By Stephen Sniegoski,
This article in “Foreign Policy” describes
one of Israel’s recent “false flag” operations. A series of CIA memos
describes how Israeli Mossad agents posed as American spies to recruit
members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight their covert
war against Iran. This type of “false flag” operation was not directed
against the US, but it could provide a model to bring about a US/Iran
war. If Iranians could be made to think that the US was behind extreme
terrorist attacks in their country, this could force the Iranian
government to take belligerent action against the US that would mean
war. The Iranian government could not afford to look like a ”paper
tiger,” too weak to make any effort to defend its citizens.
One cannot absolve America’s government leaders of the
responsibility for these Israeli actions. That the US government
fails to do anything significant to stop such “false flag” operations
makes it appear that it actually supports them. And it certainly could
appear this way to the Iranians. In fact, since Israel is allegedly
America’s close ally, the US should demand that it stop any type of
terrorism against Iran, since such activity makes it appear that it has,
at the very least, America’s tacit support. And Israel’s rejection
of such a demand should have serious consequences, such as the
termination of US military collaboration.
Ofcourse, for political reasons US government leaders are too fearful to take such a step against Israel, even though allowing Israeli terrorist attacks against Iran to continue could bring the US into a war. Unfortunately, most American politicians are far more concerned about the harm that an angry Israel lobby could do to them, than the harm that an unnecessary war could do to the United States and the rest of the world.
Interesting comments about this article are made at the Mondoweiss
website, especially those that relate to the power of the Israel lobby: http://mondoweiss.net/2012/01/bombshell-israeli-intelligence-posed-as-cia-to -recruit-terror-group-for-covert-war-on-iran.html
False Flag
A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad agents posed as American spies to recruit members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran.
by Mark Perry
Buried deep in the archives of America’s intelligence services are a
series of memos, written during the last years of President George W.
Bush’s administration, that describe how Israeli Mossad officers
recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundallah by
passing themselves off as American agents. According to two U.S.
intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and
toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah
operatives — what is commonly referred to as a “false flag” operation.
The memos, as described by the sources, one of whom has read them and
another who is intimately familiar with the case, investigated and
debunked reports from 2007 and 2008 accusing the CIA, at the direction
of the White House, of covertly supporting Jundallah — a Pakistan-based
Sunni extremist organization. Jundallah, according to the U.S. government and published reports, is responsible for assassinating Iranian government officials and killing Iranian women and children.
But while the memos show that the United States had barred even the
most incidental contact with Jundallah, according to both intelligence
officers, the same was not true for Israel’s Mossad. The memos also
detail CIA field reports saying that Israel’s recruiting activities
occurred under the nose of U.S. intelligence officers, most notably in
London, the capital of one of Israel’s ostensible allies, where Mossad
officers posing as CIA operatives met with Jundallah officials.
The officials did not know whether the Israeli program to recruit and
use Jundallah is ongoing. Nevertheless, they were stunned by the
brazenness of the Mossad’s efforts.
“It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with,”
the intelligence officer said. “Their recruitment activities were nearly
in the open. They apparently didn’t give a damn what we thought.”
Interviews with six currently serving or recently retired intelligence officers over the last 18 months have helped to fill in the blanks of the Israeli false-flag operation. In addition to the two currently serving U.S. intelligence officers, the existence of the Israeli false-flag operation was confirmed to me by four retired intelligence officers who have served in the CIA or have monitored Israeli intelligence operations from senior positions inside the U.S. government.
The CIA and the White House were both asked for comment on this
story. By the time this story went to press, they had not responded. The
Israeli intelligence services — the Mossad — were also contacted, in
writing and by telephone, but failed to respond. As a policy, Israel
does not confirm or deny its involvement in intelligence operations.
There is no denying that there is a covert, bloody, and ongoing
campaign aimed at stopping Iran’s nuclear program, though no evidence
has emerged connecting recent acts of sabotage and killings inside Iran
to Jundallah. Many reports have cited Israel as the architect of this
covert campaign, which claimed its latest victim on Jan. 11 when a
motorcyclist in Tehran slipped
a magnetic explosive device under the car of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a
young Iranian nuclear scientist. The explosion killed Roshan, making him
the fourth scientist assassinated in the past two years. The United
States adamantly denies it is behind these killings.
According to one retired CIA officer, information about the
false-flag operation was reported up the U.S. intelligence chain of
command. It reached CIA Director of Operations Stephen Kappes, his
deputy Michael Sulick, and the head of the Counterintelligence Center.
All three of these officials are now retired. The Counterintelligence
Center, according to its website, is tasked with investigating “threats posed by foreign intelligence services.”
The report then made its way to the White House, according to the
currently serving U.S. intelligence officer. The officer said that Bush
“went absolutely ballistic” when briefed on its contents.
“The report sparked White House concerns that Israel’s program was
putting Americans at risk,” the intelligence officer told me. “There’s
no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in
intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was
different. No matter what anyone thinks, we’re not in the business of
assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians.”
Israel’s relationship with Jundallah continued to roil the Bush
administration until the day it left office, this same intelligence
officer noted. Israel’s activities jeopardized the administration’s
fragile relationship with Pakistan, which was coming under intense
pressure from Iran to crack down on Jundallah. It also undermined U.S.
claims that it would never fight terror with terror, and invited attacks
in kind on U.S. personnel.
“It’s easy to understand why Bush was so angry,” a former
intelligence officer said. “After all, it’s hard to engage with a
foreign government if they’re convinced you’re killing their people.
Once you start doing that, they feel they can do the same.”
A senior administration official vowed to “take the gloves off” with
Israel, according to a U.S. intelligence officer. But the United States
did nothing — a result that the officer attributed to “political and
bureaucratic inertia.”
“In the end,” the officer noted, “it was just easier to do nothing
than to, you know, rock the boat.” Even so, at least for a short time,
this same officer noted, the Mossad operation sparked a divisive debate
among Bush’s national security team, pitting those who wondered “just
whose side these guys [in Israel] are on” against those who argued that
“the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
The debate over Jundallah was resolved only after Bush left office
when, within his first weeks as president, Barack Obama drastically
scaled back joint U.S.-Israel intelligence programs targeting Iran,
according to multiple serving and retired officers.
The decision was controversial inside the CIA, where officials were
forced to shut down “some key intelligence-gathering operations,” a
recently retired CIA officer confirmed. This action was followed in
November 2010 by the State Department’s addition
of Jundallah to its list of foreign terrorist organizations — a
decision that one former CIA officer called “an absolute no-brainer.”
Since Obama’s initial order, U.S. intelligence services have received
clearance to cooperate with Israel on a number of classified
intelligence-gathering operations focused on Iran’s nuclear program,
according to a currently serving officer. These operations are highly
technical in nature and do not involve covert actions targeting Iran’s
infrastructure or political or military leadership.
“We don’t do bang and boom,” a recently retired intelligence officer said. “And we don’t do political assassinations.”
Israel regularly proposes conducting covert operations targeting
Iranians, but is just as regularly shut down, according to retired and
current intelligence officers. “They come into the room and spread out
their plans, and we just shake our heads,” one highly placed
intelligence source said, “and we say to them — ‘Don’t even go there.
The answer is no.’”
Unlike the Mujahedin-e Khalq, the controversial exiled Iranian
terrorist group that seeks the overthrow of the Tehran regime and is
supported by former leading U.S. policymakers, Jundallah is relatively
unknown — but just as violent. In May 2009, a Jundallah suicide bomber
blew himself up inside a mosque in Zahedan, the capital of Iran’s
southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan province bordering Pakistan, during a
Shiite religious festival. The bombing killed 25 Iranians and wounded
scores of others.
The attack enraged Tehran, which traced the perpetrators to a cell operating in Pakistan. The Iranian government notified
the Pakistanis of the Jundallah threat and urged them to break up the
movement’s bases along the Iranian-Pakistani border. The Pakistanis
reacted sluggishly in the border areas, feeding Tehran’s suspicions that
Jundallah was protected by Pakistan’s intelligence services.
The 2009 attack was just one in a long line of terrorist attacks attributed to the organization. In August 2007, Jundallah kidnapped 21 Iranian truck drivers. In December 2008, it captured and executed
16 Iranian border guards — the gruesome killings were filmed, in a
stark echo of the decapitation of American businessman Nick Berg in Iraq
at the hands of al Qaeda’s Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In July 2010,
Jundallah conducted
a twin suicide bombing in Zahedan outside a mosque, killing dozens of
people, including members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The State Department aggressively denies that the U.S. government had
or has any ties to Jundallah. “We have repeatedly stated, and reiterate
again that the United States has not provided support to Jundallah,” a spokesman wrote in an email to the Wall Street Journal, following
Jundallah’s designation as a terrorist organization. “The United States
does not sponsor any form of terrorism. We will continue to work with
the international community to curtail support for terrorist
organizations and prevent violence against innocent civilians. We have
also encouraged other governments to take comparable actions against
Jundallah.”
A spate of stories in 2007 and 2008, including a report by ABC News and a New Yorker article,
suggested that the United States was offering covert support to
Jundallah. The issue has now returned to the spotlight with the string
of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and has outraged serving
and retired intelligence officers who fear that Israeli operations are
endangering American lives.
“This certainly isn’t the first time this has happened, though it’s
the worst case I’ve heard of,” former Centcom chief and retired Gen. Joe
Hoar said of the Israeli operation upon being informed of it. “But
while false-flag operations are hardly new, they’re extremely dangerous.
You’re basically using your friendship with an ally for your own
purposes. Israel is playing with fire. It gets us involved in their
covert war, whether we want to be involved or not.”
The Israeli operation left a number of recently retired CIA officers
sputtering in frustration. “It’s going to be pretty hard for the U.S. to
distance itself from an Israeli attack on Iran with this kind of thing
going on,” one of them told me.
Jundallah head Abdolmalek Rigi was captured
by Iran in February 2010. Although initial reports claimed that he was
captured by the Iranians after taking a flight from Dubai to Kyrgyzstan,
a retired intelligence officer with knowledge of the incident told me
that Rigi was detained by Pakistani intelligence officers in Pakistan.
The officer said that Rigi was turned over to the Iranians after the
Pakistani government informed the United States that it planned to do
so. The United States, this officer said, did not raise objections to
the Pakistani decision.
Iran, meanwhile, has consistently claimed that Rigi was snatched from
under the eyes of the CIA, which it alleges supported him. “It doesn’t
matter,” the former intelligence officer said of Iran’s charges. “It
doesn’t matter what they say. They know the truth.”
Rigi was interrogated, tried, and convicted by the Iranians and hanged on June 20, 2010. Prior to his execution, Rigi claimed
in an interview with Iranian media — which has to be assumed was under
duress — that he had doubts about U.S. sponsorship of Jundallah. He
recounted an alleged meeting with “NATO officials” in Morocco in 2007
that raised his suspicions. “When we thought about it we came to the
conclusion that they are either Americans acting under NATO cover or
Israelis,” he said.
While many of the details of Israel’s involvement with Jundallah are
now known, many others still remain a mystery — and are likely to remain
so. The CIA memos of the incident have been “blue bordered,” meaning
that they were circulated to senior levels of the broader U.S.
intelligence community as well as senior State Department officials.
What has become crystal clear, however, is the level of anger among
senior intelligence officials about Israel’s actions. “This was stupid
and dangerous,” the intelligence official who first told me about the
operation said. “Israel is supposed to be working with us, not against
us. If they want to shed blood, it would help a lot if it was their
blood and not ours. You know, they’re supposed to be a strategic asset.
Well, guess what? There are a lot of people now, important people, who
just don’t think that’s true.”
Mark Perry is a military and political analyst and author of eight books, including Partners In Command, George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace, and the recently released Talking To Terrorists.
Prof. Stephen J. Sniegoski, Ph.D. earned his
doctorate in American history,with a focus on American foreign policy,
at the University of Maryland. His focus on the neoconservative
involvement in American foreign policy antedates September 11, 2001. His
first major work on the subject, “The War on Iraq: Conceived in Israel”
was published February 10, 2003, more than a month before the American
attack. He is the author of “The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel”. Read more articles by Stephen J. Sniegoski at: http://home.comcast.net/~transparentcabal/
Also see:
Editing: Debbie Menon
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/01/14/israels-false-flag-operation-against-iran/
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