{news} Fw: USGP-INT Bush & Co., preparing attack on Iran, step up secret moves (Seymour Hersh, New Yorker)

[Justine McCabe]

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From: "Scott McLarty" <scottmclarty at yahoo.com>
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Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 12:24 PM
Subject: USGP-INT Bush & Co., preparing attack on Iran,step up secret moves 
(Seymour Hersh, New Yorker)


> Annals of National Security
> Preparing the Battlefield
>
> The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.
>
> Operations outside the knowledge and control of commanders have eroded 
> “the coherence of military strategy,” one general says.
>
> By Seymour M. Hersh
> The New Yorker, July 7, 2008
> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh
>
>
> Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a 
> major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current 
> and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These 
> operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million 
> dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are 
> designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert 
> activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups 
> and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering 
> intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.
>
> Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special 
> Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from 
> southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These 
> have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian 
> Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the 
> pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may 
> be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in 
> Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special 
> Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according 
> to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not 
> specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had 
> serious questions about their nature.
>
> Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, 
> must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at 
> a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the 
> House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective 
> intelligence committees—the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the 
> operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as 
> needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be 
> briefed.
>
> “The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and 
> trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person 
> familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition 
> groups and passing money.” The Finding provided for a whole new range of 
> activities in southern Iran and in the areas, in the east, where Baluchi 
> political opposition is strong, he said.
>
> Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and 
> “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, 
> according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation 
> was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic 
> leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 
> elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in 
> expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s 
> presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors 
> direct talks and diplomacy.
>
> The request for funding came in the same period in which the 
> Administration was coming to terms with a National Intelligence Estimate, 
> released in December, that concluded that Iran had halted its work on 
> nuclear weapons in 2003. The Administration downplayed the significance of 
> the N.I.E., and, while saying that it was committed to diplomacy, 
> continued to emphasize that urgent action was essential to counter the 
> Iranian nuclear threat. President Bush questioned the N.I.E.’s 
> conclusions, and senior national-security officials, including Secretary 
> of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, made 
> similar statements. (So did Senator John McCain, the presumptive 
> Republican Presidential nominee.) Meanwhile, the Administration also 
> revived charges that the Iranian leadership has been involved in the 
> killing of American soldiers in Iraq: both directly, by dispatching 
> commando units into Iraq, and indirectly, by supplying materials used
> for roadside bombs and other lethal goods. (There have been questions 
> about the accuracy of the claims; the Times, among others, has reported 
> that “significant uncertainties remain about the extent of that 
> involvement.”)
>
> Military and civilian leaders in the Pentagon share the White House’s 
> concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but there is disagreement about 
> whether a military strike is the right solution. Some Pentagon officials 
> believe, as they have let Congress and the media know, that bombing Iran 
> is not a viable response to the nuclear-proliferation issue, and that more 
> diplomacy is necessary.
>
> A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record 
> lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus 
> in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the 
> consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on 
> Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of 
> jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in 
> America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another 
> senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick 
> Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m 
> here speaking for myself.” (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he 
> discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not 
> address what he said, other than to dispute the senator’s 
> characterization.)
>
> The Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose chairman is Admiral Mike Mullen, were 
> “pushing back very hard” against White House pressure to undertake a 
> military strike against Iran, the person familiar with the Finding told 
> me. Similarly, a Pentagon consultant who is involved in the war on terror 
> said that “at least ten senior flag and general officers, including 
> combatant commanders”—the four-star officers who direct military 
> operations around the world—“have weighed in on that issue.”
>
> The most outspoken of those officers is Admiral William Fallon, who until 
> recently was the head of U.S. Central Command, and thus in charge of 
> American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In March, Fallon resigned under 
> pressure, after giving a series of interviews stating his reservations 
> about an armed attack on Iran. For example, late last year he told the 
> Financial Times that the “real objective” of U.S. policy was to change the 
> Iranians’ behavior, and that “attacking them as a means to get to that 
> spot strikes me as being not the first choice.”
>
> Admiral Fallon acknowledged, when I spoke to him in June, that he had 
> heard that there were people in the White House who were upset by his 
> public statements. “Too many people believe you have to be either for or 
> against the Iranians,” he told me. “Let’s get serious. Eighty million 
> people live there, and everyone’s an individual. The idea that they’re 
> only one way or another is nonsense.”
>
> When it came to the Iraq war, Fallon said, “Did I bitch about some of the 
> things that were being proposed? You bet. Some of them were very stupid.”
>
> The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of 
> dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the 
> general concerns of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others. “The 
> oversight process has not kept pace—it’s been coöpted” by the 
> Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding said. 
> “The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.”
>
> Senior Democrats in Congress told me that they had concerns about the 
> possibility that their understanding of what the new operations entail 
> differs from the White House’s. One issue has to do with a reference in 
> the Finding, the person familiar with it recalled, to potential defensive 
> lethal action by U.S. operatives in Iran. (In early May, the journalist 
> Andrew Cockburn published elements of the Finding in Counterpunch, a 
> newsletter and online magazine.)
>
> The language was inserted into the Finding at the urging of the C.I.A., a 
> former senior intelligence official said. The covert operations set forth 
> in the Finding essentially run parallel to those of a secret military task 
> force, now operating in Iran, that is under the control of JSOC. Under the 
> Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military 
> activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in 
> a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command 
> combat forces in the field without congressional interference. But the 
> borders between operations are not always clear: in Iran, C.I.A. agents 
> and regional assets have the language skills and the local knowledge to 
> make contacts for the JSOC operatives, and have been working with them to 
> direct personnel, matériel, and money into Iran from an obscure base in 
> western Afghanistan. As a result, Congress has been given only a partial 
> view of how the
> money it authorized may be used. One of JSOC’s task-force missions, the 
> pursuit of “high-value targets,” was not directly addressed in the 
> Finding. There is a growing realization among some legislators that the 
> Bush Administration, in recent years, has conflated what is an 
> intelligence operation and what is a military one in order to avoid fully 
> informing Congress about what it is doing.
>
> “This is a big deal,” the person familiar with the Finding said. “The 
> C.I.A. needed the Finding to do its traditional stuff, but the Finding 
> does not apply to JSOC. The President signed an Executive Order after 
> September 11th giving the Pentagon license to do things that it had never 
> been able to do before without notifying Congress. The claim was that the 
> military was ‘preparing the battle space,’ and by using that term they 
> were able to circumvent congressional oversight. Everything is justified 
> in terms of fighting the global war on terror.” He added, “The 
> Administration has been fuzzing the lines; there used to be a shade of 
> gray”—between operations that had to be briefed to the senior 
> congressional leadership and those which did not—“but now it’s a shade of 
> mush.”
>
> “The agency says we’re not going to get in the position of helping to kill 
> people without a Finding,” the former senior intelligence official told 
> me. He was referring to the legal threat confronting some agency 
> operatives for their involvement in the rendition and alleged torture of 
> suspects in the war on terror. “This drove the military people up the 
> wall,” he said. As far as the C.I.A. was concerned, the former senior 
> intelligence official said, “the over-all authorization includes killing, 
> but it’s not as though that’s what they’re setting out to do. It’s about 
> gathering information, enlisting support.” The Finding sent to Congress 
> was a compromise, providing legal cover for the C.I.A. while referring to 
> the use of lethal force in ambiguous terms.
>
> The defensive-lethal language led some Democrats, according to 
> congressional sources familiar with their views, to call in the director 
> of the C.I.A., Air Force General Michael V. Hayden, for a special 
> briefing. Hayden reassured the legislators that the language did nothing 
> more than provide authority for Special Forces operatives on the ground in 
> Iran to shoot their way out if they faced capture or harm.
>
> The legislators were far from convinced. One congressman subsequently 
> wrote a personal letter to President Bush insisting that “no lethal 
> action, period” had been authorized within Iran’s borders. As of June, he 
> had received no answer.
>
> Members of Congress have expressed skepticism in the past about the 
> information provided by the White House. On March 15, 2005, David Obey, 
> then the ranking Democrat on the Republican-led House Appropriations 
> Committee, announced that he was putting aside an amendment that he had 
> intended to offer that day, and that would have cut off all funding for 
> national-intelligence programs unless the President agreed to keep 
> Congress fully informed about clandestine military activities undertaken 
> in the war on terror. He had changed his mind, he said, because the White 
> House promised better coöperation. “The Executive Branch understands that 
> we are not trying to dictate what they do,” he said in a floor speech at 
> the time. “We are simply trying to see to it that what they do is 
> consistent with American values and will not get the country in trouble.”
>
> Obey declined to comment on the specifics of the operations in Iran, but 
> he did tell me that the White House reneged on its promise to consult more 
> fully with Congress. He said, “I suspect there’s something going on, but I 
> don’t know what to believe. Cheney has always wanted to go after Iran, and 
> if he had more time he’d find a way to do it. We still don’t get enough 
> information from the agencies, and I have very little confidence that they 
> give us information on the edge.”
>
> None of the four Democrats in the Gang of Eight—Senate Majority Leader 
> Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee 
> chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, and House Intelligence Committee chairman 
> Silvestre Reyes—would comment on the Finding, with some noting that it was 
> highly classified. An aide to one member of the Democratic leadership 
> responded, on his behalf, by pointing to the limitations of the Gang of 
> Eight process. The notification of a Finding, the aide said, “is just 
> that—notification, and not a sign-off on activities. Proper oversight of 
> ongoing intelligence activities is done by fully briefing the members of 
> the intelligence committee.” However, Congress does have the means to 
> challenge the White House once it has been sent a Finding. It has the 
> power to withhold funding for any government operation. The members of the 
> House and Senate Democratic leadership who have access to the Finding can 
> also, if they choose
> to do so, and if they have shared concerns, come up with ways to exert 
> their influence on Administration policy. (A spokesman for the C.I.A. 
> said, “As a rule, we don’t comment one way or the other on allegations of 
> covert activities or purported findings.” The White House also declined to 
> comment.)
>
> A member of the House Appropriations Committee acknowledged that, even 
> with a Democratic victory in November, “it will take another year before 
> we get the intelligence activities under control.” He went on, “We control 
> the money and they can’t do anything without the money. Money is what it’s 
> all about. But I’m very leery of this Administration.” He added, “This 
> Administration has been so secretive.”
>
> One irony of Admiral Fallon’s departure is that he was, in many areas, in 
> agreement with President Bush on the threat posed by Iran. They had a good 
> working relationship, Fallon told me, and, when he ran CENTCOM, were in 
> regular communication. On March 4th, a week before his resignation, Fallon 
> testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying that he was 
> “encouraged” about the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regarding the 
> role played by Iran’s leaders, he said, “They’ve been absolutely 
> unhelpful, very damaging, and I absolutely don’t condone any of their 
> activities. And I have yet to see anything since I’ve been in this job in 
> the way of a public action by Iran that’s been at all helpful in this 
> region.”
>
> Fallon made it clear in our conversations that he considered it 
> inappropriate to comment publicly about the President, the Vice-President, 
> or Special Operations. But he said he had heard that people in the White 
> House had been “struggling” with his views on Iran. “When I arrived at 
> CENTCOM, the Iranians were funding every entity inside Iraq. It was in 
> their interest to get us out, and so they decided to kill as many 
> Americans as they could. And why not? They didn’t know who’d come out 
> ahead, but they wanted us out. I decided that I couldn’t resolve the 
> situation in Iraq without the neighborhood. To get this problem in Iraq 
> solved, we had to somehow involve Iran and Syria. I had to work the 
> neighborhood.”
>
> Fallon told me that his focus had been not on the Iranian nuclear issue, 
> or on regime change there, but on “putting out the fires in Iraq.” There 
> were constant discussions in Washington and in the field about how to 
> engage Iran and, on the subject of the bombing option, Fallon said, he 
> believed that “it would happen only if the Iranians did something stupid.”
>
> Fallon’s early retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only 
> by his negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief 
> in the chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special 
> Operations in his area of responsibility. One of Fallon’s defenders is 
> retired Marine General John J. (Jack) Sheehan, whose last assignment was 
> as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, where Fallon was a 
> deputy. Last year, Sheehan rejected a White House offer to become the 
> President’s “czar” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “One of the 
> reasons the White House selected Fallon for CENTCOM was that he’s known to 
> be a strategic thinker and had demonstrated those skills in the Pacific,” 
> Sheehan told me. (Fallon served as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in 
> the Pacific from 2005 to 2007.) “He was charged with coming up with an 
> over-all coherent strategy for Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and, by law, 
> the
> combatant commander is responsible for all military operations within his 
> A.O.”—area of operations. “That was not happening,” Sheehan said. “When 
> Fallon tried to make sense of all the overt and covert activity conducted 
> by the military in his area of responsibility, a small group in the White 
> House leadership shut him out.”
>
> The law cited by Sheehan is the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act, known as 
> Goldwater-Nichols, which defined the chain of command: from the President 
> to the Secretary of Defense, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of 
> Staff, and on to the various combatant commanders, who were put in charge 
> of all aspects of military operations, including joint training and 
> logistics. That authority, the act stated, was not to be shared with other 
> echelons of command. But the Bush Administration, as part of its global 
> war on terror, instituted new policies that undercut regional 
> commanders-in-chief; for example, it gave Special Operations teams, at 
> military commands around the world, the highest priority in terms of 
> securing support and equipment. The degradation of the traditional chain 
> of command in the past few years has been a point of tension between the 
> White House and the uniformed military.
>
> “The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue 
> civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military operations,” 
> Sheehan said. “If you have small groups planning and conducting military 
> operations outside the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, 
> by default you can’t have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a 
> disaster, like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”
>
> Admiral Fallon, who is known as Fox, was aware that he would face special 
> difficulties as the first Navy officer to lead CENTCOM, which had always 
> been headed by a ground commander, one of his military colleagues told me. 
> He was also aware that the Special Operations community would be a 
> concern. “Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special 
> Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing,” 
> Fallon’s colleague said. “The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they 
> needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight 
> with Special Ops but for Cheney.”
>
> The Pentagon consultant said, “Fallon went down because, in his own way, 
> he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for 
> that.”
>
> In recent months, according to the Iranian media, there has been a surge 
> in violence in Iran; it is impossible at this early stage, however, to 
> credit JSOC or C.I.A. activities, or to assess their impact on the Iranian 
> leadership. The Iranian press reports are being carefully monitored by 
> retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who has taught strategy at the 
> National War College and now conducts war games centered on Iran for the 
> federal government, think tanks, and universities. The Iranian press “is 
> very open in describing the killings going on inside the country,” 
> Gardiner said. It is, he said, “a controlled press, which makes it more 
> important that it publishes these things. We begin to see inside the 
> government.” He added, “Hardly a day goes by now we don’t see a clash 
> somewhere. There were three or four incidents over a recent weekend, and 
> the Iranians are even naming the Revolutionary Guard officers who have 
> been killed.”
>
> Earlier this year, a militant Ahwazi group claimed to have assassinated a 
> Revolutionary Guard colonel, and the Iranian government acknowledged that 
> an explosion in a cultural center in Shiraz, in the southern part of the 
> country, which killed at least twelve people and injured more than two 
> hundred, had been a terrorist act and not, as it earlier insisted, an 
> accident. It could not be learned whether there has been American 
> involvement in any specific incident in Iran, but, according to Gardiner, 
> the Iranians have begun publicly blaming the U.S., Great Britain, and, 
> more recently, the C.I.A. for some incidents. The agency was involved in a 
> coup in Iran in 1953, and its support for the unpopular regime of Shah 
> Mohammed Reza Pahlavi—who was overthrown in 1979—was condemned for years 
> by the ruling mullahs in Tehran, to great effect. “This is the ultimate 
> for the Iranians—to blame the C.I.A.,” Gardiner said. “This is new, and it’s 
> an
> escalation—a ratcheting up of tensions. It rallies support for the regime 
> and shows the people that there is a continuing threat from the ‘Great 
> Satan.’ ” In Gardiner’s view, the violence, rather than weakening Iran’s 
> religious government, may generate support for it.
>
> Many of the activities may be being carried out by dissidents in Iran, and 
> not by Americans in the field. One problem with “passing money” (to use 
> the term of the person familiar with the Finding) in a covert setting is 
> that it is hard to control where the money goes and whom it benefits. 
> Nonetheless, the former senior intelligence official said, “We’ve got 
> exposure, because of the transfer of our weapons and our communications 
> gear. The Iranians will be able to make the argument that the opposition 
> was inspired by the Americans. How many times have we tried this without 
> asking the right questions? Is the risk worth it?” One possible 
> consequence of these operations would be a violent Iranian crackdown on 
> one of the dissident groups, which could give the Bush Administration a 
> reason to intervene.
>
> A strategy of using ethnic minorities to undermine Iran is flawed, 
> according to Vali Nasr, who teaches international politics at Tufts 
> University and is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign 
> Relations. “Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic problems, 
> it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same issue,” Nasr told 
> me. “Iran is an old country—like France and Germany—and its citizens are 
> just as nationalistic. The U.S. is overestimating ethnic tension in Iran.” 
> The minority groups that the U.S. is reaching out to are either well 
> integrated or small and marginal, without much influence on the government 
> or much ability to present a political challenge, Nasr said. “You can 
> always find some activist groups that will go and kill a policeman, but 
> working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of 
> the population.”
>
> The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident 
> organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the 
> groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of 
> Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former 
> C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia 
> and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who 
> hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” 
> Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in 
> this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again 
> working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the 
> nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 
> 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is 
> considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are 
> Baluchi Sunni
> fundamentalists.
>
> One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the 
> Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which 
> describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis 
> in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended 
> the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. 
> “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought 
> to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took responsibility for the 
> bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At 
> least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press 
> reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting 
> from U.S. support.
>
> The C.I.A. and Special Operations communities also have long-standing ties 
> to two other dissident groups in Iran: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in 
> the West as the M.E.K., and a Kurdish separatist group, the Party for a 
> Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK.
>
> The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than 
> a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and 
> intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the 
> newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well 
> end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. 
> The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no 
> C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining 
> their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, 
> and how much is going to its bank accounts—and yet it is almost useless 
> for the purposes the Administration intends.”
>
> The Kurdish party, PJAK, which has also been reported to be covertly 
> supported by the United States, has been operating against Iran from bases 
> in northern Iraq for at least three years. (Iran, like Iraq and Turkey, 
> has a Kurdish minority, and PJAK and other groups have sought self-rule in 
> territory that is now part of each of those countries.) In recent weeks, 
> according to Sam Gardiner, the military strategist, there has been a 
> marked increase in the number of PJAK armed engagements with Iranians and 
> terrorist attacks on Iranian targets. In early June, the news agency Fars 
> reported that a dozen PJAK members and four Iranian border guards were 
> killed in a clash near the Iraq border; a similar attack in May killed 
> three Revolutionary Guards and nine PJAK fighters. PJAK has also subjected 
> Turkey, a member of NATO, to repeated terrorist attacks, and reports of 
> American support for the group have been a source of friction between the 
> two governments.
>
> Gardiner also mentioned a trip that the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri 
> al-Maliki, made to Tehran in June. After his return, Maliki announced that 
> his government would ban any contact between foreigners and the M.E.K.—a 
> slap at the U.S.’s dealings with the group. Maliki declared that Iraq was 
> not willing to be a staging ground for covert operations against other 
> countries. This was a sign, Gardiner said, of “Maliki’s increasingly 
> choosing the interests of Iraq over the interests of the United States.” 
> In terms of U.S. allegations of Iranian involvement in the killing of 
> American soldiers, he said, “Maliki was unwilling to play the blame-Iran 
> game.” Gardiner added that Pakistan had just agreed to turn over a 
> Jundallah leader to the Iranian government. America’s covert operations, 
> he said, “seem to be harming relations with the governments of both Iraq 
> and Pakistan and could well be strengthening the connection between Tehran 
> and Baghdad.”
>
> The White House’s reliance on questionable operatives, and on plans 
> involving possible lethal action inside Iran, has created anger as well as 
> anxiety within the Special Operations and intelligence communities. JSOC’s 
> operations in Iran are believed to be modelled on a program that has, with 
> some success, used surrogates to target the Taliban leadership in the 
> tribal territories of Waziristan, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. 
> But the situations in Waziristan and Iran are not comparable.
>
> In Waziristan, “the program works because it’s small and smart guys are 
> running it,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “It’s being 
> executed by professionals. The N.S.A., the C.I.A., and the D.I.A.”—the 
> Defense Intelligence Agency—“are right in there with the Special Forces 
> and Pakistani intelligence, and they’re dealing with serious bad guys.” He 
> added, “We have to be really careful in calling in the missiles. We have 
> to hit certain houses at certain times. The people on the ground are 
> watching through binoculars a few hundred yards away and calling specific 
> locations, in latitude and longitude. We keep the Predator loitering until 
> the targets go into a house, and we have to make sure our guys are far 
> enough away so they don’t get hit.” One of the most prominent victims of 
> the program, the former official said, was Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior 
> Taliban commander, who was killed on January 31st, reportedly in a
> missile strike that also killed eleven other people.
>
> A dispatch published on March 26th by the Washington Post reported on the 
> increasing number of successful strikes against Taliban and other 
> insurgent units in Pakistan’s tribal areas. A follow-up article noted 
> that, in response, the Taliban had killed “dozens of people” suspected of 
> providing information to the United States and its allies on the 
> whereabouts of Taliban leaders. Many of the victims were thought to be 
> American spies, and their executions—a beheading, in one case—were 
> videotaped and distributed by DVD as a warning to others.
>
> It is not simple to replicate the program in Iran. “Everybody’s arguing 
> about the high-value-target list,” the former senior intelligence official 
> said. “The Special Ops guys are pissed off because Cheney’s office set up 
> priorities for categories of targets, and now he’s getting impatient and 
> applying pressure for results. But it takes a long time to get the right 
> guys in place.”
>
> The Pentagon consultant told me, “We’ve had wonderful results in the Horn 
> of Africa with the use of surrogates and false flags—basic 
> counterintelligence and counter-insurgency tactics. And we’re beginning to 
> tie them in knots in Afghanistan. But the White House is going to kill the 
> program if they use it to go after Iran. It’s one thing to engage in 
> selective strikes and assassinations in Waziristan and another in Iran. 
> The White House believes that one size fits all, but the legal issues 
> surrounding extrajudicial killings in Waziristan are less of a problem 
> because Al Qaeda and the Taliban cross the border into Afghanistan and 
> back again, often with U.S. and NATO forces in hot pursuit. The situation 
> is not nearly as clear in the Iranian case. All the 
> considerations—judicial, strategic, and political—are different in Iran.”
>
> He added, “There is huge opposition inside the intelligence community to 
> the idea of waging a covert war inside Iran, and using Baluchis and 
> Ahwazis as surrogates. The leaders of our Special Operations community all 
> have remarkable physical courage, but they are less likely to voice their 
> opposition to policy. Iran is not Waziristan.”
>
> A Gallup poll taken last November, before the N.I.E. was made public, 
> found that seventy-three per cent of those surveyed thought that the 
> United States should use economic action and diplomacy to stop Iran’s 
> nuclear program, while only eighteen per cent favored direct military 
> action. Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to endorse a 
> military strike. Weariness with the war in Iraq has undoubtedly affected 
> the public’s tolerance for an attack on Iran. This mood could change 
> quickly, however. The potential for escalation became clear in early 
> January, when five Iranian patrol boats, believed to be under the command 
> of the Revolutionary Guard, made a series of aggressive moves toward three 
> Navy warships sailing through the Strait of Hormuz. Initial reports of the 
> incident made public by the Pentagon press office said that the Iranians 
> had transmitted threats, over ship-to-ship radio, to “explode” the 
> American ships. At a White House news
> conference, the President, on the day he left for an eight-day trip to the 
> Middle East, called the incident “provocative” and “dangerous,” and there 
> was, very briefly, a sense of crisis and of outrage at Iran. “TWO MINUTES 
> FROM WAR” was the headline in one British newspaper.
>
> The crisis was quickly defused by Vice-Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, the 
> commander of U.S. naval forces in the region. No warning shots were fired, 
> the Admiral told the Pentagon press corps on January 7th, via 
> teleconference from his headquarters, in Bahrain. “Yes, it’s more serious 
> than we have seen, but, to put it in context, we do interact with the 
> Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their Navy regularly,” Cosgriff said. “I 
> didn’t get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a 
> sense of being afraid of these five boats.”
>
> Admiral Cosgriff’s caution was well founded: within a week, the Pentagon 
> acknowledged that it could not positively identify the Iranian boats as 
> the source of the ominous radio transmission, and press reports suggested 
> that it had instead come from a prankster long known for sending fake 
> messages in the region. Nonetheless, Cosgriff’s demeanor angered Cheney, 
> according to the former senior intelligence official. But a lesson was 
> learned in the incident: The public had supported the idea of retaliation, 
> and was even asking why the U.S. didn’t do more. The former official said 
> that, a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s 
> office. “The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and 
> Washington,” he said.
>
> In June, President Bush went on a farewell tour of Europe. He had tea with 
> Queen Elizabeth II and dinner with Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, the 
> President and First Lady of France. The serious business was conducted out 
> of sight, and involved a series of meetings on a new diplomatic effort to 
> persuade the Iranians to halt their uranium-enrichment program. (Iran 
> argues that its enrichment program is for civilian purposes and is legal 
> under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.) Secretary of State Rice had 
> been involved with developing a new package of incentives. But the 
> Administration’s essential negotiating position seemed unchanged: talks 
> could not take place until Iran halted the program. The Iranians have 
> repeatedly and categorically rejected that precondition, leaving the 
> diplomatic situation in a stalemate; they have not yet formally responded 
> to the new incentives.
>
> The continuing impasse alarms many observers. Joschka Fischer, the former 
> German Foreign Minister, recently wrote in a syndicated column that it may 
> not “be possible to freeze the Iranian nuclear program for the duration of 
> the negotiations to avoid a military confrontation before they are 
> completed. Should this newest attempt fail, things will soon get serious. 
> Deadly serious.” When I spoke to him last week, Fischer, who has extensive 
> contacts in the diplomatic community, said that the latest European 
> approach includes a new element: the willingness of the U.S. and the 
> Europeans to accept something less than a complete cessation of enrichment 
> as an intermediate step. “The proposal says that the Iranians must stop 
> manufacturing new centrifuges and the other side will stop all further 
> sanction activities in the U.N. Security Council,” Fischer said, although 
> Iran would still have to freeze its enrichment activities when formal 
> negotiations begin.
> “This could be acceptable to the Iranians—if they have good will.”
>
> The big question, Fischer added, is in Washington. “I think the Americans 
> are deeply divided on the issue of what to do about Iran,” he said. “Some 
> officials are concerned about the fallout from a military attack and 
> others think an attack is unavoidable. I know the Europeans, but I have no 
> idea where the Americans will end up on this issue.”
>
> There is another complication: American Presidential politics. Barack 
> Obama has said that, if elected, he would begin talks with Iran with no 
> “self-defeating” preconditions (although only after diplomatic groundwork 
> had been laid). That position has been vigorously criticized by John 
> McCain. The Washington Post recently quoted Randy Scheunemann, the McCain 
> campaign’s national-security director, as stating that McCain supports the 
> White House’s position, and that the program be suspended before talks 
> begin. What Obama is proposing, Scheunemann said, “is unilateral cowboy 
> summitry.”
>
> Scheunemann, who is known as a neoconservative, is also the McCain 
> campaign’s most important channel of communication with the White House. 
> He is a friend of David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. I have 
> heard differing accounts of Scheunemann’s influence with McCain; though 
> some close to the McCain campaign talk about him as a possible 
> national-security adviser, others say he is someone who isn’t taken 
> seriously while “telling Cheney and others what they want to hear,” as a 
> senior McCain adviser put it.
>
> It is not known whether McCain, who is the ranking Republican on the 
> Senate Armed Services Committee, has been formally briefed on the 
> operations in Iran. At the annual conference of the American Israel Public 
> Affairs Committee, in June, Obama repeated his plea for “tough and 
> principled diplomacy.” But he also said, along with McCain, that he would 
> keep the threat of military action against Iran on the table. ♦
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>


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