A spies' jamboree

[seemslikeadream]

By Shaun Waterman
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor

....

"We're not having people reading out press releases approved by their bosses," said John Loftus, a former Justice Department prosecutor who is one of the organizers. Loftus is now an attorney in private practice whose Web site says he has worked "without charge to help hundreds of intelligence agents obtain lawful permission to declassify and publish the hidden secrets of our times."

The speakers list for the three-day event includes a raft of rarely-seen-in-public senior intelligence figures such as David Szady, the FBI's assistant director for counterintelligence; Deborah Maklowski, in charge of analyst recruitment at the National Security Agency; and Harold Rhode, a Pentagon veteran who was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's liaison with now-discredited Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi.

...

Foreign intelligence officials -- at least from the two closest allies of the United States, Britain and Israel -- will also be attending, the organizers say.

...

Loftus says it is an accident that the conference will be so soon after the passage of the intelligence-reform act, signed into law just before Christmas. "We lucked out," he said, adding that 2005 will be "the most momentous year for the intelligence community since (the formation of the CIA in) 1948."

But Jamie Gorelick, a Clinton administration Justice Department official who was a member of the Sept. 11 Commission and is on the conference's advisory board, thinks he is being too modest.

"I think they sensed the tectonic plates are shifting," she said.

Gorelick says the quality of the more than 100 people slated to speak is very high and that they cover the waterfront in terms of the issues they will deal with. "If you need a three-day immersion course in all the key challenges facing our intelligence agencies, from the looks of the brochure, this is it," she concluded.

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http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20050109-100858-7308r.htm