source:
http://www.newyorker.com/re****ting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh/?=
printable=3Dtrue
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=92s
religious leader****p. The covert activities involve sup****t of the
minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident
organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran=92s
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 =93high-value targets=94 in the
President=92s 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=97the 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.
=93The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran=92s nuclear ambitions and
trying to undermine the government through regime change,=94 a person
familiar with its contents said, and involved =93working with opposition
groups and passing money.=94 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
=93there was a significant amount of high-level discussion=94 about it,
according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the
escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the
Democratic leader****p=97Congress has been under Democratic control since
the 2006 elections=97were willing, in secret, to go along with the
Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while
the Party=92s 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.=92s 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 leader****p
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 re****ted that =93significant uncertainties
remain about the extent of that involvement.=94)
Military and civilian leaders in the Pentagon share the White House=92s
concern about Iran=92s 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
pre=EBmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, =93We=92ll
create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be
battling our enemies here in America.=94 Gates=92s comments stunned the
Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was
speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates=92s answer, the
senator told me, was =93Let=92s just say that I=92m here speaking for
myself.=94 (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=92s characterization.)
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose chairman is Admiral Mike Mullen, were
=93pu****ng back very hard=94 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 =93at least ten senior flag and general officers,
including combatant commanders=94=97the four-star officers who direct
military operations around the world=97=93have weighed in on that
issue.=94
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 =93real objective=94 of U.S.
policy was to change the Iranians=92 behavior, and that =93attacking them
as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first
choice.=94
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. =93Too many people believe you have to be either for
or against the Iranians,=94 he told me. =93Let=92s get serious. Eighty
million people live there, and everyone=92s an individual. The idea that
they=92re only one way or another is nonsense.=94
When it came to the Iraq war, Fallon said, =93Did I ***** about some of
the things that were being proposed? You bet. Some of them were very
stupid.=94
The Democratic leader****p=92s 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.
=93The oversight process has not kept pace=97it=92s been co=F6pted=94 by
th=
e
Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding
said. =93The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we=92re
authorizing.=94
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=92s. 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=92s 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, mat=E9riel, 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=92s
task-force missions, the pursuit of =93high-value targets,=94 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.
=93This is a big deal,=94 the person familiar with the Finding said.
=93The
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 =91preparing the battle space,=92 and by using that
term they were able to cir***vent congressional oversight. Everything
is justified in terms of fighting the global war on terror.=94 He added,
=93The Administration has been fuzzing the lines; there used to be a
shade of gray=94=97between operations that had to be briefed to the senior
congressional leader****p and those which did not=97=93but now it=92s a
shad=
e
of mush.=94
=93The agency says we=92re not going to get in the position of helping to
kill people without a Finding,=94 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. =93This drove the
military people up the wall,=94 he said. As far as the C.I.A. was
concerned, the former senior intelligence official said, =93the over-all
authorization includes killing, but it=92s not as though that=92s what
they=92re setting out to do. It=92s about gathering information, enlisting
sup****t.=94 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 =93no lethal
action, period=94 had been authorized within Iran=92s 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
co=F6peration. =93The Executive Branch understands that we are not trying
to dictate what they do,=94 he said in a floor speech at the time. =93We
are simply trying to see to it that what they do is consistent with
American values and will not get the country in trouble.=94
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, =93I suspect there=92s
something going on, but I don=92t know what to believe. Cheney has
always wanted to go after Iran, and if he had more time he=92d find a
way to do it. We still don=92t get enough information from the agencies,
and I have very little confidence that they give us information on the
edge.=94
None of the four Democrats in the Gang of Eight=97Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee
chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, and House Intelligence Committee
chairman Silvestre Reyes=97would comment on the Finding, with some
noting that it was highly classified. An aide to one member of the
Democratic leader****p responded, on his behalf, by pointing to the
limitations of the Gang of Eight process. The notification of a
Finding, the aide said, =93is just that=97notification, and not a sign-off
on activities. Proper oversight of ongoing intelligence activities is
done by fully briefing the members of the intelligence committee.=94
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 leader****p 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, =93As a rule, we don=92t comment one way or the other on
allegations of covert activities or pur****ted findings.=94 The White
House also declined to comment.)
A member of the House Appropriations Committee acknowledged that, even
with a Democratic victory in November, =93it will take another year
before we get the intelligence activities under control.=94 He went on,
=93We control the money and they can=92t do anything without the money.
Money is what it=92s all about. But I=92m very leery of this
Administration.=94 He added, =93This Administration has been so
secretive.=94
One irony of Admiral Fallon=92s departure is that he was, in many areas,
in agreement with President Bush on the threat posed by Iran. They had
a good working relation****p, 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 =93encouraged=94 about the situations in
Iraq and Afghanistan. Regarding the role played by Iran=92s leaders, he
said, =93They=92ve been absolutely unhelpful, very damaging, and I
absolutely don=92t condone any of their activities. And I have yet to
see anything since I=92ve been in this job in the way of a public action
by Iran that=92s been at all helpful in this region.=94
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 =93struggling=94 with his views on Iran.
=93Whe=
n
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=92t know
who=92d come out ahead, but they wanted us out. I decided that I
couldn=92t 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.=94
Fallon told me that his focus had been not on the Iranian nuclear
issue, or on regime change there, but on =93putting out the fires in
Iraq.=94 There were constant discussions in Wa****ngton and in the field
about how to engage Iran and, on the subject of the bombing option,
Fallon said, he believed that =93it would happen only if the Iranians
did something stupid.=94
Fallon=92s 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=92s 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=92s =93czar=94 for
the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. =93One of the reasons the White House
selected Fallon for CENTCOM was that he=92s known to be a strategic
thinker and had demonstrated those skills in the Pacific,=94 Sheehan
told me. (Fallon served as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the
Pacific from 2005 to 2007.) =93He 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.=94=97area of operations. =93That was not
happening,=94 Sheehan said. =93When 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 leader****p shut him
out.=94
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 sup****t 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.
=93The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue
civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military
operations,=94 Sheehan said. =93If you have small groups planning and
conducting military operations outside the knowledge and control of
the combatant commander, by default you can=92t have a coherent military
strategy. You end up with a disaster, like the reconstruction efforts
in Iraq.=94
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. =93Fox said that there=92s a lot of strange
stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out
what they were really doing,=94 Fallon=92s colleague said. =93The 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.=94
The Pentagon consultant said, =93Fallon went down because, in his own
way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire
him for that.=94
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 *****s their
impact on the Iranian leader****p. The Iranian press re****ts 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 =93is very open in describing the
killings going on inside the country,=94 Gardiner said. It is, he said,
=93a controlled press, which makes it more im****tant that it publishes
these things. We begin to see inside the government.=94 He added,
=93Hardly a day goes by now we don=92t 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.=94
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 ****raz, 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
sup****t for the unpopular regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi=97who was
overthrown in 1979=97was condemned for years by the ruling mullahs in
Tehran, to great effect. =93This is the ultimate for the Iranians=97to
blame the C.I.A.,=94 Gardiner said. =93This is new, and it=92s an
escalatio=
n=97
a ratcheting up of tensions. It rallies sup****t for the regime and
shows the people that there is a continuing threat from the =91Great
Satan.=92 =94 In Gardiner=92s view, the violence, rather than weakening
Iran=92s religious government, may generate sup****t 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 =93passing
money=94 (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, =93We=92ve 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?=94 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. =93Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic
problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same
issue,=94 Nasr told me. =93Iran is an old country=97like France and
Germany=
=97
and its citizens are just as nationalistic. The U.S. is overestimating
ethnic tension in Iran.=94 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. =93You 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.=94
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. =93The Baluchis are Sunni
fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also
describe them as Al Qaeda,=94 Baer told me. =93These are guys who cut off
the heads of nonbelievers=97in this case, it=92s ****ite Iranians. The
irony is that we=92re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists,
just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.=94 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=92s Resistance Movement,
which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights
of Sunnis in Iran. =93This is a vicious Salafi organization whose
followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani
extremists,=94 Nasr told me. =93They are suspected of having links to Al
Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.=94 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 re****ts, the
Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S.
sup****t.
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=92s 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. =93The new task force will work with
the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.=94 He added,
=93The 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=97and yet it is almost useless for the purposes the
Administration intends.=94
The Kurdish party, PJAK, which has also been re****ted to be covertly
sup****ted 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 re****ted 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 re****ts of American sup****t 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.=97a slap at the U.S.=92s 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 =93Maliki=92s
increasingly choosing the interests of Iraq over the interests of the
United States.=94 In terms of U.S. allegations of Iranian involvement in
the killing of American soldiers, he said, =93Maliki was unwilling to
play the blame-Iran game.=94 Gardiner added that Pakistan had just
agreed to turn over a Jundallah leader to the Iranian government.
America=92s covert operations, he said, =93seem to be harming relations
with the governments of both Iraq and Pakistan and could well be
strengthening the connection between Tehran and Baghdad.=94
The White House=92s 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=92s operations in Iran are believed to be modelled on
a program that has, with some success, used surrogates to target the
Taliban leader****p in the tribal territories of Waziristan, along the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But the situations in Waziristan and Iran
are not comparable.
In Waziristan, =93the program works because it=92s small and smart guys
are running it,=94 the former senior intelligence official told me.
=93It=92s being executed by professionals. The N.S.A., the C.I.A., and the
D.I.A.=94=97the Defense Intelligence Agency=97=93are right in there with
th=
e
Special Forces and Pakistani intelligence, and they=92re dealing with
serious bad guys.=94 He added, =93We 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=92t get
hit.=94 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, re****tedly in a missile strike that also
killed eleven other people.
A dispatch published on March 26th by the Wa****ngton Post re****ted on
the increasing number of successful strikes against Taliban and other
insurgent units in Pakistan=92s tribal areas. A follow-up article noted
that, in response, the Taliban had killed =93dozens of people=94 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=97a beheading, in one case=97were
videotaped and distributed by DVD as a warning to others.
It is not simple to replicate the program in Iran. =93Everybody=92s
arguing about the high-value-target list,=94 the former senior
intelligence official said. =93The Special Ops guys are pissed off
because Cheney=92s office set up priorities for categories of targets,
and now he=92s getting impatient and applying pressure for results. But
it takes a long time to get the right guys in place.=94
The Pentagon consultant told me, =93We=92ve had wonderful results in the
Horn of Africa with the use of surrogates and false flags=97basic
counterintelligence and counter-insurgency tactics. And we=92re
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=92s 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=97judicial, strategic, and political
=97are different in Iran.=94
He added, =93There 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.=94
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=92s
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=92s 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 war****ps sailing through the Strait of Hormuz.
Initial re****ts of the incident made public by the Pentagon press
office said that the Iranians had transmitted threats, over ****p-to-
****p radio, to =93explode=94 the American ****ps. 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 =93provocative=94 and
=93dangerous,=94
and there was, very briefly, a sense of crisis and of outrage at Iran.
=93TWO MINUTES FROM WAR=94 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. =93Yes, it=92s more
serious than we have seen, but, to put it in context, we do interact
with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their Navy regularly,=94
Cosgriff said. =93I didn=92t get the sense from the re****ts I was
receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats.=94
Admiral Cosgriff=92s 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 re****ts suggested that it had instead come from a prankster long
known for sending fake messages in the region. Nonetheless, Cosgriff=92s
demeanor angered Cheney, according to the former senior intelligence
official. But a lesson was learned in the incident: The public had
sup****ted the idea of retaliation, and was even asking why the U.S.
didn=92t do more. The former official said that, a few weeks later, a
meeting took place in the Vice-President=92s office. =93The subject was
how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Wa****ngton,=94 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=92s 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 =93be 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.=94 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. =93The
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,=94 Fischer said, although Iran
would still have to freeze its enrichment activities when formal
negotiations begin. =93This could be acceptable to the Iranians=97if they
have good will.=94
The big question, Fischer added, is in Wa****ngton. =93I think the
Americans are deeply divided on the issue of what to do about Iran,=94
he said. =93Some 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.=94
There is another complication: American Presidential politics. Barack
Obama has said that, if elected, he would begin talks with Iran with
no =93self-defeating=94 preconditions (although only after diplomatic
groundwork had been laid). That position has been vigorously
criticized by John McCain. The Wa****ngton Post recently quoted Randy
Scheunemann, the McCain campaign=92s national-security director, as
stating that McCain sup****ts the White House=92s position, and that the
program be suspended before talks begin. What Obama is proposing,
Scheunemann said, =93is unilateral cowboy summitry.=94
Scheunemann, who is known as a neoconservative, is also the McCain
campaign=92s most im****tant channel of communication with the White
House. He is a friend of David Addington, Dick Cheney=92s chief of
staff. I have heard differing accounts of Scheunemann=92s 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=92t
taken seriously while =93telling Cheney and others what they want to
hear,=94 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 =93tough
and principled diplomacy.=94 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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