By Mark Perry
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/13/false_flag?page=full
ZOMBIE SOUP
January 15, 2012
ED: More DEEP
Israeli deeply integrated treachery against her golden goose friend, America.
When Bibi says
‘it’s 1938 and Iran is Germany,’ believe him. This is not a new scheme for
Zionists; they’re working from an old playbook.
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.
What has become crystal clear, however, is the level of anger among senior intelligence officials about Israel's actions. The intelligence official who first told me about the operation said.
"This was stupid and dangerous. 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."
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. The intelligence officer
said,
"It's amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with. 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 intelligence officer told me.
"The report sparked White House concerns that Israel's program was putting Americans at risk. 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. A former
intelligence officer said:
"It's easy to understand why Bush was so angry. 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."
The officer noted:
"In the end, 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 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.
A spokesman wrote in an email to the Wall Street Journal, following
Jundallah's designation as a terrorist organization,
"We have repeatedly stated, and reiterate again that the United States has not provided support to Jundallah.""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.
Former Centcom chief and
retired Gen. Joe Hoar said of the Israeli operation upon being informed of it,
"This certainly isn't the first time this has happened, though it's the worst case I've heard of. 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. One
of them told me,
"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."
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. He
said.
"When we thought about it we came to the conclusion that they are either Americans acting under NATO cover or Israelis."
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. The intelligence official who first told me about the
operation said,
"This was stupid and dangerous. 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."
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