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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 (£640,000) 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 £60m 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.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,918742,00.html
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