Putin: Proof Lacking on Iran's Nuke program
Submitted by Balance of Terror on Sat, 10/27/2007 - 21:49.
10/10/2007
Putin: no proof
Guardian Unlimited
October 10, 2007
There is no proof Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons programme, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said today.
But he said
"We do not have data that says
"Therefore we proceed from a position that
Echoing Mr Putin, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said hasty action would be irresponsible.
"Until the IAEA reports on what is going on in
until we receive these answers, it would be irresponsible to make any
sharp movements," Mr Lavrov was quoted by the RIA new agency as saying.
Mr Putin will make his first visit to
Mr Sarkozy said the trip could encourage
"After the trip, there could be a will to cooperate - that is essential," he said.
But
"We
have worked cooperatively with our partners at the UN security council,
and we intend to continue such cooperative work in the future," said Mr
Putin.
The IAEA is seeking details on how
obtained components for its P1-type centrifuges, of which more than
2,000 are operating at its uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, and on
its research with the more efficient P2 model.
The new talks come after an agreement reached in August for
Much of the west, led by the
The UN has imposed two rounds of sanctions on
The IAEA and the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, are due to report to the UN security council next month on
As the IAEA and
The
New Yorker magazine this week reported that the White House, pushed by
the vice-president, Dick Cheney, requested that the joint chiefs of
staff redraw plans for a possible attack on
with an emphasis on "surgical strikes" against Revolutionary Guard
facilities that are the alleged source of attacks on US troops in
The Administration’s Plan for Iran
By: Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker
October 8, 2007
In a series of public
statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his
Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree,
as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran. “Shia
extremists, backed by Iran, are training Iraqis to carry out attacks on
our forces and the Iraqi people,” Bush told the national convention of
the American Legion in August. “The attacks on our bases and our troops
by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased. . . . The Iranian regime
must halt these actions. And, until it does, I will take actions
necessary to protect our troops.” He then concluded, to applause, “I
have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s
murderous activities.”
The President’s
position, and its corollary—that, if many of America’s problems in Iraq
are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to
confront the Iranians—have taken firm hold in the Administration. This
summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick
Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing
plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and
government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing
attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear
facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the
emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps
facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims,
have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been
presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been
reconceived as counterterrorism.
The shift in
targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his
senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the
American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed
(unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result
there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The
second development is that the White House has come to terms, in
private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence
community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb.
And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and
throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical
winner of the war in Iraq.
During a secure
videoconference that took place early this summer, the President told
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, that he was thinking of
hitting Iranian targets across the border and that the British “were on
board.” At that point, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interjected
that there was a need to proceed carefully, because of the ongoing
diplomatic track. Bush ended by instructing Crocker to tell Iran to
stop interfering in Iraq or it would face American retribution.
At a White House
meeting with Cheney this summer, according to a former senior
intelligence official, it was agreed that, if limited strikes on Iran
were carried out, the Administration could fend off criticism by
arguing that they were a defensive action to save soldiers in Iraq. If
Democrats objected, the Administration could say, “Bill Clinton did the
same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and
in Baghdad to protect American lives.” The former intelligence official
added, “There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military
action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the politicians are
saying, ‘You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be
defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.’
But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and
neither does the President.”
Bryan Whitman, a
Pentagon spokesman, said, “The President has made it clear that the
United States government remains committed to a diplomatic solution
with respect to Iran. The State Department is working diligently along
with the international community to address our broad range of
concerns.” (The White House declined to comment.)
I was repeatedly
cautioned, in interviews, that the President has yet to issue the
“execute order” that would be required for a military operation inside
Iran, and such an order may never be issued. But there has been a
significant increase in the tempo of attack planning. In mid-August,
senior officials told reporters that the Administration intended to
declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist
organization. And two former senior officials of the C.I.A. told me
that, by late summer, the agency had increased the size and the
authority of the Iranian Operations Group. (A spokesman for the agency
said, “The C.I.A. does not, as a rule, publicly discuss the relative
size of its operational components.”)
“They’re moving
everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said.
“They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s
just like the fall of 2002”—the months before the invasion of Iraq,
when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the
agency. He added, “The guys now running the Iranian program have
limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how
will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has
not thought it all the way through.”
That theme was echoed
by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national-security adviser, who said
that he had heard discussions of the White House’s more limited bombing
plans for Iran. Brzezinski said that Iran would likely react to an
American attack “by intensifying the conflict in Iraq and also in
Afghanistan, their neighbors, and that could draw in Pakistan. We will
be stuck in a regional war for twenty years.”
In a speech at the
United Nations last week, Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was
defiant. He referred to America as an “aggressor” state, and said, “How
can the incompetents who cannot even manage and control themselves rule
humanity and arrange its affairs? Unfortunately, they have put
themselves in the position of God.” (The day before, at Columbia, he
suggested that the facts of the Holocaust still needed to be
determined.)
“A lot depends on how
stupid the Iranians will be,” Brzezinski told me. “Will they cool off
Ahmadinejad and tone down their language?” The Bush Administration, by
charging that Iran was interfering in Iraq, was aiming “to paint it as
‘We’re responding to what is an intolerable situation,’ ” Brzezinski
said. “This time, unlike the attack in Iraq, we’re going to play the
victim. The name of our game seems to be to get the Iranians to
overplay their hand.”
General David
Petraeus, the commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, in his
report to Congress in September, buttressed the Administration’s case
against Iran. “None of us, earlier this year, appreciated the extent of
Iranian involvement in Iraq, something about which we and Iraq’s
leaders all now have greater concern,” he said. Iran, Petraeus said,
was fighting “a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces
in Iraq.”
Iran has had a
presence in Iraq for decades; the extent and the purpose of its current
activities there are in dispute, however. During Saddam Hussein’s rule,
when the Sunni-dominated Baath Party brutally oppressed the majority
Shiites, Iran supported them.
Many in the present
Iraqi Shiite leadership, including prominent members of the government
of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, spent years in exile in Iran; last
week, at the Council on Foreign Relations, Maliki said, according to
the Washington Post, that Iraq’s relations with the Iranians had
“improved to the point that they are not interfering in our internal
affairs.” Iran is so entrenched in Iraqi Shiite circles that any “proxy
war” could be as much through the Iraqi state as against it. The crux
of the Bush Administration’s strategic dilemma is that its decision to
back a Shiite-led government after the fall of Saddam has empowered
Iran, and made it impossible to exclude Iran from the Iraqi political
scene.
Vali Nasr, a
professor of international politics at Tufts University, who is an
expert on Iran and Shiism, told me, “Between 2003 and 2006, the
Iranians thought they were closest to the United States on the issue of
Iraq.” The Iraqi Shia religious leadership encouraged Shiites to avoid
confrontation with American soldiers and to participate in
elections—believing that a one-man, one-vote election process could
only result in a Shia-dominated government. Initially, the insurgency
was mainly Sunni, especially Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Nasr told me that
Iran’s policy since 2003 has been to provide funding, arms, and aid to
several Shiite factions—including some in Maliki’s coalition. The
problem, Nasr said, is that “once you put the arms on the ground you
cannot control how they’re used later.”
In the Shiite view,
the White House “only looks at Iran’s ties to Iraq in terms of
security,” Nasr said. “Last year, over one million Iranians travelled
to Iraq on pilgrimages, and there is more than a billion dollars a year
in trading between the two countries. But the Americans act as if every
Iranian inside Iraq were there to import weapons.”
Many of those who support the President’s policy argue that Iran poses an imminent threat.
In a recent essay in
Commentary, Norman Podhoretz depicted President Ahmadinejad as a
revolutionary, “like Hitler . . . whose objective is to overturn the
going international system and to replace it . . . with a new order
dominated by Iran. . . . [T]he plain and brutal truth is that if Iran
is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no
alternative to the actual use of military force.” Podhoretz concluded,
“I pray with all my heart” that President Bush “will find it possible
to take the only action that can stop Iran from following through on
its evil intentions both toward us and toward Israel.” Podhoretz
recently told politico.com that he had met with the President for about
forty-five minutes to urge him to take military action against Iran,
and believed that “Bush is going to hit” Iran before leaving office.
(Podhoretz, one of the founders of neoconservatism, is a strong backer
of Rudolph Giuliani’s Presidential campaign, and his son-in-law,
Elliott Abrams, is a senior adviser to President Bush on national
security.)
In early August, Army
Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, the second-ranking U.S. commander
in Iraq, told the Times about an increase in attacks involving
explosively formed penetrators, a type of lethal bomb that discharges a
semi-molten copper slug that can rip through the armor of Humvees. The
Times reported that U.S. intelligence and technical analyses indicated
that Shiite militias had obtained the bombs from Iran. Odierno said
that Iranians had been “surging support” over the past three or four
months.
Questions remain,
however, about the provenance of weapons in Iraq, especially given the
rampant black market in arms. David Kay, a former C.I.A. adviser and
the chief weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations, told me
that his inspection team was astonished, in the aftermath of both Iraq
wars, by “the huge amounts of arms” it found circulating among
civilians and military personnel throughout the country. He recalled
seeing stockpiles of explosively formed penetrators, as well as charges
that had been recovered from unexploded American cluster bombs. Arms
had also been supplied years ago by the Iranians to their Shiite allies
in southern Iraq who had been persecuted by the Baath Party.
“I thought Petraeus
went way beyond what Iran is doing inside Iraq today,” Kay said. “When
the White House started its anti-Iran campaign, six months ago, I
thought it was all craziness. Now it does look like there is some
selective smuggling by Iran, but much of it has been in response to
American pressure and American threats—more a ‘shot across the bow’
sort of thing, to let Washington know that it was not going to get away
with its threats so freely. Iran is not giving the Iraqis the good
stuff—the anti-aircraft missiles that can shoot down American planes
and its advanced anti-tank weapons.”
Another element of
the Administration’s case against Iran is the presence of Iranian
agents in Iraq. General Petraeus, testifying before Congress, said that
a commando faction of the Revolutionary Guards was seeking to turn its
allies inside Iraq into a “Hezbollah-like force to serve its
interests.” In August, Army Major General Rick Lynch, the commander of
the 3rd Infantry Division, told reporters in Baghdad that his troops
were tracking some fifty Iranian men sent by the Revolutionary Guards
who were training Shiite insurgents south of Baghdad. “We know they’re
here and we target them as well,” he said.
Patrick Clawson, an
expert on Iran at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told
me that “there are a lot of Iranians at any time inside Iraq, including
those doing intelligence work and those doing humanitarian missions. It
would be prudent for the Administration to produce more evidence of
direct military training—or produce fighters captured in Iraq who had
been trained in Iran.” He added, “It will be important for the Iraqi
government to be able to state that they were unaware of this
activity”; otherwise, given the intense relationship between the Iraqi
Shiite leadership and Tehran, the Iranians could say that “they had
been asked by the Iraqi government to train these people.” (In late
August, American troops raided a Baghdad hotel and arrested a group of
Iranians. They were a delegation from Iran’s energy ministry, and had
been invited to Iraq by the Maliki government; they were later
released.)
“If you want to
attack, you have to prepare the groundwork, and you have to be prepared
to show the evidence,” Clawson said. Adding to the complexity, he said,
is a question that seems almost counterintuitive: “What is the attitude
of Iraq going to be if we hit Iran? Such an attack could put a strain
on the Iraqi government.”
A senior European
diplomat, who works closely with American intelligence, told me that
there is evidence that Iran has been making extensive preparation for
an American bombing attack. “We know that the Iranians are
strengthening their air-defense capabilities,” he said, “and we believe
they will react asymmetrically—hitting targets in Europe and in Latin
America.” There is also specific intelligence suggesting that Iran will
be aided in these attacks by Hezbollah. “Hezbollah is capable, and they
can do it,” the diplomat said.
In interviews with
current and former officials, there were repeated complaints about the
paucity of reliable information. A former high-level C.I.A. official
said that the intelligence about who is doing what inside Iran “is so
thin that nobody even wants his name on it. This is the problem.”
The difficulty of
determining who is responsible for the chaos in Iraq can be seen in
Basra, in the Shiite south, where British forces had earlier presided
over a relatively secure area. Over the course of this year, however,
the region became increasingly ungovernable, and by fall the British
had retreated to fixed bases. A European official who has access to
current intelligence told me that “there is a firm belief inside the
American and U.K. intelligence community that Iran is supporting many
of the groups in southern Iraq that are responsible for the deaths of
British and American soldiers. Weapons and money are getting in from
Iran. They have been able to penetrate many groups”—primarily the Mahdi
Army and other Shiite militias.
A June, 2007, report
by the International Crisis Group found, however, that Basra’s renewed
instability was mainly the result of “the systematic abuse of official
institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood
vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of
criminal mafias.” The report added that leading Iraqi politicians and
officials “routinely invoke the threat of outside interference”—from
bordering Iran—“to justify their behavior or evade responsibility for
their failures.”
Earlier this year,
before the surge in U.S. troops, the American command in Baghdad
changed what had been a confrontational policy in western Iraq, the
Sunni heartland (and the base of the Baathist regime), and began
working with the Sunni tribes, including some tied to the insurgency.
Tribal leaders are now getting combat support as well as money,
intelligence, and arms, ostensibly to fight Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
Empowering Sunni forces may undermine efforts toward national
reconciliation, however. Already, tens of thousands of Shiites have
fled Anbar Province, many to Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, while
Sunnis have been forced from their homes in Shiite communities. Vali
Nasr, of Tufts, called the internal displacement of communities in Iraq
a form of “ethnic cleansing.”
“The American policy
of supporting the Sunnis in western Iraq is making the Shia leadership
very nervous,” Nasr said. “The White House makes it seem as if the Shia
were afraid only of Al Qaeda—but they are afraid of the Sunni tribesmen
we are arming.
The Shia attitude is
‘So what if you’re getting rid of Al Qaeda?’ The problem of Sunni
resistance is still there. The Americans believe they can distinguish
between good and bad insurgents, but the Shia don’t share that
distinction. For the Shia, they are all one adversary.”
Nasr went on, “The
United States is trying to fight on all sides—Sunni and Shia—and be
friends with all sides.” In the Shiite view, “It’s clear that the
United States cannot bring security to Iraq, because it is not doing
everything necessary to bring stability. If they did, they would talk
to anybody to achieve it—even Iran and Syria,” Nasr said. (Such
engagement was a major recommendation of the Iraq Study Group.)
“America cannot bring stability in Iraq by fighting Iran in Iraq.”
The revised bombing
plan for a possible attack, with its tightened focus on
counterterrorism, is gathering support among generals and admirals in
the Pentagon. The strategy calls for the use of sea-launched cruise
missiles and more precisely targeted ground attacks and bombing
strikes, including plans to destroy the most important Revolutionary
Guard training camps, supply depots, and command and control facilities.
“Cheney’s option is
now for a fast in and out—for surgical strikes,” the former senior
American intelligence official told me. The Joint Chiefs have turned to
the Navy, he said, which had been chafing over its role in the Air
Force-dominated air war in Iraq. “The Navy’s planes, ships, and cruise
missiles are in place in the Gulf and operating daily. They’ve got
everything they need—even AWACS are in place and the targets in Iran
have been programmed. The Navy is flying FA-18 missions every day in
the Gulf.” There are also plans to hit Iran’s anti-aircraft
surface-to-air missile sites. “We’ve got to get a path in and a path
out,” the former official said.
A Pentagon consultant
on counterterrorism told me that, if the bombing campaign took place,
it would be accompanied by a series of what he called “short, sharp
incursions” by American Special Forces units into suspected Iranian
training sites. He said, “Cheney is devoted to this, no question.”
A limited bombing
attack of this sort “only makes sense if the intelligence is good,” the
consultant said. If the targets are not clearly defined, the bombing
“will start as limited, but then there will be an ‘escalation special.’
Planners will say that we have to deal with Hezbollah here and Syria
there. The goal will be to hit the cue ball one time and have all the
balls go in the pocket. But add-ons are always there in strike
planning.”
The surgical-strike
plan has been shared with some of America’s allies, who have had mixed
reactions to it. Israel’s military and political leaders were alarmed,
believing, the consultant said, that it didn’t sufficiently target
Iran’s nuclear facilities. The White House has been reassuring the
Israeli government, the former senior official told me, that the more
limited target list would still serve the goal of counter-proliferation
by decapitating the leadership of the Revolutionary Guards, who are
believed to have direct control over the nuclear-research program. “Our
theory is that if we do the attacks as planned it will accomplish two
things,” the former senior official said.
An Israeli official
said, “Our main focus has been the Iranian nuclear facilities, not
because other things aren’t important. We’ve worked on missile
technology and terrorism, but we see the Iranian nuclear issue as one
that cuts across everything.” Iran, he added, does not need to develop
an actual warhead to be a threat. “Our problems begin when they learn
and master the nuclear fuel cycle and when they have the nuclear
materials,” he said. There was, for example, the possibility of a
“dirty bomb,” or of Iran’s passing materials to terrorist groups.
“There is still time for diplomacy to have an impact, but not a lot,”
the Israeli official said. “We believe the technological timetable is
moving faster than the diplomatic timetable. And if diplomacy doesn’t
work, as they say, all options are on the table.”
The bombing plan has
had its most positive reception from the newly elected government of
Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. A senior European official told
me, “The British perception is that the Iranians are not making the
progress they want to see in their nuclear-enrichment processing. All
the intelligence community agree that Iran is providing critical
assistance, training, and technology to a surprising number of
terrorist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, through Hezbollah, in
Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine, too.”
There were four
possible responses to this Iranian activity, the European official
said: to do nothing (“There would be no retaliation to the Iranians for
their attacks; this would be sending the wrong signal”); to publicize
the Iranian actions (“There is one great difficulty with this
option—the widespread lack of faith in American intelligence
assessments”); to attack the Iranians operating inside Iraq (“We’ve
been taking action since last December, and it does have an effect”);
or, finally, to attack inside Iran.
The European official
continued, “A major air strike against Iran could well lead to a
rallying around the flag there, but a very careful targeting of
terrorist training camps might not.” His view, he said, was that “once
the Iranians get a bloody nose they rethink things.” For example, Ali
Akbar Rafsanjani and Ali Larijani, two of Iran’s most influential
political figures, “might go to the Supreme Leader and say, ‘The
hard-line policies have got us into this mess. We must change our
approach for the sake of the regime.’ ”
A retired American
four-star general with close ties to the British military told me that
there was another reason for Britain’s interest—shame over the failure
of the Royal Navy to protect the sailors and Royal Marines who were
seized by Iran on March 23rd, in the Persian Gulf. “The professional
guys are saying that British honor is at stake, and if there’s another
event like that in the water off Iran the British will hit back,” he
said.
The revised bombing
plan “could work—if it’s in response to an Iranian attack,” the retired
four-star general said. “The British may want to do it to get even, but
the more reasonable people are saying, ‘Let’s do it if the Iranians
stage a cross-border attack inside Iraq.’ It’s got to be ten dead
American soldiers and four burned trucks.” There is, he added, “a
widespread belief in London that Tony Blair’s government was sold a
bill of goods by the White House in the buildup to the war against
Iraq. So if somebody comes into Gordon Brown’s office and says, ‘We
have this intelligence from America,’ Brown will ask, ‘Where did it
come from? Have we verified it?’ The burden of proof is high.”
The French government
shares the Administration’s sense of urgency about Iran’s nuclear
program, and believes that Iran will be able to produce a warhead
within two years. France’s newly elected President, Nicolas Sarkozy,
created a stir in late August when he warned that Iran could be
attacked if it did not halt its nuclear program. Nonetheless, France
has indicated to the White House that it has doubts about a limited
strike, the former senior intelligence official told me. Many in the
French government have concluded that the Bush Administration has
exaggerated the extent of Iranian meddling inside Iraq; they believe,
according to a European diplomat, that “the American problems in Iraq
are due to their own mistakes, and now the Americans are trying to show
some teeth. An American bombing will show only that the Bush
Administration has its own agenda toward Iran.”
A European
intelligence official made a similar point. “If you attack Iran,” he
told me, “and do not label it as being against Iran’s nuclear
facilities, it will strengthen the regime, and help to make the Islamic
air in the Middle East thicker.”
Ahmadinejad, in his
speech at the United Nations, said that Iran considered the dispute
over its nuclear program “closed.” Iran would deal with it only through
the International Atomic Energy Agency, he said, and had decided to
“disregard unlawful and political impositions of the arrogant powers.”
He added, in a press conference after the speech, “the decisions of the
United States and France are not important.”
The director general
of the I.A.E.A., Mohamed ElBaradei, has for years been in an often
bitter public dispute with the Bush Administration; the agency’s most
recent report found that Iran was far less proficient in enriching
uranium than expected. A diplomat in Vienna, where the I.A.E.A. is
based, said, “The Iranians are years away from making a bomb, as
ElBaradei has said all along. Running three thousand centrifuges does
not make a bomb.” The diplomat added, referring to hawks in the Bush
Administration, “They don’t like ElBaradei, because they are in a state
of denial. And now their negotiating policy has failed, and Iran is
still enriching uranium and still making progress.”
The diplomat
expressed the bitterness that has marked the I.A.E.A.’s dealings with
the Bush Administration since the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
“The White House’s claims were all a pack of lies, and Mohamed is
dismissive of those lies,” the diplomat said.
Hans Blix, a former
head of the I.A.E.A., questioned the Bush Administration’s commitment
to diplomacy. “There are important cards that Washington could play;
instead, they have three aircraft carriers sitting in the Persian
Gulf,” he said. Speaking of Iran’s role in Iraq, Blix added, “My
impression is that the United States has been trying to push up the
accusations against Iran as a basis for a possible attack—as an excuse
for jumping on them.”
The Iranian
leadership is feeling the pressure. In the press conference after his
U.N. speech, Ahmadinejad was asked about a possible attack. “They want
to hurt us,” he said, “but, with the will of God, they won’t be able to
do it.” According to a former State Department adviser on Iran, the
Iranians complained, in diplomatic meetings in Baghdad with Ambassador
Crocker, about a refusal by the Bush Administration to take advantage
of their knowledge of the Iraqi political scene. The former adviser
said, “They’ve been trying to convey to the United States that ‘We can
help you in Iraq. Nobody knows Iraq better than us.’ ” Instead, the
Iranians are preparing for an American attack.
The adviser said that
he had heard from a source in Iran that the Revolutionary Guards have
been telling religious leaders that they can stand up to an American
attack. “The Guards are claiming that they can infiltrate American
security,” the adviser said. “They are bragging that they have
spray-painted an American warship—to signal the Americans that they can
get close to them.” (I was told by the former senior intelligence
official that there was an unexplained incident, this spring, in which
an American warship was spray-painted with a bull’s-eye while docked in
Qatar, which may have been the source of the boasts.)
“Do you think those
crazies in Tehran are going to say, ‘Uncle Sam is here! We’d better
stand down’? ” the former senior intelligence official said. “The
reality is an attack will make things ten times warmer.”
Another recent
incident, in Afghanistan, reflects the tension over intelligence. In
July, the London Telegraph reported that what appeared to be an SA-7
shoulder-launched missile was fired at an American C-130 Hercules
aircraft. The missile missed its mark. Months earlier, British
commandos had intercepted a few truckloads of weapons, including one
containing a working SA-7 missile, coming across the Iranian border.
But there was no way of determining whether the missile fired at the
C-130 had come from Iran—especially since SA-7s are available through
black-market arms dealers. Vincent Cannistraro, a retired C.I.A.
officer who has worked closely with his counterparts in Britain, added
to the story: “The Brits told me that they were afraid at first to tell
us about the incident—in fear that Cheney would use it as a reason to
attack Iran.” The intelligence subsequently was forwarded, he said.
The retired four-star
general confirmed that British intelligence “was worried” about passing
the information along. “The Brits don’t trust the Iranians,” the
retired general said, “but they also don’t trust Bush and Cheney.”
