Interlinked logos for the U.S. Department of Defense and Fort Huachuca’s Human Intelligence Training Joint Center of Excellence. Photo: Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin.
By Jack Poulson – Mar 20, 2024
Fort Huachuca’s Human Intelligence Training Center plans to teach soldiers to evade adversary counterintelligence, including through remotely manipulating cellphone sensors and wiping hidden volumes.
Within Fort Huachuca in southeastern Arizona, the U.S. Defense Department is quietly training its soldiers on how to spy against ‘near-peer’ adversaries such as China in the age of cellphones and facial recognition. While the Central Intelligence Agency receives the bulk of popular attention and critique for collecting what is referred to as ‘human intelligence’, or ‘HUMINT’, the U.S. military ramped up its own spying tradecraft after what was seen as shortcomings from the CIA during Operation Eagle Claw, the infamous failed attempt to rescue American hostages from U.S. Embassy Tehran during the last year of the Carter administration. Rather than solely collecting tactical intelligence through techniques such as interrogating detainees, the military would begin gathering its own strategic intelligence through infiltrating countries under cover identities, as well as partnering with the National Security Agency to extract its own signals intelligence, often via electronic eavesdropping from covert flights.
(For a comprehensive history of the U.S. military’s human intelligence capabilities, see Jeffrey T. Richelson’s 2015 article, ‘The Pentagon’s Spies’.)
Despite having been publicly exposed just two years after its formal creation more than forty years ago, the U.S. Army’s Intelligence Support Activity retains an almost mythical status, even above that of Delta Force, the Army’s elite counter-terrorism ‘Special Mission Unit’, and SEAL Team Six, the Navy’s equivalent. Originally operating under the backronym of ‘FOG’ — for ‘Field Operations Group’ — due to its ambiguous mission spanning direct action, human intelligence, and signals intelligence, FOG officially renamed to the Intelligence Support Activity on March 3, 1981 under the command of Jerry M. King. Widely known as ‘Task Force Orange’, or ‘TFO’, since its formal incorporation into Joint Special Operations Command alongside Delta Force and SEAL Team Six in the early 2000’s, official biographies refer to the unit as the ‘U.S. Army Office of Military Support’, just as SEAL Team Six uses ‘Naval Special Warfare Development Group’ and Delta Force uses ‘Combat Applications Group’.
According to a recent sole-source purchasing justification published on SAM.gov in November for a $1.9 million contract, U.S. military spies were said to be likely to die if the advanced spycraft school located at Fort Huachuca had been unable to purchase the cellphone monitoring and manipulation technology sold by Quiet Professionals LLC, a special operations contractor run by former ‘operators’ from Delta Force and Task Force Orange. Prepared for the ‘West’ campus of the Human Intelligence Training Joint Center of Excellence (HT-JCOE), which is co-located with the U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence (USAICoE), the justification document claims that the Cerebra Gray platform and Quantum Fusion “analytics and movement tracking capability” developed by Quiet Professionals is better than its competitors at “replicat[ing] the capability a modern law enforcement or adversary counterintelligence service would have at their disposal.”
In addition to the ability to remotely wipe hard drives and manipulate the sensors of operatives’ cellphones, perhaps the most surprising capability demanded for the spycraft training was the usage of cellphone “hidden volume[s]”, a technique of encrypting data such that a cover password can be provided which decrypts into a staged environment which plausibly conceals sensitive data requiring a separate password. The most infamous provider of hidden volumes has been TrueCrypt, a free encryption program built on top of the E4M software developed by the kingpin-turned-government-asset Paul Le Roux.
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As part of simulating the counterintelligence capabilities of a country such as China, HT-JCOE claims that Quiet Professionals also provides “real-time and historical tracking of students, student vehicles, and students [sic] handsets”, as well as “full-packet and locational data capture, analysis, and playback tools” for cellphone data. Far from a technique only used by China, the Nebraska-based company PenLink bragged of its historical packet-reconstruction wiretapping of cellphones through relationships with telecommunications companies such as Verizon before national security contractor Edward Snowden exposed U.S. mass surveillance and spurred the usage of end-to-end encryption.
A separate HT-JCOE solicitation for a “Camera Laboratory” sought to enable “training and exercise against security cameras and associated Artificial Intelligence capabilities of Facial Recognition and Person Tracking.” One component of the solicitation implied the usage of Chinese facial recognition cameras as part of the training by stating: “The Gov’t [Government] cannot stress enough that the purchase of adversary technology must be done in a manner that is not attributable to the USG [U.S. Government] and where USG end user is not known.” When reached for comment, Fort Huachuca public affairs claimed that the Camera Laboratory contract was cancelled and that the statement regarding the covert purchase of “adversary technology” was a mistake.
When reached regarding the more recent Quiet Professionals sole-source justification, one of the same public affairs officers did not respond to a request for comment, and neither did Quiet Professionals itself. But marketing materials make clear that the Cerebra Gray platform has run on top of Microsoft’s Azure cloud and made use of Esri’s geospatial platform. (Quiet Professionals also published a comedic mock-up of how Cerebra Gray could be used to track Santa Claus.)
The clear context for such advanced human intelligence training from HT-JCOE, which opened its doors in April 2007 following authorization from Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone in June 2006, is the threat of ‘Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance’ from a country as technologically sophisticated as the United States. While nationalistic framings generally portray China as uniquely competent in surveillance, an analogous challenge for U.S. spies hoping to gather intelligence in Chinese smart cities is covertly meeting with sources in Manhattan while their telecommunications and social media providers are being wiretapped by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the myriad outdoor cameras are attempting to track them with facial recognition developed by companies such as Clearview AI. The techniques for avoiding facial recognition cameras which would have been taught in the ‘Camera Laboratory’ are unclear, but the counter-wiretapping approach supplied by companies such as Quiet Professionals appears to involve spoofing sensor data, likely including GPS location. (In the case of physical apprehension, the hidden volumes and remote wiping would apparently come into play.)
Despite the low public profile of Quiet Professionals, which takes its name from the slogan of the Green Berets, their data analytics subsidiary Echo Analytics Group has maintained a close relationship with the controversial special operations-themed counter-sex work nonprofit Skull Games. As previously reported by the author, the first Skull Game took place in the Tampa, Florida headquarters of Echo Analytics.
Sam Biddle contributed reporting on HT-JCOE’s proposed Camera Laboratory.
(Substack)
