Seymour Hersh: Our Men In Iran?
Michael Lynn
gang of thugs who have carried out terrorist attacks on innocent
civilians inside Iran and are in no way a part of the internal Iranian
grassroots oppostion to the regime. One should also take the final
statement in this piece by an American official with a huge pillar of
salt.
--
Mike
April 6, 2012
Our Men in Iran?
Posted by Seymour M. Hersh
From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy’s Nevada
National Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain
peaks, has the look of northwest Iran. The site, some sixty-five miles
northwest of Las Vegas, was once used for nuclear testing, and now
includes a counterintelligence training facility and a private airport
capable of handling Boeing 737 aircraft. It’s a restricted area, and
inhospitable—in certain sections, the curious are warned that the
site’s security personnel are authorized to use deadly force, if
necessary, against intruders.
It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted
training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a
dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The
M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and,
in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six
American citizens. It was initially part of the broad-based revolution
that led to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. But, within a few
years, the group was waging a bloody internal war with the ruling
clerics, and, in 1997, it was listed as a foreign terrorist
organization by the State Department. In 2002, the M.E.K. earned some
international credibility by publicly revealing—accurately—that Iran
had begun enriching uranium at a secret underground location. Mohamed
ElBaradei, who at the time was the director general of the
International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear
monitoring agency, told me later that he had been informed that the
information was supplied by the Mossad. The M.E.K.’s ties with Western
intelligence deepened after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, and
JSOC began operating inside Iran in an effort to substantiate the Bush
Administration’s fears that Iran was building the bomb at one or more
secret underground locations. Funds were covertly passed to a number
of dissident organizations, for intelligence collection and,
ultimately, for anti-regime terrorist activities. Directly, or
indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up with resources like arms and
intelligence. Some American-supported covert operations continue in
Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and
military consultants.
Despite the growing ties, and a much-intensified lobbying effort
organized by its advocates, M.E.K. has remained on the State
Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations—which meant that
secrecy was essential in the Nevada training. “We did train them here,
and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns
all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American
intelligence official told me. “We were deploying them over long
distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in
communications—coördinating commo is a big deal.” (A spokesman for
J.S.O.C. said that “U.S. Special Operations Forces were neither aware
of nor involved in the training of M.E.K. members.”)
The training ended sometime before President Obama took office, the
former official said. In a separate interview, a retired four-star
general, who has advised the Bush and Obama Administrations on
national-security issues, said that he had been privately briefed in
2005 about the training of Iranians associated with the M.E.K. in
Nevada by an American involved in the program. They got “the standard
training,” he said, “in commo, crypto [cryptography], small-unit
tactics, and weaponry—that went on for six months,” the retired
general said. “They were kept in little pods.” He also was told, he
said, that the men doing the training were from JSOC, which, by 2005,
had become a major instrument in the Bush Administration’s global war
on terror. “The JSOC trainers were not front-line guys who had been in
the field, but second- and third-tier guys—trainers and the like—and
they started going off the reservation. ‘If we’re going to teach you
tactics, let me show you some really sexy stuff…’ ”
It was the ad-hoc training that provoked the worried telephone calls
to him, the former general said. “I told one of the guys who called me
that they were all in over their heads, and all of them could end up
trouble unless they got something in writing. The Iranians are very,
very good at counterintelligence, and stuff like this is just too hard
to contain.” The site in Nevada was being utilized at the same time,
he said, for advanced training of élite Iraqi combat units. (The
retired general said he only knew of the one M.E.K.-affiliated group
that went though the training course; the former senior intelligence
official said that he was aware of training that went on through
2007.)
Allan Gerson, a Washington attorney for the M.E.K., notes that the
M.E.K. has publicly and repeatedly renounced terror. Gerson said he
would not comment on the alleged training in Nevada. But such
training, if true, he said, would be “especially incongruent with the
State Department’s decision to continue to maintain the M.E.K. on the
terrorist list. How can the U.S. train those on State’s foreign
terrorist list, when others face criminal penalties for providing a
nickel to the same organization?”
Robert Baer, a retired C.I.A. agent who is fluent in Arabic and had
worked under cover in Kurdistan and throughout the Middle East in his
career, initially had told me in early 2004 of being recruited by a
private American company—working, so he believed, on behalf of the
Bush Administration—to return to Iraq. “They wanted me to help the
M.E.K. collect intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program,” Baer recalled.
“They thought I knew Farsi, which I did not. I said I’d get back to
them, but never did.” Baer, now living in California, recalled that it
was made clear to him at the time that the operation was “a long-term
thing—not just a one-shot deal.”
Massoud Khodabandeh, an I.T. expert now living in England who consults
for the Iraqi government, was an official with the M.E.K. before
defecting in 1996. In a telephone interview, he acknowledged that he
is an avowed enemy of the M.E.K., and has advocated against the group.
Khodabandeh said that he had been with the group since before the fall
of the Shah and, as a computer expert, was deeply involved in
intelligence activities as well as providing security for the M.E.K.
leadership. For the past decade, he and his English wife have run a
support program for other defectors. Khodabandeh told me that he had
heard from more recent defectors about the training in Nevada. He was
told that the communications training in Nevada involved more than
teaching how to keep in contact during attacks—it also involved
communication intercepts. The United States, he said, at one point
found a way to penetrate some major Iranian communications systems. At
the time, he said, the U.S. provided M.E.K. operatives with the
ability to intercept telephone calls and text messages inside
Iran—which M.E.K. operatives translated and shared with American
signals intelligence experts. He does not know whether this activity
is ongoing.
Five Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated since 2007.
M.E.K. spokesmen have denied any involvement in the killings, but
early last month NBC News quoted two senior Obama Administration
officials as confirming that the attacks were carried out by M.E.K.
units that were financed and trained by Mossad, the Israeli secret
service. NBC further quoted the Administration officials as denying
any American involvement in the M.E.K. activities. The former senior
intelligence official I spoke with seconded the NBC report that the
Israelis were working with the M.E.K., adding that the operations
benefitted from American intelligence. He said that the targets were
not “Einsteins”; “The goal is to affect Iranian psychology and
morale,” he said, and to “demoralize the whole system—nuclear delivery
vehicles, nuclear enrichment facilities, power plants.” Attacks have
also been carried out on pipelines. He added that the operations are
“primarily being done by M.E.K. through liaison with the Israelis, but
the United States is now providing the intelligence.” An adviser to
the special-operations community told me that the links between the
United States and M.E.K. activities inside Iran had been
long-standing. “Everything being done inside Iran now is being done
with surrogates,” he said.
The sources I spoke to were unable to say whether the people trained
in Nevada were now involved in operations in Iran or elsewhere. But
they pointed to the general benefit of American support. “The M.E.K.
was a total joke,” the senior Pentagon consultant said, “and now it’s
a real network inside Iran. How did the M.E.K. get so much more
efficient?” he asked rhetorically. “Part of it is the training in
Nevada. Part of it is logistical support in Kurdistan, and part of it
is inside Iran. M.E.K. now has a capacity for efficient operations
than it never had before.”
In mid-January, a few days after an assassination by car bomb of an
Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran, Secretary of Defense Leon
Panetta, at a town-hall meeting of soldiers at Fort Bliss, Texas,
acknowledged that the U.S. government has “some ideas as to who might
be involved, but we don’t know exactly who was involved.” He added,
“But I can tell you one thing: the United States was not involved in
that kind of effort. That’s not what the United States does.”
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