The Bush Administration steps up major escalation of covert operations against Iran

[Pastor Dale Morgan]

*
Perilous Times*

Preparing the Battlefield

*The Bush Administration steps up major escalation of covert operations
against Iran*

by Seymour M. Hersh July 7, 2008
New Yorker

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.”)

* from the issue
* cartoon bank
* e-mail this

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. ♦