I would guess that in the past year, there were more regime-change-in-Iran plots floated by members of the intelligence community than there are Iranians.
During that time, research for my novel Once A Spy (Doubleday, 2010) brought me into contact with an array of intelligence community personnel ranging from analysts to CIA Director Michael Hayden. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would estimate their overall enthusiasm for a change of regime was a 9. Among Israeli intelligence officers (who didn't exactly cotton to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's dismissal of the Holocaust as a myth or to his frequent mentions of the end of the Zionist regime and Iran's nuclear program in the same breath), the average was 12.
Still, the consensus on actively promoting regime change was: "Let's wait and see what happens in the election in June." After all, the United States hasn't had the easiest time installing new foreign governments lately (see: Iraq). And certainly not in Iran (see: Shah, The).
What was the intelligence community's best-case scenario? Short of outright regime change or Ahmadinejad climbing aboard a missile and accidentally launching himself at Pyongyang Strangelove-style, we are now witnessing it: An election leaving the Iranian people--and the world--outraged.
According to former CIA operations officer Fred Rustmann, "If we were doing our job, and I'm not sure we are, we would be knee deep into supporting opposition factions in Iran and would be able to claim at least partial credit for what's going on there today."
"The agency's political warfare capability has been dead since the days of Bill Casey," says John Lenczowski, the president of the Institute of World Politics whose extensive foreign policy résumé includes Director of European and Soviet Affairs for the National Security Council.
Regardless, Rustmann and Lenczowski say, the CIA may now help set Tehran's smoldering tinder ablaze by supplying the opposition factions with money, intel, press placement, and weapons--perhaps the most potent of which may be BlackBerrys.
"What we could do immediately is essentially manipulate Iranian media, especially the media that serves the Iranian diaspora," says another former CIA operations officer, who goes by--and wrote an espionage memoir under--the pseudonym Ishmael Jones. "The internet-driven communication between Iranians worldwide and those in Iran is frenetic."
"The CIA already has a cooperative program in place with [certain American publications]," he adds. "Reporters from [those publications] meet regularly with the top CIA officials--not a conspiracy hatched in a smoke-filled room, but the natural result of reporters working hard to develop top-level sources within the CIA. Just switching [those reporters] for journalists who serve the Iranian diaspora would do the trick. These journalists will be eager to [cooperate]. The CIA must certainly have extensive and true information about Iranian government corruption. This information, supplied by Iranian diaspora journalists, would be read within hours by ordinary Iranians and would strengthen resistance to the current regime."
It wouldn't be unprecedented. "Some of the most powerful instruments the United States had during the cold war were Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and the Voice of America," Lenczowski says. "Now such communication can enable the Iranian people to see the world differently."
And, thanks to Twitter, almost instantaneously.
Lenczowski adds, "Iranians have to be emboldened for resistance. Some may not be sufficiently fed up. Many are too fearful." He cautions, "One of the difficulties of this sort of action is you have to have a sufficient level of distance so that it doesn't look like Uncle Sam is the marionetteer. Intelligently conceived communications with Iranians talking to Iranians can penetrate barriers and make a significant difference."
Additional operations of this nature may include increasingly delegitimizing the current regime--although Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei have done much of the job themselves--and isolating the Ayatollahs from their supporting factions and allies, particularly Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas. "The Israelis are already onto this one through their own negotiations with Syria," Lenczowski points out. "A Camp David style agreement between Israel and Syria would go a long way toward removing Syria from Iran's orbit." At the same time the CIA will continue to work in conjunction with liaison counterparts like Israel's Mossad.
And at the end of the day: "The best thing the CIA chief can do is to give President Obama an honest assessment of what we know and what we do not know about the Iranian situation," says Jones. "Obama's decisions will be better if he realizes that he lacks key human source intelligence. If CIA briefers instead seek to impress him, and lead him to believe that he possesses an omnipotent view of the situation, then he will be making decisions blindly."
In any case, President Obama and CIA Director Leon Panetta will continue to deny any involvement, while Ahmadinejad and company will blame the West--particularly the United States--for meddling. So there's little to lose there, providing American fingerprints aren't found on the BlackBerry keyboards.
Follow Keith Thomson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kqthomson
Keith Thomson: 'Once a Spy': What Happens to a Spy with Alzheimer's?
What do intelligence agencies do when operatives lose their ability to retain important secrets?
Organizations that put out information, that the government, because of slignment with corporations, does not want out, are suspect. We have The School of the Americas, or WHINSEC, which teaches trainees to torture, and which many of us are trying to get Congress to make transparent, now. Go to SOAwatch.org.
The U.S. gets involved in countries in order to influence the governments on behalf of corporations; not because the U.S. cares about democracy. Venezuela and Bolivia had democratic elections; but because those governments are keyed to help the regular civilians, the U.S. says that these governments are not democracies. Most in Congress try to keep their constituents uninformed.. They have a cushy job, and their main objective is to keep that job. There are just a very few, who keep their constituents informed and, who, indeed, do what is best for the general good. The Democratic base tries to ignore these ---Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders.
If the U.S. cared about democracy, the U.S. would not be backing the Israeli government. ---http://www.icahd.org, http://www.consortiumnews.org--books-the Israel Founding Myth by Morgan Strong, http://www.tikkun.org --Rabbi Michael Lerner--Robert Fish, Independent.
It's all for the corporations.
There is little the CIA can do what is considered right in light of its history with Iran. I doubt that an apology to the Iranian people would carry much weight. This is a lose/lose situation. Any further meddling will determine how much that loss will be.
The Israelis are super-concerned about anything Iranian, of course, but I don't think that it has anything to do with Iran's nuking their country. I think that the Zionists are running out of Palestinian lands to settle and Iran would give them lots of property to occupy.
You were probably "outraged" at the fact that Bush supposedly stole the 2004 election, and based your arguements on much flimsier "evidence". If the same set of issues I listed above were present in the 2004 election, you would be screaming bloody murder. You are nothing but a bunch of hypocrites.
You guys all think we can sit down and talk nice to the Iranian leadership, and they will start to like us, and promise not to misbehave with their nuke technology, right? If we are just nice to them, they will stop funding terrorism, right? If we talk nice to them, they will stop trying to be the big bully of the region, right? Send me your addresses, people...I'll mail you a dollar so you can go buy a clue....
I can't think of one.
Only when you answer this question can you begin to understand US foreign policy.
writing propaganda. First time I've seen it though.
By the way, the difference between the current president and Mousavi?
His private army is chopping people up with axes and throwing them off bridges.
Wink, nudge, dogwhistle, ...
Gawd teh stupid.
Our open support would derail the protest movement faster and more permanently than Iran's revolutionary guards. And if our clandestine support (if there is any) were to be unmasked it would be even worse.
Why have we no patience to let things play out?
Plus, we may not remember our history in Iran (see Shah, the; and Iranian elections of the 1950's) but they sure as heck do. Any obvious whiff of foreign backing and most Iranians would support a bloodbath of Tianamen Square proportions.
No mention, incidentally, of the massive protests in Egypt when the rigged Mubarak "win" happened and the violence meted out to those protesters. Oh, forgot, they're our friends and Iran is our enemy.
Hopefully, some of the more ignorant respondents to this article will read the aforementioned articles in Squaker's response. Thanks, by the way.
The DOD ran the Iraq war, now the CIA is running the Iranian 'decapitation'- the term used by the secret NSC group set up by Elliott Abrams and such.