SEYMOUR HERSH REVEALS PLANS OF U.S. INTELLIGENCE AGAINST IRAN
PanARMENIAN.Net
30.06.2008 13:56 GMT+04:00
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, Seymour M. Hersh writes in his
article "Preparing the Battlefield. The Bush Administration steps up
its secret moves against Iran" to published in The New Yorker on July
8, 2008.
"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 focused 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 preemptive
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," the article says.
Seymour Myron Hersh is an American Pulitzer Prize winning investigative
journalist and author based in Washington, DC. He is a regular
contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security
matters.
His work first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the
My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which
he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His
2004 reports on the US military’s mistreatment of detainees at Abu
Ghraib prison gained much attention.
Hersh received the 2004 George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting
given annually by Long Island University to honor contributions to
journalistic integrity and investigative reporting. This was his
fifth George Polk Award, the first one being a Special Award given
to him in 1969.
In 2006 he reported on the US military’s plans for Iran, which
allegedly called for the use of nuclear weapons against that country.