What's the deal with MZM?

The TPM Muckraker has uncovered some interesting background on MZM, the "other" company that bribed Duke Cunningham. (MZM is the one that seems to have actually done stuff -- as opposed to the Wilkes empire, which was largely a series of false fronts.)

MZM was involved with spying on Americans. Thanks to palm greasing, MZM chieftain Mitchell Wade received some $16 million in contracts to provide "data storage" systems to CIFA -- a.k.a. the Counterintelligence Field Activity, an allegedly anti-terrorist spook-shop run by the Pentagon. They have spent a lot of their time snooping on anti-war activists and other peace-lovin', Bush-hatin' Communist sunzabitches.

CIFA has also spent some time keeping track of the anti-Bush blogosphere. Hi, boys!

(Side note: Recall that one of the few services that Wilkes actually provided was "data storage" -- using technology taken from another firm.)

Let's combine what TPM has uncovered with what we already knew.

When we first learned about MZM, we were told that they had been hired to provide "office furniture" and "intelligence services" for the White House. Why would anyone hire an intelligence firm to supply chairs and desks and office cubicle walls? Only one answer ever made sense to me: The stuff was bugged.

So who would bug staffers in the West Wing? Well, any number of entities within the government might have wanted to do such a thing. In the early 1970s, the CIA bugged Nixon's staffers (and probably even the Oval Office itself), using pretty much the same tactics.

In an earlier column, I suggested another possible party who might have shown an interest: the Mossad. Before you dismiss the suggestion, consider:

Congressman Bob Ney, one of "Abramoff's boys," mysteriously arranged for a company called Foxcom to install wireless communications in Congress. In return for getting this gig, Foxcom made a hefty donation to an Abramovian "atheletic fund," which, in this case, means that Foxcom paid for one of those expensive golf trips to Scotland.

Foxcom is an Israeli firm, but does that mean they're Mossad? I cannot say -- not for sure. But we must presume that they had a serious reason to go to such pains to set up the wireless network used by Congress.

As any number of articles have shown, the Abramoff scandal and the Cunningham/Wilkes/MZM bribery scandals are so intimately linked, one perhaps ought to think of them as a unit. So if Israel went through Abramoff in order to spy on Congress, then perhaps it also went through MZM to spy on the West Wing.

From there, might they not have also wanted to "borrow" the information running through CIFA?

Much spook lore revolves around the PROMIS software, a case management system which was once used widely in various intelligence and police agencies. Gordon Thomas' biography of Robert Maxwell tells the story of how the Israelis got hold of PROMIS and engineered a "back door" into the software; they then found ways to make sure that the intelligence services of many nations (China, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, even the USSR) got hold of and used this reconfigured program. Whatever they heard, Mossad overheard. (For more, see here.)

So many mondo-bizarro "PROMIS" stories have cropped up over the past fifteen-or-so years that I long ago despaired of ever separating the wheat from the chaff. (By no means should you believe everything you read about PROMIS on the net.) I'm persuaded, though, that Thomas' book gets within sniffing range of the truth.

In which case, we have a precedent that adds some weight to my theory as to what MZM and Foxcom have been up to.