5 December 2000. Thanks to K.
TV SHOW: 60 Minutes
DATE: December 3, 2000
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DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATIONS
MIKE WALLACE, co-host:
Today in Washington there is a secret court that exists soley for something called FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It's a court where the FBI has regularly secured permission to wire tap, bug and search the homes of individuals the FBI suspects of committing espionage against the United States.
The law establishing the secret court was enacted back in the 1970s when the US government was conducting illegal, clandestine searches and wire taps on American citizens in the name of national security. And the FISA court was set up ostensibly to protect the civil liberties of innocent Americans. At least that was the intention.
(Footage of Theresa Squillacote being escorted by a guard; Kurt Stand and Wallace at the prison; Department of Justice Building; photo of Squillacote and Stand)
WALLACE: (Voiceover) But don't tell that to Theresa Squillacote, a former Pentagon attorney currently serving a 22-year term in a Florida prison for espionage, nor to her husband Kurt Stand, a former union official currently serving 17 years in Allenwood Federal Prison in Pennsylvania, also for espionage. Their story begins here in the FISA court, a room in the Justice Department Building. No trials are held here. The court's only function is to issue surveillance warrants. And it was here in 1996 that a federal judge, in the name of national security, agreed there was probable cause for the FBI to monitor every aspect of the lives of Theresa Squillacote and Kurt Stand, a surveillance that was to last for a year and a half.
You're bugged. I guess your bedroom is bugged.
Mr. KURT STAND: Yes.
WALLACE: Your telephones are bugged. Your garbage.
Mr. STAND: Searched. Our computer is downloaded. Our house is searched in our absence.
WALLACE: You must have been thunderstruck.
Mr. STAND: It's like having a window on your life 24 hours a day. And nobody behaves 24 hours a day the way you want strangers to view you.
Ms. THERESA SQUILLACOTE: And--and why they felt compelled to discharge, you know, this massive volley of--of shot at this tiny little, meaningless little creature, I can't imagine. All they did was destroy my life and my family's.
(Footage of FBI building; Larry Robbins on phone)
WALLACE: (Voiceover) And what was the probable cause the FBI gave the court to grant this intrusion into their lives? We'll never know. Larry Robbins is Squillacote's attorney.
Mr. LARRY ROBBINS: What makes this statute unique in American law and, in our view, uniquely disturbing in American law is that to this day, we haven't the faintest idea what's in the affidavits from which they got the authority to tap these phones and go into their houses.
(Footage of Dick Sauber)
WALLACE: (Voiceover) Dick Sauber represents Kurt Stand.
Mr. DICK SAUBER: The--the principal problem with the statute, from our standpoint, is that we were not allowed to see the evidence that the government used to obtain the search and wire-tap warrants.
WALLACE: There have been thousands of cases in the 22 years since the FISA court was established, yet no judge has ever allowed a defense attorney to see the basis for granting a wire tap or a search warrant. But this is what the couple's attorneys think was the probable cause.
(Footage of Berlin Wall; forms with Stand's and Squillacote's personal information on them; photo of Stand and Squillacote)
WALLACE: (Voiceover) After the fall at East Germany in 1989, the US government gained access to what they believed were the files of East German intelligence, the Stasi. And they found Stand's and Squillacote's names in them. Next to their names was personal information about them and, in other records, an account of expense money they had received. But there were no espionage operations listed as involving them. There wasn't even any assurance that these Stasi files were authentic.
Mr. SAUBER: And we had no chance to cross-examine the origin of those documents, or we never were able to confront the person who purportedly put them together.
WALLACE: How come?
Mr. SAUBER: The judge ruled that those documents could come into evidence without actually having somebody come in and say, `I wrote them.'
(Footage of court sketch; vintage photos of Stand and Squillacote; footage of Lothar Zeimir; photo of Zeimir; footage of Stand)
WALLACE: (Voiceover) Even the US attorney, in a letter to the court, was unable to vouch for the authenticity of the Stasi files. However, the FBI was aware that Stand and Squillacote, both of them former student radicals, had traveled often to East Germany, where Stand introduced Squillacote to a man name of Lothar Zeimer, seen here in a surveillance video. Unbeknownst to Stand, his wife eventually began a love affair with Zeimir, who it turns out was working as a spy for the Stasi. Stand, too, had a connection to Zeimer.
So the first question that I have to ask you is: What'd you do for the East Germans?
Mr. STAND: What I did for the East Germans was I wrote political papers for them.
WALLACE: Did they pay you for this?
Mr. STAND: No. What they would do is they did help pay for the trips. And then I would meet with them for a few days, and they would pay me some of my expenses.
(Footage of FBI building)
WALLACE: (Voiceover) Their names in the Stasi files, their radical backgrounds, their friendship with a Stasi agent, one can see why a judge might allow the FBI to target them, except that none of that is illegal, and the FISA statute is explicit.
Mr. ROBBINS: The statute says, for example, `The target must be then and there at the time of the search an agent of a foreign power.'
Mr. SAUBER: The warrant was requested beginning in 1996, through '96, into '97. East Germany effectively ceased to exist five or six years before that.
(Photos of Squillacote; aerial footage of Pentagon)
WALLACE: (Voiceover) And, ironically, though the US government had known for years that Squillacote's name was in the Stasi files, she was still able to get security clearance in 1994 to work at the Pentagon. Her job there was to help eliminate wasteful spending.
Ms. SQUILLACOTE: That was sort of a very kind of unique project focusing on reforming all these archaic spider web of procurement laws we had.
WALLACE: You--you did a good job.
Ms. SQUILLACOTE: I did a good job.
(Footage of medal)
WALLACE: (Voiceover) So good, in fact, that she received a Meritorious Service medal from the Army and a Reinventing Government Award from Vice President Al Gore. That's a fairly sensitive job for a--somebody who's under the suspicion of being a spy.
Mr. ROBBINS: They evidently did not think she was a security risk and left her in her position, doubtless because they had no evidence that she had ever sent anything--anything relating to the government of the United States to any foreign power.
(Footage of Stand and Squillacote's home; photos of FBI evidence)
WALLACE: (Voiceover) There was some circumstantial evidence. In a search of their home, the FBI found what appeared to be spy paraphernalia: a doll with a hollow head, a small rusted camera made in East Germany and a short-wave radio. You can understand then why the FBI, when they learned all of this, said, `Hey, Kurt Stand, this guy needs watching.'
Mr. STAND: The camera we had forgotten about and was--when they found it, it was rusted. We hadn't used it. We should have thrown it away, but we didn't.
WALLACE: The doll?
Mr. STAND: Yeah, the doll, right.
WALLACE: You're a regular Whittaker Chambers.
Mr. STAND: Well, perhaps in their mind, but except that we didn't have high-level access to anything.
(Footage of FBI building; visual of transcript with excerpt reading, "We had not gathered any intelligence to that effect...")
WALLACE: (Voiceover) Indeed, even at their trial, to the question of whether they had ever passed classified documents to a foreign government, the FBI witness answered, quote, "We had not gathered any intelligence to that effect," unquote.
Mr. SAUBER: They didn't find a single piece of evidence that our clients had committed espionage or that they had ever given anything to any foreign powers.
Mr. ROBBINS: So what--so what they did is they set out to create that evidence.
WALLACE: And how did the FBI do that? The Bureau runs something called the Behavioral Analysis Program. Its purpose: to create personality profiles of suspects to help in their investigations. In Squillacote's case, her profile was based on everything the FBI learned in 18 months of 24-hour-a-day surveillance.
(Visual of surveillance documents with excerpts reading, "She strongly detests being at the Pentagon..." and "She suffers from...depression and is taking the anti-depressants Zoloft and Diserel."; Wallace and Squillacote talking)
WALLACE: (Voiceover) Here's what they knew about her: that she detested her job at the Pentagon and was about to quit; that she suffered from depression and was suicidal; and that this was a particularly bad time for her because Lothar Zeimer, the East German spy, had just broken off their 10-year love affair.
Ms. SQUILLACOTE: If you picked your lowest moment, if you picked absolutely your worst, lowest moment and a total sense of being worth nothing and of having accomplished nothing and totally defining yourself by the relationships that you had, one or two, and then they were gone, it was just a tremendous struggle.
(Footage of Eric Plakon and Jeffrey Genovski)
WALLACE: (Voiceover) At the trial, psychiatrists Eric Plakon and Jeffrey Genovski listened to the FBI surveillance tapes and then testified for the defense about Terry Squillacote's mental state.
Dr. ERIC PLAKON: You would see dramatic shifts in Terry from seeming rather composed to being suicidal, desperate, quite regressed, speaking in baby talk, struggling with suicidal feelings.
Dr. JEFFREY GENOVSKI: E--exactly. She could appear well put together, and then she'd collapse. This was especially evident when she would call her psychiatrist on the telephone or--and was out of control, sad, suicidal.
Ms. SQUILLACOTE: (From surveillance tape) Oh!
WALLACE: (Voiceover) You heard right, the FBI was eavesdropping on Squillacote and her psychiatrist, Dr. Jose Apud.
(Excerpt from surveillance tape)
Dr. JOSE APUD: Well, what's important now is that you feel safe with yourself. And I was wondering whether you feel like hurting yourself now.
Ms. SQUILLACOTE: I don't know. It's just too big.
Dr. APUD: I'm sorry?
Ms. SQUILLACOTE: It's just so big. I don't know what to do.
Dr. APUD: Mm-hmm.
(End of excerpt)
(Footage of J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building)
WALLACE: (Voiceover) So the FBI listened as Squillacote unburdened herself to her psychiatrist, and they came up with a plan to catch her in an act of espionage.
Mr. ROBBINS: And they sat in a room with all of these tapes, and this group of men and women sat and devised the perfect undercover operation, tailored to this woman's psychiatric difficulties.
WALLACE: What you've been saying is what I read, effectively, in the FBI's behavioral assessment of her.
Dr. GENOVSKI: It--it was remarkably accurate. I mean, here, they had data that no clinical or forensic psychiatrist ever has.
(Footage of FBI Building; Squillacote and Stand's home; letter; visual of the book "Armed and Dangerous: My Undercover Struggled Against Apartheid" by Ronnie Kasrils; photos of Squillacote and the agent)
WALLACE: (Voiceover) The FBI knew that Squillacote was about to leave the Pentagon, and they had to act quickly. In a search of her home, the FBI found a letter from Squillacote to South African Deputy Defense Minister Ronnie Kasrils in praise of a book he'd written. The FBI's plan was to have an undercover agent pose as an emissary of Kasrils'. His aim? To get Squillacote to give him classified documents from the Pentagon. All of her vulnerabilities went into the FBI game plan. And when she and the undercover agent met, she began to feel her dark mood lift.
(Excerpt from tape)
GREGORY: How do you feel about a little travel?
Ms. SQUILLACOTE: Oh, cool! This could be nice.
GREGORY: OK.
(End of excerpt)
Ms. SQUILLACOTE: I think he had made it quite clear to me in--in the first conversation that I--you know, `Yeah, OK, hon, babe, if you want me to hang around, you're going to have to, you know, be of value. Otherwise, psst, forget it, I'm on the road.'
WALLACE: Mm-hmm.
Ms. SQUILLACOTE: And--and, you know, I was sort of, like, this--this little Shirley Temple, just going, `Oh, OK.' So...
WALLACE: So all of a sudden, this validated you in some way.
Ms. SQUILLACOTE: Oh, yeah. Big, big-time.
WALLACE: And so you fell right into the trap.
Ms. SQUILLACOTE: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I certainly did. I certainly did.
WALLACE: Look, you bragged to the undercover agent, Gregory, `Oh, I--I've done lots and lots of illegal things.'
Ms. SQUILLACOTE: Yeah. I think I would have said just about anything to this guy. I think...
WALLACE: Why?
Ms. SQUILLACOTE: Because it was so critical to get his approval, to get his--to--to please him, to--to be what it was that he was communicating he wanted me to be. `Oh, yeah, OK. I'll be whatever you want me to be.'
(Footage of Squillacote at prison; Stand and Wallace talking)
WALLACE: (Voiceover) And that's what she thought she was doing when she gave the undercover agent four classified documents. There was little of consequence in them, but they were classified. Kurt Stand, too, was arrested and charged because he had known of his wife's liaison with the undercover agent, and they found his thumbprint on one of the documents she gave the agent.
Mr. STAND: It still just stuns me, the level of manipulation that went into this. So here you see somebody sick, and rather than try to deal with that, you try to make them sicker. And that's, in essence, what they were trying to do. And to me, it's--it's unforgivable.
Ms. SQUILLACOTE: You know, I--I made a--a--a fool of myself roundly, but I--I didn't commit a crime. I got manipulated into a crime. And I was never a spy. And the responsibility for the situation totally lies with them. And the shame is theirs. The shame is theirs.
WALLACE: Of course, we wanted to ask the FBI about their investigation, and they agreed to talk to us, saying it was a case in which they took special pride. We wanted to ask them questions like: Was she, in fact, a spy? And if so, did she spy for East Germany, a country that no longer existed when the FBI applied for permission to wire tap and search her home? And how did Squillacote manage to get a security clearance to work at the Pentagon while all this was going on? Well, in the end, despite the FBI's repeated assurances over many months that they would cooperate with us, somehow they never found the time to answer any of our questions about the case.
(Announcements)