China, Pandolfi was called to testify in classified hearings of the Senate Intelligence Committee. If Pandolfi had been in the loop and had been aware of the presence of the al Qaida terrorists on US soil -- and, as alleged by Clarke, had been ordered to remain silent about what the agency knew -- he may have sought out the Aquarium group as an under-the-radar method of leaking concerns that Osama bin Laden's organization was about to strike.

Many of Pandolfi's government associates were once involved with official US government use of anomalous mental phenomena -- so called psychic spying -- to predict threats to national security. Recently it was learned that Tom Drake, the former senior NSA official who had been indicted under the Espionage Act for his covert whistle-blowing to a Baltimore Sun reporter, had been involved with a British psychic who was targeted against Iran and Saddam Hussein. 

In the 1980s, US government psychics were warning that the first major terrorist attack on US soil would involve airplanes crashing into buildings, with threats extending to the Pentagon, the White House, and the US Capitol Building. It is well known that the 9/11 terrorists intended to strike either the US Capitol or the White House.

Following 9/11, another of Pandolfi's associates, John Gannon, the former CIA Deputy Director who chaired the National Intelligence Council in 1999, told CBS News, "If you ask anybody could terrorists convert a plane into a missile, nobody would have ruled that out."

For more about the government's paranormal efforts, see SPIES LIES and POLYGRAPH TAPE -- Knowing the Future: The UFO Spy Games Book.

For more information, please visit STARpod.org.

Copyright (c) 2011 by STARstream Research / STARpod.org -- All rights reserved.