Pentagon hawk linked to UK intelligence company

Richard Perle is director of firm selling terror alert software

David Leigh
Friday March 21, 2003
The Guardian

Amid general stock market jitters, one British company linked to the 
American hawk Richard Perle and dealing with secret intelligence is 
among the few UK commercial organisations that stand to profit from 
the Iraq war and its accompanying worldwide terrorist alert.  

The Cambridge-based Autonomy Corporation, with Mr Perle's help, 
is secretively selling advanced computer eavesdropping systems 
to intelligence agencies around the world.  

Its software simultaneously monitors hundreds of thousands of 
intercepted emails and phone conversations while they are taking 
place. 

It claims to turn patterns of conversation into "beams of light" 
of varying thickness on a screen, revealing anomalies that might 
be code phrases. 

Clients to date are believed to include MI6 and GCHQ, the newly 
launched US department of homeland security in Washington, and 
intelligence agencies in Italy.  

Mr Perle, long one of the most high-profile proponents of war with 
Iraq, is a director of Autonomy with an option on 75,000 of the 
company's shares - currently trading in the doldrums, far below 
the option price.  

He advises the company on market opportunities, he told the Guardian 
from Washington. But he said he had no input into specific procurement 
decisions by US agencies.  

Mr Perle, a former Pentagon appointee, was recruited by Autonomy 
shortly before the Bush administration came to power in 2000. His 
present position as chairman of the Pentagon's defence advisory 
board is not formally part of the US administration, and so he is 
not required to divest himself of commercial interests. But he has 
close contact with policymakers in the intelligence community.  

Mr Perle has roamed the world promoting war against Saddam Hussein 
and linking him to the al-Qaida terrorist network. Such fears have 
caused an unprecedented surge in international intelligence activity.  

Last September, for example, despite rebuttals by the FBI, Mr Perle 
insisted at a gathering of European and Israeli politicians in Italy 
that an Iraqi agent had met Mohammed Atta, one of the World Trade 
Centre hijackers, in Prague, with the inference that Saddam Hussein 
was involved with the September 11 attacks.  

This month, Italian intelligence became the latest clients of Autonomy 
Corporation, spending an undisclosed sum to install the company's Idol 
(intelligent data operating layer). This followed further $1m (UKP640,000) 
contracts last December with US intelligence agencies, including the 
defence intelligence agency (military intelligence), the secret service 
(which protects the president) and reportedly also the NSA (satellite 
intelligence) and FBI.  

The previous October, the US department of homeland security gave 
Autonomy a big contract. Autonomy says that almost a third of its 
UKP60m annual turnover comes from sales to intelligence agencies, 
but it is forbidden by many customers on security grounds from 
disclosing details.  

At the beginning of the year, boasting of his company's profitability 
record, the chief executive, Mike Lynch, said in London that the threat 
of war in Iraq had helped sales to intelligence agencies, as "defence 
issues come more to mind, which frees up the mind to spend".  

Autonomy's "beams of light" are based on mathematical algorithms that 
it claims can identify unusual patterns of conversation in any language, 
such as Arabic, in "real time". Conventional keyword recognition used 
by telephone-tap processing systems are easily defeated if a terrorist 
target avoids using words such as "bomb" or "Saddam".  

Autonomy says its system can not only handle intercepted voice, text 
and video in any language, but can sort virtually any quantity of 
intercepts as they happen.  

Mr Perle is engaged in a ferocious battle of words with the veteran US 
journalist Seymour Hersh, whom he has called a journalistic "terrorist". 
Mr Perle is threatening to sue Hersh in London for a recent New Yorker 
article in which he questioned Mr Perle's role in relation to Saudi Arabia 
in another venture capital company, Trireme, and quoted Saudis alleging 
he was misusing his business connections.  

Mr Perle said Hersh's allegations about Trireme were "outrageous 
slander". He had lunched with the arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and 
another Saudi as the article reported, he said, purely to discuss 
information they had offered about the possibility of President Saddam 
agreeing to surrender. He added: "I did not say anything of a business 
nature."  

Mr Perle would find it much more difficult to sue for libel 
in the US, where comment in good faith about public figures 
is virtually unrestricted.  

                            -==-

Source: Information Clearinghouse ....
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2364.htm

Cheers, Steve..

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