U.S. Officials Peddle False Intel to Support Terror Plot Claims

Analysis by Gareth Porter for IPS News

Officials of the Barack Obama administration have aggressively leaked information supposedly based on classified intelligence in recent days to bolster its allegation that two higher- ranking officials from Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were involved in a plot to assassinate Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir in Washington, D.C.

The media stories generated by the leaks helped divert press attention from the fact that there is no verifiable evidence of any official Iranian involvement in the alleged assassination plan, contrary to the broad claim being made by the administration.

But the information about the two Iranian officials leaked to NBC News, the Washington Post and Reuters was unambiguously false and misleading, as confirmed by official documents in one case and a former senior intelligence and counterterrorism official in the other.

The main target of the official leaks was Abdul Reza Shahlai, who was identified publicly by the Obama administration as a "deputy commander in the Quds Force" of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Shahlai had long been regarded by U.S. officials as a key figure in the Quds Force's relationship to Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Iraq.

The primary objective of the FBI sting operation involving Iranian- American Manssor Arbabsiar and a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informant that was started last June now appears to have been to use Arbabsiar to implicate Shahlai in a terror plot.

U.S. officials had learned from the DEA informant that Arbabsiar claimed that Shahlai was his cousin.

In September 2008, the Treasury Department designated Shahlai as an individual "providing financial, material and technical support for acts of violence that threaten the peace and stability of Iraq" and thus subject to specific financial sanctions. The announcement said Shahlai had provided "material support" to the Mahdi Army in 2006 and that he had "planned the Jan. 20, 2007 attack" by Mahdi Army "Special Groups" on U.S. troops at the Provincial Coordination Center in Karbala, Iraq.

Arbabsiar's confession claims that Shahlai approached him in early spring 2011 and asked him to find "someone in the narcotics business" to kidnap the Saudi ambassador to the United States, according to the FBI account. Arbabsiar implicates Shahlai in providing him with thousands of dollars for his expenses.

But Arbabsiar's charge against Shahlai was self-interested. Arbabsiar had become the cornerstone of the administration's case against Shahlai in order to obtain leniency on charges against him.

There is no indication in the FBI account of the investigation that there is any independent evidence to support Arbabsiar's claim of Shahlai's involvement in a plan to kill the ambassador.

The Obama administration planted stories suggesting that Shahlai had a terrorist past, and that it was therefore credible that he could be part of an assassination plot.

Laying the foundation for press stories on the theme, the Treasury Department announced Tuesday that it was sanctioning Shahlai, along with Arbabsiar and three other Quds Force officials, including the head of the organisation, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, for being "connected to" the assassination plot.

But Michael Issikof of NBC News reported the same day that Shahlai "had previously been accused of plotting a highly sophisticated attack that killed five U.S. soldiers in Iraq, according to U.S. government officials and documents made public Tuesday afternoon".

Isikoff, who is called "National Investigative Correspondent" at NBC News, reported that the Treasury Department had designated Shahlai as a "terrorist" in 2008, despite the fact that the Treasury announcement of the designation had not used the term "terrorist".

On Saturday, the Washington Post published a report closely paralleling the Issikof story but going even further in claiming documentary proof of Shahlai's responsibility for the January 2007 attack in Karbala. Post reporter Peter Finn wrote that Shahlai "was known as the guiding hand behind an elite militia of the cleric Moqtada al Sadr", which had carried out an attack on U.S. troops in Karbala in January 2007.

Finn cited the fact that the Treasury Department named Shahlai as the "final approving and coordinating authority" for training Sadr's militiamen in Iran. That fact would not in itself be evidence of involvement in a specific attack on U.S. forces. On the contrary, it would suggest that he was not involved in operational aspects of the Mahdi Army in Iraq.

Finn then referred to a "22-page memo that detailed preparations for the operation and tied it to the Quds Force…." But he didn't refer to any evidence that Shahlai personally had anything to do with the operation.

In fact, U.S. officials acknowledged in the months after the Karbala attack that they had found no evidence of any Iranian involvement in the operation.

Talking with reporters about the memo on Apr. 26, 2007, several weeks after it had been captured, Gen. David Petraeus conceded that it did not show that any Iranian official was linked to the planning of the Karbala operation. When a journalist asked him whether there was evidence of Iranian involvement in the Karbala operation, Petraeus responded, "No. No. No… [W]e do not have a direct link to Iran involvement in that particular case."

In a news briefing in Baghdad Jul. 2, 2007, Gen. Kevin Bergner confirmed that the attack in Karbala had been authorised by the Iraqi chief of the militia in question, Kais Khazali, not by any Iranian official.

Col. Michael X. Garrett, who had been commander of the U.S. Fourth Brigade combat team in Karbala, confirmed to this writer in December 2008 that the Karbala attack "was definitely an inside job".

Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, is on the list of those Iranian officials "linked" to the alleged terror plot, because he "oversees the IRGC-QF officers who were involved in this plot" , as the Treasury Department announcement explained. But a Reuters story on Friday reported a claim of U.S. intelligence that two wire transfers totaling 100,000 dollars at the behest of Arbabsiar to a bank account controlled by the FBI implicates Soleimani in the assassination plot.

"While details are still classified," wrote Mark Hosenball and Caren Bohan, "one official said the wire transfers apparently had some kind of hallmark indicating they were personally approved" by Soleimani.

But the suggestion that forensic examination of the wire transfers could somehow show who had approved them is misleading. The wire transfers were from two separate non-Iranian banks in a foreign country, according to the FBI's account. It would be impossible to deduce who approved the transfer by looking at the documents.

"I have no idea what such a 'hallmark' could be," said Paul Pillar, a former head of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center who was also National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East until his retirement in 2005.

Pillar told IPS that the "hallmark" notion "pops up frequently in commentary after actual terrorist attacks,", but the concept is usually invoked "along the lines of 'the method used in this attack had the hallmark of group such and such'."

That "hallmark" idea "assumes exclusive ownership of a method of attack which does not really exist," said Pillar. "I expect the same could be said of methods of transferring money."

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

Israeli Generals and Intel Officials Oppose Striking Iran

By Gareth Porter on Intifada Palestine

What Jeffrey Goldberg Didn’t Report

Pro-Israeli journalist Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in “The Atlantic” magazine was evidently aimed at showing why the Barack Obama administration should worry that it risks an attack by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Iran in the coming months unless it takes a much more menacing line toward Iran’s nuclear programme.

But the article provides new evidence that senior figures in the Israeli intelligence and military leadership oppose such a strike against Iran and believe that Netanyahu’s apocalyptic rhetoric about an Iranian nuclear threat as an “existential threat” is unnecessary and self-defeating.

Although not reported by Goldberg, Israeli military and intelligence figures began to express their opposition to such rhetoric on Iran in the early 1990s, and Netanyahu acted to end such talk when he became prime minister in 1996.

The Goldberg article also reveals extreme Israeli sensitivity to any move by Obama to publicly demand that Israel desist from such a strike, reflecting the reality that the Israeli government could not go ahead with any strike without being assured of U.S. direct involvement in the war with Iran.

Goldberg argues that a likely scenario some months in the future is that Israeli officials will call their U.S. counterparts to inform them that Israeli planes are already on their way to bomb Iranian nuclear sites.

The Israelis would explain that they had “no choice”, he writes, because “a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people.”

He claims the “consensus” among present and past Israeli leaders is that the chances are better than 50/50 that Israel “will launch a strike by next July”, based on interviews with 40 such Israeli decision-makers.

Goldberg is best known for hewing to the neoconservative line in his reporting on Iraq, particularly in his insistence that that Saddam Hussein had extensive ties with al Qaeda.

Goldberg quotes an Israeli official familiar with Netanyahu’s thinking as saying, “In World War II, the Jews had no power to stop Hitler from annihilating us. Six million were slaughtered. Today, six million Jews live in Israel, and someone is threatening them with annihilation.”

In his interview with Goldberg for this article, however, Netanyahu does not argue that Iran might use nuclear weapons against Israel. Instead he argues that Hezbollah and Hamas would be able to “fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella”.

But Israel relies on conventional forces – not nuclear deterrence – against Hezbollah and Hamas, making that argument entirely specious.

Goldberg reports that other Israeli leaders, including defence minister Ehud Barack, acknowledge the real problem with the possibility of a nuclear Iran is that it would gradually erode Israel’s ability to retain its most talented people.

But that problem is mostly self-inflicted. Goldberg concedes that Israeli generals with whom he talked “worry that talk of an ‘existential threat’ is itself a kind of existential threat to the Zionist project, which was meant to preclude such threats against the Jewish people.”

A number of sources told Goldberg, moreover, that Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli army chief of staff, doubts “the usefulness of an attack”.

Top Israeli intelligence officials and others responsible for policy toward Iran have long argued, in fact, that the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric that Netanyahu has embraced in recent years is self-defeating.

Security correspondent Ronen Bergman reported in Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s most popular newspaper, in July 2009 that former chief of military intelligence Major General Aharon Zeevi Farkash said the Israeli public perception of the Iranian nuclear threat had been “distorted”.

Farkash and other military intelligence and Mossad officials believe Iran’s main motive for seeking a nuclear weapons capability was not to threaten Israel but to “deter U.S. intervention and efforts at regime change”, according to Bergman.

The use of blatantly distorted rhetoric about Iran as a threat to Israel – and Israeli intelligence officials’ disagreement with it – goes back to the early 1990s, when the Labour Party government in Israel began a campaign to portray Iran’s missile and nuclear programmes as an “existential threat” to Israel, as Trita Parsi revealed in his 2007 book “Treacherous Alliance”.

An internal Israeli inter-ministerial committee formed in 1994 to make recommendations on dealing with Iran concluded that Israeli rhetoric had been “self-defeating”, because it had actually made Iran more afraid of Israel, and more hostile toward it, Parsi writes.

Ironically, it was Netanyahu who decided to stop using such rhetoric after becoming prime minister the first time in mid-1996. Mossad director of intelligence Uzi Arad convinced him that Israel had a choice between making itself Iran’s enemy or allowing Iran to focus on threats from other states.

Netanyahu even sought Kazakh and Russian mediation between Iran and Israel.

But he reversed that policy when he became convinced that Tehran was seeking a rapprochement with Washington, which Israeli leaders feared would result in reduced U.S. support for Israel, according to Parsi’s account. As a result, Netanyahu reverted to the extreme rhetoric of his predecessors.

That episode suggests that Netanyahu is perfectly capable of grasping the intelligence community’s more nuanced analysis of Iran, contrary to his public stance that the Iranian threat is the same as that from Hitler’s Germany.

Netanyahu administration officials used Goldberg to convey the message to the Americans that they didn’t believe Obama would launch an attack on Iran, and therefore Israel would have to do so.

But Israel clearly cannot afford to risk a war with Iran without the assurance that the United States being committed to participate in it. That is why the Israeli lobby in Washington and its allies argue that Obama should support an Israeli strike, which would mean that he would have to attack Iran with full force if it retaliates against such an Israeli strike.

The knowledge that Israel could not attack Iran without U.S. consent makes Israeli officials extremely sensitive about the possibility that Obama would explicitly reject an Israeli strike

Goldberg reports that “several Israeli officials” told him they were worried that U.S. intelligence might learn about Israeli plans to strike Iran “hours” before the scheduled launch.

The officials told Goldberg that if Obama were to say, “We know what you’re doing. Stop immediately,” Israel might have to back down.

Goldberg alludes only vaguely to the possibility that the threat of an attack on Iran is a strategy designed to manipulate both Iran and the United States. In a March 2009 article in The Atlantic online, however, he was more straightforward, conceding that the Netanyahu threat to strike Iran if the United States failed to stop the Iranian nuclear programme could be a “tremendous bluff”.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam“, was published in 2006.

The Real Aim of Israel’s Bomb Iran Campaign

by Gareth Porter for  Truthout

 

Reuel Marc Gerecht’s screed justifying an Israeli bombing attack on Iran coincides with the opening the new Israel lobby campaign marked by the introduction of House resolution 1553 expressing full support for such an Israeli attack.

What is important to understand about this campaign is that the aim of Gerecht and of the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is to support an attack by Israel so that the United States can be drawn into direct, full-scale war with Iran.

That has long been the Israeli strategy for Iran, because Israel cannot fight a war with Iran without full U.S. involvement. Israel needs to know that the United States will finish the war that Israel wants to start.

Gerecht openly expresses the hope that any Iranian response to the Israeli attack would trigger full-scale U.S. war against Iran. “If Khamenei has a death-wish, he’ll let the Revolutionary Guards mine the strait, the entrance to the Persian Gulf,” writes Gerecht. “It might be the only thing that would push President Obama to strike Iran militarily….”

Gerecht suggest that the same logic would apply to any Iranian “terrorism against the United States after an Israeli strike,” by which we really means any attack on a U.S. target in the Middle East. Gerecht writes that Obama might be “obliged” to threaten major retaliation “immediately after an Israeli surprise attack.”

That’s the key sentence in this very long Gerecht argument. Obama is not going to be “obliged” to joint an Israeli aggression against Iran unless he feels that domestic political pressures to do so are too strong to resist. That’s why the Israelis are determined to line up a strong majority in Congress and public opinion for war to foreclose Obama’s options.

In the absence of confidence that Obama would be ready to come into the war fully behind Israel, there cannot be an Israeli strike.

Gerecht’s argument for war relies on a fanciful nightmare scenario of Iran doling out nuclear weapons to Islamic extremists all over the Middle East. But the real concern of the Israelis and their lobbyists, as Gerecht’s past writing has explicitly stated, is to destroy Iran’s Islamic regime in a paroxysm of U.S. military violence.

Gerecht first revealed this Israeli-neocon fantasy as early as 2000, before the Iranian nuclear program was even taken seriously, in an essay written for a book published by the Project for a New American Century. Gerecht argued that, if Iran could be caught in a “terrorist act,” the U.S. Navy should “retaliate with fury”. The purpose of such a military response, he wrote, should be to “strike with truly devastating effect against the ruling mullahs and the repressive institutions that maintain them.”

And lest anyone fail to understand what he meant by that, Gerecht was more explicit: “That is, no cruise missiles at midnight to minimize the body count. The clerics will almost certainly strike back unless Washington uses overwhelming, paralyzing force."

In 2006-07, the Israeli war party had reason to believed that it could hijack U.S. policy long enough to get the war it wanted, because it had placed one of its most militant agents, David Wurmser, in a strategic position to influence that policy.

We now know that Wurmser, formerly a close adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu and during that period Vice President Dick Cheney’s main adviser on the Middle East, urged a policy of overwhelming U.S. military force against Iran. After leaving the administration in 2007, Wurmser revealed that he had advocated a U.S. war on Iran, not to set back the nuclear program but to achieve regime change.

"Only if what we do is placed in the framework of a fundamental assault on the survival of the regime will it have a pick-up among ordinary Iranians,” Wurmser told The Telegraph. The U.S. attack was not to be limited to nuclear targets but was to be quite thorough and massively destructive. “If we start shooting, we must be prepared to fire the last shot. Don't shoot a bear if you're not going to kill it."

Of course, that kind of war could not be launched out of the blue. It would have required a casus belli to justify a limited initial attack that would then allow a rapid escalation of U.S. military force. In 2007, Cheney acted on Wurmser’s advice and tried to get Bush to provoke a war with Iran over Iraq, but it was foiled by the Pentagon.

As Wurmser was beginning to whisper that advice in Cheney’s ear in 2006, Gerecht was making the same argument in The Weekly Standard:

Bombing the nuclear facilities once would mean we were declaring war on the clerical regime. We shouldn't have any illusions about that. We could not stand idly by and watch the mullahs build other sites. If the ruling mullahs were to go forward with rebuilding what they'd lost--and it would be surprising to discover the clerical regime knuckling after an initial bombing run--we'd have to strike until they stopped. And if we had any doubt about where their new facilities were (and it's a good bet the clerical regime would try to bury new sites deep under heavily populated areas), and we were reasonably suspicious they were building again, we'd have to consider, at a minimum, using special-operations forces to penetrate suspected sites.

The idea of waging a U.S. war of destruction against Iran is obvious lunacy, which is why U.S. military leaders have strongly resisted it both during the Bush and Obama administrations. But Gerecht makes it clear that Israel believes it can use its control of Congress to pound Obama into submission. Democrats in Congress, he boasts, “are mentally in a different galaxy than they were under President Bush.” Even though Israel has increasingly been regarded around the world as a rogue state after its Gaza atrocities and the commando killings of unarmed civilians on board the Mavi Marmara, its grip on the U.S. Congress appears as strong as ever.

Moreover, polling data for 2010 show that a majority of Americans have already been manipulated into supporting war against Iran – in large part because more than two-thirds of those polled have gotten the impression that Iran already has nuclear weapons. The Israelis are apparently hoping to exploit that advantage. “If the Israelis bomb now, American public opinion will probably be with them,” writes Gerecht. “Perhaps decisively so.”

Netanyahu must be feeling good about the prospects for pressuring Barack Obama to join an Israeli war of aggression against Iran. It was Netanyahu, after all, who declared in 2001, “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in the way.”

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

Exclusive: Eager for new ‘Curveball,’ CIA may have been duped by Iranian double agent

By Gareth Porter for the Raw Story

Despite an Iranian claim that scientist Shahram Amiri was a double agent who gave Iran an “intelligence victory” over the CIA, US officials continue to maintain the line that Amiri had been a valuable long-term US intelligence asset who had provided valuable intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program before he returned to Iran out of concern for the family he had left behind.

A change of heart by a defector is far from unknown in the history of US espionage, but some former intelligence officials wonder if the CIA’s failure to exercise normal caution in its handling of Amiri could have led them to fall for a “dangle” -- someone who offers to spy on his own government but who is actually working for that government’s intelligence service.

rsilogo Exclusive: Eager for new Curveball, CIA may have been duped by Iranian double agentFormer CIA official Philip Giraldi, who was briefed on the case last week by CIA officials with direct knowledge of it, said those who had been responsible for handling Amiri still did not regard him as a double agent. But he said an investigation had been opened by the CIA on the procedures that had been used in the case, indicating a serious concern that Amiri might have been deceiving the agency all along.

The Sunday Telegraph reported last week that a former CIA operative said the CIA was indeed investigating whether Amiri had been a double agent. The Washington Post’s Greg Miller quoted a “former high-ranking CIA official” as saying, "They have to go over everything he did provide and put a big caveat on it."

The report by Fars News Agency Wednesday cited an unidentified source as saying that Iranian intelligence had established contact with Amiri in "early 2010," while he was in the United States supposedly sequestered by the CIA. That claim, if true, would place the start of direct contact between Amiri and Iranian intelligence months before an alleged phone call by Amiri to his family that US officials have claimed caused him to start thinking about returning to Iran.

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The Iranian source said that Amiri was "managed and guided" by Iranian intelligence officials in his debriefings with the CIA and described the information he provided as "valuable details from inside the CIA."

Although those statements appeared to apply to the period of Amiri’s stay in the United States, another statement suggested a longer-term relationship between Iranian intelligence and Amiri. "This was an intelligence battle between the CIA and us that was designed and managed by Iran," the source was quoted as saying.

US officials have dismissed the Iranian claim as propaganda and derided the kind of information Amiri supposedly obtained from his contact with the CIA as trivial compared with the information he had provided on the Iranian nuclear program. But Rick Francona, a former CIA intelligence operations officer, said Amiri could have taken valuable intelligence on his debriefings with the CIA back to Iran withi him. "He knows what we don’t know," said Francona.

The operational and political context in which Amiri approached the United States and offered his services may have helped create an opening for an Iranian deception operation. Iran has long been one of the hardest places in the world for the United States to operate an intelligence network. "The Iranians were always a very tough target for us," said Francona, who has worked on the problem of distinguishing real defectors from frauds at the CIA, which arises in part because of the absence of a US embassy in Iran.

That made the CIA dependent on recruitment and "walk-ins" outside Iran. Amiri was a "walk-in" who appeared in Turkey to volunteer to work for US intelligence, according to Giraldi’s CIA sources. Turkey has been the main location for Iranian walk-ins, according to Charles S. Faddis, a 20-year veteran of CIA operations until his retirement in 2008, who conducted operations in both the Middle East and southwest Asia.

Turkey is also a place where Iran has a very active intelligence presence, according to Francona, and the Iranians "have tended to dangle targets in Turkey" in the past.

Faddis told me that Turkey would have been the right place for Iranian intelligence to offer a "dangle" to US intelligence, because the US had recruited people there before. "If this guy was walked in by the Iranians they would do it in a place that smells correct to us," said Faddis.

No US intelligence source has indicated precisely when Amiri volunteered to work for US intelligence, but he has been identified as a source for the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, indicating that he began reporting at least as early as 2007. In 2005, the Bush administration launched a major program to weaken and sabotage the Iranian nuclear program, which included a project codenamed "Brain Drain" aimed at getting nuclear scientists and others involved in the program to defect.

That meant that the CIA was inclined to put great value on Amiri, even though he admitted to having no direct knowledge of the nuclear program, according to Giraldi. "The CIA saw Amiri as someone who could help them in recruiting other scientists," said Patrick Lang, a former DIA intelligence officer for the Middle East.

There had also been pressure on the agency from the Bush administration to come up with more intelligence on what senior officials believed was a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program, according to a report by the Washington Post’s Dafna Linzer in February 2006.

"The CIA dearly wanted to have a guy play the role of 'Curveball' on Iran," a former intelligence official told me. He was referring to the Iraqi agent of the German intelligence whose tale of mobile bio-weapons labs had been seized upon by the Bush administration as the "smoking gun" evidence of Saddam’s WMD ambitions.

The agency also felt that it had not kept pace with the Israelis, Germans, French and British in recruiting new agents inside Iran, according to one intelligence community insider familiar with the issue. "The feeling was growing in the CIA that we were deeply in debt to other intelligence agencies in terms of agents in Iran," he said.

The agency had very little information about Amiri when they established a relationship with him, according to Giraldi. "He was never vetted carefully," he said. The only thing the agency knew was that he had a job that was vaguely connected to the nuclear issue at Malek Ashtar University in Tehran.

But that university had been labeled by the National Council of Resistance in Iran, the political arm of the anti-regime terrorist group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), as a front for nuclear weapons work by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The NCRI and MEK have had close relations with Israeli intelligence, which has promoted many of the same specific charges about alleged Iranian covert nuclear weapons work. Israeli insistence that the university was a key target may have been yet another source of pressure on the CIA to take on a scientist affiliated with it.

The result of those pressures was laxer procedures in dealing with Shahram Amiri than was the norm for the agency. "He was never well vetted," said Giraldi flatly, reflecting what his sources in the agency now concede.

A key danger signal for a double agent is that he offers some intelligence that the United States is known to want badly. But Amiri didn’t appear to fit that description. Giraldi’s CIA contacts say he didn’t claim to have direct knowledge of the Iranian nuclear program. "He didn’t really have original information," said Giraldi.

Instead Amiri claimed to have acquaintances in the nuclear program from whom he picked up "scuttlebutt", according to Giraldi. The very modesty of Amiri’s claims, therefore, made him appear to be sincere.

A major question mark about the Amiri case surrounds his "defection" to the United States after some unidentified period during which he was reporting to a US case officer, according to Giraldi. US officials have been quoted as saying that there were indications that he was in danger of being discovered and that the agency urged him to leave Iran for his own safety.

The normal procedure under those circumstances would be to bring Amiri’s wife and young son out, so that he would not be vulnerable to government pressures inherent in their remaining behind. But US officials have told reporters that Amiri chose to leave his family behind when he left Iran, using a Hajj in Saudi Arabia as the excuse. That should have been a danger signal about Amiri, according to Francona. "That’s the first thing defectors ask for – get my family out. That’s a big red flag."

Faddis said it would have been "exceedingly unusual, in my experience bringing people out," to have left the rest of the family in Iran. The only circumstances in which the agency would bring out an agent without his family, Faddis said, is as a "last resort – because it’s going to cause massive problems."

An intelligence operations manager would only deviate from that practice "if central national security interests are at stake," said Faddis.

That issue is central to the Amiri case, because it bears on whether the US story that Amiri was worried about threats to his family, which was leaked to the news media in the wake of Amiri’s return to Iran, is credible.

Faddis said he views the Amiri case in the light of his own experience that defectors typically have "a lot of personal problems," which he believes are usually related to their defection. He thinks Amiri was a genuine defector, but that his handlers "screwed up the defection".

Former CIA operative Francona isn't so sure. "If I could get a set of facts, I could make a judgment," he told me. "But I can’t tell who is telling the truth. I’d have to see the whole case file."

Another former intelligence official, who asked not to be identified, said he doesn’t buy the CIA’s story that Amiri returned to Iran because he was concerned about his family. If Amiri were not already working for Iranian intelligence, he observed, he would have been well aware of his fate upon return, regardless of any personal problems.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA and State Department counter-terrorism official, commented on his blog "No Quarter" last week, "At this point, it looks like [Amiri] was a dangle that CIA swallowed hook, line and sinker." Johnson pointed to the anomaly that Iranian authorities had allowed Amiri to travel alone to Saudi Arabia.

US officials defending the CIA’s handling of the case have cited alleged indications of Iranian suspicions of Amiri as the reason for getting Amiri to leave Iran for the United States. Those officials have not indicated, however, whether the indications were obtained independently of Amiri or not.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.

Have Hawks Won a Round on Iraq Escalation?

by Gareth Porter

The George W. Bush administration recently concluded that the increase in rocket attacks on coalition targets by Shi'ite forces over the summer was a deliberate move by Iran to escalate the war in order to put pressure on the United States to accept Iranian influence in Iraq, according to a senior US government official.

The reported conclusions reached by administration officials suggest that the advocates of war with Iran, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, have won at least one phase of the policy battle within the administration over the option of broadening the war into Iran.

The official, who spoke to IPS on the understanding that there would be no identification other than "senior government official," said the increased attacks represent "not just some new kinds of weapons but a new dynamic" in the conflict with Iran over Iraq.

The official said the attacks had a "very specific strategic purpose," which was "at a minimum to push the United States to accept certain Iranian desiderata" – apparently referring to Iranian negotiating aims.

The official did not specify what the administration believed those aims to be. But it seems likely that the new conclusion refers to long-established Iranian desires to have the United States recognize its legitimate geopolitical and religious interests in Iraq.

The Iranian ambassador to Iraq, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, was quite explicit in his May 28 meeting with US Ambassador Ryan Crocker that Iran wanted Washington to accept that Iraq is Iran's "backyard," according to a report on the Iranian Baztab news website in June. Iran's secret negotiating proposal to the Bush administration in May 2003 included a similar demand for "respect for Iranian national interests in Iraq and religious links to Najaf/Karbala."

The administration now believes Iran's "larger strategic aim" in allegedly providing modern weapons like 240 mm rockets to Shi'ite militias targeting US and coalition forces in Iraq is "to attempt to establish escalation dominance in Iraq and strategic dominance outside," according to the official.

The official said, "Escalation dominance means you can control the pace of escalation." That term has always been used in the past to refer to the ability of the United States to threaten another state with overwhelming retaliation in order to deter it from responding to US force.

The official defined "strategic dominance" as meaning that "you are perceived as the dominant center in the region."

The Bush administration has never used the term "strategic dominance" in any public statement on Iran. According to a concept of regional "dominance" defined by perceptions – which would mean the perceptions of Sunni Arab states who are opposed to any Shi'ite influence in the region – Iran could be seen as already having "strategic dominance" in the region.

The reported conclusion that the increased attacks by Shi'ite forces represent an effort to achieve such dominance could be the basis for a new argument that only by reducing Iranian influence in Iraq through US military action can the United States avert Iranian "strategic dominance" in the region.

That conclusion about "strategic dominance" thus implies that destroying what is perceived to be the political-military bases of Iranian influence in Iraq has become the key US war aim.

The conclusion that the Shi'ite militias' rocket attacks on coalition targets represent a bid to "control the pace of escalation" could be interpreted as expressing a concern that the United States lacks the military capacity to suppress those forces. That raises the question whether the advocates of war against Iran have introduced the concept of "escalation dominance" as a way of supporting their favorite option – attacking targets inside Iran.

Further evidence that the administration has taken a step closer to geographic escalation of the war came in a Sep. 10 interview by Brit Hume of Fox News with Gen. David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq. Hume, who appeared to have been tipped off to ask about the option of broadening the war into Iran, asked Petraeus whether the "rules of engagement" allowed him to "do what you think you need to do to suppress this activity on the part of Iran, or perhaps do you need assistance from military not under your command to do this?"

Pressed by Hume, Petraeus said, "[W]hen I have concerns about something beyond [the border], I take them to my boss...and in fact, we have shared our concerns with him and with the chain of command, and there is a pretty hard look ongoing at that particular situation."

Joe Cirincione, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank, said if the report of the administration's conclusions about Iranian aims is true, "it is a disturbing sign that the hardliners have regained the preeminent policymaking position."

The use of the term "escalation domination" in the Iraq context – suggesting that Iran is responsible for the conflict – is "wildly inappropriate," Cirincione observed. He said the reported conclusions sound like the viewpoint of a "group of people inside the administration who view Iran as Nazi Germany" and who are "constantly exaggerating" the threat from Iran.

The view that Iraq has become a U.S-Iranian "proxy war," with Iran pulling the strings in the Shi'ite camp outside the government, was apparently rejected by the US intelligence community in its National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq issued last February. The brief summary findings statement released to the public stated, "Iraq's neighbors influence, and are influenced by, events within Iraq, but the involvement of these outside actors is not likely to be a major driver of violence or the prospects of stability because of the self-sustaining character of Iraq's internal sectarian dynamics."

Lieberman-Kyl vs. the Evidence

by Gareth Porter

The Lieberman-Kyle amendment has just passed the Senate overwhelmingly after two sections were removed to satisfy Democrats that it will not serve as a backdoor authorization for war against Iran, using U.S. forces operating in Iran. Even after that compromise, it remains a poison chalice, because it endorses a set of "findings" that are fundamentally false and which are being used by the administration to lay the groundwork for a more aggressive policy toward Iran .

The amendment is based on the Bush administration's proxy war narrative which has been filling the news media for the past nine months. It cites General Petraeus's classic statement of the proxy war argument of September 12: "[I]t is increasingly apparent...that Iran through the use of the Iranian Republican [sic] Guard Corps Quds Force, seeks to turn the Sh'ia militia extremists into a Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests and fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq".

It is not unreasonable to view the proxy war narrative as the equivalent for Iran of the infamous White House Iraq Group's carefully contrived -- and stunningly successful -- fall campaign in 2002 to prepare public opinion to support an invasion of Iraq.

The following six points summarize some -- but certainly not all -- of the evidence contradicting the line on which the poisonous Liberman-Kyl amendment is based.

1. The administration has not come forward with a single piece of concrete evidence to support the claim that the Iranian government has been involved in the training, arming or advising of Iraqi Shiite militias.

o At the February 11, 2007 briefing, officials displayed one EFP and some fragments but did not claim that there was any forensic evidence linking that or any other AFP to Iran.

o One of the briefers admitted that it was only Iraqi smugglers who brought weapons into Iraq, explaining why no direct Iranian involvement could be documented.

o The official briefer who was a specialist on explosives, Maj. Marty Weber, claimed in a later interview that the use of "passive infrared sensors" in the deployment of EFPs in Iraq was "one of the strongest markers of Iranian involvement" in the traffic. But he admitted in the same interview that the electronic components needed to make the sensors found in Iraq were "easily available off the shelf at places like RadioShack.

o Another official who participated in the briefing, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, denied that the military was claiming that Iran was behind the traffic in arms to Iraq. He said in a follow-up press briefing on February 14, "What we are saying is that within Iran, that these EFP component parts are being manufactured. Within Iran weapons and munitions are being manufactured that are ending up in Iraq. And we are asking the Iranian government to assist in stopping that from happening. There's no intent to do anything other than that."

o Although one of the official briefers said shipments of EFPs had been intercepted at the border in 2005, only one press report about such a border interceptions has appeared, and there was no indication that such interceptions had produced any evidence of Iranian involvement. On the contrary, it quoted "coalition officials" as saying there was "no evidence to suggest that the government in Tehran is facilitating the smuggling of shape charges into Iraq." Despite that alleged interception, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita and Brig Gen. Carter Ham, deputy director for regional operations for the Joint Staff, continued to deny any knowledge of official Iranian complicity in EFP or any other arm supplies.

o Despite interrogations since last spring of a top official of an alleged Iraqi EFP network and the Hezbollah operative who was a liaison with the organization, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the U.S. Commander for southern Iraq, where most of the Shiite militias operate, admitted in a July 6 briefing that his troops had not captured "anybody that we can tie to Iran"

o On September 8, the commander for the northern region of Iraq, Maj. Gen. Thomas Turner II, admitted in a press briefing, "I don't think we have any specific proof of Iranians in our area other than reports. We have discovered caches....It has not been a lot. We have seen some evidence of some weapons that were employed against coalition forces that were made in...Iran, where they are coming from across the border, we're not sure."

o Despite the assertion by Gen. David Petraeus on September 12, quoted in the proposed Lieberman-Kyle amendment, that the U.S. military obtained evidence of the complicity of Iranian officials in arming and training Shiite militias from interrogations of the above detainees, it has not produced wither detainee or any transcript of the interrogations. Nor has it released a direct quote from either detainee. No apparent intelligence reason exists for withholding such evidence from Congress and the public.

o Despite Petraeus' assertion in September that the United States obtained "hard evidence" incriminating Iran from computer hard drives seized when the above detainees were captured March 22 , none of the documentation has been made public, nor have any specifics have been provided on what the files show. Earlier both Petraeus and Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner had discussed the contents of the 22-page memorandum as detailing the planning preparation, approval and conduct of military operations by the Shiite militia organization but without claiming that it showed any Iranian role in any of those activities.

2. The U.S. intelligence community has not endorsed the argument being made by some in the Bush administration that the Iranian government was responsible for the rise in Shiite military activity in Iraq.

o The National Intelligence Estimate, a brief summary of which was released to the public February 2 contradicted the official argument, stating, "Iraq's neighbors influence, and are influenced by, events within Iraq, but the involvement of these outside actors is not likely to be a major driver of violence or the prospects for stability because of the self-sustaining character of Iraq's internal sectarian dynamics."

o Instead of stating clear that Iran had provided weapons or training to Shiite militias, the NIE offered a more ambiguous formula that "Iranian lethal support for select groups of Iraqi Shia militants clearly intensifies the conflict in Iraq." That formula, according to veterans of the NIE process, probably represents a negotiated compromise, indicating that some agencies refused to endorse the claim that Iran was supply weapons to Iraqi Shiites.

3. The main argument made in the February 11, 2007 briefing for an Iranian official role in providing EFPs to Shiite militias -- the allegation that only Iran had the capability to manufacture EFPs or components for EFPs that can penetrate U.S. armor -- was quickly proven to be untrue.

o As early as mid-2005, U.S. military intelligence officials had already concluding that they believe the technology for making such armor-penetrating bombs was "spreading among a variety of insurgent groups," obviously including Sunni insurgents with no ties to Iran or Hezbollah. At least one insurgent cell in Baghdad was already "attempting to make the charges locally."

o Israeli intelligence reported that Hamas guerrillas manufactured high grade EFPs during 2006 which were used in attacks on Israeli Defense Forces in four separate incidents in September and November 2006. The shaped charges penetrated eight inches of steel armor.

o Senior military officials in Baghdad told a reporter days after the February 11 briefing that U.S. forces had been finding an "increasing number of advanced roadside bombs being not just assembled but manufactured in machine shops." One official was quoted as saying that the impact of those Iraqi-machined EFPs on armored vehicles "isn't as clean but they are almost as effective" as the EFPs being imported.

o Journalist Andrew Cockburn reported in February that in November 2006 U.S. troops raiding a Baghdad machine shop had discovered a pile of copper discs "stamped out as part of what was clearly an ongoing order"

o Maj. Marty Weber, the explosives expert who was one of the three briefers in the February 11 briefing, admitted in an interview with The New York Times less than two weeks later that "You can never be certain" that the cooper discs for the EFPs could not be manufactured with the required precision in Iraq.

o U.S. troops found a cache of components, including concave copper discs, for making EFPs in February 2007, in which the PVC tubes of varying widths appeared to have come from the open market, raising the likelihood that the liners were being manufactured locally so that they would be the right size to fit the discs.

o Another bomb-making factory discovered by U.S. troops in late February was reported to have forced U.S. officials to "reassess their belief that such bombs were being built in Iran and smuggled fully assembled into Iraq."

4. U.S. and British Military officers and civilian officials have expressed doubt that EFPs and other armaments in the hands of Shiites have actually come from Iran or that Iranian Quds force personnel have been involved in the supply.

o British Defence Secretary Des Browne said in an interview in August 2006, "I have not seen any evidence -- and I don't think any evidence exists -- of government-supported or instigated armed support on Iran's part in Iraq."

o Lt. Col. David Labouchere, commander of a few hundred British troops which began in late August 2006 to search the Iran-Iraq border for evidence of Iranian supply of weapons to Iraqi Shiites, said in October, "I suspect there's nothing out there. And I intend to prove it."

o "[S]ome military analysts have concluded there is no concrete evidence of...a link" between the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Shiite militias fighting U.S. troops, according to a Washington Post report published August 20, 2007.

5. The Quds Force of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the administration has claimed is the instrument of the alleged Iranian "proxy war" in Iraq, has apparently been withdrawn from Iraq.

o In the same testimony to the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees on September 11 in which he stated the proxy war argument, Gen. David Petraeus also said, "[T]he Qods Force itself -- we believe, by [and] large, those individuals have been pulled out of the country, as have the Lebanese Hezbollah trainers that were being used to augment that activity.

6. There is a substantial body of evidence that the Hezbollah in Lebanon -- not Iran -- has been the main source, if not the only source, of EFPs and other weapon used by Shiite militias in 2006 and 2007.

o Hezbollah was using EFPs to attack Israel Defense Forces armored vehicles as early as 1997 and provided EFP expertise to Palestinian militant groups after the start of the Intifada in 2000 (Michael Knights, Jane's Intelligence Review).

o Iraqi and Lebanese officials told a reporter in mid-2005 that Iraqi Shiite fighters had begun in early 2005 "copying Hezbollah's techniques in building roadside bombs and carrying out sophisticated ambushes." Those Hezbollah techniques included "shaped charges" (later renamed explosively formed penetrators by U.S. officials), according to those same officials.

o Hezbollah's CD-Rom instructional videos were captured in Iraq rather than Iran's, according to Michael Knights.

o All of the weapons systems captured in Iraq that are alleged to have been provided by Iran, including EFPs and 240 mm rockets, have been in the Hezbollah arsenal, as indicated by many sources on the weapons used by Hezbollah against Israel.

o One of those weapons systems, the RPG-29, which was used by Shiite militias against an American M-1 tank, is not manufactured by Iran and is known to have been acquired by Hezbollah from Syria rather than from Iran.

o There was reportedly intelligence in 2006 that Iran shipped machine tools to Lebanon that could be used to make EFPs.