Mossad Agents Posed As American Spies As Part Of Their Secret War On Iran

A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad agents posed as American spies to recruit members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran.

BY MARK PERRY

Buried deep in the archives of America's intelligence services are a series of memos, written during the last years of President George W. Bush's administration, that describe how Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundallah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives -- what is commonly referred to as a "false flag" operation.

The memos, as described by the sources, one of whom has read them and another who is intimately familiar with the case, investigated and debunked reports from 2007 and 2008 accusing the CIA, at the direction of the White House, of covertly supporting Jundallah -- a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization. Jundallah, according to the U.S. government and published reports, is responsible for assassinating Iranian government officials and killing Iranian women and children.

But while the memos show that the United States had barred even the most incidental contact with Jundallah, according to both intelligence officers, the same was not true for Israel's Mossad. The memos also detail CIA field reports saying that Israel's recruiting activities occurred under the nose of U.S. intelligence officers, most notably in London, the capital of one of Israel's ostensible allies, where Mossad officers posing as CIA operatives met with Jundallah officials.

The officials did not know whether the Israeli program to recruit and use Jundallah is ongoing. Nevertheless, they were stunned by the brazenness of the Mossad's efforts.

"It's amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with," the intelligence officer said. "Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn't give a damn what we thought."

Interviews with six currently serving or recently retired intelligence officers over the last 18 months have helped to fill in the blanks of the Israeli false-flag operation. In addition to the two currently serving U.S. intelligence officers, the existence of the Israeli false-flag operation was confirmed to me by four retired intelligence officers who have served in the CIA or have monitored Israeli intelligence operations from senior positions inside the U.S. government.

The CIA and the White House were both asked for comment on this story. By the time this story went to press, they had not responded. The Israeli intelligence services -- the Mossad -- were also contacted, in writing and by telephone, but failed to respond. As a policy, Israel does not confirm or deny its involvement in intelligence operations.

There is no denying that there is a covert, bloody, and ongoing campaign aimed at stopping Iran's nuclear program, though no evidence has emerged connecting recent acts of sabotage and killings inside Iran to Jundallah. Many reports have cited Israel as the architect of this covert campaign, which claimed its latest victim on Jan. 11 when a motorcyclist in Tehran slipped a magnetic explosive device under the car of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a young Iranian nuclear scientist. The explosion killed Roshan, making him the fourth scientist assassinated in the past two years. The United States adamantly denies it is behind these killings.

According to one retired CIA officer, information about the false-flag operation was reported up the U.S. intelligence chain of command. It reached CIA Director of Operations Stephen Kappes, his deputy Michael Sulick, and the head of the Counterintelligence Center. All three of these officials are now retired. The Counterintelligence Center, according to its website, is tasked with investigating "threats posed by foreign intelligence services."

The report then made its way to the White House, according to the currently serving U.S. intelligence officer. The officer said that Bush "went absolutely ballistic" when briefed on its contents.

"The report sparked White House concerns that Israel's program was putting Americans at risk," the intelligence officer told me. "There's no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we're not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians."

Israel's relationship with Jundallah continued to roil the Bush administration until the day it left office, this same intelligence officer noted. Israel's activities jeopardized the administration's fragile relationship with Pakistan, which was coming under intense pressure from Iran to crack down on Jundallah. It also undermined U.S. claims that it would never fight terror with terror, and invited attacks in kind on U.S. personnel.

"It's easy to understand why Bush was so angry," a former intelligence officer said. "After all, it's hard to engage with a foreign government if they're convinced you're killing their people. Once you start doing that, they feel they can do the same."

A senior administration official vowed to "take the gloves off" with Israel, according to a U.S. intelligence officer. But the United States did nothing -- a result that the officer attributed to "political and bureaucratic inertia."

"In the end," the officer noted, "it was just easier to do nothing than to, you know, rock the boat." Even so, at least for a short time, this same officer noted, the Mossad operation sparked a divisive debate among Bush's national security team, pitting those who wondered "just whose side these guys [in Israel] are on" against those who argued that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

The debate over Jundallah was resolved only after Bush left office when, within his first weeks as president, Barack Obama drastically scaled back joint U.S.-Israel intelligence programs targeting Iran, according to multiple serving and retired officers.

The decision was controversial inside the CIA, where officials were forced to shut down "some key intelligence-gathering operations," a recently retired CIA officer confirmed. This action was followed in November 2010 by the State Department's addition of Jundallah to its list of foreign terrorist organizations -- a decision that one former CIA officer called "an absolute no-brainer."

Since Obama's initial order, U.S. intelligence services have received clearance to cooperate with Israel on a number of classified intelligence-gathering operations focused on Iran's nuclear program, according to a currently serving officer. These operations are highly technical in nature and do not involve covert actions targeting Iran's infrastructure or political or military leadership.

"We don't do bang and boom," a recently retired intelligence officer said. "And we don't do political assassinations."

Israel regularly proposes conducting covert operations targeting Iranians, but is just as regularly shut down, according to retired and current intelligence officers. "They come into the room and spread out their plans, and we just shake our heads," one highly placed intelligence source said, "and we say to them -- 'Don't even go there. The answer is no.'"

Unlike the Mujahedin-e Khalq, the controversial exiled Iranian terrorist group that seeks the overthrow of the Tehran regime and is supported by former leading U.S. policymakers, Jundallah is relatively unknown -- but just as violent. In May 2009, a Jundallah suicide bomber blew himself up inside a mosque in Zahedan, the capital of Iran's southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan province bordering Pakistan, during a Shiite religious festival. The bombing killed 25 Iranians and wounded scores of others.

The attack enraged Tehran, which traced the perpetrators to a cell operating in Pakistan. The Iranian government notified the Pakistanis of the Jundallah threat and urged them to break up the movement's bases along the Iranian-Pakistani border. The Pakistanis reacted sluggishly in the border areas, feeding Tehran's suspicions that Jundallah was protected by Pakistan's intelligence services.

The 2009 attack was just one in a long line of terrorist attacks attributed to the organization. In August 2007, Jundallah kidnapped 21 Iranian truck drivers. In December 2008, it captured and executed 16 Iranian border guards -- the gruesome killings were filmed, in a stark echo of the decapitation of American businessman Nick Berg in Iraq at the hands of al Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In July 2010, Jundallah conducted a twin suicide bombing in Zahedan outside a mosque, killing dozens of people, including members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The State Department aggressively denies that the U.S. government had or has any ties to Jundallah. "We have repeatedly stated, and reiterate again that the United States has not provided support to Jundallah," a spokesman wrote in an email to the Wall Street Journal, following Jundallah's designation as a terrorist organization. "The United States does not sponsor any form of terrorism. We will continue to work with the international community to curtail support for terrorist organizations and prevent violence against innocent civilians. We have also encouraged other governments to take comparable actions against Jundallah."

A spate of stories in 2007 and 2008, including a report by ABC News and a New Yorker article, suggested that the United States was offering covert support to Jundallah. The issue has now returned to the spotlight with the string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and has outraged serving and retired intelligence officers who fear that Israeli operations are endangering American lives.

"This certainly isn't the first time this has happened, though it's the worst case I've heard of," former Centcom chief and retired Gen. Joe Hoar said of the Israeli operation upon being informed of it. "But while false-flag operations are hardly new, they're extremely dangerous. You're basically using your friendship with an ally for your own purposes. Israel is playing with fire. It gets us involved in their covert war, whether we want to be involved or not."

The Israeli operation left a number of recently retired CIA officers sputtering in frustration. "It's going to be pretty hard for the U.S. to distance itself from an Israeli attack on Iran with this kind of thing going on," one of them told me.

Jundallah head Abdolmalek Rigi was captured by Iran in February 2010. Although initial reports claimed that he was captured by the Iranians after taking a flight from Dubai to Kyrgyzstan, a retired intelligence officer with knowledge of the incident told me that Rigi was detained by Pakistani intelligence officers in Pakistan. The officer said that Rigi was turned over to the Iranians after the Pakistani government informed the United States that it planned to do so. The United States, this officer said, did not raise objections to the Pakistani decision.

Iran, meanwhile, has consistently claimed that Rigi was snatched from under the eyes of the CIA, which it alleges supported him. "It doesn't matter," the former intelligence officer said of Iran's charges. "It doesn't matter what they say. They know the truth."

Rigi was interrogated, tried, and convicted by the Iranians and hanged on June 20, 2010. Prior to his execution, Rigi claimed in an interview with Iranian media -- which has to be assumed was under duress -- that he had doubts about U.S. sponsorship of Jundallah. He recounted an alleged meeting with "NATO officials" in Morocco in 2007 that raised his suspicions. "When we thought about it we came to the conclusion that they are either Americans acting under NATO cover or Israelis," he said.

While many of the details of Israel's involvement with Jundallah are now known, many others still remain a mystery -- and are likely to remain so. The CIA memos of the incident have been "blue bordered," meaning that they were circulated to senior levels of the broader U.S. intelligence community as well as senior State Department officials.

What has become crystal clear, however, is the level of anger among senior intelligence officials about Israel's actions. "This was stupid and dangerous," the intelligence official who first told me about the operation said. "Israel is supposed to be working with us, not against us. If they want to shed blood, it would help a lot if it was their blood and not ours. You know, they're supposed to be a strategic asset. Well, guess what? There are a lot of people now, important people, who just don't think that's true."

-This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 13/01/2012
-Mark Perry is an author and historian. His latest book is Talking to Terrorists

Iran: The 20 Percent Solution

Iran's provocative uranium-enrichment program is at the center of its confrontation with the West. It's also, potentially, the way out.

BY OLLI HEINONEN

On Monday, Jan. 9, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed that Iran had begun producing 20 percent enriched uranium at Fordow, a fuel enrichment plant buried deep underground near the holy city of Qom. On the surface, there is little new here: Since February 2010, Iran has been producing 20 percent enriched uranium at Natanz, another once-secret site located about 3 ½ hours from Tehran.

Iran disclosed neither the Natanz nor the Fordow site to the IAEA until forced to do so, in 2002 and 2009, respectively, when outside observers discovered and publicized them. Fordow is smaller than Natanz in scale, but better protected from prying satellites and, potentially, a bombing campaign. Worryingly, the plant appears designed to focus on producing higher enrichments.

What has raised the world's suspicions is that Iran continues to produce 20 percent enriched uranium despite the fact that this exceeds its civilian needs and, as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad acknowledged in September, does not make economic sense.

There are serious concerns over the proliferation aspects of Iran's enrichment activities. Increasing stockpiles of enriched uranium, together with studies related to an advanced nuclear weapon design, are building blocks for attaining a virtual nuclear weapon capability. (A state has a virtual nuclear arsenal if it possesses weapons-usable nuclear material and the knowledge and experience needed to design, manufacture, assemble, and deploy nuclear weapons.) So Iran's recent announcement that it plans to increase production of 20 percent enriched uranium is alarming.

Over the last few days, Iran has begun operating two enrichment cascades at Fordow. Furthermore, Iran is completing installation of two additional cascades, with their planned operation already announced. Once the four cascades at Fordow, in addition to the two Natanz ones, are operating, Iran will be able to produce 15 kg of 20 percent enriched UF6 (uranium hexafluoride) per month. This process uses as feed 3.5 percent enriched uranium, which is produced currently at a rate of 140 to 150 kg UF6 per month at Natanz.

This means that Iran's entire uranium-enrichment program is now being devoted to producing 20 percent enriched uranium. At current production rates, Iran can expect to have a stock of 20 percent enriched uranium of around 250 kg UF6 by the end of 2012, as well as more than 4 tons of 3.5 percent enriched UF6. (These estimates are based on the use of IR-1 centrifuges, which are now also operating at Fordow.) Iran will not likely be able to commission a large number of more advanced and powerful centrifuges before 2013. But if that happens, it will be an altogether different scenario.

If Iran decides to produce weapons-grade uranium from 20 percent enriched uranium, it has already technically undertaken 90 percent of the enrichment effort required. What remains to be done is the feeding of 20 percent uranium through existing additional cascades to achieve weapons-grade enrichment (more than 90 percent uranium). This step is much faster than the earlier ones. Growing the stockpile of 3.5 percent and 20 percent enriched uranium, as Iran is now doing, provides the basic material needed to produce four to five nuclear weapons. With IR-1 centrifuges, it would take half a year to go from 3.5 percent enriched uranium to weapons-grade material for the first nuclear device. More advanced centrifuges would cut the time required in half. If, however, IR-1s are using 20 percent enriched uranium as a feed, 250 kg UF6 with that level of enrichment can be turned to weapons-grade material in a month's time. This does not automatically mean Iran will be able to build a nuclear weapon in one month -- building an atomic bomb is a complex endeavor that requires precision engineering capabilities that Iran may lack -- but it does mean that the country would be able to "break out" of its international obligations very quickly should it decide to do so.

How can Iran convince the international community that its nuclear program will follow a peaceful track?

There are a few ways to go about it. One way would be to suspend the production of enriched uranium and convert the existing 3.5 percent and 20 percent enriched uranium stocks, with the assistance of the international community, to fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor, as well as for another modern research reactor that could be provided to Iran. This approach would be good for Iran, as it would give the country a sustainable production of radioisotopes for industrial and medical uses in the shortest time.

Iran would also have to address the world's concerns about the military dimensions of its nuclear program, concerns laid out in the IAEA's most recent monitoring report. So far, Iran's leaders have failed to do so, despite being signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. With sanctions beginning to bite, tensions growing in the Persian Gulf, and international patience running out, there's no time like the present.

-This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 11/01/2012
-Olli Heinonen, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, is a former deputy director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, where he headed its Department of Safeguards.

Arab League's Indecision Is Fuelling Assad's Belligerence

By Michael Young

Arab League secretary general Nabil al-Arabi (R) meets with veteran Sudanese military intelligence officer General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi, head of the Arab League observer mission in Syria, in Cairo on December 24, 2011. (AFP PHOTO/MOHAMMED ABED)

When lost, continue walking around in circles. That is the motto of the Arab League in dealing with the crisis in Syria. And judging from the wavering in Arab capitals over what to do next with the regime of President Bashar Al Assad, little is likely to soon change.

Sensing the confusion among Arab governments over an Arab League plan to end the Syrian violence, Mr Al Assad counterattacked in a speech on Tuesday, rebuking them for not standing by his government. He hopes to profit from their mood to regain the initiative at home.

When Mr Al Assad accepted the Arab plan, he widened the cracks in Arab ranks over how to resolve his country's problems. The plan calls for a withdrawal of the army from Syrian cities, the release of prisoners, and a dialogue between the regime and opposition, as well as the deployment of Arab monitors to implement the scheme.

Each of these conditions is a minefield. The Syrian army has not withdrawn from cities, with some 400 people estimated to have been killed since the monitors arrived last month. Yet there are too few of them to verify compliance. Some prisoners have been released, but without accurate figures for how many have been detained, and without a mandate for monitors to freely enter detention facilities, it will be impossible to ascertain the actual number. And while the Assad regime says it welcomes dialogue, it wants to choose its interlocutor, and sees talks as a way of splitting the opposition further.

Last November, Arab states seemed more decisive. They suspended Syria's Arab League membership when it refused to sign the protocol formalising the Arab plan. They also imposed sanctions and a travel ban on Syrian officials. The impact was limited, in there being no mechanism compelling Arab League members to enforce sanctions. While they went further than expected, Arab officials said the decisions were necessary to avoid "internationalisation" of the crisis through the United Nations Security Council.

Mr Al Assad's foes now describe the execution of the Arab plan as a fiasco. In a report last Sunday, the monitors hardly dispelled the unease. Killings and arrests have continued, though Arab divisions meant the Arab League could agree only on pursuing the mission for now. The arrival of new monitors is being delayed by Syria, their movement is controlled by the security forces, and Mr Al Assad feels confident.

Arab dynamics are revealing in this regard. Other than Qatar, which has played a vanguard role in opposing the leadership in Damascus, there is a profound disconnect between the Arab regimes and the Syrian opposition, whose minimal demand is Mr Al Assad's removal. That explains the opposition's mistrust of the Arab League, itself a mirror of the Arab consensus - or rather the lack thereof.

The two traditional Arab powerhouses, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, remain deeply ambiguous on Syria. The Egyptian military council is focused on managing its domestic affairs and is avoiding taking risks abroad, despite the potential strategic advantage to Cairo of a breakdown in the Syrian-Iranian alliance. More cynically, the generals, keen to consolidate their authority at home, favour the status quo regionally. They fear that new convulsions, above all Mr Al Assad's fall, would further embolden their Egyptian detractors.

The disposition of the Egyptian military can be read in the actions of the Arab League secretary general, Nabil Al Arabi, an Egyptian who like most of his predecessors is close to the power centres in Cairo. Mr Al Arabi has been indecisive and behind the curve on Syria, and has not used his pulpit to advance his organisation's plan. Instead, he has obtained agreement over lowest common denominators among the Arab states, effectively neutralising the Arab mission.

Saudi Arabia has also been strikingly hazy on Mr Al Assad's repression. The kingdom has condemned the actions of the Syrian regime, but it has also shied away from shaping Arab agreement on events in Syria. Riyadh has played a largely passive role, in contrast to its interventions in Bahrain and Yemen. That could be because the Saudi plate is full and the royal family is going through a transition; perhaps, too, the Saudis prefer a slow corrosion of Syria's regime. That said, the prospect of ensuring that Iran loses a vital ally in the Levant has appeared not to galvanise Saudi decision-makers.

The Saudis' response on Monday to the Arab League monitor's report showed that they still prefer to have it both ways. The council of ministers issued a statement calling on the Syrian government to carry out the Arab plan and protect civilians. Yet it also implicitly supported pursuing the plan, affirming that it has been "partially" implemented - which the opposition rejects.

Other Arab states have also shown no enthusiasm for aggressively applying Arab decisions. Iraq, Algeria, Sudan, Morocco, Jordan and Lebanon have either been openly sympathetic to Mr Al Assad or have gone with the flow. Most of the Gulf states will follow the Saudi lead, which has been to step back. Qatar has stood out as the exception, but in March it relinquishes the rotating presidency of the Arab League to Iraq, which has defended Mr Al Assad.

There is no Arab momentum to side with the Syrian population against their leaders. This risks dangerously alienating the Syrian opposition, leading to radicalisation of the uprising. That may be precisely what Mr Al Assad wants, but it is also what the Arab states claim they want to avert. Syria is now an urgent matter for the UN Security Council, and has been for months. Arab indecision shows why.

-This commentary was published in The National on 12/01/2012
-Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut and author of The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon's Life Struggle

Bashar al-Assad has three options

Syria's leader does not seem happy in his work. As the crisis deepens, he could choose to run, to fight or to negotiate

By Simon Tisdall

Bashar al-Assad said in his Damascus speech that he still had the support of the Syrian people. Photograph: Ho/AP

Bashar al-Assad went into typical passive-aggressive mode in his Damascus speech, vowing to crush dissent while simultaneously promising vague reforms. Broadly defined, this sort of behaviour involves procrastination, stubbornness, resentment, sullenness, obstructionism, self-pity and a tendency to create chaotic situations. Since the Syrian uprising erupted around his ears last March, Assad, who never really wanted the presidency and has proved himself spectacularly ill-suited to it, has exhibited all of these character defects and more.

The Syrian leader's state of mind is increasingly relevant as the nine-month-old national crisis deepens, with no sign yet of how or when it may be resolved. Critics say the president is isolated and out of touch with reality; others that he is a pawn, or even a hostage, in the hands of more powerful relatives and military figures. He certainly does not give the impression of being happy in his work.

Whatever the truth, with the deaths of at least 5,000 people laid at his door, with Arab leaders joining the US and Europe in demanding his resignation, with the prospect of a UN crimes against humanity prosecution looming and with the regime's collapse and all-out civil war a distinct possibility, the pressure on Assad must be all but unbearable. Will he crack? And what are his options?

1. Flight

If the situation gets simply too hot to handle, Assad could try making a run for it, as did the Arab spring's first victim, Tunisia's former president, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali. He headed for Saudi Arabia, a favourite refuge for displaced dictators such as Uganda's Idi Amin and Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh. Assad turning up on their doorstep would be an embarrassment for Saudi leaders (who do not like him), but if it brought stability back to the region, it might be worth it.

Alternatively, Assad could make a dash for Iran, his long-time ally, or even Russia, which has consistently shielded his regime from international censure and has sent a naval taskforce to the Syrian port of Tartus in a show of solidarity. If he does decide to leg it, a key consideration will be what to do with his British-born wife, Asma, and their three children. Any request from her to return to her family home in Acton, west London, could present Britain with an interesting diplomatic and security headache.

Assad insisted in his speech that he was not going anywhere. But Gaddafi-style, he also sounded seriously deluded. "I am not someone who abandons responsibility. I am in this position because of support from the people and if I leave, it will be because of the desire of the people."

2. Fight

The current approach to the crisis comes straight from the play-book written by Assad's late father, Hafez. He notoriously put down an earlier uprising in Hama in 1982, when up to 10,000 people are said to have died. The difference this time is that, so far at least, bloody repression has not worked and the unrest in not confined to one city or region. Increasingly, regime opponents backed by defecting military personnel have resorted to armed resistance across the board. Assad also says they are getting assistance from abroad, a claim that is difficult to verify.

"The situation in Syria is heading towards a religious, sectarian, racial war, and this needs to be prevented," Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime minister, warned this week, voicing a concern that is shared across the region and in the west. Assad's dilemma is that if the killing continues unchecked – in other words, if he cannot definitively reassert his control – the Arab League mission may be discredited and withdrawn, leading to direct UN security council action and possible Libyan-style intervention.

So far there is no sign the violent crackdown is working. But in his speech, Assad suggested he would not change tack – while again appearing to deny reality. "There is no cover for anyone. There are no orders for anyone to open fire on any citizen," he said. His main aim was to restore order and this could only be achieved by "hitting terrorists with an iron fist … there is no tolerance for terrorism or for those who use weapons to kill".

3. Negotiation

Assad again floated vague promises of reform, including a constitutional referendum on a proposed multi-party system in March. But his credibility is shot among many, if not most, Syrians after years of failing to carry through similar pledges. If Assad pushed for genuine change, he could risk being dumped by regime associates, notably by his tough-guy brother, Maher, the most powerful man in Syria's security apparatus who is blamed for much of the recent killing.

Assad has also burned his boats with leading Arab states and western countries, including the US and Britain, which initially entertained high hopes of his leadership when he took over in 2000. They and neighbours such as Turkey now see no alternative but for him to stand down. Ironically, Israel – Syria's old enemy – might prefer it if he survived, for the sake of a stable border. And if the alternative to Assad is an anti-western, Sunni Muslim-led regime, then the US and Iraq, for different reasons, might also secretly prefer him to stay.

Apparently heedless of such nuances and of his need for support if he is to negotiate his way out this mess, Assad poured contempt on fellow Arab leaders in his speech. "The Arab League has failed for six decades to take a position in the Arab interest … We should not be surprised," he said. Yet at the same time he said Syria would not "close the door" to any Arab proposal that respected its sovereignty and unity. This suggests he still hopes for some face-saving regional formula that would enable him to stay in power.

Egypt may yet serve as a model for what happens in Syria. In this scenario, the regime figurehead – Hosni Mubarak/Assad – is removed and put on symbolic trial but the regime itself, represented by the military and other powerful insider forces, having offered up this high-profile sacrifice, remains largely intact. The revolution appears to have succeeded, the violence mostly stops, and there is a big celebratory party. But the morning after, it slowly dawns that nothing much has really changed.

-This commentary was published in The Guardian on 10/01/2012
-Simon Tisdall is an assistant editor of the Guardian and a foreign affairs columnist. He was previously a foreign leader writer for the paper and has also served as its foreign editor and its US editor, based in Washington DC. He was the Observer's foreign editor from 1996-98

Algeria … The Dog That Didn't Bark

Algeria looked ripe for revolution. What happened?

BY JAMES TRAUB

What's wrong with Algeria? Over the last year, the fever that is the Arab Spring has overtaken one country after another. Monarchies like Morocco or Jordan have been able to focus popular discontent on the government rather than the head of state; oil sheikdoms like Qatar or Kuwait have bought social peace. But no autocratic republic, no matter how brutal, has been able to resist the storm -- except Algeria. Here is a country where strikes and demonstrations were routine long before 2011, where newspapers openly mocked an enfeebled leader, where security forces and pro-regime thugs confronted rioters amid the first stirrings of the Arab Spring. A year ago, Algeria might well have been voted most likely to overthrow its ruler. But it hasn't. In fact, the mass protests petered out. Why? Why elsewhere, and not Algeria?

Very few Americans visit Algeria, or study it, or know much about it. You probably didn't know, for example, that Algeria is the biggest country in Africa -- bigger even, than undivided Sudan, which was always said to be roughly the size of Western Europe. Most of it, of course, is the Sahara Desert, though with 35 million people Algeria is also the second-largest nation in the Arab world (behind Egypt, of course). Algeria has the world's fourth-largest reserves of natural gas. It has $150 billion in its sovereign wealth fund. Are you feeling a bit ashamed yet that you don't more about Algeria?

Algeria was, like Tunisia and Morocco, a French colony. But France ruled Algeria as an overseas extension of la patrie, and would not, or could not, part with it. French rule in Algeria ended with the horrendous civil war of 1954-1962, a struggle whose atrocities were famously memorialized in Gilles Pontecorvo's film Battle of Algiers. The anti-colonial war brutalized Algerian society and left in its wake a legacy of revolutionary rhetoric, and revolutionary posturing. Algeria became an avant-garde autocracy -- the Cuba of the Maghreb. The state wrapped itself in the flag of revolution.

But then something remarkable happened: Chadli Benjedid, a president installed by Algeria's shadowy military leaders, decided to give democracy a try. After winning re-election in 1988, Benjedid promulgated a new constitution and submitted it to a national referendum. The constitution eliminated all reference to socialism, removed restrictions on freedom of speech and legalized unions and political parties. In a matter of months, as John P. Entelis, the rare American Algeria expert, writes in the current issue of The Journal of North African Studies, "the Algerian political system had been fundamentally transformed from a single-party authoritarian state to a multiparty, pluralistic nation of laws."

For the next two years, Algeria carried out an experiment in democracy which the Arab world had never seen before, and has not seen again until now. An Islamist party, the FIS, won an overwhelming fraction of seats in local elections -- and the vote was allowed to stand. Entelis says that the FIS espoused a moderate brand of Islam, like Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood or Tunisia's Ennahda (though other accounts claim that the FIS sought to discredit the state and undermine the constitution). But in January 1992, citing the fear of an Islamist takeover, the military annulled the election and overthrew the regime. The West, equally frightened of political Islam, offered little criticism. The FIS did pose a threat to the secular Algerian state; but the military also exploited that threat in order to re-impose its authority over the state, as the Turkish military would do the following year after a moderate Islamist party came to power through election.

Turkey got a second chance with the election of the current ruling party, the AKP, in 2002; Algeria never did. The failure of liberal meliorism reignited Algeria's habits of revolutionary polarization. The military hunted down the FIS leadership and the rank-and-file; the party splintered, with some joining the state and others embracing terrorism. For the next six years, both sides engaged in a mutual slaughter which left as many 200,000 dead -- the worst spasm of violence in Algeria's convulsive history. The civil war of the 1990s traumatized the Algerian public far more deeply than the war against France had done. The uprising against France had fostered an image of national solidarity; the civil war turned Algeria's activists and reformers against one another and shattered the state's revolutionary legitimacy.

President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, first elected in 1999, brought the war to an end. Bouteflika advanced some mild social reforms and tolerated far more freedom of the press than was available, for example, in Tunisia. He was re-elected in a relatively free election in 2004, and was given credit both for seeking to modernize the economy and for seeking to tame the power of the security and intelligence apparatus. He permitted Islamists, who had come to terms with the civil state, to operate openly, and to run for office. Nevertheless, as Bouteflika continued to consolidate power in his own office, jailed opponents, and undermined the independence of parliament and the judiciary, he came to be seen as a "liberal autocrat" in the mold of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. And with high unemployment and rising costs, by 2011 Algerians were as deeply alienated from the state as Egyptians or Tunisians. The chief difference was that they expressed their frustration more openly, through strikes and public criticism of the regime, which Bouteflika, like his predecessors, tolerated within limits.

When the Arab Spring blossomed last January, Entelis says, Algeria's opposition -- human rights activists, Islamists, Trotskyites -- seemed ready to overcome the deep mutual suspicions that had long separated them, and had been exacerbated by the civil war. He thought, and Algerian activists hoped, that 2011 might be the fulfillment of 1992. Last January, in between the protests in Tunisia and Egypt, riots in Algiers over food prices and unemployment led to the death of five protesters and the wounding of 800. Demonstrations spread to major cities across the country.

Bouteflika responded with force, but also with conciliation. In February, the regime lifted the emergency law that had been imposed in 1992. In April, Bouteflika went on the air to announce constitutional reforms designed to "strengthen democracy," including a new electoral law. In May, the government announced that it would boost subsidies on flour, milk, cooking oil, and sugar -- on top of a 34 percent increase in the salaries of civil servants announced earlier in the year. Algeria, it turned out, belonged to a category of its very own -- more flexible than neighbors like Libya or Egypt, but also wealthy enough that, like the Gulf sheikdoms, it could use payoffs to blunt social anger. Instead of gathering force, as happened elsewhere, the mass protests in Algeria subsided.

Algerians remembered their own past all too well. Despots like Syria's Bashar al-Assad warned that protest will unleash extremism -- and then consciously provoked precisely the violent response they had warned of. But in Algeria, political dissent had boiled over into fratricide in very recent memory. A relatively moderate form of Islam had degenerated into terrorism; indeed, one remnant of the FIS ultimately signed on with al Qaeda in the Maghreb and remains a threat to the state, if a distant one. And so while Algeria's tradition of protest permitted a degree of activism forbidden elsewhere, the fear that it would boil over, leading the military to respond with murderous force, acted as a check on public resentment.

The Bouteflika regime is itself engaged in a battle for supremacy with le pouvoir, as Algerians call the security and intelligence apparatus, with the ultimate prize being control over Algeria's oil and gas revenues. Entelis argues that the reactionary forces within le pouvoir have recently gained the upper hand. Meanwhile, Algeria's ruling elite seems more divorced than ever from Algeria's restive public. Deeply fearful of the domino effect of the Arab Spring, the regime sided with Muammar al-Qaddafi during the Libyan civil war, and was the last country in the region to recognize Libya's National Transition Council, rendering its "revolutionary" credentials yet more threadbare. Secular and Islamist opponents have called on Bouteflika to replace his current prime minister in advance of parliamentary elections this May. But Entelis says that he doesn't expect either evolutionary or revolutionary change. Algeria has tried both, and both failed.

Algeria's story reminds us of the danger of looking at events categorically. Because the same grievances have given rise to protest across the Arab world, and because that protest has taken a very similar form from one country to the next, we tend to expect the outcomes to resemble each other as well. But they won't, because different histories have shaped different political cultures in each of these places. Algeria also forces us to recognize the weight of the past. History is not destiny: Had the military chosen not to step in, Algeria might well have groped its way to democracy. Turkey went one way, Algeria another. But history shapes expectations and fears, conditions the response to new events. All of us, whether we know it or not, carry our past within ourselves.

-This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 06/01/2012
-James Traub is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a fellow of the Center on International Cooperation

Can Iran Close the Strait of Hormuz?

By MARK THOMPSON

Iranian Admiral Habibollah Sayyari says it would be "very easy" for his navy to shut down the Strait of Hormuz

Since it doesn’t have nuclear weapons yet, Iran is playing the lone trump card in its hand: threatening to shut down the Strait of Hormuz through which Persian Gulf oil flows to fuel much of the world’s economy. Iranian navy chief Admiral Habibollah Sayyari told state television Wednesday that it would be “very easy” for his forces to shut down the chokepoint. “Iran has comprehensive control over the strategic waterway,” he said as his vessels continued a 10-day exercise near the strait.

But just how good a trump card is it?

“Iran has constructed a navy with considerable asymmetric and other capabilities designed specifically to be used in an integrated way to conduct area denial operations in the Persian Gulf and SoH, and they routinely exercise these capabilities and issue statements of intent to use them,” Jonathan Schroden writes in a recent report for the Pentagon-funded Center for Naval Analyses. “This combination of capabilities and expressed intent does present a credible threat to international shipping in the Strait.”

Not so fast, other experts maintain. “We believe that we would be able to maintain the strait,” Marine General James Cartwright, then-vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress last year. “But it would be a question of time and impact and the implications from a global standpoint on the flow of energy, et cetera, [that] would have ramifications probably beyond the military actions that would go on.”

International maritime law guarantees unimpeded transit through straits, and any deliberate military disruption is an act of war. “Anyone who threatens to disrupt freedom of navigation in an international strait is clearly outside the community of nations,” the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet said from its headquarters in Bahrain. “Any disruption will not be tolerated.”

Of course, brandishing a threat and carrying it out are two different things. “By presuming that Iran can easily close the strait, Western diplomats concede leverage, and the current U.S. habit of reacting immediately and aggressively to Iranian provocations risks unnecessary escalation,” Eugene Gholz, a professor at the University of Texas, wrote in Foreign Policy in 2009. “Iran would find it so difficult, if not impossible, to close the strait that the world can afford to relax from its current hair-trigger alert.”

Most U.S. military thinkers, speaking privately, seem to agree. There are two linked issues at play here: military and monetary. While it might be challenging for the Iranian navy to shut down commerce flowing through the strait, Iranian moves to carry out that threat could have much the same effect. Oil companies, and the shippers that transport their product by water, are conservative business types, not given to putting their costly tankers and crews in harm’s way. But they’d get over it pretty quickly, and commerce would resume, with higher insurance rates.

One point worth noting: analyses of possible Iranian military action to plug the strait generally note that Iran gets about half of its national budget from oil exports that transit the strait. But if the next round of sanctions keeps Iranian oil off the world market, that brake on Iranian military action will be gone.

Iran has been practicing such saber-rattling for decades, and it always sends a nervous twitch through the world oil markets, spiking prices upward. It has done so this week, and oil’s per-barrel price has flirted with the $100 mark. That’s a drag on the world economic powers seeking to punish Iran for its nuclear-development efforts, and Tehran plainly views it as a net-positive for itself. That’s especially true in the year leading up to a U.S. presidential election, where the incumbent is seeking a second term.

About a fifth of the world’s oil flows through the strait, which is only 34 miles wide at its narrowest point. But the navigable part of the strait is 20 miles across, although shipping is supposed to use a pair of two-mile wide channels, one inbound and the other outbound. Iran borders the strait to the north and east, and it has a major naval base – and its key submarine base – close by.

“While closing the Strait may be possible for Iran for a short period of time, the U.S. military would prevail in a conflict with Iran in order to re-open the Strait at a great cost to the Iranian armed forces,” Brenna Schnars wrote in a 2010 study at the Naval Postgraduate School. “With international mistrust concerning the Iranian nuclear program already at the height of world concerns, an Iranian closure of the Strait would only enrage the majority of the international community, as their economies would severely suffer without its oil imports from the Persian Gulf.”

U.S. Navy Commander Rodney Mills examined the military implications of an Iranian move to shut the strait in a 2008 study at the Naval War College. His bottom line:

There is consensus among the analysts that the U.S. military would ultimately prevail over Iranian forces if Iran sought to close the strait. The various scenarios and assumptions used in the analyses produce a range of potential timelines for this action, from the optimistic assessment that the straits would be open in a few days to the more pessimistic assessment that it would take five weeks to three months to restore the full flow of maritime traffic.

But fighting an Iranian effort to close the strait may not be easy. Iran in recent years has acquired “thousands of sea mines, wake homing torpedoes, hundreds of advanced cruise missiles and possibly more than one thousand small Fast Attack Craft and Fast Inshore Attack Craft,” U.S. Navy Commander Daniel Dolan wrote in a report last year at the Naval War College. “…The majority of these A2/AD [anti-access, area-denial] forces are concentrated astride the vital Strait of Hormuz…” He urged the U.S. and its allies to fight any Iranian effort to shut the strait from the relative safely of the Arabian Sea, that broad body of water between the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. “It will allow the [allied commander] to concentrate fires on attriting the enemy forces,” he said, “while denying the enemy an equal opportunity to return fires.”

History offers some guidance. In the 1980s, the “tanker wars” between Iran and Iraq in the Persian Gulf – which led to 544 attacks and 400 civilians killed over eight years – the oil flow dropped by 25% before returning to normal levels. Insurances rates also would rise – perhaps from a penny to $6 a barrel, Mills estimates – a steep hike in insurance premiums, but not that much when tacked on to a $100 barrel of oil. “Despite the increased risk,” Mills notes, “history shows us that insurance will remain available at a reasonable rate for the value of the cargo shipped.”

Iran has scant chance of covertly mining the strait, U.S. military officers say. Small boats or anti-ship missiles would make more military sense. But Iran’s trio of Russian-built Kilo-class submarines, as well as a dozen smaller subs, would be vulnerable to U.S. anti-submarine warfare. “The (U.S.) Navy,” Mills wrote, “would be eager to permanently eliminate the Iranian submarine threat in a naval conflict.”

And attacks Iran launched against tankers aren’t guaranteed to work. “Most tankers today are of newer, double-hulled designs; coupled with internal compartmentalization, this tends to limit damage from an explosion,” Mills’ study said. “There are relatively few areas of vital machinery that could disable the vessel if damaged, and much of the vital machinery is underwater.” But what about all that oil? “The crude oil they carry tends to absorb and dissipate the shock caused by an explosion, reducing the effectiveness of the warhead,” Mills wrote. “And the crude oil is not very flammable, reducing the chance of fire or secondary explosion.”

All this is not to say any battle over the strait would be a cakewalk, as some U.S. officials erroneously predicted the Iraq war would be. If war were to break out, Iran would throw everything it has into the fight. “It’s clear that the Iranians have taken an approach in which they are going to attempt to use small boats, swarms, cruise missiles, mines, perhaps suicide boats, small submarines,” Vice Admiral Mark Fox, the top U.S. commander in the region, said earlier this year. “We watch them very carefully and understand where they are, what they’re doing.”

Fox’s 5th Fleet, which patrols the region, recommends its officers read Immortal: A Military History of Iran and Its Armed Forces, by CIA analyst Steven R. Ward. “Iran’s soldiers, from the famed `Immortals’ of ancient Persia to today’s Revolutionary Guard, have demonstrated through the centuries that they should not be underestimated,” a summary of the book on the fleet’s web site says. “The Iranians’ ability to impose high costs on their enemies by exploiting Iran’s imposing geography bear careful consideration today by potential opponents.”

Fox acknowledges that “imposing geography” cited by Ward as the admiral discussed how the Iranians would likely fight. “They have a long littoral there — it’s 1,300 nautical miles,” Fox said. “They’ve got a lot of places where they have an ability to set up, they have coves for small boats and cruise missiles that can potentially move around.” All this would complicate any conflict.

But Mills sees all the Iranian rhetoric and war gaming as little more than Persian saber rattling. “Iran gains more from the existence of their threat,” he concludes, “than they would by actually carrying it out.”

-This commentary was published in Time magazine’s blog on 28/12/2011

The World's Worst Human Rights Observer

As Arab League monitors work to expose President Bashar al-Assad's crackdown, the head of the mission is a Sudanese general accused of creating the fearsome "janjaweed," which was responsible for the worst atrocities during the Darfur genocide.

BY DAVID KENNER

                           Gen. Mohammad Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi

For the first time in Syria's nine-month-old uprising, there are witnesses to President Bashar al-Assad's crackdown, which according to the United Nations has claimed more than 5,000 lives. Arab League observers arrived in the country on Dec. 26, and traveled to the city of Homs -- the epicenter of the revolt, where the daily death toll regularly runs into the dozens, according to activist groups -- on Dec. 27. Thousands of people took to the streets to protest against Assad upon the observers' arrival, while activists said Syrian tanks withdrew from the streets only hours before the Arab League team entered the city.

"I am going to Homs," insisted Sudanese Gen. Mohammad Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi, the head of the Arab League observer mission, telling reporters that so far the Assad regime had been "very cooperative."

But Dabi may be the unlikeliest leader of a humanitarian mission the world has ever seen. He is a staunch loyalist of Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for genocide and crimes against humanity for his government's policies in Darfur. And Dabi's own record in the restive Sudanese region, where he stands accused of presiding over the creation of the feared Arab militias known as the "janjaweed," is enough to make any human rights activist blanch.

Dabi's involvement in Darfur began in 1999, four years before the region would explode in the violence that Secretary of State Colin Powell labeled as "genocide." Darfur was descending into war between the Arab and Masalit communities -- the same fault line that would widen into a bloodier interethnic war in a few years' time. As the situation escalated out of control, Bashir sent Dabi to Darfur to restore order.

According to Julie Flint and Alex De Waal's Darfur: A New History of a Long War, Dabi arrived in Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, on Feb. 9, 1999, with two helicopter gunships and 120 soldiers. He would stay until the end of June. During this time, he would make an enemy of the Masalit governor of West Sudan. Flint and De Waal write:

Governor Ibrahim Yahya describes the period as ‘the beginning of the organization of the Janjawiid', with [Arab] militia leaders like Hamid Dawai and Shineibat receiving money from the government for the first time. ‘The army would search and disarm villages, and two days later the Janjawiid would go in. They would attack and loot from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., only ten minutes away from the army. By this process all of Dar Masalit was burned.'

Yahya's account was supported five years later by a commander of the Sudan Liberation Army, a rebel organization movement in the region. "[T]hings changed in 1999," he told Flint and De Waal. "The PDF [Popular Defense Forces, a government militia] ended and the Janjawiid came; the Janjawiid occupied all PDF places."

Dabi provided a different perspective on his time in Darfur, but it's not clear that he disagrees on the particulars of how he quelled the violence. He told Flint and De Waal that he provided resources to resolve the tribes' grievances, and employed a firm hand to force the leaders to reconcile -- "threatening them with live ammunition when they dragged their feet," in the authors' words. "I was very proud of the time I spent in Geneina," Dabi said.

De Waal told FP that Yahya, who would become a senior commander for the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), had "an axe to grind" against the Sudanese military -- but his charge that Dabi spurred the creation of the janjaweed wasn't far off base.

"[T]he army command finds the militia useful and fearsome in equal measure," De Waal said.  "So al-Dabi's regularization of the Arab militia served both to rein them in, but also to legitimize their activities and retain them as a future strike force."

Dabi's role in Darfur is only one episode in a decades-long career that has been spent protecting the interests of Bashir's regime. He has regularly been trusted with authority over the regime's most sensitive portfolios: The day Bashir took power in a coup in 1989, he was promoted to head of military intelligence. In August 1995, after protesters at Khartoum University rattled the regime, Dabi became head of Sudan's foreign intelligence agency -- pushing aside a loyalist of Hassan al-Turabi, the hard-line Islamist cleric who helped Bashir rise to power but would be pushed aside several years later. And as civil war ravaged south Sudan, Dabi was tasked from 1996 to 1999 as chief of Sudan's military operations.

It is likely, however, Dabi's more recent career that led to his selection as head of the Arab League observer mission in Syria. He served as Sudan's ambassador to Qatar from 1999 to 2004, and would return to Doha after his term ended in a Darfur-related position -- making him a well-known quantity to the Qatari government, which has taken the lead among Arab states in pressuring Assad's regime.

In 2006, Dabi was appointed head of the Darfur Security Arrangements Implementation Commission (DSAIC) -- according to the peace agreement, De Waal said, a representative of the former rebels was supposed to get the position, but Bashir "simply ignored" that provision to tap Dabi. In this new position, he played a major role in the peace talks, sponsored by Qatar, which resulted in the government and one rebel group signing the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur in July 2011.

While much of Dabi's activities in recent years have been behind closed doors, his limited media statements show that he remains a Bashir loyalist par excellence. In 2006, he slammed U.N. Special Representative Jan Pronk's statement that Sudan had suffered defeats in Darfur as "false and misleading," according to the Sudanese press, urging Pronk to "steer clear" of military issues and "concentrate on his duties instead." That same year, his aide suggested there would be a time limit to the African Union troops in Darfur, saying the peacekeepers could "stay until the crisis is over, but not indefinitely."

Dabi's checkered past is only one of the criticisms of the observer mission, which human rights activists have criticized for falling far short of its promise to monitor the implementation of an Arab League initiative meant to end Assad's crackdown. Wissam Tarif, the Arab world coordinator for the human rights group Avaaz, slammed the mission for being far too small -- at roughly 50 people -- to monitor the situation across Syria, for failing to provide any biographical information about the observers to human rights organizations, and for relying on Assad's forces to shepherd them around the country. "I helped set up a meeting with activists in Homs, and [the observers] arrived with 10 security officers along with them," Tarif noted -- obviously a huge risk to the protest organizers' safety.

As monitors arrive in Homs, Syrians will no doubt cheer their arrival at the center of the uprising. But given the stumbles of the Arab League observer mission, it's clear that Syrians are still very much alone.

-David Kenner is an associate editor at Foreign Policy
-This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 27/12/2011