“An attack in Karachi, Pakistan, during which another NSA employee Gary C. Durrell was shot in March 1995 is believed to be related to Crypto AG.” MINERVA — A History

March 2 2020 — Why has the Washington Post decided not to tell their readers that the Minerva Files contain disturbing information about a series of suspicious deaths? Could it be that the Post acted under instructions from the CIA? Let us therefore pull this thread, and see where it leads. Follow us on Twitter: @INTEL_TODAY

Beside the fatal “car accident” of Boris Hagelin Jr., the Minerva Files mention — at least — four suspicious deaths and names two individuals.

“An NSA employee allegedly told a journalist about his involvement in manipulating the Crypto AG devices. This NSA man and the journalist died the same year from non-natural cause. An attack in Karachi, Pakistan, during which another NSA employee Gary C. Durrell was shot in March 1995 is believed to be related to Crypto AG. In September 2002, a car bomb killed a German employee of Crypto AG, Werner Graf, in Saudi Arabia.”

In this post, I would like to share with you what is known about former Crypto AG employee Werner Graf and former “NSA employee” Gary C. Durrell.

Incidentally, allow me to make an obvious point.

Whoever wrote the Minerva Files — and whatever the reasons for leaking these files now — this particular document was indeed written after September 29 2002.

According to the Post, the document is made of two files. The first is a 96-page account of the operation completed in 2004 by the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence, an internal historical branch.

The second is an oral history compiled by German intelligence officials in 2008.

Death of a Salesman

Werner Graf was one of the top Crypto AG salesmen, with primary responsibility for Arabic countries.

According to a Crypto AG newsletter, Werner Graf died in a car accident. Obviously Boris Hagelin, and those in his inner circle, had a knack for understatements…

On September 29 2002, at 4:29 p.m., Werner Graf stepped into his 77 model Ford Mercury which he had parked on the Abdulhamid-al-Katib street of Riyadh.

Before he had the time to turn on the engine, someone remotely detonated a large amount of explosive hidden under his car. There was very little left of the 55 years old salesman to make an identification.

According to Saudi officials, Graf had apparently fallen victim to a dispute by the “alcohol mafia”.

The German media reported that Graf was the victim of a senseless act of terrorism which they blamed on al-Qaeda.

Top officials from the German foreign intelligence services had — of course — an other explanation, but they kept it for themselves.

Secret within a secret

At the time of his death, Gary C. Durrell was no longer an NSA employee. [That is a fact. So once again, I ask myself who wrote the MINERVA Files?]

Durrell was working for the Special Collection Service, an elite eavesdropping unit culled from the ranks of the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency.

Even within the closed intelligence community, SCS has been a secret within a secret since it was created in the late 1970s.

According to intelligence historian James Bamford, the directorship of the special service is switched every four years between the two spy agencies.

The U.S. government has never officially acknowledged its existence, and little is known about the technologies and techniques it employs. [The SCS employs exotic covert listening device technologies to bug foreign embassies. Microwave spying?]

The SCS program was compromised by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Robert Hanssen in the 1990s, who provided Moscow with sensitive information about highly sophisticated U.S. overseas bugging operations.

According to documents leaked by Edward Snowden (2013), the SCS is part of a larger global surveillance program known as STATEROOM.

Gary C. Durrell — Does the name ring a bell?

First thing first. Does the name ring a bell? If you are a loyal reader of Intel Today, it probably does because I have mentioned it before.

Here is what I wrote about Jacqueline K. Van Landingham whose name was added to the Book of Honour on May 22 2012.

“Jacqueline K. Van Landingham joined the CIA in July 1985 as a clerk-typist, working in the Directorate of Operations (now the National Clandestine Service), Near East (NE) Division, Logistics Branch. She was gunned down on March 8, 1995 in Karachi, Pakistan. Also killed in the attack was a signals intelligence (SIGINT) intercept operator named Gary C. Durrell, who worked for a joint CIA-NSA SIGINT organization called the Special Collection Service (SCS). In September 1999, a Pakistani antiterrorism court acquitted three suspects in the Van Landingham-Durrell killings and dismissed the case for lack of evidence.” RELATED POST: On This Day — Remembering CIA Jacqueline K. Van Landingham (1962 – March 8 1995)

So Gary Durrell was killed in the same attack as Jacqueline K. Van Landingham but the CIA did not honor him with a star. Why on earth not?

From the Horse’s Mouth

Let us read carefully what the CIA wrote about the event:

“In the morning hours on Wednesday, March 8, 1995, the US Consulate’s 20-passenger shuttle bus was attacked by two gun-wielding terrorists armed with AK-47 rifles. The bus had just picked up three passengers in a residential area and had turned onto a major road from the airport to the city center. While the bus was stopped at a traffic light, a yellow taxi pulled up next to the vehicle. Two men leapt out of the cab, shot out the bus’s windshield, and then walked alongside the vehicle, methodically firing a large number of single rounds into it. The shooters then jumped back into their taxi and sped away. All three passengers were hit, but the driver was unharmed. One slightly wounded passenger told the driver to head for the hospital. One passenger was pronounced dead at the hospital and, shortly thereafter, Jacqueline Elaine Keys Van Landingham, the only Agency employee on the shuttle, died from her wounds as doctors at the hospital struggled to stabilize her condition.”

Obviously, the CIA statement is not a lie as Durrell was not working for them directly, but for the SCS.

Yet, it is a bit puzzling that the CIA did not honor Durrell with a star considering they have done so for a person who died before the CIA was created and for another individual who died when he was no longer working at the agency.

The Missing Piece of the Snowden Puzzle

The exact size of Snowden’s disclosure is unknown, but estimates provided by U.S. officials are on the order of 1.7 million files, some pretty large ones.

And yet, to the best of my knowledge, there is not a single hint to a connection between the Special Collection Service (SCS) and the Minerva Project. Why on earth not?

Surely, if the author of the Minerva Files thought that Durrell’s murder was related to Crypto AG, there MUST be a connection between the SCS and Crypto. What is it?

Final Question

According to the information released from the “Minerva Files“,

“An NSA employee allegedly told a journalist about his involvement in manipulating the Crypto AG devices. This NSA man and the journalist died the same year from non-natural cause.”

Ask yourself a very simple question. Why have the journalists from SRF, ZDF and the Washington Post refrained from naming the journalist?

For sure, they gave us very little to identify him/her.

And yet, there is very little doubt in my mind that I have already identified this American journalist as I will explain in the next post.

Stay tuned!

REFERENCES

RELATED POST: 9/11 — Two Unanswered Questions

Find a grave — Gary C. Durrell

ESPIONAGE FROM THE FRONT LINES By Tom Bowman and Scott Shane, SUN STAFF (December 08, 1995)

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Crypto AG — The Missing Piece of the Snowden Puzzle