COVERT OPS

THE CULTURE OF SECRECY, PART 2

by Larry Beinhart, September 24, 2007

The ostensible reason is that we have to stop the Iranians before they can develop a nuclear weapon. We don’t have any ground troops left, so it has to be an air war. Smart, smarter, and smartest bombs and missiles will zip down the chimneys of facilities in Iran and take out their capabilities—and maybe their conventional forces while we’re at it—creating only the barest minimum of collateral damage. (Collateral
damage is dead babies, crippled children, burnt mothers, and crushed fathers.) All of this requires intelligence—information, not smarts. Do they actually have a weapons program? How close are they? Would they really use them? Where are the targets? How are they protected?
So the President picks up the phone and calls the CIA and says, “What do our spies tell us?” The answer is, “Nothing.”
In 2004, someone made a clerical error and sent a batch e-mail to the CIA’s network in Iran such that any recipient could identify all the others. One was a double agent. So much for that.
No matter. We have our multibillion-dollar NSA supersecret, spy on anyone, don’t need no courts or warrants, listening program!
Remember Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi émigré, convicted of bank fraud, who orchestrated the “information” that Iraq had WMDs, and who was picked to be the Charles DeGaulle of liberated Iraq? He told the Iranians that we had broken the code of their intelligence service. That shut that down.
This is not a unique situation. It is the standard. The archetype. The prototype.
The CIA has never been able to penetrate hard targets. Either to get information,
to foment unrest, revolutions, and coups, or to carry out assassinations.
Hard targets refer to stable, authoritarian regimes, usually with an ideological
base.
During the Cold War, that meant the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc coun-
tries (Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, and
Poland), Red China, North Korea, North Vietnam, and Cuba.
Since the Cold War such targets include Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Syria,
Iran, North Korea, Cuba and the nonstate enemy, al-Qaeda.
They certainly tried. There was not just one Bay of Pigs. There were many. At-
tempts were made in all the countries listed above. All of them failed. Thousands
died.