US Conducting Secret Missions Inside Iran

US 'making secret plans to attack sites in Iran'
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
18 January 2005


The Pentagon has been conducting secret reconnaissance of potential target sites inside Iran, a magazine claimed yesterday, reigniting the debate here over whether the US should take military action to destroy Tehran's suspected nuclear weapons programme.

The report in The New Yorker, by Seymour Hersh, the journalist who uncovered the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, paints a picture of a rampant Pentagon that under the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is steadily gaining complete control of covert operations.

According to Mr Hersh, President George Bush has authorised commando and special forces units to take action against terrorist targets in "as many as 10" countries in the Middle East and south Asia. But the top strategic target is Iran, say unidentified officials interviewed for the article. Both US and European experts believe that the regime in Tehran is only a few years from acquiring a nuclear weapon and a delivery system, under development at "three dozen or more" sites scattered across the country.

The reconnaissance missions are said to have been under way "at least since last summer", to identify targets that could be hit either by air strikes or commando raids on the ground. "It's not 'if' we're going to do anything against Iran," one former high-level intelligence official is quoted as saying. "They're doing it."

If the report is correct, the Pentagon is on the verge of triumph in its long struggle with a discredited CIA for control of most covert operations. It now appears that the CIA's paramilitary arm will be placed under Mr Rumsfeld's control. Its operations would be reclassified as steps to "prepare the battlefield" in the continuing war on terror. The Pentagon would thus not be required to inform Congress of such activities - in contrast to the CIA, which has to keep the House and Senate broadly abreast of its activities.

There was no immediate comment from the Pentagon on the claims. But Dan Bartlett, Mr Bush's communications director, told CNN that the New Yorker report was "riddled with inaccuracies", though he did not deny it outright.

The administration was committed to negotiations over Iran, Mr Bartlett said. However, he added, "no President at any juncture in history has ever taken military options off the table" - implicit confirmation that the Pentagon at the very least has contingency plans for military action.

The issue is sure to feature during the confirmation hearing of Condoleezza Rice, at which the Secretary of State-designate will be grilled on the administration's second-term plans for Iran and North Korea, the other member of the "axis of evil" identified by Mr Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address. Her answers during the two-day session which begins this morning should throw more light on where she stands in the tug of war between moderates and neo-conservative hardliners over US foreign policy.

As national security adviser during the first Bush term, Ms Rice mostly steered a middle course between the two factions. But if the New Yorker report is only half right, there seems little doubt that, like her predecessor Colin Powell, she will soon be embroiled in turf fights with Mr Rumsfeld - usually allied with Dick Cheney, the Vice-President.

With some misgiving, the Bush administration has gone along with a Europeaninitiative to strike a deal with Tehran, whereby the latter would abandon its nuclear ambitions in return for aid from the European Union.

Now US ponders attack on Iran

Hardliners in Pentagon ready to neutralise 'nuclear threat' posed by Tehran

Julian Borger in Washington and Ian Traynor
Tuesday January 18, 2005
The Guardian

President Bush's second inauguration on Thursday will provide the signal for an intense and urgent debate in Washington over whether or when to extend the "global war on terror" to Iran, according to officials and foreign policy analysts in Washington.
That debate is being driven by "neo-conservatives" at the Pentagon who emerged from the post-election Bush reshuffle unscathed, despite their involvement in collecting misleading intelligence on Iraq's weapons in the run-up to the 2003 invasion.

Washington has stood aside from recent European negotiations with Iran and Pentagon hardliners are convinced that the current European-brokered deal suspending nuclear enrichment and intensifying weapons inspections is unenforceable and will collapse in months.

Only the credible threat, and if necessary the use, of air and special operations attacks against Iran's suspected nuclear facilities will stop the ruling clerics in Tehran acquiring warheads, many in the administration argue.

Moderates, who are far fewer in the second Bush administration than the first, insist that if Iran does have a secret weapons programme, it is likely to be dispersed and buried in places almost certainly unknown to US intelligence. The potential for Iranian retaliation inside Iraq and elsewhere is so great, the argument runs, that there is in effect no military option.

A senior administration official involved in developing Iran policy rejected that argument. "It is not as simple as that," he told the Guardian at a recent foreign policy forum in Washington. "It is not a straightforward problem but at some point the costs of doing nothing may just become too high. In Iran you have the intersection of nuclear weapons and proven ties to terrorism. That is what we are looking at now."

The New Yorker reported this week that the Pentagon has already sent special operations teams into Iran to locate possible nuclear weapons sites. The report by Seymour Hersh, a veteran investigative journalist, was played down by the White House and the Pentagon, with comments that stopped short of an outright denial.

"The Iranian regime's apparent nuclear ambitions and its demonstrated support for terrorist organisations is a global challenge that deserves much more serious treatment than Seymour Hersh provides," Lawrence DiRita, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday: "Mr Hersh's article is so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed."

However, the Guardian has learned the Pentagon was recently contemplating the infiltration of members of the Iranian rebel group, Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) over the Iraq-Iran border, to collect intelligence. The group, based at Camp Ashraf, near Baghdad, was under the protection of Saddam Hussein, and is under US guard while Washington decides on its strategy.

The MEK has been declared a terrorist group by the state department, but a former Farsi-speaking CIA officer said he had been asked by neo-conservatives in the Pentagon to travel to Iraq to oversee "MEK cross-border operations". He refused, and does not know if those operations have begun.

"They are bringing a lot of the old war-horses from the Reagan and Iran-contra days into a sort of kitchen cabinet outside the government to write up policy papers on Iran," the former officer said.

He said the policy discussion was being overseen by Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defence for policy who was one of the principal advocates of the Iraq war. The Pentagon did not return calls for comment on the issue yesterday. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Mr Feith's Office of Special Plans also used like-minded experts on contract from outside the government, to serve as consultants helping the Pentagon counter the more cautious positions of the state department and the CIA.

Crazy


"They think in Iran you can just go in and hit the facilities and destabilise the government. They believe they can get rid of a few crazy mullahs and bring in the young guys who like Gap jeans, all the world's problems are solved. I think it's delusional," the former CIA officer said.

However, others believe that at a minimum military strikes could set back Iran's nuclear programme several years. Reuel Marc Gerecht, another former CIA officer who is now a leading neo-conservative voice on Iran at the American Enterprise Institute, said: "It would certainly delay [the programme] and it can be done again. It's not a one-time affair. I would be shocked if a military strike could not delay the programme." Mr Gerecht said the internal debate in the administration was only just beginning.

"This administration does not really have an Iran policy," he said. "Iraq has been a fairly consuming endeavour, but it's getting now towards the point where people are going to focus on [Iran] hard and have a great debate."

That debate could be brought to a head in the next few months. Diplomats and officials in Vienna following the Iranian nuclear saga at the International Atomic Energy Agency expect the Iran dispute to re-erupt by the middle of this year, predicting a breakdown of the diplomatic track the EU troika of Britain, Germany and France are pursuing with Tehran. The Iran-EU agreement, reached in November, was aimed at getting Iran to abandon the manufacture of nuclear fuel which can be further refined to bomb-grade.

Now the Iranians are feeding suspicion by continuing to process uranium concentrate into gaseous form, a breach "not of the letter but of the spirit of the agreement," said one European diplomat.

Opinions differ widely over how long it would take Iran to produce a deliverable nuclear warhead, and some analysts believe that Iranian scientists have encountered serious technical difficulties.

"The Israelis believe that by 2007, the Iranians could enrich enough uranium for a bomb. Some of us believe it could be the end of this decade," said David Albright, a nuclear weapons expert at the Institute for Science and International Security. A recent war-game carried out by retired military officers, intelligence officials and diplomats for the Atlantic Monthly, came to the conclusion that there were no feasible military options and if negotiations and the threat of sanctions fail, the US might have to accept Iran as a nuclear power.

However, Sam Gardiner, a retired air force colonel who led the war-game, acknowledged that the Bush administration might not come to the same conclusion.

"Everything you hear about the planning for Iraq suggests logic may not be the basis for the decision," he said.

Mr Gerecht, who took part in the war-game but dissented from the conclusion, believes the Bush White House, still mired in Iraq, has yet to make up its mind.

"The bureaucracy will come down on the side of doing nothing. The real issue is: will the president and the vice president disagree with them? If I were a betting man, I'd bet the US will not use pre-emptive force. However, I would not want to bet a lot."