Military Intelligence

Air Force Lt. Gen. Kenneth A. Minihan, who was in charge of the nation's military intelligence, has been nominated to become the director of the National Security Agency, the Pentagon announced yesterday.General Minihan, 52, a former top military aide at NSA in the early 1980s, will take over the nation's largest and most secretive intelligence agency -- as well as Maryland's biggest employer -- from Vice Adm. John M. "Mike" McConnell, who is retiring after four years as agency director.NSA, which employs some 20,000 linguists, computer specialists, engineers and mathematicians at Fort Meade and tens of thousands of eavesdroppers around the world, intercepts foreign communications and protects U.S. government communications from foreign spies.

Unfortunately, a lot of military decisions are being made by people who have never served in combat or have had limited service ("Military ceiling lifted," Jan. 25). President Barack Obama never served in the military, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta served a brief two years in military intelligence. Not only will women in combat create all kinds of additional issues as far as personal privacy, but you are adding an undue burden to these units which is the last thing they need while in a front line situation.

In announcing the appointment of a new headmaster last winter, officials at the Boys' Latin School in North Baltimore would say only that Scott K. Gibson III was leaving a career in military intelligence to assume the post. On where he was living and exactly what he was doing, they were keeping quiet. But Gibson's classified days are behind him now. And as the mild-mannered man of 42 busily prepares for the start of classes Wednesday, he is ready to talk about his past - and his vision for the future at the helm of Maryland's oldest nonsectarian boys school.

Harry Dutton Grunwell, a retired Army warrant officer with a talent for linguistics and computers, died Dec. 5 at Howard County General Hospital from complications of multiple sclerosis. The Marriottsville resident was 66. Mr. Grunwell was born in Ogden, Pa., the son of Paul and Bernice Grunwell. He graduated in 1963 from Chichester High School in Pennsylvania, where he was class president his last two years. In his senior year, Mr. Grunwell was voted "most talented" for his skill at the piano and "most dependable," said Norman Guarinello, who became friends with Mr. Grunwell in sixth grade when they competed against each other in sports.

WASHINGTON - More than two dozen U.S. military intelligence soldiers and civilian contractors participated in detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib, according to a Pentagon report released yesterday that portrays the Iraq prison scandal as reaching well beyond the isolated pranks of a few low-ranking Army reservists. The new report casts some of the abuses, such as interrogating detainees naked or threatening them with barking dogs, as mistakes stemming from confusing policies to extract information useful in combating a growing insurgency.

MONTEREY, Calif. -- When Romy Hall enlisted in the Air Force last summer, they asked her if she had any special interests. She checked off the "linguistics" box on the form.Later, she took a test and scored high enough to be offered the chance to come here: to a hill overlooking the fishing wharves and rolling dunes of this West Coast tourist destination, to a school unlike any other.The place where spies learn the languages of the world's hot spots.For more than 50 years the Defense Language Institute and its predecessors have trained military intelligence officers.

WIESBADEN, Germany - The two military intelligence soldiers, assigned interrogation duties at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, were young, relatively new to the Army and had only one day of training on how to pry information from high-value prisoners. But almost immediately on their arrival in Iraq, say the two members of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, they recognized that what was happening around them was wrong, morally and legally. They said in interviews Friday and yesterday that the abuses were not caused by a handful of rogue soldiers poorly supervised and lacking morals but resulted from failures that went beyond the low-ranking military police charged with abuse.

YONE JAMES SUGIYAMA, Major USA retired, 87, of Baltimore, Maryland, died March 27, 2006. Born in Seattle, Washington. Served in the CIC, military intelligence unit, on active duty in the Philippines and Japan during WWII. He taught at the military intelligence language school at Fort Holabird, Maryland. After retirement from the U.S. Army in 1961, he continued his career with the Deapartment of Defense and was posted to Vietnam with the State Department after the cease fire in 1973. He later co-owned and operated Balimoy, Inc. Survived by wife Toku Mary; children, George, Carolyn and Maeona; six grandchildren; two great-grandchildren.

The tale of the FBI's trap for suspected spy Robert S. Lipka, laid out in a 20-page affidavit, reads at times like a passage from a John LeCarre spy novel -- with moments from the old television slapstick show "Get Smart."The FBI played a cat-and-mouse game with Mr. Lipka in clandestine meetings in Pennsylvania and Baltimore in 1993, as an investigator posing as a Russian military intelligence agent sought to provoke Mr. Lipka into incriminating himself.The FBI agent improvised his role as Russian spy, persuasively faking answers to some questions but flubbing a few key lines.

Unfortunately, a lot of military decisions are being made by people who have never served in combat or have had limited service ("Military ceiling lifted," Jan. 25). President Barack Obama never served in the military, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta served a brief two years in military intelligence. Not only will women in combat create all kinds of additional issues as far as personal privacy, but you are adding an undue burden to these units which is the last thing they need while in a front line situation.

Curtis B. Reiber, an Army intelligence officer whose career spanned three decades, died Nov. 20 of a stroke at Saint Agnes Hospital. He was 77. The son of a DuPont Co. worker and a homemaker, Curtis Brooks Reiber was born in Centre Hall, Pa., and raised in Woodstown, N.J., where he graduated in 1954 from Woodstown High School. He was a 1958 graduate of Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa., and earned a master's degree from Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant. Mr. Reiber was drafted into the Army in 1958 and the next year graduated from Officer Candidate School.

Let me get this straight: a spontaneous movement arises and takes up the name "Tea Party" based on historical actions and the acronym "taxed enough already," amasses a very large number of either followers or sympathizers, and literally reverses the party breakdown in the U.S. House of Representatives and state-level assemblies, but it is not worth receiving any reporting. When it is reported upon, the items are buried deep within the pages of The Sun and are usually flippant or derogatory in nature.

Robert Gaspar Leginus Sr., who flew gliders during World War II and later served as a military intelligence analyst, died Feb. 20. He was 98. Mr. Leginus died at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Columbia, said his son Robert Leginus Jr. He had lived in Columbia since the 1990s. Mr. Leginus was born in 1913 in Wyoming, Pa. He learned to fly at the Wilkes-Barre Wyoming Valley Airport, developing a lifelong fascination with flying and aircraft. "His biggest dream was to become an astronaut," his son said.

For Susan Sellner of Columbia, what might have been a weekend of shopping and holiday preparations was instead a time to send her 24-year-old daughter off to war in Afghanistan. Sellner, 56, was part of a small crowd of family members and loved ones who gathered in Baltimore Sunday morning to say goodbye to 40 members of the U.S. Army's 203rd Military Intelligence Battalion, which is mobilizing for deployment to Afghanistan and Iraq next month. "I was real proud of her for wanting to sign up," Sellner said of her daughter, Spec.

Col. Louis Beck, a retired career Army intelligence officer who served in three wars, died of liver failure Aug. 2 at the Veteran Administration's Extended Care and Rehabilitation Center in Northeast Baltimore. He was 90 and had lived in Northwest Baltimore. Colonel Beck, the son of parents from Lithuania and Belarus, was born and raised in Hartford, Conn., where he attended Hartford High School. In 1943, he was inducted into the Army, where he earned his General Educational Development diploma.

Ground-breaking event held at Fort Meade Fort George G. Meade will hold a groundbreaking at 10 a.m. Wednesday at the pavilion for the construction of the co-location of the Defense and Military Adjudication Activities Facility, the third and final BRAC-related project at the base. Lt. Gen Richard P. Zahner, deputy chief of staff for Army G-2, will host the ceremony, part the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission Recommendations. The $31,856,596 contract was awarded to Skanska USA Building Inc. of Rockville and will provide 151,590 square feet of administrative space for approximately 760 employees from 10 agencies.

William E. Wright Jr., an Army officer captured by the Germans in World War II and a civilian military intelligence specialist for the Army, died Saturday of cancer at his home on Stonewall Road in Catonsville.Services for Mr. Wright, 70, will be held at 9 a.m. tomorrow in a chapel at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.He retired from the Army as a lieutenant colonel in 1966.He had enlisted in 1940. After completing Officers Candidate School, he was an infantry officer in Italy and Southern France before being captured by the Germans in 1944.

.. Princess C. Samuels wanted to see the world. The 22-year-old enlisted in the Army after she graduated in 2003 from Charles Herbert Flowers High School in Springdale, Prince George's County. "We just wanted to see the world and go to school and just get out of Maryland," said Senior Airman Jacqueline "Nikki" Ellis in an interview from Anderson Air Force Base in Guam. The two lived together like sisters during high school. "We saw so many people that just stayed in there and never do anything else," she said.

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering. The CIA has also been issuing what are known as national security letters to gain access to financial records from American companies, though it has done so only rarely, intelligence officials say. Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions receiving the letters have usually turned over documents voluntarily, allowing investigators to examine the financial assets and transactions of U.S. military personnel and civilians, officials say. The FBI, the lead agency on domestic counterterrorism and espionage, has issued thousands of national security letters since the attacks of Sept.