＂Ordered To DESTROY 9⧸11 Data＂ – Able Danger Whistleblower EXPOSES Classified Intel Deletion Scandal
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Summary
In this episode, retired Lt. Col. Tony Schoomaker tells the story of how he was exposed by the Defense Intelligence Agency for his role in the Able Danger mission in Afghanistan in 2003. He also talks about his experience with the 9/11 Commission and how he handled the aftermath of the attacks.
Transcript
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If you don't mind, Tony, for you, you're a lieutenant colonel, okay?
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One of my biggest heroes when I was in the military was a man named Lieutenant Colonel P. Cox.
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He ended up being a general later on, but he was one of my favorite guys I ever worked under
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Lieutenant Colonel is a very high-ranking place to be, and you've seen a lot.
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That day, then Senator Biden, today ex-president Joe Biden,
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says five of them were not allowed to come on today.
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What were you told that first you were invited?
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And then what did they say that you can't come on?
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Well, let me give a little bit of background for context.
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So being a lieutenant colonel is a bit of a misnomer.
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That was a part of my cover that happened during the time I was outed by DIA.
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I'm in something called the Military Intelligence Accepted Career Program, MICEP.
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So what happened was, Pat, is that when I came back from Afghanistan,
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after I disclosed my role in the Able Danger operation,
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I was immediately suspended by defense intelligence over nonsense.
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Yeah, it was Major General, I'll think of his name in a second.
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And at the time, the director was Admiral Jacoby.
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And when I got suspended, I had some time on my hands because nobody knew what was going on.
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There was three nonsensical allegations, which, by the way, the Army resolved in my favor,
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You don't get promoted if you have standing at potential adverse actions over you.
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It's like, congratulations, you're being promoted.
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Defense Intelligence used the three same allegations to suspend my clearance and get me fired,
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And think about that from a business perspective.
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You're looking at facts, and Army says, yeah, this is not nonsense.
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Defense Intelligence, who I have the issue with, suspend me and fire me over the same allegations.
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We can go through them in greater detail at some point.
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But, Tony, you have to tell the story as to what you had done in Afghanistan when Mueller came through.
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He is the staff director of the 9-11 Commission.
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So, when I was undercover—again, this is a bit complicated.
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When I was undercover in alias in Afghanistan, being the director of operations for the clandestine operations in Afghanistan in 2003,
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it's when Zelikow came through, Bagram, and he was part of the 9-11 Commission.
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He and several staffers came through, and their task—this is the 9-11 Commission task—was to do research on events before, the day of, and after the 9-11 attacks.
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They basically wanted to talk to people with firsthand anecdotal information.
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It's like, hey, they've probably already heard of this, but I want to talk about Able Danger.
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And so, what I'm going to tell you now is what I told them.
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Able Danger was an entrepreneurial concept that was created for the purposes of targeting a non-geographic target, al-Qaeda.
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We were trying to figure out the best and brightest way to go after al-Qaeda in 1999.
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So, what we did is that, as a reservist—I know you're going to laugh at this—as a major, I was down in Tampa.
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And the DIA rep, Al Downs, said, go talk—this is a major reservist going to brief the commanding general, Pete Schoomaker, on my civilian mission.
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General Pete Schoomaker, who was commander of Special Operations Command in 1999 to 2000.
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So, imagine, if you will, when people have a hard time wrapping their mind around this, a little old reservist major goes in to brief the commanding general of SOCOM on what I do in my civilian DIA job.
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Out of that meeting, Pat, General Schoomaker says, I get him right in to able danger.
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So, the next day, I think this was August of 1999, I'm brought down into a secure—yeah, you guys have your thing in a bank vault.
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They're secure facilities within secure facilities.
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I go down, and I'm introduced to Captain Scott Philpott, who's a lieutenant commander, or a commander, and I'm given this big old binder.
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The binder's about, oh, about five inches thick.
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And I start reading it, Scott, Scott Philpott, and I start reading it, and it is like the e-ticket to Disneyland.
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This is a sweet—this is a concept to go and conduct offensive, offensive operations against the growing threat.
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Remember you talked about the value judgment of what you invest in?
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We had already been hit twice in Africa from al-Qaeda, and there was a recognition that that was a growing threat.
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So, secretly, General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs—you can bring him up.
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Hugh Shelton was chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 99—had tasked Pete Schoomaker with Able Danger.
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You're a business guy, so you guys do campaigns, right?
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You sign resources to tasks to potential outcomes.
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So, Able Danger was the offensive concept off the books.
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Remember, you see it in the movies all the time, the euphemism of off the books.
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But if I'm not mistaken, it was under Eric Clinesmith's—
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As a matter of fact, he's never been in Reddit in everything we did.
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So, I'm right into the project, and my job is to develop access for purposes of weaponized technology.
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This is before 9-11, and we're tasked to go kill al-Qaeda before 9-11.
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Think about the—now, this is the problem with the whole thing we're talking about.
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This is why they want to distract with the chart constantly, Pat.
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We—this is why they were upset with me testifying.
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You remember the Israeli op, the pager op, Pat?
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They weren't the first ones to think about that.
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I have to be careful about where I'm going, because we have to—I'm still trying to get
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permission from the Pentagon to talk about my role.
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My role in Able Danger, to this day, has never been disclosed.
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My role was so highly classified—he probably remembers this—I was waived at—in closed
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I was waived off by the staff director of the House Armed Service Committee, because I couldn't
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He was literally in the back of the room saying, don't say that.
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So to this day, we have never talked about—and I'm still trying to get permission to talk
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Anyway, suffice it to say that what I was doing in my civilian job was what we wanted to introduce
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to the Able Danger operation as one of the offensive options.
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This wasn't about waiting until something happened.
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This was about us, Pete Schoomaker, putting together a team, the best and the brightest,
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to put together options for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Hugh Shelton, to go do something
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We put together a team that would be invested in doing things that have never been done before.
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And oh, by the way, how do you target something that's never been targeted?
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How do you do something relating to a non-geographic target, a transnational target?
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Remember, this is 99—this is before anybody understood the power of the Internet.
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So when I'm tasked to help them figure out how do we go about targeting all the ranch—Pete Schoomaker
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called it the ranch, the Special Operations Command ranch.
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That includes the Secret Army of Northern Virginia, Delta, you know, Rangers.
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It's the options that were available for us to do something.
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And oh, by the way, the other thing key about this, this was—Able Danger was the first
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time Special Operations Command was ever the supported sink.
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This is important because that means they were the lead.
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They were the ones asking the other regional sinks to help them.
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I just pulled up, and I asked, what was the original purpose of Able Danger?
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Mission objective, number one, map al-Qaeda's global network.
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The team used open-source intelligence, public records, website news, and advanced data analysis
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tools to construct link charts of suspected terrorists and their connections.
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Number two, identify terrorist cells in the U.S.
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Able Danger reportedly flagged individuals later tied to 9-11, including Muhammad Al-Tah,
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based on behavior patterns, travel records, and communication metadata.
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Number three, provide operational intelligence to military planners.
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The goal was to preemptively disrupt terror plots through actionable intelligence passed
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So I got this task, and it's like, what do I do?
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I knew Lewa was experimenting with data mining, and I'll let Eric talk take over here, because
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So this is a long way to answering your question, I know, Pat, but you need to understand the
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picture of what got us into the room that day of the hearing.
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I guess what I want to know is, who told you you can't be in the hearing?
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So DOD leadership, Army leadership said you can't go in.
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I'm in uniform, standing right next to the charts.
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If you bring up, if you Google Able Danger Senate Hearing 2005, it should come up with
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a number of time-life pictures that show all of us together, where I'm in the back row
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Everything I'm laying out to you right now, we were going to lay out in great detail.
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And so this is where, to answer your question, what I was going to do is build the case of
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why-and by the way, Pat, one key thing to remember, we weren't supposed to find what
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We were looking at Al-Qaeda from a fresh perspective.
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I would argue that we became a dangling participle, an inconvenient organization that saw what the
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deep state was doing, and that's why they came after us.
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Did any one of you at the time have a relationship with the president, President Trump, currently
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Before we show anything, the only reason I'm sharing this is, Rob, do you have a clip
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of President Trump on Mourning Joe Scarborough?
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I don't know if you guys have seen this or not.
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Mourning Joe is doing a show, and they're talking about a book that he wrote that came
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And just listen to Mourning Joe's reaction to this.
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BuzzFeed dug up an old quote from Donald Trump, talking about a large-scale terror attack 19 months
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In his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, Trump wrote,
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I really am convinced we're in danger of the sort of terrorist attacks that will make the
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bombing of the 1993 Trade Center look like little kids playing with firecrackers.
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Trump also mentioned the mastermind of the attack, writing, quote,
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One day, we're told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin Laden is
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public enemy number one, and U.S. jet fighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan.
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He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later, it's on to a new enemy
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So what do you think about the fact that, Robby Kempos, what do you think about the
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fact that the president said this 19 months before 9-11 happened?
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I think wise people understood what was forming, because we were told by the chairman
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And one of the notable things about this, now, full disclosure, I know President Trump.
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I was a national security advisor for the Trump 2020 campaign.
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So I do have, you know, and I did meet him way later in 20, I think, 15.
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But I think he had a sense, like many of us, that something was brewing.
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And to continue your point to answer your question, when I was the coordinator of trying
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to pull the team together behind the scenes, I took the ABLE Danger Team to land information
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They were doing an extraordinary job of, again, look at the time frame, 98, 99, 2000.
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And so we were the first operational unit to actually use a combination of open source,
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Part of my job was to actually combine the top secret piece.
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One of my deputies, Teresa McSwain, Lieutenant Colonel McSwain, brought the NSA database down
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to Garland, Texas, to combine them together to do this overall targeting, to, you know,
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And again, before I let Eric, one second, before I turn it over to Eric, remember, we're talking
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about a massive investment of resources as you, as a businessman, would recognize as a
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Yet somehow they reduced it down to a map of a chart they couldn't find to dismiss everything
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we did because they were so desperate to focus on one thing and push us away.
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So now, Eric, were you coming here as an army major, intelligence officer?
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You're the one that was at, you testified before Congress and were ordered to destroy two and
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It was, well, yes and no, because before the destruction, we were giving a cease and desist
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order down through DOD to stop what you're doing because you're violating intelligence
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oversight rules on how you collected that information.
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One of the problems that, yeah, that was me, a much younger me.
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But what we learned, again, we were running several different operations.
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It was only, I think, two years old by the time this started up.
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I was the first military chief of the intelligence branch.
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So it was an operational unit designed to help the army or support the army in fighting
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information warfare, information operations, psychological deception, operational security,
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So we had operational teams, but I had a 24-person intel branch within that group.
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And we were getting, because of the power that we were given with these new data mining
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tools, and I'm telling you, they were bleeding edge.
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We were doing a lot of things that we were making mistakes along the way.
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I got called in one morning because apparently I had conducted a denial of service attack against
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DIA, and then now NGA, their proxy server, shut the whole thing down.
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Only because we were training a harvesting tool to pick up different information, and
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it hit DIA on a classified network and started harvesting the entire agency.
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And so, you know, denial of service, they shut the whole thing down.
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You know, I got called on the carpet for that one morning.
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That's what I mean, like the types of technology we were trying to wrestle with and figure out.
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Once we had gotten those down, and it was a great combination of the data that we were
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bringing in, the tools that we were using, but also, more importantly, the people and
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the processes that we had put in place and the folks that I had assigned to different tasks.
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We had first done an operation using data mining to show Department of Defense how our technology
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was being stolen, specifically by China and some other countries, and we were able to
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map it out by using a single technology as a sample.
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That became a firestorm because it had gotten leaked that we were doing this work.
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We received a subpoena from Congressman Dan Burton that he wanted all that information.
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So we spent a weekend making 30,000 copies to deliver it by, you know, a data set on paper
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But that got us on the map, and that's why Tony came to see us.
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Is this two and a half terabytes anywhere right now?
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Here's the rub, because it was myself and one of my warrant officer analysts who was on
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the team, we had to have a deep discussion because we were told, you know, if you're
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collecting information that has information about U.S. persons from an intelligence standpoint,
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I mean, they beat this regulation into your head every year as a requirement.
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Oh, by the way, all this stuff that you had collected, and it wasn't just one chart.
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And then we started seeing cells pop up within the U.S.
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My hometown of Plymouth, Michigan popped up as a potential operation, a front organization
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that was using my little hometown outside of Detroit to funnel money into the organization.
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It was an entire support and sympathetic footprint.
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But is there enough information here where you know who was behind 9-11?
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We had a person that was actually monitoring global movement of individuals of interest
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She did a three-hour interview for my oral history, which has never been released.
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And the DOD IG interviewed her and then basically proceeded to not ask her a single question about
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Eric was provided via Orion Scientific as the source, detailed data about individuals moving
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It was the fact that we were targeting down to the mosque level, which makes it hugely
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The bigger story in the Congress is that I was funding their program as the chairman of
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I would go down to Fort Belvoir because all the services were standing up information dominant
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They were using software like Starlight and Spires and others that no one else was using.
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John Hamry was the Deputy Secretary of Defense.
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I suggested, John, you go down and see what your people are doing.
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He looked at it and he called me and said, Mr. Chairman, you're absolutely right.
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Far beyond what the Army is using it for, we need this capability.
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I proposed establishing a data fusion center that would not just be for the Army or DOD.
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So John Hamry suggested to me, Congressman, I will support and manage it either at the
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But you've got to convince the FBI and the CIA to allow us to use their raw data because
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So on November the 4th of 1999, a date I'll never forget, I had John Hamry in my office.
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I had the Deputy Director of the FBI, the Deputy Director of the CIA, and I handed them a
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proposal to create the NOAA, National Operations and Analysis Hub, Policymaker and Warfighters
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Tool to Deal with Emerging Transnational Terrorist Threats.
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The big question for 9-11 is, why did the CIA not want to be a part of a fusion center
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I was going to fund, FBI was supporting, two years before 9-11.
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The biggest criticism after 9-11 was the lack of fusion of intelligence data.
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And that recommendation was based on what these folks were doing.
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Eric, Tony, Eileen Pricer, Scott Philpott, and all the others, J.D. Smith, that were a part of the Able Danger team.
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They brought the charts in, and I took them right to the White House.
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