Cover-up Deepens

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 21, 2001 | by J. Michael Waller

The Navy continues to deny solid evidence that in 1997 a Russian spy ship fired a laser beam at a Navy officer on a reconnaissance mission and wounded him in the eye.

More than four years after a suspected Russian spy ship in U.S. waters fired a laser into the eye of a U.S. Navy intelligence officer, Navy bureaucrats continue to cover up for a Clinton administration whitewash of the affair. Meanwhile, the wounded officer, Lt. Cmdr. Jack Daly, suffers constantly from debilitating laser burns to his right eye -- burns he sustained while photographing the spy ship for the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).

The incident occurred in April 1997 in the Strait of Juan de Fuca that separates Washington state from Canada. The ONI director personally had hand-picked Daly to serve aboard a Canadian military helicopter tasked to monitor suspicious ships in the waterway. On his very first mission, Daly was instructed to photograph a Vladivostok-based freighter known as the Kapitan Man. The Navy considered the Kapitan Man a Russian spy ship. A Sea King helicopter, piloted by Canadian Air Force Capt. Patrick Barnes, left its base in Esquimalt with Daly aboard to fly close to the vessel and photograph its unusual antenna arrays.

Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz tells the story of the ordeal -- with documents showing that the Clinton administration tried to cover up the affair in an effort to appease the Russians -- in his best-selling book, Betrayal. Insight subsequently reported that, as part of the cover-up, ONI bureaucrats altered a photograph Daly had shot that revealed a laser flash emanating from the bridge of the Kapitan Man. As Insight showed, the photo the Pentagon released to the public, as part of a White House-level policy decision to cover up for the Russians, had been substantially altered to "prove" that no laser beam emanated from the ship ("Fixing a Photo to Fit a Policy," Jan. 21, 2000).

Even though Bill Clinton is gone, the cover-up continues, Daly tells Insight. Sen. Robert C. Smith, R-N.H., has been duking it out with the Navy about the story exposing the photograph discrepancy. Last year, Navy Undersecretary Jerry MacArthur Hultin told Smith in a letter, "Contrary to [the author's] assertions, no evidence of a cover-up by ONI or the Department of Defense was found."

"That's because no one looked into it" notes Daly.

At the request of Sen. Smith for a "point-by-point rebuttal," the ONI wrote a "white paper" to challenge the Insight article. Once again the rebuttal, according to Smith and Daly, was misleading. Smith identified and itemized no fewer than 13 material errors or distortions in the ONI white paper (see sidebar). Among the errors was the ONI's insistence that a photograph the Pentagon had released in an attempt to discredit Daly -- the one showing a laser beam emanating from the bridge of the Kapitan Man -- had not been altered.

As Insight reported a year ago, the photo had been altered heavily. Yet in its rebuttal to this magazine, ONI again insisted that the picture was "unaltered" when it was released to the press and placed on the Department of Defense (DOD) Defenselink.mil Website.

Smith was furious. "My request for a `point-by-point' rebuttal was essentially given a one-word reply in the last sentence of the white paper, stating that the photo taken was `unaltered' when it was provided for public release," Smith told the Navy.

As Insight reported last year, a side-by-side comparison of the photograph Daly shot capturing the laser flash differs markedly from the version released by the Pentagon. Taken in the early afternoon in sunny weather, the photo was bright, clearly showing a sharp, pinkish-yellow flash emanating from the bridge, with the ship's name -- Kapitan Man -- clearly visible in the background. That same photo, released by the Pentagon in June 1999, was different. The colors were darker, the ship's name was almost invisible and the bright pink-and-yellow laser beam was portrayed as a subtle, dim red.

Some Pentagon sources tried to explain the discrepancies by saying that the dramatically changed image quality was due to repeated copying of the picture. But digital-photography experts say that such alteration through copying is impossible. Kodak, the manufacturer of the DCS 420 digital camera that Daly used to photograph the Kapitan Man, states, "because the ... picture consists of digital data (binary code, i.e., 1's and 0's) copies suffer no quality loss and are identical to the original."

Imagery analysts and a specialist with the manufacturer of the digital camera state unequivocally that someone did alter the photo prior to public release. And a senior digital-camera technician with the company that developed the device managed to duplicate the alteration.

The Kodak digital-camera technician, who requested anonymity, tried to duplicate the alteration from the original photograph. The result, he wrote in a memorandum obtained by Insight, "shows quite clearly that the two images are much different than just contrast. From observation of the noise in the images, there has been extensive noise filtering on the DOD image. This filtering was probably responsible for the loss of color saturation in the red light in your image relative to the DOD image." He adds, however, that it is not clear if the modification around the red light was intentional. The technician stresses that the opinions are his own and that "Kodak is in no way involved in this affair."