Citizen Journalism by Josh Mull

[The following post was published on Enduring America]

On April 9, President Obama sent his 2009 supplemental budget request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to Congress. Predictably, most of the media coverage was simply carried over and adapted from the previous battle over funding for the military.

For example, some attention has centered upon the stiff opposition to Secretary of Defense Gates’ decision not to order additional F-22 fighters. While this discussion is important, particularly on the usefulness of F-22 fighter planes in Iraq, there was something else in this supplemental budget that seems to have escaped notice.

We find this on page 6:

$0.8 billion to support the Palestinian people, strengthen the Palestinian Authority, and provide humanitarian assistance for the crisis in Gaza.

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[The following is analysis written for Enduring America]

It was recently revealed that sometime in January, several Israeli F-15s and F-16s entered Sudanese airspace and attacked a convoy of 17 trucks, supposedly filled with weapons bound for Hamas in Gaza. The attack killed 39 people, all Eritrean, Sudanese, and Ethiopian nationals, as well as injuring an unknown number of bystanders. The official reasoning was that this was designed as a deterrent to Iran smuggling weapons to Hamas, as well as display of Israel’s capability to strike, as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, “everywhere there is terror.”

However, this attack may have had catastrophic consequences, not only for Israel’s battle against Hamas, but for the US War on Terror, and on a much greater scale, those suffering from the horrible human rights crisis in Darfur. To understand how, we must examine in detail the events leading up to the Israeli attack, the attack itself, and the fallout from the government in Khartoum.

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[The following is an essay written for Enduring America in response to Scott Lucas's piece Is Israel Winning a Covert War Against Iran.]

Earlier this week in The Daily Telegraph, it was revealed by former US intelligence operatives that Israel and the United States have allegedly been waging a covert campaign of kidnappings, assassinations, and sabotage against Iran’s nuclear program. In his post “Is Israel Winning a Covert War Against Iran?”, Professor Lucas proposes that this revelation is “a bit of ‘psychological warfare’ to keep Tehran off-balance over what might and might not be attempted to undermine its nuclear programme” as well as a “stick” in non-proliferation discussions.

However, the leak could also be interpreted as exactly the opposite of Prof. Lucas’s assessment. Not only is this revelation more concrete than mere “psychological” warfare. It is a Loss, not a Win, for Israel and a Carrot, not a Stick, for Iran.

There are already reports that the United States and Israel have targeted Iranian nuclear operatives in the past. In December 2006, the Iranian Deputy Defense Minister, Ali Reza Asgari, disappeared while travelling in Istanbul, Turkey. The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet speculated at the time that Asgari had hidden his family in Damascus, Syria before defecting to the West. However, according to the Iranian Labor News Agency, Asgari’s family was actually back in Iran. They denied Asgari would seek asylum with the west, and Iran publicly accused the US and Israel of kidnapping Asgari, a process known as “extraordinary rendition.” Four months later, US non-proliferation expert Robert Levinson disappeared under equally mysterious circumstances in Iran, a possible retaliation for Asgari.

There is also evidence possibly verifying the existence of the shell companies which, the Telegraph article suggests, are used to “dupe” and sabotage Iranian companies involved in the nuclear program. The US Treasury Department regularly designates, or “burns” to use apt intelligence lingo, corporations and financial entities it knows to be connected to illicit Iranian activities. For instance, in December 2008, in a possible closing act of the exiting Bush Administration, the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) burned one of its largest shell companies, Assa Corporation.

World Check reported at the time “the corporate name chosen, Assa Corp. and Co., is deceptively similar to that of a well-known European corporation and of several US companies. This is a tactic frequently employed by financial criminals to confuse and mislead.” World Check also pointed out “the address of the New York corporation appears to be that of the law firm that organised the company, which could indicate that it is a shell company with no actual address. The company has no telephone listing in New York, has no Internet footprint, and does not have a principal place of business.”

Note there are never any subsequent indictments or investigations into these “designated” entities, just a simple burning, or public destruction, of the intelligence asset. While parallel information from Iran regarding their financial investigations is unavailable, it could be presumed that companies are burned by OFAC after being discovered by Iranian counter-intelligence officials.

The leak can be seen as a major loss, not a win, for Israel. As the CIA officer told the Telegraph, “Disruption is designed to slow progress on the programme, done in such a way that they don’t realise what’s happening.” Obviously, Iran is now fully aware of the operation. Israeli intelligence services will be, or more likely have already been, forced to abort all facets of the operation and Iranian nuclear officials will likely be even more closely scrutinized, controlled, and monitored by state security services.

One of the most grim aspects of Israel’s loss is, of course, the gruesome destruction of its intelligence assets remaining in Iran. Fars, an Iranian news agency, reported in November 2008 that three people suspected of spying for Israel, specifically a connection to Defense Minister Asgari’s kidnapping, were executed by the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps. CNN also reports on another man, Ali Ashtari, who “was convicted by [the IRGC] in June of spying for Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad.” Furthermore “according to Ashtari’s ‘confession,’ published by Fars, he was a salesman who obtained high-end but security-compromised pieces of electronic equipment…and sold them to military and defense centers in Iran.” The covert war, clearly already suffering losses, will now possibly be completely dismantled.

With that in mind, it’s possible to see this as not only a “stick” for Israel, but also as a “carrot” for Iran. The consequences for Israel have been noted, but the direct benefits to Iran require more subtlty to discern. As Prof. Lucas points out in his analysis, the sources Radio Farda and STRATFOR, used in the Telegraph leak as well as other similar leaks, have been linked to the US Government and its intelligence agencies in the past. However, rather than interpreting their connection to US intelligence as a disqualification, it should more accurately be interpreted as adding legitimacy to the claims. Quite plainly, it could mean the US Government explicitly authorized the release of this information.

The benefit to Iran would be tangible evidence that the administration of President Barack Obama was ending the policy of regime change in Iran. Furthermore, he is willing to use US psychological operations assets previously devoted to targeting Iran to instead target Israel. It will be difficult for Iranian hardliners to argue that the US is a either a puppet or puppeteer of Zionist interests when Obama is burning Israeli intelligence assets on the front page of the Daily Telegraph.

If there is in fact an American and Israeli covert war of disruption being waged against Iran’s nuclear program, it is now in my judgement, completely over, with the results being a humiliating loss for Israel, a lowering of hostilities with Iran, and a vastly strengthened American diplomatic position vis-a-vis the Iranian nuclear negotiations.

UPDATE: Published

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From the Jerusalem Post:

Meanwhile, an Israeli nuclear expert said on Thursday that the main target of the Israeli attack was most likely a plant for assembling a nuclear bomb, challenging other analysts’ conclusions that it housed a North Korean-style nuclear reactor.

Tel Aviv University chemistry professor Uzi Even, who worked in the past at Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor, said satellite pictures of the site taken before the Israeli strike showed no sign of the cooling towers and chimneys characteristic of reactors.

The absence of telltale features of a reactor convinced him the building must have housed something else, he said. And a rush by the Syrians after the attack to bury the site under tons of soil suggests that the facility was a bomb-assembly plant left leaking lethal doses of radiation by the Israeli attack.

The notion that the Syrian facility was a bomb-assembly plant, as opposed to a nuclear reactor, seems a lot more reasonable to me. While satellite imagery shows it to have extremely cursory similarities to nuclear sites in North Korea, the Syrian facility looks to me a lot more like the various rocket and missile development centers here in my hometown of Huntsville, Alabama. For instance, examine the rocket testing facilities at Wiley Labs courtesy of Google. Compare them with images of the Syrian installation. The design of the Syrian facility begins to make more sense. The likelihood that the Syrians constructed a rudimentary rocket development facility is much higher than the possibility of the Syrians somehow developing nuclear technology with no thermal emissions, visible output, or ventilation.

While it’s somewhat reasonable to presume that the Syrian facility was intended to be used by Iran to produce nuclear weapons, I’m doubtful that there was actually any nuclear material at the site before the attack. The Iranians would not risk losing all international legitimacy by allowing themselves to be directly linked to nuclear weapons development before their entire nuclear program is fully online. The paradigm of a peaceful nuclear power program is paramount to the Iranian position on the nuclear file, and they show absolutely no other signs of abandoning this paradigm for the sake of expediency. However, this doesn’t fully explain why the Syrians covered up and abandoned the site.

More likely, it was the Israelis who used tactical nuclear weapons on the site. This better explains why the Syrians would contain the site. A radioactive leak from damaged warheads is much easier to clean and repair than an actual warhead detonation. After a tactical nuclear strike, there is no hope of repair, no other option than to seal the site. This also explains the surreal discretion and silence from the Israeli government immediately following the strike. The Israelis will gladly comment about Iranian or Iraqi or anyone else’s nuclear weapons. What they won’t do is comment on Israeli nuclear weapons. This could also shed more light on the comic-book-like stories about Israeli commandos stealing plutonium from the Syrian site just before the airstrike. It begins to appear that these various media reports were plants to head off public opinion in case any government or international institution cried foul over sudden signs of radiation. As it’s become clear that no one is going to confront Israel on their use of nuclear weapons, they have relaxed their discretion and begun to comment more openly on the airstrike. Unfortunately, this doesn’t do anything to explain the silence from regional and international players.

While the US Administration could be accused of hubris in some instances, it’s unlikely that the US and Israel conducted a tactical nuclear strike and simply expected regional and international governments to keep quiet. In addition, given the complexity of the operation, involving among other things multiple sovereign airspaces and inter-military coordination, it’s unlikely that the West could have conceived, plotted, and executed the operation with zero intelligence leaks. It’s much more probable that the US informed various other players long before the airstrike occurred.

For this we turn to AINA via Beirut to the Beltway:

Saudi Arabia has told Iran not to count on the kingdom’s help if the international community imposes harsher measures on Tehran because of its refusal to abide by international requirements on the nuclear issue.

At a meeting in Riyadh last month, King Abdullah told visiting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Iran will have to “bear the consequences” of its actions, and should not underestimate the power, capabilities or will of the United States and the rest of the international community, according to a Saudi official.

“We told him, ‘Don’t come back to us and say you wish somebody had told you that,’” the official said. “Don’t come back and ask for help.”

The king was equally blunt with Syrian President Bashar Assad, whom he met in Riyadh on the sidelines of the Arab summit last month. Abdullah told Assad that if he wants to improve relations with Saudi Arabia — which are at an all-time low — he first has to prove his good intentions in Lebanon, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issues.

Abdullah’s words to the two close allies — Iran and Syria — come amid Saudi worries that the two countries’ defiance of the international community could plunge the region into larger chaos than the turmoil that resulted from Saddam Hussein’s refusal to come clean on his weapons of mass destruction program.

This occurred in March of 2007, months before the airstrike occurred. It’s possible that Abdullah’s reference to “us” and “we” refers not to the Saudis themselves, but more broadly to Arabs and muslims. Restive Arab dictatorships like Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia have nothing but catastrophe to gain from another Iraq-like scenario in the Middle East, which is precisely what the US is promising if Iran obtains nuclear weapons. Turkey was the only regional player to respond publicly, declaring that Turkish airspace was not used to conduct the operation. It’s entirely not true, but it wasn’t intended to be. Turkey’s new prime minister, as a devout muslim, has a lot to prove to the international community as Turkey struggles to join the European Union. The statement about airspace was simply a political message to Turkish domestic audiences who may be upset that a muslim prime minister’s first act in office was to attack other muslims.

Under this interpretation, it appears that the entire operation was a success, with the West effectively deterring Syrian and Iranian development of nuclear weapons. However, the consequences must not be underestimated. After Saddam’s Iraq used chemical weapons against the Iranians with impunity, Tehran developed the idea that the international community does not care about Iran’s interest, no matter what the transgression. The use of nuclear weapons, and the proceeding silence, placed Syria firmly in Tehran’s corner. Syrian president Bashar Assad, unlike the ideologically-run regime in Tehran, is much more reasonable and open to compromise with the West. The near-immediate assassination of yet another March 14 minister in Lebanon was likely Assad’s response to the airstrike, and perhaps loose evidence of Syria’s future position on compromise with the West.

But the broader strategic implications for the US could be even more dire. It’s a wise bet that military planners in Beijing and Moscow immediately re-assessed their plans for Taiwan and the Caucasus respectively. While it’s unlikely that China or Russia could ensure the compliance of regional governments with the same degree of success as the US, the prospect of being free to use tactical nuclear weapons unilaterally without repercussions may be too enticing to pass up.

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