September 11, 2001 Re-imagined Redux

Back in May, President Trump abruptly dismissed "dozens national security advisors from US National Security Council (NSC). NPR reported that the Middle East section at the NSC was being reduced from 10 staffers to five.

Trump also dismissed his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and gave that position to Marco Rubio on top of Rubio's job as Secretary of State, and Rubio's role as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

Trump turned to Steve Witkoff, his longtime friend from his New York real estate days, to be his point man on the Iran nuclear negotiations. Witkoff, who has no national security experience whatsoever, is also the main negotiator in US efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

Among those reported to have departed the NSC are Principal Deputy National Security Adviser Alex Wong, Senior Director for the Middle East and North Africa Eric Trager, Senior Director for Europe Andrew Peek, as well as communications team members like Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Brian Hughes.

Trump finds NSC's processes, "unnecessarily complex," and sees the NSC giving priority to the opinions of career officials over his "policy preferences."

Trump's Director of National Intelligence — for now — is Tulsi Gabbard. She had the misfortune to state publicly that Iran did not have the intention to create a nuclear weapon, only to be publicly corrected by the President, who was clearly thinking ahead to his address to the Nation on bombing the bejesus out of Iran's nuclear facilities.

Trump's CIA Director is John Ratcliffe, his FBI Director is conspiracy theorist, Kash Patel, and of course, the man picked to be his Secretary of Defense is former Fox News personality, Pete Hegseth.

The US agency that may have the most important role in protecting Americans from any retaliatory actions from Iran, or other actors sympathetic to the Iranian regime, will be the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), led by former South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem.

Noem has no experience in national security or intelligence, knows little to nothing about counter-terrorism, counter intelligence, cyber security, terrorism fusion centers, joint terrorism task forces, suitcase nukes, dirty bombs, Iranian sleeper cells, radicalized lone operators and their profiles, extremist messaging and their messaging platforms (though Hegseth may know), underground terrorist financing operations, such as hawala, shell companies, or 'cash mules.' Iran knows all this and more, because this is the way they operate, not with nuclear weapons, but with C4 packed in Easter Eggs.

What I wrote in 2018 titled, "September 11, 2001 Re-imagined," haunts me. It should you, as well, viz.:

The next terrorist attack on American soil is not a matter of if, but when. Determined fanatics willing to die for their cause will usually outwit even a well-managed Department of Homeland Security staffed with highly motivated and trained officers. A bombastic “strongman” equipped with a keyboard and wielding a heavy-handed immigration policy will never be an effective counter to terrorism. A country divided against itself will never be ready, or resilient.

Pentagon, September 11, 2001

 

Republicans Conduct Another Black Bag Operation on the Central Intelligence Agency

Any thought that the Republican Party was the party of law and order departed our collective conscience when Donald Trump was elected president. Oh, we knew they were crooks, despite Dick Nixon's denial (although he was in fairness, only speaking for himself). We knew they'd go to any lengths to protect their story line on Iraq and WMD, including revealing the identity of a CIA field agent, but this? This is a new low even for them.



Dr. Jeff T.H. Pon
Director, Office of Personnel Management
Director Daniel Coats
Director of National Intelligence

Dear Director Pon and Director Coats,

As former national security professionals, we have all served our country—some of us in uniform, others as intelligence, diplomatic, law enforcement, or national security professionals.We did so not for the prestige, and not for the paycheck, but because we wanted to give back: representing, advocating for, and protecting the United States at home and around the world.We asked for very little in return, assuming only that the country we served would always have our backs.

As such, it was with surprise, anger, and profound disappointment that we recently learned that our government—whether intentionally or not—violated the trust of one among our ranks.The New York Times reported this month that the Executive Branch released in full the confidential national security questionnaire, or SF-86, of Abigail Spanberger, who served as a CIA case officer until 2014. The SF-86 is one of the most confidential and sensitive documents the U.S. government requires its national security officials to file. Neither we, nor national security law experts we have consulted, are familiar with any previous case of an SF-86 being released in full, to include Social Security Number and medical history, pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request, as was reportedly done in this case.

We have yet to hear an adequate explanation as to why Ms. Spanberger’s sensitive personal information was released and subsequently made public by House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Political Action Committee, the Congressional Leadership Fund. It is possible this situation maybe the result of a single person’s error. Nevertheless, we note how peculiar it would be for the first victim of such an error to be Ms. Spanberger, who is the Democratic nominee in a competitive U.S. House of Representatives race in Virginia. To be clear, Ms. Spanberger’s current political ambitions should have absolutely nothing to do with the obligation of the Executive Branch to safeguard her personal and confidential information. Absent answers, however, we cannot dismiss the deeply troubling possibility that this was an act of political retribution by this administration in violation of U.S. law.

Ultimately, this is about more than Ms. Spanberger’s case or our own concern for the security of our personal information. Each year, thousands of aspiring public servants file this same document, hoping to serve their country, just as we did. They must be confident that their information will be handled securely and never released pursuant to a political agenda. They, we, and Ms. Spanberger deserve answers.
_______________________________
You can donate to Abigail Spanberger's campaign, should you choose to do so, at: https://abigailspanberger.com/

Benghazi was a CIA Operation

"The committee’s work is mostly about beating up a political adversary and not at all about advancing the security of American diplomats abroad." (Larry Hancock, 10/23/15)*

State Department's Special Diplomatic Mission Facility (upper left corner) was not a "consulate." It was cover for the CIA operation housed in the "Annex" (lower right corner).

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), then under Director David Patraeus, was carrying out a clandestine operation in Benghazi, Libya, operating from facility in the Benghazi compound that was simply known as the “Annex.” The "Benghazi mission" was primarily an intelligence operation and most the U.S. officials there and at the nearby annex were CIA officers who used State Department cover.

According to Michael Morell, former Deputy Director of the CIA, the State Department facility in Benghazi has been widely mischaracterized as a US consulate. In fact it was a Temporary Mission Facility (TMF), a presence that was not continuously staffed by senior personnel and that was never given formal diplomatic status by the Libyan government.

Some two dozen CIA case officers, analysts, translators and special staff were a part of this operation and its security was provided by CIA Global Response Staff (GRS), who had entered the country under diplomatic cover (Hancock, 10/23/15).

CIA Benghazi "Annex"

According to an article in the New York Times, the CIA’s mission included arms interdiction — attempting to stop the flow of Soviet-era weapons to Central Africa — and very possibly the organization of Libyan arms shipments to vetted insurgent groups on the ground in Syria, something Michael Morell disputes.

There is also evidence that the mission was working in concert with military personnel from the Joint Special Operations Group Trans-Sahara. At the time of the attack, an unarmed American surveillance drone was in flight over the territory east of Benghazi and Trans-Sahara military personnel were stationed in the Libyan capital of Tripoli.

The top-secret presence and location of the CIA outpost was first acknowledged by Charlene Lamb, a top official in the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, during Congressional testimony in October. Representatives Jason Chaffetz and Darrell Issa immediately called a point of order when Lamb exposed the location of the annex, and asked for the revelation to be stricken from the record. “I totally object to the use of that photo,” Chaffetz. said. “I was told specifically while I was in Libya I could not and should not ever talk about what you’re showing here today” (Michael B Kelley and Geoffery Ingersoll, 8/3/13).

In contrast, the State Department’s special diplomatic mission facility, classified as “temporary,” was minimally staffed with a rotating series of State Department officers sent to and from Tripoli.

US Ambassador Christopher Stevens had not been in Benghazi for a year. When he arrived for a short stay in September 2012, only a single diplomatic officer was present there, and that officer rotated back to Tripoli upon the ambassador’s arrival. Stevens was accompanied by a communications officer and a handful of Diplomatic Service Security staff. The security personnel provided protection for the ambassador during his travels and meetings in the city. His presence was intended to be extremely low key, but it was exposed in the local media shortly after his arrival (Hancock, 10/23/15).

Larry Hancock has written that "asking Clinton to justify maintaining the State Department temporary mission in the face of a worsening security situation is fruitless, given its actual function as a clandestine national security mission cover." Furthermore, "querying Clinton about her involvement in the immediate response to the attacks is also pointless. The Secretary of State has no legal or operational role in a military response to a diplomatic facility attack. Only National Command Authority (president/secretary of defense) can order a foreign military intervention" (Hancock, 10/23/15).

Hancock has concluded that, "the committee’s work is mostly about beating up a political adversary and not at all about advancing the security of American diplomats abroad."

---

*Larry Hancock conducts investigative and historical research in the areas of intelligence and national security. He has studied Benghazi in regard to both its covert aspects and the issues it raises for diplomatic security. That work is published in Shadow Warfare, A History of America’s Undeclared Wars (Counterpoint, 2014) and his most recently published book, Surprise Attack, from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 to Benghazi (Counterpoint, Sept. 2015).

America's Role in Advancing Iran's Nuclear Weapons Program

It may seem insensitive, even undiplomatic to remind those following today's debate over the Iran nuclear deal that United States provided nuclear assistance to Iran from 1957 to 1979, when the two states were presumptive allies. In 1967, under the so-called "Atoms for Peace" program, the U.S. supplied Tehran a 5 megawatt-thermal (MWth) pool-type light water research reactor. Along with the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR), the U.S. provided 5.58kg of highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuel, as well as hot cells, ostensibly for the production of medical isotopes.

Although U.S. assistance to Tehran was strictly for "peaceful purposes," after America and Iran had its unfortunate 'falling out' in 1979, the technology, equipment, and expertise provided ended up advancing Iran's nuclear weapons program. But not immediately. Many of Iran's nuclear-trained scientists/engineers fled the country in the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and this loss, compounded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's opposition to nuclear technology, resulted in the near disintegration of Iran's nuclear program post-1979.

I wrote about America's chequered past as an ally of Iran in an earlier post, in which I described the CIA's meddling in internal Iranian political affairs, and how that, and America's stubborn support of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, led to distrust of and then hate for America by the Monarchy's opposition. The student-led storming of the American embassy and the taking of American hostage in November of 1979 cemented the wall of enmity and distrust between the two countries that lasts to this day.

Iran’s decades long nuclear weapons development efforts are the backdrop for my novel, The Lion and the Sun, which I wrote about in another blog post.

Black Friday Redux

The United States is largely responsible for the distrust and antipathy Iranians feel towards America. The Geneva Deal formulated by the Obama Administration on November 25, 2013, is a promising first step in the effort to open up meaningful dialogue with Iran over its nuclear ambitions, and the possibility of a normalization of relations somewhere downstream. It would be a major mistake for the Republican Party to sabotage this effort for political gain.

Black Friday

America's retailers are again promoting "Black Friday," the go-crazy shopping day after Thanksgiving, when "fantastic deals" are being offered, and stores are hiring extra security personnel to manage the stampede of frantic shoppers pressing against the closed doors, waiting to burst through and snatch up the last X-Box One, Barbie Fashionista doll, or gigantic flat-screen TV they really can't afford, even if it is half price.

The Shah's Imperial Guard Shooting at Protesters, Black Friday, Tehran, Iran,
September 8, 1978

Thirty-five years ago another Black Friday occurred, one that made inexorable the overthrow of the Pahlavi monarchy in Iran and the ouster of the country's leader, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. This was the massacre of protesters in Tehran's Jaleh Square on September 8, 1978, by troops loyal to the Shah. The day was labeled "Black Friday" by the opposition, and the event radicalized further an already fervent opposition movement, making compromise with the regime, practically impossible.

I arrived in Tehran two months after Black Friday and experienced first hand the chaotic period leading up to the overthrow of the Shah, and the storming of the American Embassy the following year. I made it a point to learn about Iran's history before I went there, and continued to follow the country's troubled road to its current impasse with the U.S. after I left.

The Pahlavi Dynasty

The United States was a reliable backer of the Pahlavi dynasty, although during World War II, the US stood by when Great Britain and the USSR arrested the then Shah and sent him into exile. The three nations then took control of Iran's oil resources, secured a transportation corridor, and using Iran's resources, supplied the war effort. It was during this time that the Shah's son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was installed as the head of the rump state and told exactly what he could and could not do.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Early 1950s

The United States agreed to grant Iran its independence at the end of WWII, although the USSR balked, delaying the withdrawal of its occupying forces until 1946, after trying and failing to create an autonomous state in the northern provinces of Iran.

Iran formed a parliamentary form of government and in 1944 the election of the Majlis (lower house of parliament) was the first genuine democratic process most Iranians could remember. Unfortunately for the Iranians, Britain and the US found Iran's oil too attractive to risk losing to what the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service ("MI6") perceived to be a looming communist movement in Tehran.

Operation Ajax

Just nine years after Iran began opening its state to opposition parties, the United States and Britain, through the machinations of their intelligence services, undertook to overthrow the government of Mohammad Mosaddeqh, elected prime minister in 1951. Britain owned and operated the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and prevailed upon the US to help make sure things stayed the way they were, with the UK deciding how much Iran would earn from the use of its oil reserves, and the Shah deciding who, besides he and his family, would receive the millions of dollars flowing into the government's coffers.

Mohammad Mosaddeqh, 1952

In 1953, in an operation the CIA code named TPAJAX, or in some circles, Operation Ajax, Mosaddeqh was toppled, thrown in jail, and then after several years, placed under house arrest, where he died. The coup preserved the Shah's power and served to protect Western economic and security interests, including Western ownership of Iran's vast oil infrastructure. As Stephen Kinzer wrote, "It also transformed a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolutist kingship and induced a succession of unintended consequences at least as far ahead as the Islamic revolution of 1979."

Nuclear Cooperation Between the U.S. and Iran

During the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah, the United States supplied Iran with modern military weapon systems and even nuclear technology. Looking back, one can say that the foundation for Iran's current nuclear program was laid by the United States in 1957 under Dwight D. Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program. The US even supplied Iran's Tehran Nuclear Research Center (TNRC) with a 5-megawatt nuclear reactor that was fueled by highly enriched uranium. The U.S. and Iran negotiated a nuclear cooperation agreement as late as 1975, approved by President Gerald Ford and signed by Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. In it, the U.S. explicitly permitted Iran to fabricate U.S. nuclear material into fuel for use in Iran's reactors and for pass through to third countries with which the U.S. had agreements. The Shah was open about his intent to build, with U.S. help, as many as 23 nuclear power stations by the year 2000. American nuclear architect-engineering companies were ecstatic.

Unfortunately, Humpty-Dumpty fell off the wall in 1979 and we haven't been able to bring all the pieces back together again. After initially eschewing nuclear development, Ayatollah Khomeini, who came to power after the revolution, changed his mind and agreed that the program should go forward. Iran sought help from Germany, and then Russia, which helped complete Bushehr, to date, Iran's only nuclear power reactor.

The Current State of Affairs

Various intelligence sources showed that Iran pursued not just a peaceful nuclear program, but a nuclear weapons development capability, as well, although a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate judged that Iran stopped work on nuclear weapon's development in 2003, but was  "keeping the door open" on restarting its nuclear weapons program.

It is clear from recent developments that Iran is more open now that at any time in the recent past to consider a permanent halt to any efforts to develop nuclear weapons. The Obama Administration has been working quietly for months to open a dialogue with Iran and seek a mutually agreeable path forward towards that end. The agreement, reached just a few days before Thanksgiving, provides Iran with about $7 billion in relief from international sanctions in exchange for curbs on uranium enrichment and other nuclear activity. All parties to the so-called "Geneva deal," pledged to work toward a final accord next year that would remove remaining suspicions in the West that Tehran is intent on building nuclear weapons.

 This opening with Iran is promising. However, Republicans in Congress, joined by some Democrats, are critical of the deal. They want to continue sanctions, and even impose new ones, which they argue are working. Republicans, heartened by Obama's vulnerability over the troubled roll-out of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), are quickly labeling the accord, "Obama's deal," and even before hearing the details, calling it "disgraceful," and an obvious attempt to distract the public from the ACA "debacle."

All this Republican hullabaloo is to be expected from a Republican Party that acts with a knee jerk negative spin to anything the current White House does. Nevertheless, in this particular case, it would be a shame if Republican intransigence managed to scuttle an agreement as critically important as this. That would truly be a BLACK FRIDAY spelt large.

CLASSIFIED: TOP SECRET

As Mother Jones reported recently, the CIA's Center on Climate Change and National Security has been keeping a low profile, probably because Republican members of Congress have been trying to ax the program. But apparently the CIA is going so far as to keep all information about the program highly classified. But leave it to the Obama Administration to leak classified documents to further its nefarious political aims. Here's the latest.

_________________________________________

For additional details, please refer to the extended report.

Although the "leaked" document is fake, the threat of abrupt climate destabilization isn't.

Remembering 9/11

Attack on the Pentagon, September 11, 2001

I was working at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Science & Technology Intelligence when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred. The event completely changed my work focus and I soon found myself working out of a special compartmented information facility, a SCIF (pronounced “skiff”), in the basement of the Pentagon helping to plan Operation Iraqi Freedom. I saw the damage to the Pentagon first hand.

When I returned to PNNL, I worked on counter terrorism. We briefed a Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) for our region -- JTTFs were set up as a result of what were seen as intelligence failures in preventing 9/11 -- and worked with an FBI office in Seattle to help them shift from after-the-fact crime assessment to forward-looking attack prevention. I worked with our counterintelligence/counter terrorism group doing threat assessments.

Back in the PNNL SCIF, I saw playing cards showing the most wanted members of Saddam Hussein’s government posted on the cork board. These cards were called “personality identification playing cards.” We turned them upside down as the individuals were captured or killed. You can now buy these cards on eBay (but some of the decks for sale are not the original cards).

After my temporary duty at the Pentagon, my focus at PNNL shifted from intelligence analysis of major powers, to the far more difficult assessment of non-state actors. We quickly learned that an over dependence on technical means for intelligence collection (e.g., imagery) wouldn't cut it in the new threat environment.

I think the world changed dramatically after 9/11 -- mine certainly did.

"As the United States heads toward the sixth year of the global war on terror, representing violent nonstate actors (VNSA) as a system remains elusive to all but a few pockets of the Department of Defense." (Maj. Tara A. Leweling, 2006)

Revisiting Past Glories

With the mid-term elections coming up, a lot is being said about the Obama Administration and its effectiveness in dealing with a myriad of issues facing the country. Although the economy and jobs are central to the current debate, Iraq and Afghanistan are still at the forefront of hard problems yet to be satisfactorily resolved.


I think it's important for thoughtful Americans to understand some background on these military adventures.

One of the most devastating accounts of that fiasco was the book by that title, Fiasco, the American Military Adventure in Iraq, by Thomas Ricks. The planning for and execution of the early stages of that war were abysmal. Much of the problem seems to have been with Pentagon planners eager to satisfy the White House -- Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld -- who were determined to present the coming war in as rosy a picture as possible -- quick and easy. Ricks states that under Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith, the Pentagon concocted "the worst war plan in American history," with insufficient troops and no thought for the invasion's aftermath. Anyone who keeps up with developments in Iraq knows this now, but Rick's book was published in 2006 and at the time, caused no little controversy. Bob Woodward's books, Bush at War, and Plan of Attack, provided interesting insights into the Bush White House's "seat of pants" approach to critical national defense issues, although Woodward's writing style is somewhat wooden, especially in comparison with Rick's.

I just finished reading, Where Men Win Glory, the Odyssey of Pat Tillman. I had to stop reading it at night before bed, because the story of how the Bush Administration and the Pentagon betrayed an honorable, heroic man made me so angry and upset I could not sleep. Most people probably know by now that Tillman was killed by the men in his own platoon; an event termed "friendly fire" by the military -- an oxymoron if there ever was one. But few people know the full story of how first the Army, and then the Bush White House, went to great extremes to keep the public, and even the Tillman family in the dark about what really happened. The actions of the Army and the Administration were so egregious that it makes one literally ill to read about it.

I happened to be reading, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, by Scott McClellan, at the same time. McClellan left the White House after he was lied to about the Valery Plame affair and in briefing the White Press Corps on the basis of what he was told, made himself out to be a liar. McClellan's story of how the Bush Administration conducted government affairs as if they were involved in a continuous political campaign, without regard for the truth, and ruthless in their treatment of anyone who didn't toe the party line, is extremely troubling.

I also read recently, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, by Richard A. Clarke. Here again, the White House comes across as uninformed and arrogant. Much of what Clarke writes is supported by another book I read earlier in the year, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, by George Tenet. In his book, Clarke details how, in light of mounting intelligence of the danger Al-Qaeda presented, his urgent requests to move terrorism up the list of priorities in the early days of the Bush Administration were met with apathy and procrastination. He is particularly critical of Condoleezza Rice, Bush's National Security Advisor, who seemed not only unaware of the Al-Qaeda threat, but uninterested as well. To her, Al-Qaeda was simply one of many extremist groups, no more important than others. Rice was one of Bush's strongest supporters for the invasion of Iraq.

For many, the invasion of Iraq now seems a terrible strategic blunder, both in terms of its impact on the balance of power in the Middle East -- we did a great favor for Iran -- and it's diversion away from the center of the terrorism storm in Afghanistan. There are those who believe that oil was the real reason for the war, but that's probably simplistic. George W. Bush probably convinced himself that invading Iraq and creating a democratic government there would be a great achievement -- a centerpiece for his presidential library. In addition, he wanted to one up his father, who always favored brother Jeb, the sober, thoughtful, industrious son, who would one day be president. Well, Dubya showed him -- he showed us all.

And here we are, about to elect representatives to lead us in the difficult times ahead. As we ponder how to cast our votes, I think it's important to revisit past glories.