by Gareth Porter
[While the terrible events in Egypt have delayed my plans to reply to ProPublica’s response to my critique of Sebastian Rotella’s report on the alleged build-up of Iran’s terrorist infrastructure in the Americas, Gareth Porter has written the following essay [...]]]>
by Gareth Porter
[While the terrible events in Egypt have delayed my plans to reply to ProPublica’s response to my critique of Sebastian Rotella’s report on the alleged build-up of Iran’s terrorist infrastructure in the Americas, Gareth Porter has written the following essay on a 2009 article by Rotella for the Los Angeles Times about an alleged bomb plot to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 2008. It offers a very good illustration of some of the problems raised in my original critique of Rotella’s most recent work, notably the virtually exclusive reliance on sources that are clearly hostile to Iran with an interest in depicting it in the most negative light possible. But you be the judge. -- Jim Lobe]
It happened in Baku, transforming the capital of Azerbaijan into a battleground in a global shadow war.
Police intercepted a fleeing car and captured two suspected Hezbollah militants from Lebanon. The car contained explosives, binoculars, cameras, pistols with silencers and reconnaissance photos. Raiding alleged safe houses, police foiled what authorities say was a plot to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic that borders Iran.
Thus begins the only detailed English-language press account of an alleged Iranian terror plot in Azerbaijan in 2008: a May 2009 article, written with a Paris dateline, by Sebastian Rotella for the Los Angeles Times.
But despite the sense of immediacy conveyed by his lede, Rotella’s sources for his account were not Azerbaijanis. Rather, the sources Rotella quoted on the details of the alleged plot, the investigation and apprehension of the suspects consisted of an unnamed “Israeli security official”, and Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the author of a constant stream of articles, op-eds, and Congressional testimony reflecting the Israeli government’s interest in promoting the perception of a growing Iranian terrorist threat around the world.[1]
It was Levitt who described the alleged plot in Baku to Rotella as having been “in the advanced stages” when it was supposedly broken up by Azerbaijani security forces, an assertion echoed by the anonymous Israeli security official cited in the article:
”[Iran] had reached the stage where they had a network in place to do an operation,” said an Israeli security official, who requested anonymity for safety reasons. “We are seeing it all over the world. They are working very hard at it.”
So readers of the LA Times received a version of the plot that was filtered primarily, if not exclusively, through an Israeli lens.[2] Relying on Israeli officials and a close ally at a pro-Israel US think tank for a story on an alleged Iranian bomb plot against an Israeli Embassy is bound to produce a predictable story line where the accuracy can hardly be assumed at face value. Indeed, in this case, there were and remain many reasons for skepticism.
Yet, three years later, in a July 2012 article for ProPublica, he referred to the plot as though it was established fact.
Had Rotella sought an independent source in Azerbaijan, he would have learned, for example, that such alleged plots had been a virtual perennial in Baku for years. That is what a leading scholar of Azerbaijan’s external relations, Anar Valiyev, told me in an interview last November. “It’s always the same plot year after year,” said Valiyev, Dean of the School of International Affairs of the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy in Baku.
In fact, security officials in Azerbaijan had claimed the existence of a similar plot in October 2007 and January 2012 and only two months later, authorities arrested Azerbaijani suspects in two different allegedly Iranian-initiated plots to carry out terrorist actions against Western embassies, the Israeli Embassy and/or Jewish targets. In early 2013, prison sentences were announced in yet another alleged terrorist plot to attack the Eurovision song contest in Baku in 2012. Valiyev told me that those detained by Azerbaijani security officials are always charged with wanting to kill Israeli or US officials and subsequently tried for plots to overthrow the government, which carries the maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.
In a 2007 article in Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Focus, Valiyev observed that plots, assassination and coup-attempts were “thwarted” with regularity in Azerbaijan. “Periodically the government finds a scapegoat,” he wrote, to justify attacks on domestic critics, including “Wahabbis”, followers of Kurdish-Sunni scholar Said Nursi and/or Shiite radicals. Valiyev suggested that security officials might be “trying to show that radical Islamists could come to power…should the incumbent government lose the election.”
The Azerbaijani government and its security forces are not known for their devotion to the rule of law. The current president, Ilham Aliyev, is the son of Azerbaijan’s first president, Heydar Aliyev, who, in turn, was the head of the Soviet KGB before Azerbaijan’s independence. According to Jim Lobe, who visited Baku last year, dissidents regard the first Aliyev’s tenure as relatively liberal compared that of his son. A 2009 State Department cable described Ilham Aliyev as a “mafia-like” figure, likening him to a combination of Michael and Sonny Corleone in the “The Godfather”.
Valiyev observed that virtually nothing about the alleged plot made sense, beginning with the targets. According to Rotella’s story, the alleged Hezbollah operatives and their Azerbaijani confederates had planned to set off three or four car bombs at the Israeli Embassy simultaneously, using explosives they “intended to accumulate” in addition to the “hundreds of pounds of explosives” they had allegedly already acquired from “Iranian spies.”
But the Israeli Embassy is located in the seven-story Hyatt Tower office complex along with other foreign embassies, and no automobiles are allowed to park in close proximity to the complex, according to Valiyev. So the alleged plotters would have needed a prodigious amount of explosives to accomplish such a plan.
For example, the bomb that destroyed the eight-story US Air Force barracks at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996 was estimated at 23,000 pounds of explosives detonated less than 100 feet away from the building. Valiyev told me that it is “practically impossible to find such components in Azerbaijan” because “Even a few kilograms of explosives would be tracked down by the ministry of national security.”
In his article, Rotella also referred — though only in passing — to the prosecutor’s charge that the alleged conspirators were planning to attack a Russian radar installation at Gabala (sometimes spelled Qabala) in northern Azerbaijan. But that part of the plot was also highly suspect, according to Valiyev. No reason was ever given for such a target, and it would have made no sense for either Hezbollah’s or Iran’s interests.
Built in 1984, the Gabala radar station was leased to the Russians until 2012, and 900 troops from the Russian Space Forces were stationed there. An attack on the station by Hezbollah or its supposed proxies in Azerbaijan would have represented a major provocation against Russia by Iran and Hezbollah, and was therefore hard to believe, as Valiyev pointed out in a July 2009 report for the Jamestown Foundation. Valiyev said it was far more plausible that the alleged plotters were simply carrying out surveillance on the station which, according to some reports, was being considered for possible integration into a regional US missile defense system.
Rotella failed to mention yet another aspect of the prosecution’s case that should arouse additional skepticism. The indictment included the charge that the leader of the alleged terrorist cell plotting these attacks was working simultaneously for Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. Even though it has been long been discredited, the idea of an Iran-al-Qaeda collaboration on terrorism has been a favorite Israeli theme for some time and one that continues to be propagated by Levitt.
Rotella’s account of how the suspects were apprehended also appears implausible. In May 2008, when the bombings were supposedly still weeks away, according to his story, the suspects realized they were under surveillance and tried to flee.
But instead of hiding or destroying incriminating evidence of their terrorist plot — such as the reconnaissance photos, the explosives, the cameras and the pistols with silencers — as might be expected under those circumstances, the two suspects allegedly packed all that equipment in their car and fled toward the border with Iran, whereupon they were intercepted, according to the official line reported by Rotella.
Somehow, despite the surveillance, according to anonymous “anti-terrorist officials” cited by Rotella, “a number of Lebanese, Iranian and Azerbaijani suspects escaped by car into Iran.” Only those with the incriminating evidence — including, most implausibly, hundreds of pounds of explosives — in their car were caught, according to the account given to Rotella.
Even Rotella’s description of the two Lebanese suspects, Ali Karaki and Ali Najem Aladine, as a veteran Hezbollah external operations officer and an explosives expert, respectively, should not be taken at face value, according to Valiyev. It is more likely, he said, that the two were simply spies working for Iranian intelligence.
Even the US Embassy report on the trial of the suspects suggested it also had doubts about the alleged plot. “In early October after a closed trial,” the reporting cable said, “an Azerbaijani court sentenced a group of alleged terrorists arrested the previous Spring and supposedly connected to Lebanese Hezbollah plot to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Baku AND the Qabala radar station in northern Azerbaijan” (emphasis in the original). It added, “In a public statement the state prosecutor repeated earlier claims that the entire plot was an operation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.”
Yet another striking anomaly about the alleged plot was the fact that nothing was published about it for an entire year. No explanation for the silence was ever made public. This silence is all the more significant because during 2009 and 2010, the Israeli government either publicly alleged or leaked stories of Iranian or Hezbollah plots in Turkey and Jordan about which the host country authorities either did not comment on or offered a different explanation. But despite the extremely close relationship between Azebaijani and Israeli intelligence services (confirmed by this US Embassy cable), neither the Israeli media nor foreign journalists were tipped off to the plot until the Israelis leaked the story to Rotella a year later.[3]
The complete absence of any leak by the Israelis for an entire year about an alleged Iranian plot to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Baku casts some circumstantial doubt on whether such a plot had indeed been uncovered in 2008, as claimed in the article.
Despite the multiple anomalies surrounding this story — the complete lack of any publicly available corroborating evidence; the well-established penchant for the Aliyev government for using such alleged plots to justify rounding up domestic critics; the US Embassy’s apparent skepticism, his failure to consult independent sources; and the 2009 publication by the Jamestown Foundation of Valiyev’s own critique of the “official” version of the case — Rotella has shown no interest in clarifying what actually happened. In fact, as noted above, he referred to the plot again in a July 2012 article for ProPublica as if there was not the slightest doubt with regard to its actual occurrence, identifying it, as he did in the original article, as an attempted retaliation for the assassination of a senior Hezbollah operative three months before:
Conflict with Israel intensified in February 2008 after a car bomb in the heart of Damascus killed Imad Mughniyah, a notorious Hezbollah military leader and ally of Iranian intelligence. Iranian Hezbollah publicly accused Israel and vowed revenge.
Within weeks, a plot was under way against the Israeli Embassy in Azerbaijan. Police broke up the cell in May 2008. The suspects included Azeri accomplices, a senior Hezbollah field operative and a Hezbollah explosives expert. Police also arrested two Iranian spies, but they were released within weeks because of pressure from Tehran, Western anti-terror officials say.[4] The other suspects were convicted.
As narrowly sourced as it was, Rotella’s original 2009 story thus helped make a dubious tale of a bomb plot in Baku part of the media narrative. More recently, he continued that pattern by promoting the unsubstantiated charge by Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman and various pro-Israel groups and right-wing members of Congress, such as Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, that Iran poses a growing terrorist threat to the US in the Americas. While Jim Lobe has helped deconstruct that story line, I have recently marshaled evidence showing that Nisman’s charges about alleged Iranian involvement in the 1994 AMIA bombing and the 2007 JFK airport plot were tendentious and highly questionable.
Photo: Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a dinner hosted by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in November 2010.
[1] In one illustration of Rotella’s and Levitt’s long-time symbiosis, Levitt cited Rotella’s account of the alleged Baku plot as his main source about the incident in a 2013 article on alleged Hezbollah terrorism published by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC).
[2] Rotella referred twice to “anti-terrorism officials” as sources for describing the surveillance of the alleged perpetrators that preceded their arrest and past work for Hezbollah. Of course, the phrase “anti-terrorism officials” does not exclude the possibility that they, too, were Israeli.)
[3] The first time the alleged plot’s details appeared in the Anglophone Israeli press was when Haaretz published a several hundred-word piece based virtually exclusively on Rotella’s account with the added detail, citing “Israeli sources,” that the “plotters also planned to kidnap the Israeli ambassador in Baku…”
[4] This account, incidentally, was the first to report the arrest in the case of “two Iranian spies”, another anomaly that may be explained by a flurry of media reports in 2010 that it was the two Lebanese who were released as part of a larger prisoner exchange that also included an Azerbaijani nuclear scientist arrested as a spy by Iran.
To: IRI Foreign Minister Ali Akhbar Salehi
From: Makhzan al-Pand, FM Research and PR Dept.
Subject: As Requested: Draft Response to WikiLeaks Revelations of Stratfor E-mails
Respectfully submitted for your consideration at the highest level of confidentiality:
The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran formally acknowledges and confirms [...]]]>
To: IRI Foreign Minister Ali Akhbar Salehi
From: Makhzan al-Pand, FM Research and PR Dept.
Subject: As Requested: Draft Response to WikiLeaks Revelations of Stratfor E-mails
Respectfully submitted for your consideration at the highest level of confidentiality:
The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran formally acknowledges and confirms the claim that the Zionist Usurper Regime That Occupies Jerusalem (ZURTOJ, otherwise known as Israel) has utterly destroyed the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
The Stuxnet and Duqu computer viruses, the magnetic bombs that martyred three Iranian nuclear scientists, carried out in cooperation with the terrorists of the Mojahedin-e Khalq, the explosions at Iranian military bases, and the latest revelations that Israeli commandos, aided by Kurdish fighters, have destroyed Iran’s nuclear facilities and its infrastructure. We can no longer hide the fact that Iran does not have a viable nuclear weapons program.
ZURTOJ has eradicated the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear capability and nothing remains of it. Zionist spies have corrupted or deleted every computer file in the Islamic Republic, shredding and burning every sheet of paper with even a shred of dual-use knowledge that might be used in the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. The Mossad’s super-sensitive mind control software have infiltrated even the brains of our researchers, from graduate students to our technical experts at the highest level, eradicating any recollection of the principles of nuclear fission and fusion.
The Islamic Republic of Iran openly admits to the world that the real reason for its reluctance to disclose the location and contents of our most sensitive and top secret nuclear weapons development facilities is because they do not exist.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has declared many times that it has no nuclear weapons program. In light of the most recent WikiLeaks revelations, the international community may now accept this fact. We fully acknowledge the enormous contribution of ZURTOJ to world peace by eliminating the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear weapons program without dropping a single US supplied GBU-28 on any of our beautiful cities. ZURTOJ has the credibility, and therefore is welcome to take the credit, for assuring the the world that there is no Iranian nuclear weapons program in existence today.
We realize and sincerely regret the many inconveniences the disclosure of the disappearance of our nuclear weapons program may cause to the international community. US President Barack Obama and the Zionist regime’s spokesman, Benjamin Netanyahu, will have to find something other than Iran’s nuclear program to top the agenda of their upcoming talks. AIPAC will need to find experts on something besides “the Iranian threat” as a major theme for its annual policy conference next week. Republican contenders for the presidential nomination will no longer be able to rely on the slogan “bomb Iran” to demonstrate their deep understanding of the dynamics of global diplomacy.
Since the Islamic Republic of Iran has no nuclear weapons program, it anticipates the immediate lifting of all sanctions and the revocation of the planned boycott of Iranian oil. Although America presently is not a customer of Iran’s oil industry, the lifting of the sanctions and the embargo should result in a significant drop in the price of Brent crude futures in the global market, and avert a global oil crisis. Consumers can expect this to sharply reduce the price of gasoline at the pump in the US.
Iran continues to be in the forefront of supporters of a Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone (MENWFZ) and expresses the hope that the latest WikiLeaks disclosures will prove helpful in securing its establishment, with full ZURTOJ participation.
]]>The [...]]]>
The IAEA is supposed to be a neutral body, but a 2009 WikiLeaks cable featured in the Guardian shows that the U.S. strongly approved of IAEA chief, Yukiya Amano, specifically because of his approach to Iran, which he emphasized would be different than Mohamed ElBaradei’s.
- In a meeting with Ambassador on the eve of the two-week Board of Governors (BoG) and General Conference (GC) marathon of mid-September, IAEA Director General-designate Yukiya Amano thanked the U.S. for having supported his candidacy and took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded Ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77, which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran‘s alleged nuclear weapons program.
This is the U.S.’s initial assessment of him:
- 9. (SBU) Comment: By the time he departed Vienna with the GC’s confirmation of his appointment, Amano appeared comfortable in his “Director General” shoes. He speaks with increasing confidence and clarity, having mastered his talking points and grown accustomed to his new title. Apprehensions linger among IAEA staff and diplomatic missions regarding his communications and leadership abilities, but with his performance during the GC he made progress in winning over skeptics. His wisdom in downplaying Japanese visibility among his senior advisors will also assuage staff fears that Amano would subvert the Agency with a Japanese corporate management style. On a grander stage, Amano’s global political savvy was clearly in evidence, and his willingness to speak candidly with U.S. interlocutors on his strategy and various balancing acts bodes well for our future relationship. For example, his description of President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit as the biggest event of his early tenure was a deliberate and gratifying gesture.
When news broke two weeks ago that the U.S. had sent bunker buster bombs to Israel in 2009 or 2010, many worried that shipping the bombs — which can penetrate deep into underground bunkers like those that protect the Iranian nuclear program — might be perceived [...]]]>
When news broke two weeks ago that the U.S. had sent bunker buster bombs to Israel in 2009 or 2010, many worried that shipping the bombs — which can penetrate deep into underground bunkers like those that protect the Iranian nuclear program — might be perceived by Israel or Iran as a U.S. “green light” for an Israeli attack on the Islamic Republic. Retired General James Cartwright said that the military had worried about “how the Iranians would perceive it,” and “how the Israelis might perceive it.” And according to a U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, U.S. and Israeli military and diplomatic officials meeting in Israel in late 2009 agreed that “the transfer should be handled quietly to avoid any allegations that the [U.S. government] is helping Israel prepare for a strike against Iran.”
But Defense Secretary Leon Panetta threw cold water on the idea of an Israeli military strike on Iran during a trip to Israel yesterday. At a joint press conference with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Panetta signaled that the U.S. didn’t want to see a surprise strike by Israel: “I think the most effective way to deal with Iran is not on a unilateral basis,” he said in response to a question. Panetta went on to say that, like Israel, the U.S. sees the Iranian nuclear program as a priority, but that countries should work “together” to address it:
- We are very concerned [about Iran] and the best approach for dealing with this threat is for all of us to make it clear to them that they cannot proceed on the path that they are on. We will work together to do whatever is necessary to make sure that they do not represent a threat to this region and it depends on countries working together.
The defense correspondent of the Israeli paper Haaretz wrote that Panetta “repeated the word ‘together’ several times in this context.” And the Jerusalem Post added that:
- The combination of Panetta’s warning that Israel is “growingly isolated” and his calls for Israel to “work together” were understood within the government as carrying an underlying message that since Israel can only really rely on the US, it will not be able to surprise it with unilateral military action against Iran.
Panetta’s thinly-veiled message came on the same day that the former head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency Meir Dagan — echoing comments from May that attacking Iran was “the stupidest thing [he's] ever heard” — said that Iran was not close to having a nuclear bomb and a military attack was “far from being Israel’s preferred option.”
]]>Reposted by arrangement with Tom Dispatch
On the same day that more than 250,000 unredacted State Department cables hemorrhaged out onto the Internet, I was interrogated for the first time in [...]]]>
Reposted by arrangement with Tom Dispatch
On the same day that more than 250,000 unredacted State Department cables hemorrhaged out onto the Internet, I was interrogated for the first time in my 23-year State Department career by State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) and told I was under investigation for allegedly disclosing classified information. The evidence of my crime? A posting on my blog from the previous month that included a link to a WikiLeaks document already available elsewhere on the Web.
As we sat in a small, gray, windowless room, resplendent with a two-way mirror, multiple ceiling-mounted cameras, and iron rungs on the table to which handcuffs could be attached, the two DS agents stated that the inclusion of that link amounted to disclosing classified material. In other words, a link to a document posted by who-knows-who on a public website available at this moment to anyone in the world was the legal equivalent of me stealing a Top Secret report, hiding it under my coat, and passing it to a Chinese spy in a dark alley.
The agents demanded to know who might be helping me with my blog (“Name names!”), if I had donated any money from my upcoming book on my wacky year-long State Department assignment to a forward military base in Iraq, and if so to which charities, the details of my contract with my publisher, how much money (if any) I had been paid, and — by the way — whether I had otherwise “transferred” classified information.
Had I, they asked, looked at the WikiLeaks site at home on my own time on my own computer? Every blog post, every Facebook post, and every Tweet by every State Department employee, they told me, must be pre-cleared by the Department prior to “publication.” Then they called me back for a second 90-minute interview, stating that my refusal to answer questions would lead to my being fired, never mind the Fifth (or the First) Amendments.
Why me? It’s not like the Bureau of Diplomatic Security has the staff or the interest to monitor the hundreds of blogs, thousands of posts, and millions of tweets by Foreign Service personnel. The answer undoubtedly is my new book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. Its unvarnished portrait of State’s efforts and the U.S. at work in Iraq has clearly angered someone, even though one part of State signed off on the book under internal clearance procedures some 13 months ago. I spent a year in Iraq leading a State Department Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) and sadly know exactly what I am talking about. DS monitoring my blog is like a small-town cop pulling over every African-American driver: vindictive, selective prosecution. “Ya’ll be careful in these parts, ‘hear, ‘cause we’re gonna set an example for your kind of people.”
Silly as it seems, such accusations carry a lot of weight if you work for the government. DS can unilaterally, and without any right of appeal or oversight, suspend your security clearance and for all intents and purposes end your career. The agents questioning me reminded me of just that, as well as of the potential for criminal prosecution — and all because of a link to a website, nothing more.
It was implied as well that even writing about the interrogation I underwent, as I am doing now, might morph into charges of “interfering with a Government investigation.” They labeled routine documents in use in my interrogation as “Law Enforcement Sensitive” to penalize me should I post them online. Who knew such small things actually threatened the security of the United States? Are these words so dangerous, or is our nation so fragile that legitimate criticism becomes a firing offense?
Let’s think through this disclosure of classified info thing, even if State won’t. Every website on the Internet includes links to other websites. It’s how the web works. If you include a link to say, a CNN article about Libya, you are not “disclosing” that information — it’s already there. You’re just saying: “Have a look at this.” It’s like pointing out a newspaper article of interest to a guy next to you on the bus. (Careful, though, if it’s an article from the New York Times or the Washington Post. It might quote stuff from Wikileaks and then you could be endangering national security.)
Security at State: Hamburgers and Mud
Security and the State Department go together like hamburgers and mud. Over the years, State has leaked like an old boot. One of its most hilarious security breaches took place when an unknown person walked into the Secretary of State’s outer office and grabbed a pile of classified documents. From the vast trove of missing classified laptops to bugging devices found in its secure conference rooms, from high ranking officials trading secrets in Vienna to top diplomats dallying with spies in Taiwan, even the publicly available list is long and ugly.
Of course, nothing compares to what history will no doubt record as the most significant outpouring of classified material ever, the dump of hundreds of thousands of cables that are now on display on WikiLeaks and its mushroom-like mirror sites. The Bureau of Diplomatic Security (an oxymoron if there ever was one) is supposed to protect our American diplomats by securing State’s secrets, and over time they just haven’t done very well at that.
The State Department and its Bureau of Diplomatic Security never took responsibility for their part in the loss of all those cables, never acknowledged their own mistakes or porous security measures. No one will ever be fired at State because of WikiLeaks — except, at some point, possibly me. Instead, State joined in the Federal mugging of Army Private Bradley Manning, the person alleged to have copied the cables onto a Lady Gaga CD while sitting in the Iraqi desert.
That all those cables were available electronically to everyone from the Secretary of State to a lowly Army private was the result of a clumsy post-9/11 decision at the highest levels of the State Department to quickly make up for information-sharing shortcomings. Trying to please an angry Bush White House, State went from sharing almost nothing to sharing almost everything overnight. They flung their whole library onto the government’s classified intranet, SIPRnet, making it available to hundreds of thousands of Federal employees worldwide. It is usually not a good idea to make classified information that broadly available when you cannot control who gets access to it outside your own organization. The intelligence agencies and the military certainly did no such thing on SIPRnet, before or after 9/11.
State did not restrict access. If you were in, you could see it all. There was no safeguard to ask why someone in the Army in Iraq in 2010 needed to see reporting from 1980s Iceland. Even inside their own organization, State requires its employees to “subscribe” to classified cables by topic, creating a record of what you see and limiting access by justifiable need. A guy who works on trade issues for Morocco might need to explain why he asked for political-military reports from Chile.
Most for-pay porn sites limit the amount of data that can be downloaded. Not State. Once those cables were available on SIPRnet, no alarms or restrictions were implemented so that low-level users couldn’t just download terabytes of classified data. If any activity logs were kept, it does not look like anyone checked them.
A few classified State Department cables will include sourcing, details on from whom or how information was collected. This source data allows an informed reader to judge the veracity of the information; was the source on a country’s nuclear plans a street vendor or a high military officer? Despite the sometimes life-or-death nature of protecting sources (though some argue this is overstated), State simply dumped its hundreds of thousands of cables online unredacted, leaving source names there, all pink and naked in the sun.
Then again, history shows that technical security is just not State’s game, which means the Wikileaks uproar is less of a surprise in context. For example,in 2006, news reports indicated that State’s computer systems were massively hacked by Chinese computer geeks. In 2008, State data disclosures led to an identity theft scheme only uncovered through a fluke arrest by the Washington D.C. cops. Before it was closed down in 2009, snooping on private passport records was a popular intramural activity at the State Department, widely known and casually accepted. In 2011, contractors using fake identities appear to have downloaded 250,000 internal medical records of State Department employees, including mine.
Wishing Isn’t a Strategy, Hope Isn’t a Plan
Despite their own shortcomings, State and its Bureau of Diplomatic Security take this position: if we shut our eyes tightly enough, there is no Wikileaks. (The morning news summary at State includes this message: “Due to the security classification of many documents, the Daily Addendum will not include news clips that are generated by leaked cables by the website WikiLeaks.”)
The corollary to such a position evidently goes something like this: since we won’t punish our own technical security people or the big shots who approved the whole flawed scheme in the first place, and the damned First Amendment doesn’t allow us to punish the New York Times, let’s just punish one of our own employees for looking at, creating links to, and discussing stuff on the web — and while he was at it, writing an accurate, first-hand, and critical account of the disastrous, if often farcical, American project in Iraq.
That’s what frustrated bullies do — they pick on the ones they think they can get away with beating up. The advantage of all this? It gets rid of a “troublemaker,” and the Bureau of Diplomatic Security people can claim that they are “doing something” about the WikiLeaks drip that continues even while they fiddle. Of course, it also chills free speech, sending a message to other employees about the price of speaking plainly.
Now does that make sense? Only inside the world of Diplomatic Security, and historically it always has.
For example, Diplomatic Security famously took into custody the color slides reproduced in the Foreign Service Journal showing an open copy of one of the Government’s most sensitive intelligence documents, albeit only after the photos were published and distributed in the thousands. Similarly DS made it a crime to take photos of the giant U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad, but only after the architecture firm building it posted sketches of the Embassy online; a Google search will still reveal many of those images; others who served in Iraq have posted them on their unsecured Facebook pages.
Imagine this: State’s employees are still blocked by a firewall from looking at websites that carry or simply write about and refer to WikiLeaks documents, including TomDispatch.com, which is publishing this piece. (That, in turn, means my colleagues at State won’t be able to read this — except on the sly.)
In the Belly of the Beast
Back in that windowless room for a second time, I faced the two DS agents clumsily trying to play semi-bad and altogether-bad cop. They once again reminded me of my obligation to protect classified information, and studiously ignored my response — that I indeed do take that obligation seriously, enough in fact to distinguish between actual disclosure and a witch-hunt.
As they raised their voices and made uncomfortable eye contact just like it says to do in any Interrogation 101 manual, you could almost imagine the hundreds of thousands of unredacted cables physically spinning through the air around us, heading — splat, splot, splat — for the web. Despite the Hollywood-style theatrics and the grim surroundings, the interrogation-style was less police state or 1984-style nightmare than a Brazil-like dark comedy.
In the end, though, it’s no joke. I’ve been a blogger since April, but my meeting with the DS agents somehow took place only a week before the publication date of my book. Days after my second interrogation, the Principal Deputy Secretary of State wrote my publisher demanding small redactions in my book — already shipped to the bookstores — to avoid “harm to U.S. security.” One demand: to cut a vignette based on a scene from the movie version of Black Hawk Down.
The link to Wikileaks is still on my blog. The Bureau of Diplomatic Security declined my written offer to remove it, certainly an indication that however much my punishment mattered to them, the actual link mattered little. I may lose my job in State’s attempt to turn us all into mini-Bradley Mannings and so make America safe.
These are not people steeped in, or particularly appreciative of, the finer points of irony. Still, would anyone claim that there isn’t irony in the way the State Department regularly crusades for the rights of bloggers abroad in the face of all kinds of government oppression, crediting their voices for the Arab Spring, while going after one of its own bloggers at home for saying nothing that wasn’t truthful?
Here’s the best advice my friends in Diplomatic Security have to offer, as far as I can tell: slam the door after the cow has left the barn, then beat your wife as punishment. She didn’t do anything wrong, but she deserved it, and don’t you feel better now?
Peter Van Buren spent a year in Iraq as a State Department Foreign Service Officer serving as Team Leader for two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). Now in Washington, he writes about Iraq and the Middle East at his blog, We Meant Well. His new book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books), is published today. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Van Buren discusses what it’s like to be interrogated by the State Department click here, or download it to your iPod here.
[Note: The views expressed here are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense, or any other entity of the U.S. Government. It should be quite obvious that the Department of State has not approved, endorsed, or authorized this post.]
Copyright 2011 Peter Van Buren
]]>The best instant analysis of the worrisome implications of this transaction come from Paul Pillar on his National Interest blog, which, incidentally, I read daily. One excerpt:
The even bigger worry about the bunker busters concerns what they would be used for. The one possible use that looms above any others one could conceive of is an attack on Iran and specifically its nuclear facilities. Providing the bunker busters was a mistake insofar as it increases Israel’s ability to initiate a war with Iran in this way. Even more serious (because Israel probably could develop the bunker-busting technology on its own, albeit at greater expense), is that providing the bombs could be interpreted as a green light to go to war. Even more serious than that (because Israel, notwithstanding all that aid, does not wait for green lights from the United States anyway), is that the use of U.S.-made bombs to initiate war with Iran would accentuate the already-existing association of the United States with any Israeli action and intensify the resulting damage to U.S. political, economic, and security interests.
As Pillar notes, this is one more example — and a very substantial one at that — why former Pentagon chief Robert Gates reportedly believes that the Netanyahu government has been ungrateful for all the things Obama has provided Israel, especially with respect to military assistance and cooperation. Because the transfer was held up so long by the Bush administration, one assumes that the delivery of these bombs was the subject of an Oval Office decision. It would be interesting to know who participated in the debate that resulted in the go-ahead and what their positions were. After all, it was in June 2008, only one year before, that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen went to Israel precisely to make clear to his counterpart there that he and his boss were dead-set against an attack on Iran. So did Gates and Mullen, the most important holdovers from Bush, take part in the debate? If so, were they overruled by the politicos in the White House, or did they buy into the Dennis Ross argument that the only way to gain concessions from Israel on the “peace process” front was to make them feel super-secure? Did the administration obtain any assurances about how these weapons will be used or not used?
During my conversation with M.J. Rosenberg for the article I wrote yesterday on Obama’s cave-in to Netanyahu at the UN, he asserted outright that, “from the point of view of the Israel crowd, Obama has been the most pliant and most pro-Israel president ever,” even more than Bush. (He made this into a major theme of his weekly comment at Media Matters in which he compared Obama’s Israel-Palestine policy to Rick Perry’s.) Eli Lake’s piece, a longer version of which is due to come out Monday in the new issue of Newsweek Monday, is yet another major piece of evidence — and a particularly scary one — that this analysis is not far off the mark.
Lake’s article also should prompt some additional reflection among those readers who dismiss the possibility of a U.S. and/or Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. I still believe it’s much more of a possibility than a probability, but, given Obama’s abject surrender on the peace process, the obvious influence of Ross and other White House hawks, and the likelihood that the bunker busters were delivered over the Pentagon’s objections, there is clearly cause for concern.
]]>Like many, I’ve been disappointed with Obama’s civil liberties record, but in some cases — such as the failure to close Guantanamo and to prosecute Bush administration officials responsible for torture — his administration’s failings might reasonably be blamed on political forces beyond his control (such as the willingness of other politicians to demagogue the Guantanamo issue). This is not such a case. No one is forcing the Obama administration to torture Manning in this way, and there is no apparent reason why his administration — having made such a concerted decision to inflict suffering on Manning — should be treated any differently from the Bush administration when it made similar decisions.
]]>The two main problems with Ayalon’s analysis is that he seems not to have actually read the WikiLeaks cables—which offer ample evidence confirming the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the minds of Arab leaders—or bothered to understand how promoters of linkage define the concept.
(Matt Duss has an excellent post up on the Wonk Room that covers many of the same problems with Ayalon’s rather selective (when not downright misleading) interpretation of WikiLeaks and linkage.)
Linkage, as defined by Gen. David Petraeus last March, is [my emphasis]:
The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR. Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.
Rather conveniently, Ayalon’s definition of linkage misinterprets the concept and fails to address the concerns raised by Petraeus and members of the Obama administration who have endorsed the idea. Matt Duss accurately describes Ayalon’s description as “an obvious strawman.”
While right-wing blogs, political pundits, and columnists quickly embraced the talking point that WikiLeaks showed an Arab world that is deathly afraid of Iran’s nuclear program — but didn’t have much to say about the Arab-Israeli conflict — an actual reading of the cables suggests a very different message.
Here are a set of excerpts from WikiLeaks that show Arab leaders endorsing the concept of linkage (the Petraeus definition, not the Ayalon one) in the most blunt way possible.
The Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, in a December 9, 2009 meeting with the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman:
Emphasized the strategic importance of creating a Palestinian State (i.e., resolving the Israeli- Palestinian conflict) as the way to create genuine Middle Eastern unity on the question of Iran’s nuclear program and regional ambitions.
A cable from the U.S. embassy in Amman, written shortly after the end of the Gaza War in January 2009, reads:
Speaking to PolOffs [political officers] in early February 2009, immediately after the Gaza War, Director of the Jordanian Prime Minister’s Political Office Khaled Al-Qadi noted that the Gaza crisis had allowed Iranian interference in inter-Arab relations to reach unprecedented levels.
An April 2, 2009 cable from Amman repeated the Jordanian position:
Jordanian leaders have argued that the only way to pull the rug out from under Hizballah – and by extension their Iranian patrons – would be for Israel to hand over the disputed Sheba’a Farms to Lebanon.
It went on:
With Hizballah lacking the ‘resistance to occupation’ rationale for continued confrontation with Israel, it would lose its raison d’etre and probably domestic support.
And a February 22, 2010, cable describes UAE foreign minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nayan as he warns a Congressional delegation against a military attack on Iran, led by Nita Lowey:
The cable remarks that bin Zayed:
Concluded the meeting with a soliloquy on the importance of a successful peace process between Israel and its neighbors as perhaps the best way of reducing Iran’s regional influence.
During a February 14, 2010, meeting with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, Qatar Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al-thani suggested one reason that Israel might be hyping the threat of a nuclear Iran.
The cable summarizes bin Khalifa as saying:
[The Israelis] are using Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons as a diversion from settling matters with the Palestinians.
Ayalon twisting the definition of linkage and misstating the messages contained in the WikiLeaks cables is indicative of the increasing desperation that the Israeli right-wing must be experiencing as authoritarian Middle Eastern governments, that have helped Israel maintain the status quo, are under increasing pressure to make democratic reforms. There’s no guarantee that the governments in Middle Eastern capitals will be as cooperative in helping Israel maintain its occupation of the West Bank or its siege on Gaza in the future. The time for Israeli hardliners to face their nation’s political realities and make difficult but necessary concessions may be drawing closer. Danny Ayalon is choosing to ignore the shifting political winds.
]]>In this context, the new memo provides more insight into Israeli decision-making. Dated Aug. 29, 2008 (about two months after the beginning of the Tahdiya, and four months before the beginning of Cast Lead), it notes (emphasis added):
Regarding the Tahdiya, Hacham said Barak stressed that while it was not permanent, for the time being it was holding. There have been a number of violations of the ceasefire on the Gaza side, but Palestinian factions other than Hamas were responsible. Hacham said the Israelis assess that Hamas is making a serious effort to convince the other factions not to launch rockets or mortars. Israel remains concerned by Hamas’ ongoing efforts to use the Tahdiya to increase their strength, and at some point, military action will have to be put back on the table. The Israelis reluctantly admit that the Tahdiya has served to further consolidate Hamas’ grip on Gaza, but it has brought a large measure of peace and quiet to Israeli communities near Gaza.
Note the wording of the bolded sentence. The memo does not say that the Israelis believe “military action will have to be put back on the table” because at some point Hamas will break the ceasefire, but rather because Hamas would like to maintain the ceasefire to strengthen its position. Thus if the memo accurately reflects the Israeli government’s thinking, it would appear that the Israelis were, from relatively early on, contemplating breaking the ceasefire in order to cut Hamas off at the knees. While the memo simply confirms what many had already suspected, it provides yet another reason to be highly skeptical of the decision to initiate Cast Lead.
]]>- The Atlantic: Jeffrey Goldberg lists his observations on the ongoing events in Egypt and mentions that friends of his, like FDD fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht, advocate that democratically elected Islamist governments might be part of a “long-term process of gradual modernization.” But Goldberg is “not so sure” and suggests that not all democratically elected governments are worth ending “fifty years of peace” which have “meant propping up dictators for fifty years.” “I support democratization, but the democratization we saw in Gaza (courtesy of, among others, Condi Rice) doesn’t seem particularly worth it,” he writes.” Goldberg then tries to deny the importance of “linkage”—despite its embrace by the military establishment and the Obama administration—and concludes, “these uprisings are offering proof that Israel isn’t the central Arab preoccupation. Wikileaks showed us that Iran is the obsession of Arab leaders, and these mass demonstrations are showing us that the faults of Arab leaders are the actual obsession of Arab people.” (Jim Lobe and I took a closer look at those cables and found a very different message.)
- The National Interest: Ben-Gurion University professor Benny Morris writes, “The regimes that have crumbled or appear to be on the verge of crumbling, are those linked to the West, and they are regimes characterized by a relatively soft authoritarianism, and are commonly perceived as weak, if not downright flabby, well past their prime.” He contrasts the end of Ben Ali’s rule and the escalating situation in Egypt with the suppression of protests by the Iranian government in 2009. “All of this stands in stark contrast to the Iranian regime’s successful suppression of last year’s street rebellion, triggered by the fraudulent elections that left President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in power,” he writes. Morris concludes, “What is clear is that the West, as usual, is faring poorly among the Muslims of the Middle East, where real savagery—sadly—wins respect, and irresolution, a kick in the pants.”