[Peace-discuss] US crimes in Iran, and elsewhere

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The liberals -- Democrats like Richard Holbrooke and Barack Obama and the 
"foreign policy establishment" within the Bush administration -- are pushing for 
more war (i.e., killing more people) in Pakistan and Afghanistan, while the 
conservatives -- Republicans like John McCain and the administration faction 
around the OVP (with the help of the Democratic leadership in Congress) -- want 
to stabilize the war in Iraq to a Cold War-style occupation ("like South Korea") 
with Iran playing the part of the USSR. (If the McCain campaign seems to be in 
serious trouble in the fall, we might see him re-invent himself as a peace 
candidate, decrying the liberals' war in AfPak...) Here, from the current New 
Yorker, is an account of how the conservatives are getting their war on.  The 
article can be read, roughly, as an attempt by the CIA to put a stop to it, in 
aid of the liberal project. --CGE]


"...in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates ... warned of 
the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, 
saying ... “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, [who] asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President 
Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer ... was 'Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for 
myself.'" [After this article was published, Obama let it be known that he was 
thinking of keeping Gates on as Defense Secretary.  --CGE]

	Preparing the Battlefield
	The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.
	by Seymour M. Hersh July 7, 2008

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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