Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

FTR #899 Fara Mansoor on “The Deep October Surprise,” Part 4

Dave Emory’s entire life­time of work is avail­able on a flash dri­ve that can be obtained here. The new dri­ve is a 32-giga­byte dri­ve that is cur­rent as of the pro­grams and arti­cles post­ed by ear­ly win­ter of 2016. The new dri­ve (avail­able for a tax-deductible con­tri­bu­tion of $65.00 or more.)  (The pre­vi­ous flash dri­ve was cur­rent through the end of May of 2012.)

WFMU-FM is pod­cast­ing For The Record–You can sub­scribe to the pod­cast HERE.

You can sub­scribe to e‑mail alerts from Spitfirelist.com HERE

You can sub­scribe to RSS feed from Spitfirelist.com HERE.

You can sub­scribe to the com­ments made on pro­grams and posts–an excel­lent source of infor­ma­tion in, and of, itself HERE.

This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Intro­duc­tion: This broad­cast con­cludes our review of Fara Man­soor’s hero­ic, ground-break­ing research on what we call “The Deep Octo­ber Sur­prise,” and ref­er­ences the his­tor­i­cal lessons to be drawn from the inquiry to the con­tem­po­rary polit­i­cal scene.

In numer­ous pro­grams, we have dis­cussed what Peter Lev­en­da has termed “weaponized reli­gion.” In par­tic­u­lar, we have exam­ined what Peter termed weaponized Islam. With the recent Iran­ian nuclear deal and the lift­ing of eco­nom­ic sanc­tions against Iran, the his­to­ry of U.S./Iranian rela­tions has attained greater rel­e­vance.

In that con­text, we present the fourth and con­clud­ing broad­cast in a series of pro­grams revis­it­ing Fara Man­soor’s land­mark research on what we have termed the “Deep Octo­ber Sur­prise.” Usu­al­ly, the term “Octo­ber Sur­prise” refers to an alleged deal between the Reagan/Bush cam­paign and the Khome­i­ni regime in Iran to with­hold the U.S. hostages tak­en from the Amer­i­can Embassy until after Jim­my Carter’s humil­i­a­tion and con­se­quent elec­tion defeat were assured.

” . . . . By late August [of 1977], the Shah was total­ly con­fused. U.S. Ambas­sador Sul­li­van record­ed the Shah’s plead­ings over the out­break of vio­lence: ‘He said the pat­tern was wide­spread and that it was like an out­break of a sud­den rash in the country…it gave evi­dence of sophis­ti­cat­ed plan­ning and was not the work of spon­ta­neous oppo­si­tion­ists…the Shah pre­sent­ed that it was the work of for­eign intrigue…this intrigue went beyond the capa­bil­i­ties of the Sovi­et KGB and must, there­fore, also involve British and Amer­i­can CIA. The Shah went on to ask ‘Why was the CIA sud­den­ly turn­ing against him? What had he done to deserve this sort of action from the Unit­ed States?’ . . . . ”

Fara’s research goes far­ther and deep­er, sug­gest­ing that the CIA learned of the Shah’s can­cer in 1974 (from for­mer CIA direc­tor Richard Helms), with­held the infor­ma­tion from Jim­my Carter, installed Khome­ini’s Islam­ic fun­da­men­tal­ists as an anti-com­mu­nist bul­wark on the Sovi­et Union’s South­ern flank and then micro-man­aged the hostage cri­sis to insure the ascen­sion of the Reagan/Bush/Casey forces. What has become known as the Iran-Con­tra Scan­dal was an out­growth of this dynam­ic.

” . . . . With thou­sands of doc­u­ments to sup­port his posi­tion, Man­soor says that the “hostage cri­sis” was a polit­i­cal “man­age­ment tool” cre­at­ed by the pro-Bush fac­tion of the CIA, and imple­ment­ed through an a pri­ori Alliance with Khomeini’s Islam­ic Fun­da­men­tal­ists.” He says the pur­pose was twofold:

  • To keep Iran intact and com­mu­nist-free by putting Khome­i­ni in full con­trol.
  • To destablize the Carter Admin­is­tra­tion and put George Bush in the White House.

‘The pri­vate Alliance was the log­i­cal result of the intri­cate Iran­ian polit­i­cal real­i­ty of the mid-70s, and a com­plex net­work of pow­er­ful U.S.-Iranian ‘busi­ness’ rela­tion­ships,’ Man­soor states. ‘I first met Khome­i­ni in 1963 dur­ing the failed coup attempt against the Shah. Since that time I have been inti­mate­ly involved with Iran­ian pol­i­tics. I knew in 1979 that the whole, phoney ‘Islam­ic Rev­o­lu­tion’ was ‘mis­sion implau­si­ble’.’ Man­soor was frank. ‘There is sim­ply no way that those guys with the beards and tur­bans could have pulled off such a bril­liant­ly planned oper­a­tion with­out very sophis­ti­cat­ed help.’ . . .

. . . . ‘I have col­lect­ed enough data to yield a very clear pic­ture. Mr. Bush’s lieu­tenants removed the Shah, brought Khome­i­ni back to Iran, and guid­ed his rise to pow­er, stick­ing it to Pres­i­dent Carter, the Amer­i­can peo­ple (52 in par­tic­u­lar), and the Iran­ian peo­ple.’ . . .”

Extend­ing a doc­trine for­mu­lat­ed by then Sec­re­tary of State John Fos­ter Dulles in the ear­ly 1950’s, “the reli­gions of the East” were viewed by the nation­al secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment as a bul­wark against the U.S.S.R. (We note that the British orig­i­nal­ly installed the first Shah of Iran in the post World War I peri­od as an anti-Sovi­et bul­wark.) When Jim­my Carter nei­ther extend­ed George H.W. Bush’s CIA tenure nor appoint­ed Theodore Shack­ley as head of the agency, but fired Shack­ley and much of the insti­tu­tion­al­ized covert action team, his polit­i­cal fate was sealed.

” . . . Mansoor’s metic­u­lous research clear­ly demon­strates how Khomeini’s pub­lished vision of an Islam­ic Gov­ern­ment (Vilay­at-Faqih) dove­tailed with the region­al and glob­al strate­gic objec­tives of a hard-core sub­set of the U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment loy­al to George Bush. It shows that the Iran­ian hostage cri­sis was nei­ther a cri­sis nor chaos. In 1953, the CIA orches­trat­ed a coup in Iran, which threw out the demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­ern­ment and installed the Shah.

In order to under­stand the imper­a­tive of this Alliance, we must real­is­ti­cal­ly exam­ine the sociopo­lit­i­cal align­ment both in Iran and the U.S., and accu­rate­ly assess their respec­tive inter­ests to find the com­mon ground for this coa­les­cence. The anti-monar­chic forces in mid-70s Iran con­sist­ed of var­i­ous nation­al­ist groups includ­ing reli­gious reformists, the Islam­ic Fun­da­men­tal­ists, and the left­ists and com­mu­nists. . . . .

. . . . The Islam­ic Fun­da­men­tal­ists had no gov­ern­ment expe­ri­ence, but they had major grass­roots sup­port. Islam, in its Shi’ite for­mat, was deeply embed­ded in the lives of the vast major­i­ty of the Iran­ian peo­ple. The Fun­da­men­tal­ists were absolute­ly anti-com­mu­nist.

The philo­soph­i­cal divide with­in the U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment, espe­cial­ly the CIA, became quite seri­ous in the after­math of Water­gate. To make mat­ters worse, the elec­tion of Jim­my Carter in 1976, his cam­paign promise to clean the “cow­boy” ele­ments out of the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency and his “human rights” poli­cies alarmed the fac­tion of the CIA loy­al to George Bush. Bush was CIA direc­tor under Ger­ald Ford. Final­ly, the fir­ing of CIA Direc­tor George Bush by Carter, and the sub­se­quent “Hal­loween Mas­sacre” in which Carter fired over 800 CIA covert oper­a­tives in 1977, angered the “cow­boys” beyond all mea­sure. That was Carter’s Octo­ber sur­prise, 800 fir­ings on Hal­loween 1977.

Bush and his CIA coverts were well aware of the Shah’s ter­mi­nal can­cer, unknown to Pres­i­dent Carter. The team had an elab­o­rate vest­ed inter­est to pro­tect. They were deter­mined to keep Iran intact and com­mu­nist-free and put George Bush in the White House. . . .

Trac­ing the intri­cate net­work­ing of CIA and Iran­ian per­son­nel in the machi­na­tions of this gam­bit, this broad­cast high­lights a sig­na­ture event in April of 1978, months before Khome­i­ni took over and and more than a year before the hostages were tak­en from the U.S. Embassy.

” . . . . Man­soor pro­duced a con­fi­den­tial doc­u­ment called the “Coun­try Team Min­utes” of April 26, 1978, more than a year before the hostage cri­sis. The meet­ing was held in Iran. The sec­ond para­graph of the rou­tine min­utes, states, ‘The Ambas­sador com­ment­ed on our dis­tin­guished vis­i­tors, Ronald Rea­gan, George Bush and Mar­garet Thatch­er, and com­ment­ed that Teheran seems to be the site for an oppo­si­tion par­ties con­gress.’ Man­soor indi­cates the entire rela­tion­ship was prob­a­bly the most sophis­ti­cat­ed crim­i­nal act in recent his­to­ry. ‘That the peo­ple who, until recent­ly, were hold­ing pow­er in Wash­ing­ton and those who cur­rent­ly are still in con­trol in Teheran, got there by total­ly sub­vert­ing the demo­c­ra­t­ic process of both coun­tries is news. That their meth­ods of sub­ver­sion relied on kid­nap­ping, extor­tion and mur­der is crim­i­nal,’ Man­soor states. . . .”

Drama­tis Per­son­ae of the “Deep Octo­ber Sur­prise”:

A. Gen­er­al Hos­sein Far­doust:

  1. Far­doust was a key play­er in this dra­ma. Like Richard Cot­tam and Gen­er­al Qarani, he had been net­work­ing with the CIA/Shah/Helms milieu for decades. He was the head of an elite intel­li­gence orga­ni­za­tion with­in the Shah’s regime that super­seded the SAVAK (the Shah’s secret police) in impor­tance and influ­ence. It was from his long-time asso­ciate Far­doust that Helms learned that the Shah had can­cer. ” . . . In 1975, for­mer CIA direc­tor, and the U.S. Ambas­sador to Iran, Richard Helms learned of the Shah’s can­cer through the Shah’s clos­est con­fi­dant, Gen­er­al Hos­sein Far­doust. The Shah, Helms and Far­doust had been close per­son­al friends since their school days togeth­er in Switzer­land dur­ing the 1930s. . . .”
  2. Gen­er­al Far­doust set up an inci­dent that was cen­tral to the stag­ing of the upris­ing that installed Khome­i­ni in pow­er. ” . . . On Jan­u­ary 7, 1978, an insid­i­ous arti­cle enti­tled Iran and the Red and Black Colo­nial­ism, appeared in the Iran­ian dai­ly news­pa­per Ettela’at. It cas­ti­gat­ed the exiled Khome­i­ni, and pro­duced a mas­sive protest riot in the Holy City of Qum the next day. The cler­gy had lit­tle choice but to ral­ly to Khomeini’s defense. The Qum inci­dent shift­ed many of the cler­gy from a posi­tion of sup­port for the Shah’s monar­chy to an active oppo­si­tion. That ‘dirty trick’ per­pet­u­at­ed by Gen­er­al Far­doust was the trig­ger that sparked Islam­ic move­ment par­tic­i­pat­ing in the anti-Shah demo­c­ra­t­ic Rev­o­lu­tion. John D. Stem­pel, char­ac­ter­ized Fardoust’s impor­tance to the Alliance: ‘it is hard to over­es­ti­mate the val­ue of hav­ing a mole in the inner cir­cle of the Shah.’ . . .”
  3. After Khome­ini’s ascen­sion to pow­er, Gen­er­al Qarani (see below) con­sults with Gen­er­al Far­doust about the per­son­nel to fill Khome­ini’s gen­er­al staff of the armed forces. All the rec­om­men­da­tions are fol­lowed, except for the fill­ing of the head of SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police. Far­doust is then appoint­ed head of SAVAMA, Khome­ini’s ver­sion of SAVAK! ” . . . . On Feb­ru­ary 11, 1979, in seem­ing­ly a bizarre twist, Gen­er­al Qarani asked the Shah’s “eyes and ears” Gen­er­al Hossien Far­doust for rec­om­men­da­tions to fill the new top posts in Iran’s armed forces. Except for the rec­om­men­da­tion for the Chief of SAVAK, all the oth­ers were accept­ed. Short­ly after, Gen­er­al Far­doust became head of SAVAMA, Khomeini’s suc­ces­sor to SAVAK. . . .”

B. Dr. Ibrahim Yaz­di:

  1. Yaz­di is in close con­tact with 1953 coup par­tic­i­pant, Bush oper­a­tive and prob­a­ble CIA offi­cer Richard Cot­tam. ” . . . . In August [1978], the Bush team sent its own point man to meet the exiled Aya­tol­lah in Najaf. Pro­fes­sor Richard Cot­tam car­ried excel­lent cre­den­tials. Dur­ing the 1953 coup, he had been in charge of the CIA’s Iran Desk. He had also been in close con­tact with Dr. Ibrahim Yaz­di in the U.S. since 1975. . . .”
  2. In Sep­tem­ber of 1978, Yaz­di is vis­it­ed in the U.S. by Khome­i­ni ally Aya­tol­lah Mohammed Hus­sein Beheshti. ” . . . . In Mid-Sep­tem­ber, at the height of the rev­o­lu­tion, ‘one of the hand­ful of Khomeini’s trust­ed asso­ciates,’ Aya­tol­lah Mohammed Hus­sein Beheshti, secret­ly vis­it­ed the Unit­ed States. He also met with Yaz­di in Texas, among oth­ers. Beheshti was an advo­cate of the eye-for-an-eye school of jus­tice. . . .”
  3. Fol­low­ing an abortive takeover of the U.S. Embassy by Khome­i­ni fol­low­ers pos­ing as left­ists, Yaz­di con­nects U.S. Ambas­sador William Sul­li­van with Mashal­lah Khashani, who becomes chief of secu­ri­ty for the com­pound.  ” . . . . On Feb­ru­ary 14, soon after order was restored at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, Khomeini’s aide Yaz­di sup­plied the Embassy with a group of Ira­ni­ans for com­pound secu­ri­ty. Ambas­sador Sul­li­van installed, armed, and trained this Swat squad lead by SAVAK/CIA agent Mashal­lah Kah­sani, with whom Sul­li­van devel­oped a close work­ing rela­tion­ship. . . . ”

C. Gen­er­al Val­li­ol­lah Qarani:

  1. Like Gen­er­al Hos­sein Far­doust, Qarani was net­work­ing with the CIA milieu since the 1953 coup that installed the Shah. In April of 1978, he advised Khome­i­ni that the CIA was ready to remove the Shah. ” . . . . The same month, Khomeini’s old ally from the failed 1963 coup (that result­ed in Khomeini’s arrest and major upris­ing in June 1963 and his sub­se­quent exile to Iraq) Gen­er­al Val­li­ol­lah Qarani sent his emis­sary to meet Khome­i­ni in Najaf. Qarani had been a major CIA asset in Iran since the 1953 coup. See­ing anoth­er chance to gain pow­er for him­self, he advised Khome­i­ni, accord­ing to for­mer Iran­ian Pres­i­dent Abol Has­san Bani-sad­er: ‘If you set­tle for the Shah’s depar­ture and don’t use anti-Amer­i­can rhetoric, the Amer­i­cans are ready to take him out. . . .’ ”
  2. Qarani was then appoint­ed chief of staff of the army under Khome­i­ni.  ” . . . . Khome­i­ni moved quick­ly to estab­lish his author­i­ty. On Feb­ru­ary 5 he named Meh­di Bazargan, a devot­ed Mus­lim and anti-com­mu­nist, inter­im Prime Min­is­ter. Yaz­di and Abbas Amir Entezam became Bazargan’s deputies, Dr. San­jabi For­eign Min­is­ter, and Gen­er­al Qarani was named mil­i­tary Chief of Staff. . . . ”

D. Mashal­lah Khashani:

  1. Mashal­lah Khashani was a SAVAK and CIA agent who was installed by Khome­i­ni aide Dr. Ibrahim Yaz­di as chief of secu­ri­ty for the com­pound after an abortive takeover of the Embassy in Feb­ru­ary of 1979. ” . . . . On Feb­ru­ary 14, soon after order was restored at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, Khomeini’s aide Yaz­di sup­plied the Embassy with a group of Ira­ni­ans for com­pound secu­ri­ty. Ambas­sador Sul­li­van installed, armed, and trained this Swat squad lead by SAVAK/CIA agent Mashal­lah Kah­sani, with whom Sul­li­van devel­oped a close work­ing rela­tion­ship. . . . ”
  2. On Novem­ber 4th of 1979, “chief of secu­ri­ty” Khashani leads the takeover of the U.S. Embassy. This was the begin­ning of the hostage cri­sis. ” . . . . On Novem­ber 4, 1979, the U.S. Embassy was tak­en again. Lead­ing the charge was none oth­er than Ambas­sador Sullivan’s trust­ed Mashal­lah Kashani, the Embassy’s once and for­mer secu­ri­ty chief. . . .”

E. Aya­tol­lah Mohammed Hos­sein Beheshti:

  1. By July of 1977, a CIA analy­sis iden­ti­fies Beheshti as one of the major play­ers in any sce­nario fol­low­ing the removal of the Shah. ” . . . . By July 1977, antic­i­pat­ing trou­ble ahead, the Bush covert team issued a pre­lim­i­nary script for the tran­si­tion of pow­er in Iran. Accord­ing to John D. Stem­pel, a CIA ana­lyst and Deputy Chief Polit­i­cal offi­cer of the U.S. Embassy in Iran: “A ten page analy­sis of the oppo­si­tion writ­ten by the embassy’s polit­i­cal sec­tion in July 1977 cor­rect­ly iden­ti­fied Bakhtiar, Bazargan, Khome­i­ni and Beheshti as major actors in the dra­ma that began unfold­ing a year lat­er. . . . ”
  2. In mid-Sep­tem­ber of 1978, Beheshti vis­its Yaz­di in the Unit­ed States. ” . . . . In Mid-Sep­tem­ber, at the height of the rev­o­lu­tion, “one of the hand­ful of Khomeini’s trust­ed asso­ciates,” Aya­tol­lah Mohammed Hus­sein Beheshti, secret­ly vis­it­ed the Unit­ed States. He also met with Yaz­di in Texas, among oth­ers. Beheshti was an advo­cate of the eye-for-an-eye school of jus­tice. . . .”

F. Richard Cot­tam: 

  1.  A pro­fes­sor, Cot­tam was in all like­li­hood the CIA oper­a­tive he was dur­ing the 1953 coup that oust­ed Mossadegh and re-installed the Shah. ” . . . In August, the Bush team sent its own point man to meet the exiled Aya­tol­lah in Najaf. Pro­fes­sor Richard Cot­tam car­ried excel­lent cre­den­tials. Dur­ing the 1953 coup, he had been in charge of the CIA’s Iran Desk. He had also been in close con­tact with Dr. Ibrahim Yaz­di in the U.S. since 1975. Curi­ous­ly, he admit­ted to Bani-sadr in 1987, that he had not been work­ing for the Carter Admin­is­tra­tion. Cottam’s vis­it must have had an impact, because Iran sud­den­ly began to expe­ri­ence a series of mys­te­ri­ous cat­a­stro­phes. . . .”
  2. Cot­tam tried to arrange a meet­ing between Carter secu­ri­ty aide Gary Sick and Khome­ini’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive in the U.S., Ibrahim Yaz­di. ” . . . A few days lat­er, Carter’s Nation­al Secu­ri­ty aide, Gary Sick, received a call from Richard Cot­tam, request­ing a dis­crete meet­ing between him and Khomeini’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive in the U.S., Dr. Yaz­di. Sick refused. . . .”
  3. Cot­tam requests of Gary Sick that the Carter admin­is­tra­tion facil­i­tate the tran­sit of Khome­i­ni from Iraq. “. . . . Octo­ber 3, 1978, Yaz­di picked up Khome­i­ni in Iraq and head­ed for Kuwait. Accord­ing to Gary Sick, he received an urgent call from Richard Cot­tam, learn­ing for the first time that Khome­i­ni had been forced out of Iraq. Sick was told that Khome­i­ni and his entourage were stuck in no man’s land while attempt­ing to cross the bor­der. Cot­tam was request­ing White House inter­ven­tion to resolve the issue. Sick respond, ‘there is noth­ing we could do.’ ”
  4. In Decem­ber of 1978, Cot­tam vis­its Khome­i­ni in Paris, not­ing that Ibrahim Yaz­di func­tioned as the Aya­tol­lah’s appar­ent chief of staff. ” . . . . Decem­ber 28, Cot­tam vis­it­ed Khome­i­ni in Paris where he not­ed that U.S. cit­i­zen Dr. Yaz­di was the ‘lead­ing tac­ti­cian in Khomeini’s camp’ and appar­ent ‘chief of staff’. . . .”
  5. In Jan­u­ary of 1979, Cot­tam goes to Teheran to pre­pare for Khome­ini’s return and instal­la­tion. ” . . . . Leav­ing Paris, Cot­tam slipped into Teheran, arriv­ing the first week in Jan­u­ary 1979, to pre­pare Khomeini’s tri­umphal return to Iran. . . .”

Some key events and rela­tion­ships fig­ur­ing promi­nent­ly in the mate­r­i­al pre­sent­ed in this pro­gram (mate­r­i­al in these broad­casts is delib­er­ate­ly over­lapped with infor­ma­tion from the pre­vi­ous pro­gram):

20. A few days lat­er, Carter’s Nation­al Secu­ri­ty aide, Gary Sick, received a call from Richard Cot­tam, request­ing a dis­crete meet­ing between him and Khomeini’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive in the U.S., Dr. Yaz­di. Sick refused.

21. Khome­i­ni for the first time, pub­licly called for the Shah’s over­throw.

22. In Mid-Sep­tem­ber, at the height of the rev­o­lu­tion, “one of the hand­ful of Khomeini’s trust­ed asso­ciates,” Aya­tol­lah Mohammed Hus­sein Beheshti, secret­ly vis­it­ed the Unit­ed States. He also met with Yaz­di in Texas, among oth­ers. Beheshti was an advo­cate of the eye-for-an-eye school of jus­tice.

23. In ear­ly Octo­ber 1978, the agent for the Bush covert team arranged to force Khome­i­ni out of Iraq.

24. Octo­ber 3, 1978, Yaz­di picked up Khome­i­ni in Iraq and head­ed for Kuwait. Accord­ing to Gary Sick, he received an urgent call from Richard Cot­tam, learn­ing for the first time that Khome­i­ni had been forced out of Iraq. Sick was told that Khome­i­ni and his entourage were stuck in no man’s land while attempt­ing to cross the bor­der. Cot­tam was request­ing White House inter­ven­tion to resolve the issue. Sick respond, “there is noth­ing we could do”.

25. Octo­ber 6, Khomeini’s entourage, hav­ing got­ten back through Bagh­dad, popped up in Paris. Accord­ing to Bani-sadr, “it was Khome­i­ni who insist­ed on going to Paris instead of Syr­ia or Alge­ria”. Who­ev­er helped Khome­i­ni out of the Kuwaiti bor­der impasse had to have been on good terms with both the French and Sad­dam Hus­sein.

26. Decem­ber 12, Yaz­di made a trip to the U.S. to pro­mote Khome­i­ni and his Islam­ic Repub­lic. Yaz­di met secret­ly with Hen­ry Precht in an unof­fi­cial capac­i­ty. Precht was the Direc­tor of the Iran Desk at the State Depart­ment and one of the Bush team’s main choke points in the Carter Admin­is­tra­tion. Lat­er Precht and Yaz­di appeared togeth­er for tele­vised dis­cus­sion of Iran. Yaz­di assured the Amer­i­can pub­lic that Khome­i­ni had not real­ly called for a “tor­rent of blood,” and that the “elec­tion would be absolute­ly free.” The Islam­ic Repub­lic “would enjoy full free­dom of speech and the press, includ­ing the right to attack Islam. [Khome­ini’s fat­wa against Salman Rushdie stands in sharp rebut­tal to that claim–D.E.]

27. Decem­ber 28, Cot­tam vis­it­ed Khome­i­ni in Paris where he not­ed that U.S. cit­i­zen Dr. Yaz­di was the “lead­ing tac­ti­cian in Khomeini’s camp” and appar­ent “chief of staff”. Khome­i­ni was not inter­est­ed in the Mul­lahs tak­ing over the gov­ern­ment. It is also not­ed that “Khomeini’s move­ment def­i­nite­ly plans to orga­nize a polit­i­cal par­ty to draw on Khomeini’s charis­ma. Cot­tam thinks such a par­ty would win all Majlis seats.”

28. Leav­ing Paris, Cot­tam slipped into Teheran, arriv­ing the first week in Jan­u­ary 1979, to pre­pare Khomeini’s tri­umphal return to Iran.

29. Jan­u­ary 4, 1979, Carter’s secret envoy, Gen­er­al Robert Huyser arrived in Iran. His mis­sion was to pre­vent the “fall of the Shah.” Accord­ing to Huyser, Alexan­der Haig, osten­si­bly a strong Shah sup­port­er-inex­plic­a­bly, “took vio­lent excep­tion to the whole idea.” Huyser recalled that “Gen­er­al Haig nev­er gave me a full expla­na­tion of his strong objec­tions.” Huyser also revealed that Ambas­sador Sul­li­van “had also expressed objec­tions.” Two pro-Shah advo­cates opposed to the pre­ven­tion of the Shah’s fall.

30. On Jan­u­ary 14, Pres­i­dent Carter final­ly “autho­rized a meet­ing between War­ren Zim­mer­man and Ibrahim Yaz­di. On the same day, Khome­i­ni, in an inter­view on CBS claimed, “a great part of the army was loy­al to him” and that “he will be in effect the strong man of Iran.”

31. On Jan­u­ary 16, in an exact repeat of the 1953 CIA coup, Bush’s covert team ush­ered the “eccen­tric and weak” Shah out of Iran.

32. On Feb­ru­ary 1, 1979, Aya­tol­lah Khome­i­ni staged his own ver­sion of a “tri­umphal return” in the streets of Teheran.

33. Khome­i­ni moved quick­ly to estab­lish his author­i­ty. On Feb­ru­ary 5 he named Meh­di Bazargan, a devot­ed Mus­lim and anti-com­mu­nist, inter­im Prime Min­is­ter. Yaz­di and Abbas Amir Entezam became Bazargan’s deputies, Dr. San­jabi For­eign Min­is­ter, and Gen­er­al Qarani was named mil­i­tary Chief of Staff.

34. On Feb­ru­ary 11, 1979, in seem­ing­ly a bizarre twist, Gen­er­al Qarani asked the Shah’s “eyes and ears” Gen­er­al Hossien Far­doust for rec­om­men­da­tions to fill the new top posts in Iran’s armed forces. Except for the rec­om­men­da­tion for the Chief of SAVAK, all the oth­ers were accept­ed. Short­ly after, Gen­er­al Far­doust became head of SAVAMA, Khomeini’s suc­ces­sor to SAVAK.

35. On Feb­ru­ary 14, 1979, two weeks after Khomeini’s return to Iran, the U.S. Embassy in Teheran was seized by Khome­i­ni sup­port­ers dis­guised as left­ist guer­ril­las in an attempt to neu­tral­ize the left. U.S. hostages were seized, but to the cha­grin of Khomeini’s Fun­da­men­tal­ists, the Iran­ian coali­tion gov­ern­ment restored order imme­di­ate­ly. On the same day in Kab­ul, Afghanistan, the U.S. Ambas­sador was also kid­napped by fanat­ic Islam­ic Fun­da­men­tal­ists dis­guised as left­ist guer­ril­las and killed in the gun­fight.

36. On Feb­ru­ary 14, soon after order was restored at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, Khomeini’s aide Yaz­di sup­plied the Embassy with a group of Ira­ni­ans for com­pound secu­ri­ty. Ambas­sador Sul­li­van installed, armed, and trained this Swat squad lead by SAVAK/CIA agent Mashal­lah Kah­sani, with whom Sul­li­van devel­oped a close work­ing rela­tion­ship.

37. By August, pro-Bush CIA offi­cial George Cave was vis­it­ing Iran to pro­vide intel­li­gence brief­in­gs to Khomeini’s aides, espe­cial­ly Yaz­di and Entezam. These intel­li­gence exchanges con­tin­ued until Octo­ber 31, the anniver­sary of the day on which Carter fired Bush and the 800 agents. Then with all the Iran­ian offi­cials who had restored order in the first Embassy seizure elim­i­nat­ed, the stage was set for what hap­pened four days lat­er.

38. On Novem­ber 4, 1979, the U.S. Embassy was tak­en again. Lead­ing the charge was none oth­er than Ambas­sador Sullivan’s trust­ed Mashal­lah Kashani, the Embassy’s once and for­mer secu­ri­ty chief.

Pro­gram High­lights Include:

  • The assas­si­na­tion of anoth­er mod­er­ate rival of Khome­ini’s.
  • Appar­ent links between Hos­sein Far­doust’s selec­tion to head the Iran­ian navy and Albert Hakim and Richard Sec­ord of Iran-Con­tra fame.
  • The par­tial dis­arm­ing of the Marine guards assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Iran, there­by facil­i­tat­ing the takeover in Novem­ber of 1979.
  • A warn­ing by Mr. Emory (on 1/23/1993) that the same counter-ter­ror­ism net­works that were used by George H.W. Bush were still in place and that they might be used to de-sta­bi­lize the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion.
  • The counter-ter­ror­ism back­ground of Bush White House holdover Lin­da Tripp, who was the infor­mant for the Mon­i­ca Lewin­sky affair. That affair, of course, de-sta­bi­lized Clin­ton’s Pres­i­den­cy. Tripp was also the last per­son to see White House Coun­sel Vince Fos­ter alive, before he alleged­ly com­mit­ted sui­cide. Lin­da Tripp served Fos­ter lunch, which turned out to be his “last sup­per.”
  • Mitt Rom­ney sup­port­er James Comey’s ini­ti­a­tion of the inves­ti­ga­tion into Hillary Clin­ton’s e‑mail serv­er. Comey is head of the FBI and the for­mal gen­er­al coun­sel for Bridge­wa­ter Asso­ciates, which helped to cap­i­tal­ize Palan­tir, the appar­ent mak­er of the PRISM soft­ware at the focal point of “L’Af­faire Snow­den.”

1. A 1995 arti­cle by Har­ry Mar­tin, for­mer­ly of the Napa Sen­tinel, gives an overview of Fara’s analy­sis:

“The Real Iran­ian Hostage Sto­ry from the Files of Fara Man­soor” by Har­ry V. Mar­tin; Free Amer­i­ca; 7/1/1995.

Fara Man­soor is a fugi­tive. No, he hasn’t bro­ken any laws in the Unit­ed States. His crime is the truth. What he has to say and the doc­u­ments he car­ries are equiv­a­lent to a death war­rant for him. Man­soor is an Iran­ian who was part of the “estab­lish­ment” in Iran long before the 1979 hostage tak­ing. Mansoor’s records actu­al­ly dis­count the alleged “Octo­ber Sur­prise” the­o­ry that the Ronald Rea­gan-George Bush team paid the Ira­ni­ans not to release 52 Amer­i­can hostages until after the Novem­ber 1980 Pres­i­den­tial elec­tions.

Mansoor’s metic­u­lous doc­u­ments, shared exclu­sive­ly with this mag­a­zine, shows a much more sin­is­ter plot, the plot to take the hostages in the first place. “For 15 years the truth about the nature and ori­gins of the Iran­ian hostage cri­sis has been buried in a moun­tain of mis­in­for­ma­tion,” Man­soor states. “End­less expert analy­sis has served only to deep­en the fog that still sur­rounds this issue. We have been led to believe that the ‘cri­sis’ was a spon­ta­neous act that just sprang out of the ‘chaos’ of the ‘Islam­ic Rev­o­lu­tion’. Noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth!”

“To real­ly under­stand the hostage cri­sis and ‘who done it’, one has to look not only with a micro­scope, but also a wide angle lens to have a panoram­ic view of this well script­ed ‘dra­ma’,” Man­soor states. “That ‘dra­ma’ was the result of large his­tor­i­cal pat­terns, mod­els, and motives. Once its true nature is under­stood, it will be clear how Iran/Contra hap­pened, why Raf­san­jani has been try­ing to ‘move toward the West,’ and why Rea­gan called him a ‘mod­er­ate’. And why, dur­ing the Gulf War, James Bak­er said, ‘we think Iran has con­duct­ed itself in a very, very cred­i­ble way through this cri­sis’” Man­soor empha­sizes that the “Octo­ber Sur­prise” myth has served as dan­ger­ous mis­in­for­ma­tion.

THOUSANDS OF DOCUMENTS IN SUPPORT

With thou­sands of doc­u­ments to sup­port his posi­tion, Man­soor says that the “hostage cri­sis” was a polit­i­cal “man­age­ment tool” cre­at­ed by the pro-Bush fac­tion of the CIA, and imple­ment­ed through an a pri­ori Alliance with Khomeini’s Islam­ic Fun­da­men­tal­ists.” He says the pur­pose was twofold:

  • To keep Iran intact and com­mu­nist-free by putting Khome­i­ni in full con­trol.
  • To destablize the Carter Admin­is­tra­tion and put George Bush in the White House.

“The pri­vate Alliance was the log­i­cal result of the intri­cate Iran­ian polit­i­cal real­i­ty of the mid-70s, and a com­plex net­work of pow­er­ful U.S.-Iranian ‘busi­ness’ rela­tion­ships,” Man­soor states. “I first met Khome­i­ni in 1963 dur­ing the failed coup attempt against the Shah. Since that time I have been inti­mate­ly involved with Iran­ian pol­i­tics. I knew in 1979 that the whole, phoney ‘Islam­ic Rev­o­lu­tion’ was ‘mis­sion implau­si­ble’.” Man­soor was frank. “There is sim­ply no way that those guys with the beards and tur­bans could have pulled off such a bril­liant­ly planned oper­a­tion with­out very sophis­ti­cat­ed help.”

Man­soor has spent 10 years research­ing the issue.

“I have col­lect­ed enough data to yield a very clear pic­ture. Mr. Bush’s lieu­tenants removed the Shah, brought Khome­i­ni back to Iran, and guid­ed his rise to pow­er, stick­ing it to Pres­i­dent Carter, the Amer­i­can peo­ple (52 in par­tic­u­lar), and the Iran­ian peo­ple.”

He stat­ed with box­es and box­es of evi­dence to sup­port his con­tentions.

“My exten­sive research has revealed the hereto­fore untold truth about this episode. This is not anoth­er ‘Octo­ber Sur­prise’ the­o­ry pur­port­ing how the hostage cri­sis result­ed in some Khome­i­ni-Repub­lic bet­ter deal. That the­o­ry puts the cart before the horse. Its absurd premise is that a major inter­na­tion­al deal was ini­ti­at­ed and con­sum­mat­ed in three weeks. Give me a break! Bill Casey didn’t have to go to Paris to play lets-make-deal. The ‘deal’ had been in oper­a­tion for at least two years. This game of blind-man’s‑bluff around Casey’s grave­stone was more dis­in­for­ma­tion, dam­age con­trol.”

REAGAN, BUSH AND THATCHER IN IRAN IN 1978

Man­soor pro­duced a con­fi­den­tial doc­u­ment called the “Coun­try Team Min­utes” of April 26, 1978, more than a year before the hostage cri­sis. The meet­ing was held in Iran. The sec­ond para­graph of the rou­tine min­utes, states, “The Ambas­sador com­ment­ed on our dis­tin­guished vis­i­tors, Ronald Rea­gan, George Bush and Mar­garet Thatch­er, and com­ment­ed that Teheran seems to be the site for an oppo­si­tion par­ties con­gress.” Man­soor indi­cates the entire rela­tion­ship was prob­a­bly the most sophis­ti­cat­ed crim­i­nal act in recent his­to­ry. “That the peo­ple who, until recent­ly, were hold­ing pow­er in Wash­ing­ton and those who cur­rent­ly are still in con­trol in Teheran, got there by total­ly sub­vert­ing the demo­c­ra­t­ic process of both coun­tries is news. That their meth­ods of sub­ver­sion relied on kid­nap­ping, extor­tion and mur­der is crim­i­nal,” Man­soor states.

Man­soor became a tar­get after he did a radio show in Port­land on Novem­ber 13, 1992. It was the first time he attempt­ed to go pub­lic with his doc­u­ments and infor­ma­tion. The Iran­ian regime has placed a boun­ty on Mansoor’s head and he has received many death threats.

Is Man­soor just anoth­er con­spir­a­cy nut? Ervand Abra­hami­an of Baruch Col­lege of New York stat­ed in a let­ter to Man­soor,

“As you know I am very weary of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries. But, despite my pre­con­ceived bias, I must admit I found your man­u­script to be thor­ough­ly researched, well doc­u­ment­ed, and, of course extreme­ly rel­e­vant to the present. You have done a first-class job of inter­view­ing par­tic­i­pants, col­lect­ing data from scat­tered sources, and putting them togeth­er like a high­ly com­pli­cat­ed puz­zle.”

Mansoor’s metic­u­lous research clear­ly demon­strates how Khomeini’s pub­lished vision of an Islam­ic Gov­ern­ment (Vilay­at-Faqih) dove­tailed with the region­al and glob­al strate­gic objec­tives of a hard-core sub­set of the U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment loy­al to George Bush. It shows that the Iran­ian hostage cri­sis was nei­ther a cri­sis nor chaos. In 1953, the CIA orches­trat­ed a coup in Iran, which threw out the demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­ern­ment and installed the Shah.

In order to under­stand the imper­a­tive of this Alliance, we must real­is­ti­cal­ly exam­ine the sociopo­lit­i­cal align­ment both in Iran and the U.S., and accu­rate­ly assess their respec­tive inter­ests to find the com­mon ground for this coa­les­cence. The anti-monar­chic forces in mid-70s Iran con­sist­ed of var­i­ous nation­al­ist groups includ­ing reli­gious reformists, the Islam­ic Fun­da­men­tal­ists, the left­ists and com­mu­nists.

The nation­al­ist forces were var­ied. Some were from with­in the gov­ern­ment, but they were poor­ly orga­nized and with­out grass-roots sup­port. Their posi­tion was clear­ly anti-left and anti-com­mu­nist, but they were vul­ner­a­ble to being tak­en over by the well-orga­nized left.

The Islam­ic Fun­da­men­tal­ists had no gov­ern­ment expe­ri­ence, but they had major grass­roots sup­port. Islam, in its Shi’ite for­mat was deeply embed­ded in the lives of the vast major­i­ty of the Iran­ian peo­ple. The Fun­da­men­tal­ists were absolute­ly anti-com­mu­nist.

CARTER FIRES 800 CIA COVERT OPERATORS

The philo­soph­i­cal divide with­in the U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment, espe­cial­ly the CIA, became quite seri­ous in the after­math of Water­gate. To make mat­ters worse, the elec­tion of Jim­my Carter in 1976, his cam­paign promise to clean the “cow­boy” ele­ments out of the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency and his “human rights” poli­cies alarmed the fac­tion of the CIA loy­al to George Bush. Bush was CIA direc­tor under Ger­ald Ford. Final­ly, the fir­ing of CIA Direc­tor George Bush by Carter, and the sub­se­quent “Hal­loween Mas­sacre” in which Carter fired over 800 CIA covert oper­a­tives in 1977, angered the “cow­boys” beyond all mea­sure. That was Carter’s Octo­ber sur­prise, 800 fir­ings on Hal­loween 1977.

Bush and his CIA coverts were well aware of the Shah’s ter­mi­nal can­cer, unknown to Pres­i­dent Carter. The team had an elab­o­rate vest­ed inter­est to pro­tect. They were deter­mined to keep Iran intact and com­mu­nist-free and put George Bush in the White House.

TIMELINE: SEQUENCE OF EVENTS

Hence, the Islam­ic Fun­da­men­tal­ists were the only viable choice through which the Bush covert team could imple­ment its own pri­vate for­eign pol­i­cy. The results: the birth of the Islam­ic Repub­lic of Iran and the fall of Pres­i­dent Carter. Mansoor’s doc­u­ments show step-by-step events:

1. In 1974, the Shah of Iran was diag­nosed with can­cer.

2. In 1975, for­mer CIA direc­tor, and the U.S. Ambas­sador to Iran, Richard Helms learned of the Shah’s can­cer through the Shah’s clos­est con­fi­dant, Gen­er­al Hos­sein Far­doust. The Shah, Helms and Far­doust had been close per­son­al friends since their school days togeth­er in Switzer­land dur­ing the 1930s.

3. On Novem­ber 4, 1976, con­cur­rent with Jim­my Carter’s elec­tion as Pres­i­dent, CIA Direc­tor George Bush issued a secret memo to the U.S. Ambas­sador in Iran, Richard Helms, ask­ing:

“Have there been any changes in the per­son­al­i­ty pat­tern of the Shah; what are their impli­ca­tions . . . . for polit­i­cal behav­ior? Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of top mil­i­tary offi­cers that most like­ly play key roles in any trans­fer­ence of pow­er if the Shah were killed…who will be the lead­ing actors? How will the Shah’s pet projects, includ­ing the eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment pro­gram, be affect­ed by his depar­ture?”

4. By July 1977, antic­i­pat­ing trou­ble ahead, the Bush covert team issued a pre­lim­i­nary script for the tran­si­tion of pow­er in Iran. Accord­ing to John D. Stem­pel, a CIA ana­lyst and Deputy Chief Polit­i­cal offi­cer of the U.S. Embassy in Iran: “A ten page analy­sis of the oppo­si­tion writ­ten by the embassy’s polit­i­cal sec­tion in July 1977 cor­rect­ly iden­ti­fied Bakhtiar, Bazargan, Khome­i­ni and Beheshti as major actors in the dra­ma that begin unfold­ing a year lat­er.”

5. Con­trary to this analy­sis, in August 1977, the “offi­cial wing” of the CIA fed Pres­i­dent Carter a 60-page Study on Iran which con­clud­ed:

“The Shah will be an active par­tic­i­pant in Iran­ian life well into the 1980s…and there will be no rad­i­cal changes in Iran­ian polit­i­cal behav­ior in the near future.”

6. On Octo­ber 31, 1977, pres­i­dent Carter made good on his cam­paign promise to clean the “cow­boys” out of the CIA. He fired over 800 covert oper­a­tives from the Agency, many of whom were loy­al to George Bush. Carter’s pres­i­den­cy split the CIA. It pro­duced in them–many of whom were “well-trained in polit­i­cal warfare–a con­cert­ed will for revenge.” By the end of the 1970s many of these spe­cial covert oper­a­tives had allied them­selves with George Bush’s can­di­da­cy, and lat­er with Ronald Reagan’s pres­i­den­tial cam­paign.

7. On Novem­ber 15, the Shah of Iran vis­it­ed Wash­ing­ton, D.C. Carter toast­ed his guest, “If ever there was a coun­try which has blos­somed forth under enlight­ened lead­er­ship, it would be the ancient empire of Per­sia.”

8. On Novem­ber 23, Aya­tol­lah Khomeini’s elder son, Haji Mustafa, died mys­te­ri­ous­ly in Najaf, Iraq. Accord­ing to pro­fes­sor Hamid Algar, he was “assas­si­nat­ed by the Shah’s U.S.-instituted secu­ri­ty police SAVAK…the tragedy inflamed the pub­lic in Iran.” Aya­tol­lah Khome­i­ni placed an adver­tise­ment in the French News­pa­per Le Monde which read: “thank­ing peo­ple for con­do­lences that had been sent for the mur­der of his son.” He also “appealed to the army to lib­er­ate Iran, and to the intel­lec­tu­als and all good Mus­lims to con­tin­ue their crit­i­cism of the Shah”.

9. Decem­ber 31, 1977, Carter vis­it­ed the Shah in Iran. He toast­ed the Shah for main­tain­ing Iran as “an island of sta­bil­i­ty in one of the more trou­bled areas of the world.” Iron­i­cal­ly, that so-called sta­bil­i­ty evap­o­rat­ed before the cham­pagne lost its fizz.

10. On Jan­u­ary 7, 1978, an insid­i­ous arti­cle enti­tled Iran and the Red and Black Colo­nial­ism, appeared in the Iran­ian dai­ly news­pa­per Ettela’at. It cas­ti­gat­ed the exiled Khome­i­ni, and pro­duced a mas­sive protest riot in the Holy City of Qum the next day. The cler­gy had lit­tle choice but to ral­ly to Khomeini’s defense. The Qum inci­dent shift­ed many of the cler­gy from a posi­tion of sup­port for the Shah’s monar­chy to an active oppo­si­tion. That “dirty trick” per­pet­u­at­ed by Gen­er­al Far­doust was the trig­ger that sparked Islam­ic move­ment par­tic­i­pat­ing in the anti-Shah demo­c­ra­t­ic Rev­o­lu­tion. John D. Stem­pel, char­ac­ter­ized Fardoust’s impor­tance to the Alliance: “it is hard to over­es­ti­mate the val­ue of hav­ing a mole in the inner cir­cle of the Shah.”

11. On Feb­ru­ary 3, a con­fi­den­tial com­mu­niqué from the U.S. Embassy clear­ly reflect­ed the vision of the Alliance:

“Though based on incom­plete evi­dence, our best assess­ment to date is that the Shia Islam­ic move­ment dom­i­nat­ed by Aya­tol­lah Khome­i­ni is far bet­ter orga­nized, enlight­ened and able to resist Com­mu­nism than its detrac­tors would lead us to believe. It is root­ed in the Iran­ian peo­ple more than any west­ern ide­ol­o­gy, includ­ing Com­mu­nism.”

12. April 1978, Le Monde “iden­ti­fied Khomeini’s Lib­er­a­tion Move­ment of Iran as the most sig­nif­i­cant force in the oppo­si­tion. Shi’ite Islam unites the reformist pro­gres­sive crit­ics of the Shah on the same ground. In fact, this analy­sis was con­trary to what Mohaam­mad Tavas­soli, leader of the Lib­er­a­tion Move­ment of Iran, expressed to John D. Stem­pel on August 21, 1978:

“The nation­al­ist move­ment in Iran lacks a pop­u­lar base. The choice is between Islam and Communism…close ties between the Lib­er­a­tion Move­ment of Iran and the reli­gious move­ment were nec­es­sary. Iran was becom­ing split between the Marx­ist and the reli­gious.”

13. On April 26, the con­fi­den­tial min­utes of the U. S. Embassy Coun­try team meet­ing wel­comed Bush, Rea­gan and Thatch­er.

14. On May 6, Le Monde became the first west­ern news­pa­per to inter­view Khome­i­ni in Najaf, Iraq. Khome­i­ni acknowl­edged his com­pat­i­bil­i­ty with the strate­gic imper­a­tives of the Bush covert team, “we would not col­lab­o­rate with the Marx­ists, even in the over­throw of the Shah.”

15. The same month, Khomeini’s old ally from the failed 1963 coup (that result­ed in Khomeini’s arrest and major upris­ing in June 1963 and his sub­se­quent exile to Iraq) Gen­er­al Val­li­ol­lah Qarani sent his emis­sary to meet Khome­i­ni in Najaf. Qarani had been a major CIA asset in Iran since the 1953 coup. See­ing anoth­er chance to gain pow­er for him­self, he advised Khome­i­ni, accord­ing to for­mer Iran­ian Pres­i­dent Abol Has­san Bani-sad­er:

“If you set­tle for the Shah’s depar­ture and don’t use anti-Amer­i­can rhetoric, the Amer­i­cans are ready to take him out.”

16. In August, the Bush team sent its own point man to meet the exiled Aya­tol­lah in Najaf. Pro­fes­sor Richard Cot­tam car­ried excel­lent cre­den­tials. Dur­ing the 1953 coup, he had been in charge of the CIA’s Iran Desk. He had also been in close con­tact with Dr. Ibrahim Yaz­di in the U.S. since 1975. Curi­ous­ly, he admit­ted to Bani-sadr in 1987, that he had not been work­ing for the Carter Admin­is­tra­tion. Cottam’s vis­it must have had an impact, because Iran sud­den­ly began to expe­ri­ence a series of mys­te­ri­ous cat­a­stro­phes:

  • Fun­da­men­tal­ist sup­port­ers burned down a the­ater killing the inno­cent occu­pants, blam­ing it on the SAVAK and the Shah.
  • There were riots in Isfa­han that result­ed in mar­tial law.
  • On August 27, one of Khomeini’s rivals among the Shia Islam­ic faith­ful out­side of Iran, Aya­tol­lah Mosa Sadr mys­te­ri­ous­ly disp­peared. Accord­ing to an intel­li­gence source he was killed and buried in Libya.

17. By late August, the Shah was total­ly con­fused. U.S. Ambas­sador Sul­li­van record­ed the Shah’s plead­ings over the out­break of vio­lence:

“He said the pat­tern was wide­spread and that it was like an out­break of a sud­den rash in the country…it gave evi­dence of sophis­ti­cat­ed plan­ning and was not the work of spon­ta­neous oppositionists…the Shah pre­sent­ed that it was the work of for­eign intrigue…this intrigue went beyond the capa­bil­i­ties of the Sovi­et KGB and must, there­fore, also involve British and Amer­i­can CIA. The Shah went on to ask ‘Why was the CIA sud­den­ly turn­ing against him? What had he done to deserve this sort of action from the Unit­ed States?”

18. Sep­tem­ber 8, the Shah’s army gunned down hun­dreds of demon­stra­tors in Teheran in what became known as the “Jaleh Square Mas­sacre”.

19. On Sep­tem­ber 9, Pres­i­dent Carter phoned the Shah to con­firm his sup­port for the Shah, a fact that enraged the Iran­ian pop­u­la­tion.

20. A few days lat­er, Carter’s Nation­al Secu­ri­ty aide, Gary Sick, received a call from Richard Cot­tam, request­ing a dis­crete meet­ing between him and Khomeini’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive in the U.S., Dr. Yaz­di. Sick refused.

21. Khome­i­ni for the first time, pub­licly called for the Shah’s over­throw.

22. In Mid-Sep­tem­ber, at the height of the rev­o­lu­tion, “one of the hand­ful of Khomeini’s trust­ed asso­ciates,” Aya­tol­lah Mohammed Hus­sein Beheshti, secret­ly vis­it­ed the Unit­ed States. He also met with Yaz­di in Texas, among oth­ers. Beheshti was an advo­cate of the eye-for-an-eye school of jus­tice.

23. In ear­ly Octo­ber 1978, the agent for the Bush covert team arranged to force Khome­i­ni out of Iraq.

24. Octo­ber 3, 1978, Yaz­di picked up Khome­i­ni in Iraq and head­ed for Kuwait. Accord­ing to Gary Sick, he received an urgent call from Richard Cot­tam, learn­ing for the first time that Khome­i­ni had been forced out of Iraq. Sick was told that Khome­i­ni and his entourage were stuck in no man’s land while attempt­ing to cross the bor­der. Cot­tam was request­ing White House inter­ven­tion to resolve the issue. Sick respond, “there is noth­ing we could do”.

25. Octo­ber 6, Khomeini’s entourage, hav­ing got­ten back through Bagh­dad, popped up in Paris. Accord­ing to Bani-sadr, “it was Khome­i­ni who insist­ed on going to Paris instead of Syr­ia or Alge­ria”. Who­ev­er helped Khome­i­ni out of the Kuwaiti bor­der impasse had to have been on good terms with both the French and Sad­dam Hus­sein.

26. Decem­ber 12, Yaz­di made a trip to the U.S. to pro­mote Khome­i­ni and his Islam­ic Repub­lic. Yaz­di met secret­ly with Hen­ry Precht in an unof­fi­cial capac­i­ty. Precht was the Direc­tor of the Iran Desk at the State Depart­ment and one of the Bush team’s main choke points in the Carter Admin­is­tra­tion. Lat­er Precht and Yaz­di appeared togeth­er for tele­vised dis­cus­sion of Iran. Yaz­di assured the Amer­i­can pub­lic that Khome­i­ni had not real­ly called for a “tor­rent of blood,” and that the “elec­tion would be absolute­ly free.” The Islam­ic Repub­lic “would enjoy full free­dom of speech and the press, includ­ing the right to attack Islam. [Khome­ini’s fat­wa against Salman Rushdie stands in sharp rebut­tal to that claim–D.E.]

27. Decem­ber 28, Cot­tam vis­it­ed Khome­i­ni in Paris where he not­ed that U.S. cit­i­zen Dr. Yaz­di was the “lead­ing tac­ti­cian in Khomeini’s camp” and appar­ent “chief of staff”. Khome­i­ni was not inter­est­ed in the Mul­lahs tak­ing over the gov­ern­ment. It is also not­ed that “Khomeini’s move­ment def­i­nite­ly plans to orga­nize a polit­i­cal par­ty to draw on Khomeini’s charis­ma. Cot­tam thinks such a par­ty would win all Majlis seats.”

28. Leav­ing Paris, Cot­tam slipped into Teheran, arriv­ing the first week in Jan­u­ary 1979, to pre­pare Khomeini’s tri­umphal return to Iran.

29. Jan­u­ary 4, 1979, Carter’s secret envoy, Gen­er­al Robert Huyser arrived in Iran. His mis­sion was to pre­vent the “fall of the Shah.” Accord­ing to Huyser, Alexan­der Haig, osten­si­bly a strong Shah sup­port­er-inex­plic­a­bly, “took vio­lent excep­tion to the whole idea.” Huyser recalled that “Gen­er­al Haig nev­er gave me a full expla­na­tion of his strong objec­tions.” Huyser also revealed that Ambas­sador Sul­li­van “had also expressed objec­tions.” Two pro-Shah advo­cates opposed to the pre­ven­tion of the Shah’s fall.

30. On Jan­u­ary 14, Pres­i­dent Carter final­ly “autho­rized a meet­ing between War­ren Zim­mer­man and Ibrahim Yaz­di. On the same day, Khome­i­ni, in an inter­view on CBS claimed, “a great part of the army was loy­al to him” and that “he will be in effect the strong man of Iran.”

31. On Jan­u­ary 16, in an exact repeat of the 1953 CIA coup, Bush’s covert team ush­ered the “eccen­tric and weak” Shah out of Iran.

32. On Feb­ru­ary 1, 1979, Aya­tol­lah Khome­i­ni staged his own ver­sion of a “tri­umphal return” in the streets of Teheran.

33. Khome­i­ni moved quick­ly to estab­lish his author­i­ty. On Feb­ru­ary 5 he named Meh­di Bazargan, a devot­ed Mus­lim and anti-com­mu­nist, inter­im Prime Min­is­ter. Yaz­di and Abbas Amir Entezam became Bazargan’s deputies, Dr. San­jabi For­eign Min­is­ter, and Gen­er­al Qarani was named mil­i­tary Chief of Staff.

34. On Feb­ru­ary 11, 1979, in seem­ing­ly a bizarre twist, Gen­er­al Qarani asked the Shah’s “eyes and ears” Gen­er­al Hossien Far­doust for rec­om­men­da­tions to fill the new top posts in Iran’s armed forces. Except for the rec­om­men­da­tion for the Chief of SAVAK, all the oth­ers were accept­ed. Short­ly after, Gen­er­al Far­doust became head of SAVAMA, Khomeini’s suc­ces­sor to SAVAK.

35. On Feb­ru­ary 14, 1979, two weeks after Khomeini’s return to Iran, the U.S. Embassy in Teheran was seized by Khome­i­ni sup­port­ers dis­guised as left­ist guer­ril­las in an attempt to neu­tral­ize the left. U.S. hostages were seized, but to the cha­grin of Khomeini’s Fun­da­men­tal­ists, the Iran­ian coali­tion gov­ern­ment restored order imme­di­ate­ly. On the same day in Kab­ul, Afghanistan, the U.S. Ambas­sador was also kid­napped by fanat­ic Islam­ic Fun­da­men­tal­ists dis­guised as left­ist guer­ril­las and killed in the gun­fight.

36. On Feb­ru­ary 14, soon after order was restored at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, Khomeini’s aide Yaz­di sup­plied the Embassy with a group of Ira­ni­ans for com­pound secu­ri­ty. Ambas­sador Sul­li­van installed, armed, and trained this Swat squad lead by SAVAK/CIA agent Mashal­lah Kah­sani, with whom Sul­li­van devel­oped a close work­ing rela­tion­ship.

37. By August, pro-Bush CIA offi­cial George Cave was vis­it­ing Iran to pro­vide intel­li­gence brief­in­gs to Khomeini’s aides, espe­cial­ly Yaz­di and Entezam. These intel­li­gence exchanges con­tin­ued until Octo­ber 31, the anniver­sary of the day on which Carter fired Bush and the 800 agents. Then with all the Iran­ian offi­cials who had restored order in the first Embassy seizure elim­i­nat­ed, the stage was set for what hap­pened four days lat­er.

38. On Novem­ber 4, 1979, the U.S. Embassy was tak­en again. Lead­ing the charge was none oth­er than Ambas­sador Sullivan’s trust­ed Mashal­lah Kashani, the Embassy’s once and for­mer secu­ri­ty chief.

With the evi­dence and doc­u­men­ta­tion sup­plied by Man­soor, the alleged Octo­ber Sur­prise would not have been nec­es­sary. Pres­i­dent Carter was the tar­get, in revenge for the Hal­loween Mas­sacre, the night 800 CIA oper­a­tives and George Bush were fired by Carter. The main thrust, how­ev­er, was to pre­vent a com­mu­nist takover of Iran after the Shah’s antic­i­pat­ed death.

2. In the con­clud­ing min­utes of the excerpt pre­sent­ed from the 1/23/1993 inter­view with Fara Man­soor, Mr. Emory warned that the counter-ter­ror­ism appa­ra­tus used by George H.W. Bush to affect many of the machi­na­tions of the Iran-Con­tra scan­dal were still in place and could be used to de-sta­bi­lize the (Bill) Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion. Bush White House holdover Lin­da Tripp was the con­duit who con­veyed the Mon­i­ca Lewin­sky infor­ma­tion to Lucianne Gold­berg, who pub­li­cized it and pre­cip­i­tat­ed the scan­dal that result­ed in Clin­ton’s impeach­ment.

Lin­da Tripp had a back­ground in counter-ter­ror­ism, hav­ing a Top-Secret secu­ri­ty clear­ance while work­ing for the Delta Force, the coun­try’s elite counter-ter­ror­ism com­man­do unit.

Inci­den­tal­ly, Mon­i­ca Lewin­sky was rep­re­sent­ed by Pla­to Cacheris, who is now rep­re­sent­ing Edward Snow­den, whose actions have helped to de-sta­bi­lize the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion.

“Linda’s Trip” by Jeff Leen and Gene Wein­garten; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 3/15/1998.

 . . . . There was a long string of assign­ments, in Ger­many and else­where. Lin­da got a top-secret secu­ri­ty clear­ance. At one point, accord­ing to her resume, she was doing sec­re­tar­i­al work for Delta Force, the super-secret coun­tert­er­ror­ist unit that does not, offi­cial­ly, exist. . . .

. . . . It was April 1990 when she joined the Bush White House. Ellen Strichartz, a neigh­bor who worked as a White House cor­re­spon­dence ana­lyst, had spon­sored her. Tripp start­ed as a “floater,” fill­ing in answer­ing phones or tak­ing dic­ta­tion when­ev­er there was a sec­re­tar­i­al vacan­cy.

Tripp had worked most­ly for the mil­i­tary, in aus­tere oper­a­tions that were high in dis­ci­pline and rig­or but low in pomp and stature. This changed. Her 32-month tenure in the Bush White House was a bath in pow­er and priv­i­lege and pres­tige.  . . .

3. Repub­li­can James Comey–a Mitt Rom­ney sup­port­er in 2012–is tak­ing actions that are caus­ing seri­ous prob­lems for the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion and for the Hillary Clin­ton can­di­da­cy. In par­tic­u­lar, the e‑mail scan­dal appears to have been Comey’s baby.

He has also ruf­fled feath­ers with the alto­geth­er com­pli­cat­ed Apple “ISIS­pho­ne” con­tro­ver­sy. That con­sum­mate­ly impor­tant case, Byzan­tine in its com­plex­i­ty and mul­ti-dimen­sion­al­i­ty (to coin a term) will be dealt with in a future pro­gram.

Comey was pre­vi­ous­ly the gen­er­al coun­sel for Bridge­wa­ter Asso­ciates, a hedge fund that helped cap­i­tal­ize Palan­tir, which (their dis­claimers to the con­trary notwith­stand­ing) makes the Prism soft­ware that is at the epi­cen­ter of “L’Af­faire Snow­den.” (CORRECTION: In past pro­grams and posts, we incor­rect­ly iden­ti­fied Comey as gen­er­al coun­sel for Palan­tir, not Bridge­wa­ter.)

The Bridgewater/Palantir/Comey nexus is inter­est­ing, nonethe­less. Palan­tir’s top stock­hold­er is Peter Thiel, a backer of Ted Cruz and the man who pro­vid­ed most of the cap­i­tal for Ron Paul’s 2012 Pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. Ron Paul’s Super PAC was in–of all places–Provo Utah, Rom­ney coun­try. Paul is from Texas. The alleged mav­er­ick Paul was, in fact, close to Rom­ney.

Recall that “Eddie the Friend­ly Spook” is a big Ron Paul fan and Bruce Fein, Snow­den’s first attor­ney and the coun­sel for the Snow­den fam­i­ly, was the chief legal coun­sel for Ron Paul’s cam­paign.

The pos­si­ble impli­ca­tions of these rela­tion­ships are worth con­tem­plat­ing and will be dis­cussed at greater length in future pro­grams.

“Comey’s FBI Makes Waves” by Cory Ben­nett and Julian Hat­tem; The Hill; 3/09/2016.

The aggres­sive pos­ture of the FBI under Direc­tor James Comey is becom­ing a polit­i­cal prob­lem for the White House.

The FBI’s demand that Apple help unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardi­no killers has out­raged Sil­i­con Val­ley, a sig­nif­i­cant source of polit­i­cal sup­port for Pres­i­dent Oba­ma and Democ­rats.

Comey, mean­while, has stirred ten­sions by link­ing ris­ing vio­lent crime rates to the Black Lives Mat­ter movement’s focus on police vio­lence and by warn­ing about “gaps” in the screen­ing process for Syr­i­an refugees.

Then there’s the biggest issue of all: the FBI’s inves­ti­ga­tion into the pri­vate email serv­er used by Hillary Clin­ton, Obama’s for­mer sec­re­tary of State and the lead­ing con­tender to win the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion.

A deci­sion by the FBI to charge Clin­ton or her top aides for mis­han­dling clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion would be a shock to the polit­i­cal sys­tem.

In these cas­es and more, Comey — a Repub­li­can who donat­ed in 2012 to Mitt Rom­ney — has proved he is “not attached to the strings of the White House,” said Ron Hosko, the for­mer head of the FBI’s crim­i­nal inves­tiga­tive divi­sion and a crit­ic of Obama’s law enforce­ment strate­gies.

Pub­licly, admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials have not betrayed any wor­ry about the Clin­ton probe. They have also down­played any dif­fer­ences of opin­ion on Apple.

But for­mer offi­cials say the FBI’s moves are clear­ly ruf­fling feath­ers with­in the admin­is­tra­tion.

With regards to the Apple stand­off, “It’s just not clear [Comey] is speak­ing for the admin­is­tra­tion,” said Richard Clarke, a for­mer White House coun­tert­er­ror­ism and cyber­se­cu­ri­ty chief. “We know there have been admin­is­tra­tion meet­ings on this for months. The pro­pos­al that Comey had made on encryp­tion was reject­ed by the admin­is­tra­tion.”

Comey has a rep­u­ta­tion for speak­ing truth to pow­er, dat­ing back to a dra­mat­ic con­fronta­tion in 2004 when he rushed to a hos­pi­tal to stop the Bush White House from renew­ing a war­rant­less wire­tap­ping pro­gram while Attor­ney Gen­er­al John Ashcroft was grave­ly ill. Comey was Ashcroft’s deputy at the time.

That show­down won Comey plau­dits from both sides of the aisle and made him an attrac­tive pick to lead the FBI. But now that he’s in charge of the agency, the pres­i­dent might be get­ting more than he bar­gained for.

“Part of his role is to not nec­es­sar­i­ly be in lock step with the White House,” said Mitch Sil­ber, a for­mer intel­li­gence offi­cial with the New York City Police Depart­ment and cur­rent senior man­ag­ing direc­tor at FTI Con­sult­ing.

“He takes very seri­ous­ly the fact that he works for the exec­u­tive branch,” added Leo Tad­deo, a for­mer agent in the FBI’s cyber divi­sion. “But he also under­stands the impor­tance of main­tain­ing his inde­pen­dence as a law enforce­ment agency that needs to give not just the appear­ance of inde­pen­dence but the real­i­ty of it.”

The split over Clinton’s email serv­er is the most polit­i­cal­ly charged issue fac­ing the FBI, with noth­ing less than the race for the White House poten­tial­ly at stake.

Oba­ma has pub­licly defend­ed Clin­ton, say­ing that while she “made a mis­take” with her email set­up, it was “not a sit­u­a­tion in which America’s nation­al secu­ri­ty was endan­gered.”

But the FBI direc­tor has bris­tled at that state­ment, say­ing the pres­i­dent would not have any knowl­edge of the inves­ti­ga­tion. Comey, mean­while, told law­mak­ers last week that he is “very close, per­son­al­ly,” to the probe.

Obama’s com­ments reflect­ed a pat­tern, sev­er­al for­mer agents said, of the pres­i­dent mak­ing improp­er com­ments about FBI inves­ti­ga­tions. In 2012, he made sim­i­lar­ly dis­mis­sive com­ments about a pend­ing inquiry into then-CIA Direc­tor David Petraeus, who lat­er plead­ed guilty to a mis­de­meanor charge for giv­ing clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion to his mis­tress and biog­ra­ph­er, Paula Broad­well.

“It serves no one in the Unit­ed States for the pres­i­dent to com­ment on ongo­ing inves­ti­ga­tions,” Tad­deo said. “I just don’t see a pur­pose.”

Hosko sug­gest­ed that a show­down over poten­tial crim­i­nal charges for Clin­ton could lead to a reprise of the famous 2004 hos­pi­tal scene, when Comey threat­ened to resign.

“He has that man­tle,” Hosko said. “I think now there’s this expec­ta­tion — I hope it’s a fair one — that he’ll do it again if he has to.”

Comey’s inde­pen­dent streak has also been on dis­play in the Apple fight, when his bureau decid­ed to seek a court order demand­ing that the tech giant cre­ate new soft­ware to bypass secu­ri­ty tools on an iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the two ter­ror­ist attack­ers in San Bernardi­no, Calif.

Many observers ques­tioned whether the FBI was mak­ing an end-run around the White House, which had pre­vi­ous­ly dis­missed a series of pro­pos­als that would force com­pa­nies to decrypt data upon gov­ern­ment request.

“I think there’s actu­al­ly some peo­ple that don’t think with one mind­set on this issue with­in the admin­is­tra­tion,” said Sen. Tom Carp­er (D‑Del.), the Sen­ate Home­land Secu­ri­ty Committee’s top Demo­c­rat, at a Tues­day hear­ing. “It’s a tough issue.”

While the White House has repeat­ed­ly backed the FBI’s deci­sion, it has not ful­ly endorsed the poten­tial pol­i­cy ram­i­fi­ca­tions, leav­ing some to think a gap might devel­op as sim­i­lar cas­es pop up. The White House is poised to soon issue its own pol­i­cy paper on the sub­ject of data encryp­tion.

“The posi­tion tak­en by the FBI is at odds with the con­cerns expressed by indi­vid­u­als [in the White House] who were look­ing into the encryp­tion issue,” said Neema Singh Guliani, a leg­isla­tive coun­sel with the Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union (ACLU).

This week, White House home­land secu­ri­ty advis­er Lisa Mona­co tried to down­play the dif­fer­ences between the two sides. The White House and FBI are both grap­pling with the same prob­lems, she said in a dis­cus­sion at the Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions.

“There is a recog­ni­tion across the admin­is­tra­tion that the virtues of strong encryp­tion are with­out a doubt,” Mona­co said on Mon­day. “There is also uni­for­mi­ty about the recog­ni­tion that strong encryp­tion pos­es real chal­lenges.”

 

 

 

Discussion

6 comments for “FTR #899 Fara Mansoor on “The Deep October Surprise,” Part 4”

  1. http://www.newsweek.com/opening-holocaust-cartoon-contest-exhibition-tehran-provokes-continued-461286

    Ger­many added yet anoth­er voice Wednes­day to the grow­ing list of coun­tries and lead­ers con­demn­ing a Holo­caust car­toon con­test being held in Iran.

    “The mur­der of 6 mil­lion men, women and chil­dren dur­ing the Holo­caust, for which we Ger­mans bear guilt and respon­si­bil­i­ty, must not be aban­doned to ridicule,” Ger­man For­eign Min­istry spokesman Mar­tin Schae­fer said. The For­eign Min­is­ter Frank-Wal­ter Stein­meier him­self, Schae­fer said, had pre­vi­ous­ly come out against such a con­test dur­ing a vis­it to Tehran in Feb­ru­ary, the Asso­ci­at­ed Press report­ed. It’s “very regret­table” that the con­test has nev­er­the­less con­tin­ued, Schae­fer said.

    An exhi­bi­tion of 150 car­toons and car­i­ca­tures sub­mit­ted for the con­test opened Sat­ur­day at the Tehran Art Bureau, accord­ing to the Tehran Times, with artists of dozens of nation­al­i­ties rep­re­sent­ed in the dis­play. Sub­mis­sions report­ed­ly came from coun­tries such as France, Aus­tralia, Brazil, Chi­na, Indone­sia and Colom­bia. Three win­ners in each of the two cat­e­gories (car­toon and car­i­ca­ture) will be announced upon the show’s con­clu­sion at the end of the month, CNSNews report­ed, with rough­ly $50,000 in prize mon­ey to be dis­trib­uted among win­ners and final­ists. The top prize is $12,000.

    Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week

    “This exhi­bi­tion con­sti­tutes a response to the pub­li­ca­tions of car­toons by the French Char­lie Heb­do mag­a­zine, which affront­ed the Prophet Muham­mad, as well as an expres­sion of [our oppo­si­tion] to the mas­sacres per­pe­trat­ed against the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple,” said Masoud Sho­jaei-Tabatabaei in a report by Iran’s Al-Alam TV, which has been post­ed to YouTube with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles by the Mid­dle East Media Research Insti­tute (MEMRI), a non­prof­it based in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., that aims to bridge lan­guage gaps and inform dis­cus­sions of the Mid­dle East.

    “We do not mean to approve or deny the Holo­caust,” Sho­jaei-Tabatabaei told the Tehran Times. “How­ev­er, the main ques­tion is why is there no per­mis­sion to talk about the Holo­caust despite their [the West­’s] belief in free­dom of speech.” He report­ed­ly explained at a press con­fer­ence Sat­ur­day that the first con­test, held in 2006, as well as the cur­rent one—which some sources are refer­ring to as the Sec­ond Inter­na­tion­al Holo­caust Car­toon Con­test despite the fact that a ver­sion of the com­pe­ti­tion was also held last year—are meant to high­light a dou­ble stan­dard in the West when it comes to depict­ing the Holo­caust ver­sus the Prophet Moham­mad. He insist­ed that Holo­caust denial was not the goal, but his attempts to elab­o­rate result­ed in a jar­ring com­par­i­son. “Holo­caust means ‘mass killing,’” he said. “We are wit­ness­ing the biggest killings by the Zion­ist regime in Gaza and Pales­tine.”

    Iran has a his­to­ry of Holo­caust denial. When the con­test was first held in 2006, then-Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad had already become well known for call­ing the Holo­caust a “myth.” The country’s supreme leader, Aya­tol­lah Ali Khamenei, has also expressed doubt. For exam­ple, in a speech he gave for Nowruz, the Iran­ian New Year, in 2014, he called the Holo­caust “an event whose real­i­ty is uncer­tain, and if it hap­pened, it’s uncer­tain how it hap­pened.”

    The com­ments from Germany’s For­eign Min­istry spokesman on Wednes­day were only the lat­est in a string of con­dem­na­tions for the lat­est con­test. Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu, who was a fre­quent tar­get in the sub­mit­ted car­i­ca­tures, fumed at a week­ly cab­i­net meet­ing in Jerusalem on Sun­day, telling min­is­ters that Iran “denies the Holo­caust, mocks the Holo­caust and is prepar­ing anoth­er Holo­caust,” and say­ing that “every coun­try in the world must stand up and ful­ly con­demn this.”

    That same day, U.S. State Depart­ment spokesman Mark Ton­er expressed Washington’s con­cern that the con­test could “be used as a plat­form for Holo­caust denial and revi­sion­ism and egre­gious­ly anti-Semit­ic speech, as it has in the past.”

    “We denounce any Holo­caust denial and triv­i­al­iza­tion as inflam­ma­to­ry and abhor­rent. It is insult­ing to the mem­o­ry of the mil­lions of peo­ple who died in the Holo­caust,” Ton­er added. “Such offen­sive speech should be con­demned by the author­i­ties and civ­il soci­ety lead­ers rather than encour­aged.”

    In an inter­view pub­lished last month, Iran­ian For­eign Min­is­ter Moham­mad Javad Zarif told The New York­er that the gov­ern­ment of Iran was not respon­si­ble for the con­test and did not con­trol or endorse the non­govern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tion run­ning it. But both the con­test orga­niz­er Sho­jaei-Tabatabaei and exiled Iran­ian jour­nal­ist Aida Qajar have refut­ed the idea that Iran’s gov­ern­ment has no involve­ment.

    The Unit­ed States Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al Muse­um echoed those sen­ti­ments in a press release dat­ed April 29. “The orga­ni­za­tions asso­ci­at­ed with the con­test are spon­sored or sup­port­ed by gov­ern­ment enti­ties, includ­ing the Islam­ic Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guard Corps and the Min­istry of Islam­ic Guid­ance,” the release said, while reports in Iran­ian press indi­cat­ed sup­port from the Min­istry of Cul­ture. The 2006 con­test, the USHMM said, “had the endorse­ment and sup­port of gov­ern­ment offi­cials and agen­cies.”

    “The glob­al com­mu­ni­ty and the peo­ple of Iran deserve an unequiv­o­cal denounce­ment of this Holo­caust car­toon con­test,” Tad Stahnke, direc­tor of USHMM’s Ini­tia­tive on Holo­caust Denial and Anti­semitism, is quot­ed as say­ing. “Giv­en the Iran­ian government’s past involve­ment with these events and its his­to­ry of restrict­ing unsanc­tioned speech, it will take much more effort on its part to dis­tance itself from this con­test,” he added. “We strong­ly encour­age Zarif and oth­er mem­bers of the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment to con­demn Holo­caust denial and to allow Iran­ian cit­i­zens access to accu­rate infor­ma­tion about the Holo­caust.”

    In the Al-Alam seg­ment post­ed by MEMRI, reporter Sal­im Issa says that “the goals of the con­test are to enhance the cul­ture of free­dom of speech by means of mod­ern art and to open new hori­zons for cul­tur­al and artis­tic coop­er­a­tion and exchange between Iran­ian and for­eign artists.”

    But Iri­na Boko­va, the direc­tor-gen­er­al of UNESCO, has vehe­ment­ly crit­i­cized the event. “This con­test goes against the uni­ver­sal val­ues of tol­er­ance and respect, and runs counter to the action led by UNESCO to pro­mote Holo­caust edu­ca­tion, to fight anti-Semi­tism and denial,” she said in a state­ment post­ed Fri­day, hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly expressed UNESCO’s con­cerns in a let­ter to the Iran­ian ambas­sador. “Such an ini­tia­tive which aims at a mock­ery of the geno­cide of the Jew­ish peo­ple, a trag­ic page of human­i­ty’s his­to­ry, can only fos­ter hatred and incite to vio­lence, racism and anger.”

    Posted by Tiffany Sunderson | May 18, 2016, 3:02 pm
  2. Fore some time I had my sus­pi­cious about the Iran­ian rev­o­lu­tion. So this infor­ma­tion does­n’t sur­prise me.
    Does Man­soor still lives and where’re his doc­u­ments? Why did­n’t he pub­lish a book? I was search­ing for this kind of book on this mat­ter)
    Thank you for shar­ing this impor­tant, inter­est­ing info!

    Posted by Patrick | June 27, 2016, 5:29 am
  3. @Patrick–

    Fara has a blog, which is the best I can do: https://faratimes.com/about/

    Best,

    Dave

    Posted by Dave Emory | June 27, 2016, 8:17 pm
  4. How many more ‘Octo­ber Sur­prise’ sur­pris­es are there, wait­ing to be found or shared? That was one of the many ques­tions raised by a pret­ty sur­pris­ing report out of the New York Times last week that appears to be about as sol­id a con­fir­ma­tion as we can expect at this point that the Octo­ber Sur­prise plot was indeed car­ried out by the Rea­gan cam­paign. It’s a con­fir­ma­tion that comes from Ben Barnes, a once promi­nent Texas Demo­c­ra­t­ic who has an even more promi­nent men­tor: John Con­nal­ly. The same for­mer Texas gov­er­nor who was shot and injured dur­ing the JFK assas­si­na­tion while he was Democ­rats and went on to switch parites and become Richard Nixon’s Trea­sury Sec­re­tary.

    Con­nal­ly are Barnes aren’t names that have pre­vi­ous­ly been asso­ci­at­ed with the Octo­ber sur­prise plot. But as Barnes tells it, it was Barnes and Con­nal­ly who lit­er­al­ly trav­eled across the Mid­dle East in 1980, meet­ing one leader after anoth­er with a sim­ple mes­sage: Iran can’t release the hostages yet. Or, rather, it was Con­nal­ly con­vey­ing the mes­sage. Barnes was just tag­ging along for some rea­son. Impor­tant­ly, Barnes also reveals that, fol­low­ing the Mid­dle East trip, he and Con­nal­ly both had a three hour meet­ing with Bill Casey at the Dal­las air­port where Casey was briefed about the trip.

    As Barnes tells it, Con­nal­ly’s mes­sage to the Arab lead­ers was some­thing along the lines of “‘Look, Ronald Reagan’s going to be elect­ed pres­i­dent and you need to get the word to Iran that they’re going to make a bet­ter deal with Rea­gan than they are Carter,’...‘It would be very smart for you to pass the word to the Ira­ni­ans to wait until after this gen­er­al elec­tion is over.’ ” Intrigu­ing­ly, Barnes claims that he had no idea this was the intent of the trip until he and Con­nal­ly met with the first Arab leader and Con­nal­ly con­veyed that mes­sage right in front of him. And then did it again with each leader. Why did Conal­ly bring Barnes along for such a mis­sion? That remains a mys­tery.

    It’s worth recall anoth­er Con­nal­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty pro­tege who found him­self involved with some rather sleazy polit­i­cal maneu­ver­ings: Robert (Bob) Strauss, who Con­nal­ly placed on the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee in 1968 as part of an effort to block the nom­i­na­tion of anti-war can­di­date George McGov­ern. Two years lat­er, Con­nal­ly joined the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion. It’s also worth not­ing that it was Barnes who appar­ent­ly got George W. Bush into the Texas Air Nation­al Guard as part of Bush’s attempt to dodge the Viet­nam war. That’s part of the of con­text here: Barnes and Con­nal­ly were Texas Democ­rats with deep Repub­li­can ties. So deep in Con­nal­ly’s case that he lit­er­al­ly became a Repub­li­can and Nixon’s Trea­sury Sec­re­tary in 1973. And some­how, the two were put at the cen­ter of a clan­des­tine lob­by­ing effort to put Rea­gan in office. An effort that Barnes appar­ent­ly did­n’t even know he was get­ting into when Con­nal­ly dragged him along.

    All in all, it’s quite a remark­able sto­ry. But not one Barnes has nev­er shared before with any­one else. In fact, four peo­ple con­firmed to the NY Times that Barnes did indeed dis­close all of this to them years ago. It rais­es the ques­tion of just how open a secret is all this stuff in DC cir­cles?

    Why is Barnes reveal­ing it now? To give Jim­my Carter some long belat­ed jus­tice as he sits on his deathbed. At least that’s how Barns is putting it. It’s sort of a ‘deathbed by proxy’ con­fes­sion.

    Also note that there is no men­tion at all of how this all ties into the explo­sive and damn­ing research by Fara Man­soor show­ing how the Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion was effec­tive foment­ed and man­aged by the CIA as part of an effort start­ed after learn­ing of the Shah’s can­cer diag­no­sis to install the ardent­ly anti-com­mu­nist reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ists of Iran into pow­er to pre­vent left-wing forces from fil­ing that vac­u­um. Not that we should have expect­ed Man­soor’s research to fac­tor into this report­ing. But it points towards one of the oth­er major con­texts that this new rev­e­la­tion is oper­at­ing in: the utter inabil­i­ty of the US to mean­ing­ful­ly come to grips with its own his­to­ry. An inabil­i­ty root­ed in the col­lec­tive silence giv­en to impor­tant research like Man­soor’s. The US soci­ety sim­ply does­n’t seem to care very much about acquir­ing an accu­rate under­stand­ing of how it got here. So while it’s going to be inter­est­ing to watch the poten­tial impact of this lat­est rev­e­la­tion play out, it’s like­ly going to be depress­ing­ly inter­est­ing as the US’s amne­si­ac apa­thy kicks in and every­one for­gets that there are major unre­solved scan­dals just sit­ting here wait­ing to be under­stood:

    The New York Times

    A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Sto­ry of Sab­o­tag­ing Carter’s Re-elec­tion

    A promi­nent Texas politi­cian said he unwit­ting­ly took part in a 1980 tour of the Mid­dle East with a clan­des­tine agen­da.

    By Peter Bak­er
    March 18, 2023

    WASHINGTON — It has been more than four decades, but Ben Barnes said he remem­bers it vivid­ly. His long­time polit­i­cal men­tor invit­ed him on a mis­sion to the Mid­dle East. What Mr. Barnes said he did not real­ize until lat­er was the real pur­pose of the mis­sion: to sab­o­tage the re-elec­tion cam­paign of the pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States.

    It was 1980 and Jim­my Carter was in the White House, bedev­iled by a hostage cri­sis in Iran that had par­a­lyzed his pres­i­den­cy and ham­pered his effort to win a sec­ond term. Mr. Carter’s best chance for vic­to­ry was to free the 52 Amer­i­cans held cap­tive before Elec­tion Day. That was some­thing that Mr. Barnes said his men­tor was deter­mined to pre­vent.

    His men­tor was John B. Con­nal­ly Jr., a titan of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics and for­mer Texas gov­er­nor who had served three pres­i­dents and just lost his own bid for the White House. A for­mer Demo­c­rat, Mr. Con­nal­ly had sought the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion in 1980 only to be swamped by for­mer Gov. Ronald Rea­gan of Cal­i­for­nia. Now Mr. Con­nal­ly resolved to help Mr. Rea­gan beat Mr. Carter and in the process, Mr. Barnes said, make his own case for becom­ing sec­re­tary of state or defense in a new admin­is­tra­tion.

    What hap­pened next Mr. Barnes has large­ly kept secret for near­ly 43 years. Mr. Con­nal­ly, he said, took him to one Mid­dle East­ern cap­i­tal after anoth­er that sum­mer, meet­ing with a host of region­al lead­ers to deliv­er a blunt mes­sage to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the elec­tion. Mr. Rea­gan will win and give you a bet­ter deal.

    Then short­ly after return­ing home, Mr. Barnes said, Mr. Con­nal­ly report­ed to William J. Casey, the chair­man of Mr. Reagan’s cam­paign and lat­er direc­tor of the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency, brief­ing him about the trip in an air­port lounge.

    Mr. Carter’s camp has long sus­pect­ed that Mr. Casey or some­one else in Mr. Reagan’s orbit sought to secret­ly tor­pe­do efforts to lib­er­ate the hostages before the elec­tion, and books have been writ­ten on what came to be called the Octo­ber sur­prise. But con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tions debunked pre­vi­ous the­o­ries of what hap­pened.

    Mr. Con­nal­ly did not fig­ure in those inves­ti­ga­tions. His involve­ment, as described by Mr. Barnes, adds a new under­stand­ing to what may have hap­pened in that hard-fought, piv­otal elec­tion year. With Mr. Carter now 98 and in hos­pice care, Mr. Barnes said he felt com­pelled to come for­ward to cor­rect the record.

    “His­to­ry needs to know that this hap­pened,” Mr. Barnes, who turns 85 next month, said in one of sev­er­al inter­views, his first with a news orga­ni­za­tion about the episode. “I think it’s so sig­nif­i­cant and I guess know­ing that the end is near for Pres­i­dent Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.”

    Mr. Barnes is no shady for­eign arms deal­er with ques­tion­able cred­i­bil­i­ty, like some of the char­ac­ters who fueled pre­vi­ous iter­a­tions of the Octo­ber sur­prise the­o­ry. He was once one of the most promi­nent fig­ures in Texas, the youngest speak­er of the Texas House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and lat­er lieu­tenant gov­er­nor. He was such an influ­en­tial fig­ure that he helped a young George W. Bush get into the Texas Air Nation­al Guard rather than be exposed to the draft and sent to Viet­nam. Lyn­don B. John­son pre­dict­ed that Mr. Barnes would become pres­i­dent some­day.

    ...

    Mr. Barnes iden­ti­fied four liv­ing peo­ple he said he had con­fid­ed in over the years: Mark K. Upde­grove, pres­i­dent of the L.B.J. Foun­da­tion; Tom John­son, a for­mer aide to Lyn­don John­son (no rela­tion) who lat­er became pub­lish­er of the Los Ange­les Times and pres­i­dent of CNN; Lar­ry Tem­ple, a for­mer aide to Mr. Con­nal­ly and Lyn­don John­son; and H.W. Brands, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas his­to­ri­an.

    All four of them con­firmed in recent days that Mr. Barnes shared the sto­ry with them years ago. “As far as I know, Ben nev­er has lied to me,” Tom John­son said, a sen­ti­ment the oth­ers echoed. Mr. Brands includ­ed three para­graphs about Mr. Barnes’s rec­ol­lec­tions in a 2015 biog­ra­phy of Mr. Rea­gan, but the account gen­er­at­ed lit­tle pub­lic notice at the time.

    Records at the Lyn­don Baines John­son Library and Muse­um con­firm part of Mr. Barnes’s sto­ry. An itin­er­ary found this past week in Mr. Connally’s files indi­cat­ed that he did, in fact, leave Hous­ton on July 18, 1980, for a trip that would take him to Jor­dan, Syr­ia, Lebanon, Sau­di Ara­bia, Egypt and Israel before return­ing to Hous­ton on Aug. 11. Mr. Barnes was list­ed as accom­pa­ny­ing him.

    Brief news accounts at the time report­ed on some of Mr. Connally’s stops with scant detail, describ­ing the trip as “strict­ly pri­vate.” An intrigu­ing note in Mr. Connally’s file con­firms Mr. Barnes’s mem­o­ry that there was con­tact with the Rea­gan camp ear­ly in the trip. Under the head­ing “Gov­er­nor Rea­gan,” a note from an assis­tant report­ed to Mr. Con­nal­ly on July 21: “Nan­cy Rea­gan called — they are at Ranch he wants to talk to you about being in on strat­e­gy meet­ings.” There was no record of his response.

    Mr. Barnes recalled join­ing Mr. Con­nal­ly in ear­ly Sep­tem­ber to sit down with Mr. Casey to report on their trip dur­ing a three-hour meet­ing in the Amer­i­can Air­lines lounge at what was then called the Dallas/Fort Worth Region­al Air­port. An entry in Mr. Connally’s cal­en­dar found this past week showed that he trav­eled to Dal­las on Sept. 10. A search of Mr. Casey’s archives at the Hoover Insti­tu­tion at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty turned up no doc­u­ments indi­cat­ing whether he was in Dal­las then or not.

    Mr. Barnes said he was cer­tain the point of Mr. Connally’s trip was to get a mes­sage to the Ira­ni­ans to hold the hostages until after the elec­tion. “I’ll go to my grave believ­ing that it was the pur­pose of the trip,” he said. “It wasn’t free­lanc­ing because Casey was so inter­est­ed in hear­ing as soon as we got back to the Unit­ed States.” Mr. Casey, he added, want­ed to know whether “they were going to hold the hostages.”

    None of that estab­lish­es whether Mr. Rea­gan knew about the trip, nor could Mr. Barnes say that Mr. Casey direct­ed Mr. Con­nal­ly to take the jour­ney. Like­wise, e does not know if the mes­sage trans­mit­ted to mul­ti­ple Mid­dle East­ern lead­ers got to the Ira­ni­ans, much less whether it influ­enced their deci­sion mak­ing. But Iran did hold the hostages until after the elec­tion, which Mr. Rea­gan won, and did not release them until min­utes after noon on Jan. 20, 1981, when Mr. Carter left office.

    ...

    Sus­pi­cions about the Rea­gan camp’s inter­ac­tions with Iran cir­cu­lat­ed qui­et­ly for years until Gary Sick, a for­mer nation­al secu­ri­ty aide to Mr. Carter, pub­lished a guest essay in The New York Times in April 1991 advanc­ing the the­o­ry, fol­lowed by a book, “Octo­ber Sur­prise,” pub­lished that Novem­ber.

    The term “Octo­ber sur­prise” was orig­i­nal­ly used by the Rea­gan camp to describe its fears that Mr. Carter would manip­u­late the hostage cri­sis to effect a release just before the elec­tion.

    To fore­stall such a sce­nario, Mr. Casey was alleged to have met with rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Iran in July and August 1980 in Madrid lead­ing to a deal sup­pos­ed­ly final­ized in Paris in Octo­ber in which a future Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion would ship arms to Tehran through Israel in exchange for the hostages being held until after the elec­tion.

    The House and Sen­ate sep­a­rate­ly autho­rized inves­ti­ga­tions and both ulti­mate­ly reject­ed the claims. The bipar­ti­san House task force, led by a Demo­c­rat, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Lee H. Hamil­ton of Indi­ana, and con­trolled by Democ­rats 8 to 5, con­clud­ed in a a con­sen­sus 968-page report that Mr. Casey was not in Madrid at the time and that sto­ries of covert deal­ings were not backed by cred­i­ble tes­ti­mo­ny, doc­u­ments or intel­li­gence reports.

    Still, a White House memo pro­duced in Novem­ber 1991 by a lawyer for Pres­i­dent George H.W. Bush report­ed the exis­tence of “a cable from the Madrid embassy indi­cat­ing that Bill Casey was in town, for pur­pos­es unknown.” That memo was not turned over to Mr. Hamilton’s task force and was dis­cov­ered two decades lat­er by Robert Par­ry, a jour­nal­ist who helped pro­duce a “Front­line” doc­u­men­tary on the Octo­ber sur­prise.

    Reached by tele­phone this past week, Mr. Sick said he nev­er heard of any involve­ment by Mr. Con­nal­ly but saw Mr. Barnes’s account as ver­i­fy­ing the broad con­cerns he had raised. “This is real­ly very inter­est­ing and it real­ly does add sig­nif­i­cant­ly to the base lev­el of infor­ma­tion on this,” Mr. Sick said. “Just the fact that he was doing it and debriefed Casey when he got back means a lot.” The sto­ry goes “fur­ther than any­thing that I’ve seen thus far,” he added. “So this is real­ly new.”

    Michael F. Zeldin, a Demo­c­ra­t­ic lawyer for the task force, and David H. Lauf­man, a Repub­li­can lawyer for the task force, both said in recent inter­views that Mr. Con­nal­ly nev­er crossed their radar screen dur­ing the inquiry and so they had no basis to judge Mr. Barnes’s account.

    While Mr. Casey was nev­er proved to have been engaged in any Octo­ber sur­prise deal-mak­ing, he was lat­er accused of sur­rep­ti­tious­ly obtain­ing a Carter cam­paign brief­ing book before the lone debate between the two can­di­dates, although he denied involve­ment.

    News of Mr. Barnes’s account came as val­i­da­tion to some of Mr. Carter’s remain­ing advis­ers. Ger­ald Raf­shoon, who was his White House com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor, said any inter­fer­ence may have changed his­to­ry. “If we had got­ten the hostages home, we’d have won, I real­ly believe that,” he said. “It’s pret­ty damn out­ra­geous.”

    Mr. Con­nal­ly was a polit­i­cal giant of his era. Raised on a South Texas cot­ton farm, he served in the Navy in World War II and became a con­fi­dant of Lyn­don B. John­son, help­ing run five of his cam­paigns, includ­ing his dis­put­ed 1948 elec­tion to the Sen­ate that was marred by cred­i­ble alle­ga­tions of fraud. Mr. Con­nal­ly man­aged Mr. Johnson’s unsuc­cess­ful bid for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion in 1960, then worked for the tick­et of John F. Kennedy and Mr. John­son. Mr. Con­nal­ly was reward­ed with an appoint­ment as sec­re­tary of the Navy. He then won a race for gov­er­nor of Texas in 1962.

    He was in the pres­i­den­tial lim­ou­sine sit­ting just in front of Mr. Kennedy in Dal­las in Novem­ber 1963 when Lee Har­vey Oswald opened fire. Mr. Con­nal­ly suf­fered injuries to his back, chest, wrist and thigh, but unlike Mr. Kennedy sur­vived the ordeal. He won two more terms as gov­er­nor, then became Pres­i­dent Richard M. Nixon’s sec­re­tary of the Trea­sury and ulti­mate­ly switched par­ties. He was a favorite of Mr. Nixon, who want­ed to make him his vice pres­i­dent or suc­ces­sor as pres­i­dent.

    ...

    Along the way, Mr. Con­nal­ly found a polit­i­cal pro­tégé in Mr. Barnes, who became “more a god­son than a friend,” as James Reston Jr. put it in “The Lone Star,” his biog­ra­phy of Mr. Con­nal­ly. The son of a peanut farmer who paid for col­lege sell­ing vac­u­um clean­ers door to door, Mr. Barnes was elect­ed to the Texas Leg­is­la­ture at age 21 and stood at Mr. Connally’s side for his first speech as a can­di­date for gov­er­nor in 1962.

    With Mr. Connally’s help, Mr. Barnes became House speak­er at 26 and was lat­er elect­ed lieu­tenant gov­er­nor, a pow­er­ful posi­tion in Texas, only to fall short in his own bid for gov­er­nor in 1972. He urged Mr. Con­nal­ly to run for pres­i­dent in 1980 even though by then they were in dif­fer­ent par­ties.

    After Mr. Connally’s cam­paign col­lapsed, he and Mr. Barnes went into busi­ness togeth­er, form­ing Barnes/Connally Invest­ments. The two built apart­ment com­plex­es, shop­ping cen­ters and office build­ings, and bought a com­muter air­line and an oil com­pa­ny, and lat­er a bar­be­cue house, a West­ern art mag­a­zine, a title com­pa­ny and an adver­tis­ing com­pa­ny. But they overex­tend­ed them­selves, took on too much debt and, after falling oil prices shat­tered the Texas real estate mar­ket, filed for bank­rupt­cy in 1987.

    The two stayed on good terms. “In spite of the dis­il­lu­sion­ment of our busi­ness arrange­ments, Ben Barnes and I remain friends, although I doubt that either of us would go back into busi­ness with the oth­er,” Mr. Con­nal­ly wrote in his mem­oir, “In History’s Shad­ow,” short­ly before dying in 1993 at age 76. Mr. Barnes, for his part, said this past week that “I remain a great fan of him.”

    Mr. Barnes said he had no idea of the pur­pose of the Mid­dle East trip when Mr. Con­nal­ly invit­ed him. They trav­eled to the region on a Gulf­stream jet owned by Supe­ri­or Oil. Only when they sat down with the first Arab leader did Mr. Barnes learn what Mr. Con­nal­ly was up to, he said.

    Mr. Con­nal­ly said, “‘Look, Ronald Reagan’s going to be elect­ed pres­i­dent and you need to get the word to Iran that they’re going to make a bet­ter deal with Rea­gan than they are Carter,’” Mr. Barnes recalled. “He said, ‘It would be very smart for you to pass the word to the Ira­ni­ans to wait until after this gen­er­al elec­tion is over.’ And boy, I tell you, I’m sit­ting there and I heard it and so now it dawns on me, I real­ize why we’re there.”

    Mr. Barnes said that, except for Israel, Mr. Con­nal­ly repeat­ed the same mes­sage at every stop in the region to lead­ers such as Pres­i­dent Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt. He thought his friend’s motive was clear. “It became very clear to me that Con­nal­ly was run­ning for sec­re­tary of state or sec­re­tary of defense,” Mr. Barnes said. (Mr. Con­nal­ly was lat­er offered ener­gy sec­re­tary but declined.)

    Mr. Barnes said he did not reveal the real sto­ry at the time to avoid blow­back from his own par­ty. “I don’t want to look like Bene­dict Arnold to the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty by par­tic­i­pat­ing in this,” he recalled explain­ing to a friend. The head­lines at the time, he imag­ined, would have been scan­dalous. “I did not want that to be on my obit­u­ary at all.”

    But as the years have passed, he said, he has often thought an injus­tice had been done to Mr. Carter. Dis­cussing the trip now, he indi­cat­ed, was his way of mak­ing amends. “I just want his­to­ry to reflect that Carter got a lit­tle bit of a bad deal about the hostages,” he said. “He didn’t have a fight­ing chance with those hostages still in the embassy in Iran.”

    ———–
    “A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Sto­ry of Sab­o­tag­ing Carter’s Re-elec­tion” By Peter Bak­er; The New York Times; 03/18/2023

    “His men­tor was John B. Con­nal­ly Jr., a titan of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics and for­mer Texas gov­er­nor who had served three pres­i­dents and just lost his own bid for the White House. A for­mer Demo­c­rat, Mr. Con­nal­ly had sought the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion in 1980 only to be swamped by for­mer Gov. Ronald Rea­gan of Cal­i­for­nia. Now Mr. Con­nal­ly resolved to help Mr. Rea­gan beat Mr. Carter and in the process, Mr. Barnes said, make his own case for becom­ing sec­re­tary of state or defense in a new admin­is­tra­tion.

    The Octo­ber Sur­prise plot was, in part, a bid by John Con­nal­ly to become Ronald Rea­gan’s sec­re­tary of state or defense. That was the motive for Con­nal­ly’s pre­vi­ous­ly unrec­og­nized key role in the plot, as laid out by Con­nal­ly’s mentee, Ben Barnes. And as the arti­cle pointcs out, Barnes is no ran­dom acquain­tance of Con­nal­ly. He was, at one point, one of the most promi­nent fig­ures in Texas. He even helped George W. Bush dodge the draft by get­ting into the Texas Air Nation­al Guard. Those appar­ent ties to the Bush fam­i­ly make this a good time to recall how Farah Man­soor’s research found the Iran­ian hostage cri­sis to be a polit­i­cal “man­age­ment tool” cre­at­ed by a ‘pro-Bush’ fac­tion of the CIA. That was the milieu Barnes was oper­at­ing in when he had the expe­ri­ences he’s only now shar­ing. It’s not quite a deathbed con­fes­sion from Barnes — it’s Jim­my Carters deathbed that appar­ent­ly promt­ed this — but Barnes is clear­ly some­one who knows where ‘the bod­ies are buried’. That part of the con­text of this new round of Octo­ber Sur­prise rev­e­la­tions. This is some­one undoubt­ed­ly who knows A LOT of secrets reach­ing a point in life where they are will­ing to start shar­ing them:

    ...
    “His­to­ry needs to know that this hap­pened,” Mr. Barnes, who turns 85 next month, said in one of sev­er­al inter­views, his first with a news orga­ni­za­tion about the episode. “I think it’s so sig­nif­i­cant and I guess know­ing that the end is near for Pres­i­dent Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.”

    Mr. Barnes is no shady for­eign arms deal­er with ques­tion­able cred­i­bil­i­ty, like some of the char­ac­ters who fueled pre­vi­ous iter­a­tions of the Octo­ber sur­prise the­o­ry. He was once one of the most promi­nent fig­ures in Texas, the youngest speak­er of the Texas House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and lat­er lieu­tenant gov­er­nor. He was such an influ­en­tial fig­ure that he helped a young George W. Bush get into the Texas Air Nation­al Guard rather than be exposed to the draft and sent to Viet­nam. Lyn­don B. John­son pre­dict­ed that Mr. Barnes would become pres­i­dent some­day.
    ...

    Nor are Bar­nes’s claims entire­ly uncor­rob­o­rat­ed. For starters, four peo­ple con­firmed Barnes shared this when them years ago, which rais­es the inter­est­ing ques­tion as to just how open a secret this all real­ly was in DC cir­cles. But it appears a Con­nal­ly itin­er­ary found in the LBJ Library pro­vide some com­pelling evi­dence that Barnes isn’t mak­ing the 1980 Mid­dle East trip up. The trip hap­pened, includ­ing post-trip dis­cus­sions with Rea­gan:

    ...
    Mr. Barnes iden­ti­fied four liv­ing peo­ple he said he had con­fid­ed in over the years: Mark K. Upde­grove, pres­i­dent of the L.B.J. Foun­da­tion; Tom John­son, a for­mer aide to Lyn­don John­son (no rela­tion) who lat­er became pub­lish­er of the Los Ange­les Times and pres­i­dent of CNN; Lar­ry Tem­ple, a for­mer aide to Mr. Con­nal­ly and Lyn­don John­son; and H.W. Brands, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas his­to­ri­an.

    All four of them con­firmed in recent days that Mr. Barnes shared the sto­ry with them years ago. “As far as I know, Ben nev­er has lied to me,” Tom John­son said, a sen­ti­ment the oth­ers echoed. Mr. Brands includ­ed three para­graphs about Mr. Barnes’s rec­ol­lec­tions in a 2015 biog­ra­phy of Mr. Rea­gan, but the account gen­er­at­ed lit­tle pub­lic notice at the time.

    Records at the Lyn­don Baines John­son Library and Muse­um con­firm part of Mr. Barnes’s sto­ry. An itin­er­ary found this past week in Mr. Connally’s files indi­cat­ed that he did, in fact, leave Hous­ton on July 18, 1980, for a trip that would take him to Jor­dan, Syr­ia, Lebanon, Sau­di Ara­bia, Egypt and Israel before return­ing to Hous­ton on Aug. 11. Mr. Barnes was list­ed as accom­pa­ny­ing him.

    Brief news accounts at the time report­ed on some of Mr. Connally’s stops with scant detail, describ­ing the trip as “strict­ly pri­vate.” An intrigu­ing note in Mr. Connally’s file con­firms Mr. Barnes’s mem­o­ry that there was con­tact with the Rea­gan camp ear­ly in the trip. Under the head­ing “Gov­er­nor Rea­gan,” a note from an assis­tant report­ed to Mr. Con­nal­ly on July 21: “Nan­cy Rea­gan called — they are at Ranch he wants to talk to you about being in on strat­e­gy meet­ings.” There was no record of his response.
    ...

    Per­haps the most unbe­liev­able part of Bar­nes’s sto­ry is how Con­nal­ly appar­ent­ly did­n’t inform Barnes as to what the trip was about, and yet both of them met with one Mid­dle East leader after anoth­er where Con­nal­ly issued the same mes­sage. It points to a remark­able lev­el of trust Con­nal­ly must have had in Bar­nes’s abil­i­ty to keep a secret. Which is what Barns did, most­ly, for 43 years. But the secret isn’t just that they met with all these lead­ers to deliv­er the same mes­sage. There was the fol­low up meet­ing with future CIA-direc­tor Bill Casey at the Amer­i­can Air­lines lounge at the Dal­las Air­port. A meet­ing that Con­nal­ly again brought Barnes to. And then there’s the fact that Barnes is claim­ing that Con­nal­ly and Barnes were shar­ing the ‘don’t release the hostages’ mes­sages not just with Iran­ian lead­ers but lead­ers across the Mid­dle East, with an appar­ent hope that those lead­ers would con­vey the mes­sage to Iran. It’s not entire­ly clear why Barnes was brought along to all these meet­ings for a scan­dalous mis­sion that he appar­ent­ly was­n’t aware of from the start, or why non-Iran­ian lead­ers would be informed about the plot, but that’s the sto­ry he’s shar­ing:

    ...
    What hap­pened next Mr. Barnes has large­ly kept secret for near­ly 43 years. Mr. Con­nal­ly, he said, took him to one Mid­dle East­ern cap­i­tal after anoth­er that sum­mer, meet­ing with a host of region­al lead­ers to deliv­er a blunt mes­sage to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the elec­tion. Mr. Rea­gan will win and give you a bet­ter deal.

    ...

    Mr. Barnes recalled join­ing Mr. Con­nal­ly in ear­ly Sep­tem­ber to sit down with Mr. Casey to report on their trip dur­ing a three-hour meet­ing in the Amer­i­can Air­lines lounge at what was then called the Dallas/Fort Worth Region­al Air­port. An entry in Mr. Connally’s cal­en­dar found this past week showed that he trav­eled to Dal­las on Sept. 10. A search of Mr. Casey’s archives at the Hoover Insti­tu­tion at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty turned up no doc­u­ments indi­cat­ing whether he was in Dal­las then or not.

    Mr. Barnes said he was cer­tain the point of Mr. Connally’s trip was to get a mes­sage to the Ira­ni­ans to hold the hostages until after the elec­tion. “I’ll go to my grave believ­ing that it was the pur­pose of the trip,” he said. “It wasn’t free­lanc­ing because Casey was so inter­est­ed in hear­ing as soon as we got back to the Unit­ed States.” Mr. Casey, he added, want­ed to know whether “they were going to hold the hostages.”

    ...

    Mr. Barnes said he had no idea of the pur­pose of the Mid­dle East trip when Mr. Con­nal­ly invit­ed him. They trav­eled to the region on a Gulf­stream jet owned by Supe­ri­or Oil. Only when they sat down with the first Arab leader did Mr. Barnes learn what Mr. Con­nal­ly was up to, he said.

    Mr. Con­nal­ly said, “‘Look, Ronald Reagan’s going to be elect­ed pres­i­dent and you need to get the word to Iran that they’re going to make a bet­ter deal with Rea­gan than they are Carter,’” Mr. Barnes recalled. “He said, ‘It would be very smart for you to pass the word to the Ira­ni­ans to wait until after this gen­er­al elec­tion is over.’ And boy, I tell you, I’m sit­ting there and I heard it and so now it dawns on me, I real­ize why we’re there.”

    Mr. Barnes said that, except for Israel, Mr. Con­nal­ly repeat­ed the same mes­sage at every stop in the region to lead­ers such as Pres­i­dent Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt. He thought his friend’s motive was clear. “It became very clear to me that Con­nal­ly was run­ning for sec­re­tary of state or sec­re­tary of defense,” Mr. Barnes said. (Mr. Con­nal­ly was lat­er offered ener­gy sec­re­tary but declined.)
    ...

    And while sus­pi­cions about an Octo­ber Sur­prise were around from the start of the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion, it was­n’t until the 1991 pub­li­ca­tion of an opin­ion piece by for­mer Carter Nation­al Secu­ri­ty aide Gary Sick, that the sto­ry start­ed get­ting the kind of atten­tion it deserved. Recall how Farah Man­soor’s the­sis that the CIA orches­trat­ed the col­lapse of the Shah of the rise of Khome­i­ni and the Islam­ic fun­da­men­tal­ists was based in part on Sick­’s expe­ri­ences, that includ­ed what appeared to be mul­ti­ple attempts in 1978 by CIA-con­nect­ed indi­vid­u­als to take steps that would have assist­ed Khome­ini’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary efforts. It’s a reminder that we can’t real­ly sep­a­rate the Octo­ber Sur­prise intrigue Barnes is flesh­ing out from Fara Man­soor’s damn­ing the­sis about the CIA’s spon­sor­ship of the Iran­ian rev­o­lu­tion. This is all one big wild­ly scan­dalous sto­ry:

    ...
    Sus­pi­cions about the Rea­gan camp’s inter­ac­tions with Iran cir­cu­lat­ed qui­et­ly for years until Gary Sick, a for­mer nation­al secu­ri­ty aide to Mr. Carter, pub­lished a guest essay in The New York Times in April 1991 advanc­ing the the­o­ry, fol­lowed by a book, “Octo­ber Sur­prise,” pub­lished that Novem­ber.

    ...

    Reached by tele­phone this past week, Mr. Sick said he nev­er heard of any involve­ment by Mr. Con­nal­ly but saw Mr. Barnes’s account as ver­i­fy­ing the broad con­cerns he had raised. “This is real­ly very inter­est­ing and it real­ly does add sig­nif­i­cant­ly to the base lev­el of infor­ma­tion on this,” Mr. Sick said. “Just the fact that he was doing it and debriefed Casey when he got back means a lot.” The sto­ry goes “fur­ther than any­thing that I’ve seen thus far,” he added. “So this is real­ly new.”
    ...

    Regard­ing the bipar­ti­san con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tion that fol­lowed Gary Sick­’s 1991 opin­ion piece, and the fact that it ini­tial­ly con­clud­ed that there was noth­ing to the Octo­ber Sur­prise ‘con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries’, it’s worth not­ing that the Demo­c­rat who head­ed that inves­ti­ga­tion, Lee H. Hamil­ton of Indi­ana, was also the vice chair of the wide­ly panned 9/11 Com­mis­sion.

    And note who ulti­mate­ly dis­cov­ered a 1991 memo by a lawyer for Pres­i­dent George H.W. Bush that con­firmed that yes, Bill Casey was indeed in Madrid dur­ing July and August of 1980, the peri­od when he is alleged to have met with rep­re­se­n­a­tives of Iran to pre­vent a release of the hostage: Robert Par­ry, 20 year lat­er in 2011. Who else knew about that memo dur­ing that 20 year peri­od? Just how open a secret was all this?

    ...
    The term “Octo­ber sur­prise” was orig­i­nal­ly used by the Rea­gan camp to describe its fears that Mr. Carter would manip­u­late the hostage cri­sis to effect a release just before the elec­tion.

    To fore­stall such a sce­nario, Mr. Casey was alleged to have met with rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Iran in July and August 1980 in Madrid lead­ing to a deal sup­pos­ed­ly final­ized in Paris in Octo­ber in which a future Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion would ship arms to Tehran through Israel in exchange for the hostages being held until after the elec­tion.

    The House and Sen­ate sep­a­rate­ly autho­rized inves­ti­ga­tions and both ulti­mate­ly reject­ed the claims. The bipar­ti­san House task force, led by a Demo­c­rat, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Lee H. Hamil­ton of Indi­ana, and con­trolled by Democ­rats 8 to 5, con­clud­ed in a a con­sen­sus 968-page report that Mr. Casey was not in Madrid at the time and that sto­ries of covert deal­ings were not backed by cred­i­ble tes­ti­mo­ny, doc­u­ments or intel­li­gence reports.

    Still, a White House memo pro­duced in Novem­ber 1991 by a lawyer for Pres­i­dent George H.W. Bush report­ed the exis­tence of “a cable from the Madrid embassy indi­cat­ing that Bill Casey was in town, for pur­pos­es unknown.” That memo was not turned over to Mr. Hamilton’s task force and was dis­cov­ered two decades lat­er by Robert Par­ry, a jour­nal­ist who helped pro­duce a “Front­line” doc­u­men­tary on the Octo­ber sur­prise.

    ...

    Michael F. Zeldin, a Demo­c­ra­t­ic lawyer for the task force, and David H. Lauf­man, a Repub­li­can lawyer for the task force, both said in recent inter­views that Mr. Con­nal­ly nev­er crossed their radar screen dur­ing the inquiry and so they had no basis to judge Mr. Barnes’s account.
    ...

    John Con­nal­ly was­n’t even ‘on the radar’ of con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tors over 30 years ago. But he’s just been put on the radar in a big way. What will his­to­ri­ans and inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ists do with this now? Is this just a ran­dom­ly one-off? Prob­a­bly. But, again, that’s a big part of the con­text here: it’s not just that we got what appears to be con­fir­ma­tion that the ‘Octo­ber Sur­prise’ did indeed hap­pen as many sus­pect­ed. We’re also get­ting fur­ther con­fir­ma­tion that, for the most part, almost no one actu­al­ly cares. Sure, there was some hoopla about this report when it first came out. But that was about it. Now it’s back to just pas­sive­ly wait­ing for more sur­pris­es and then not real­ly pur­su­ing those new sur­pris­ing leads.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 23, 2023, 10:52 am
  5. It’s Israel’s 9/11. That’s the fram­ing we keep hear­ing in the reports and analy­sis cov­er­ing the explo­sion of full blow war between Israel and Gaza. A giant seem­ing­ly inex­plic­a­ble 9/11-style intel­li­gence fail­ure.

    Time will tell if that’s real­ly what hap­pened, but it’s worth keep­ing in mind that this appar­ent giant intel­li­gence fail­ure coin­cid­ed with the 50th anniver­sary of the start of the Yom Kip­pur War. In oth­er words, the tim­ing of some­thing hap­pen­ing on that date was­n’t exact­ly shock­ing. Some­thing was sure­ly com­ing, albeit not nec­es­sar­i­ly some­thing on this scale.

    But as the ques­tions of how such an intel­li­gence fail­ure hap­pened con­tin­ue to grow, ques­tions are rapid­ly eclips­ing the debate: was Iran involved and will this lead to a wider region­al war? Beyond that, was dis­rupt­ing the Israeli/Saudi peace process the motive here?

    Inter­est­ing­ly, the offi­cial stances on Iran’s involve­ment remain neb­u­lous, with the WSJ ini­tial­ly report­ing that senior mem­bers of Hamas and Hezbol­lah admit­ted that Iran gave its sup­port and green light for the attack. Lat­er state­ments from a senior Hamas offi­cial sug­gest­ed that Iran and Hezbol­lah played no roles at all in the attack. Iran con­tin­ues to insist it played no role at all. And while it’s not hard to see what Iran is deny­ing any involve­ment, it’s also not hard to imag­ine Hamas had some sort of Iran­ian assis­tance, espe­cial­ly giv­en the progress of Israeli/Saudi peace talks. This was a remark­ably sophis­ti­cat­ed mil­i­tary oper­a­tion on a num­ber of lev­els that had to require exten­sive train­ing some­where.

    But for all the ques­tions about Iran’s pos­si­ble involve­ment, and whether or not Iran ends up get­ting dragged into a broad­er region­al war that could pull in the US too, it’s going to be impor­tant to keep in mind the oth­er major ally Hamas has that obvi­ous­ly could have played a major oper­a­tional role: the rest of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and its many relat­ed affil­i­ates and off­shoots. Hamas isn’t just some iso­lat­ed actor. Plen­ty of Mus­lim Broth­er­hood off­shoots have suf­fered defeats in recent years (like in Syr­ia or Egypt). How big a gam­ble is that larg­er net­work will­ing to make at this point?

    And that brings up the grim­ly fas­ci­nat­ing his­to­ry of the Iran­ian rev­o­lu­tion that is all the more rel­e­vant today as this cri­sis plays out: the his­to­ry of Iran­ian rev­o­lu­tion as an exten­sion of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood’s explo­sive growth across the Mus­lim World through­out the Cold War peri­od. Explo­sive growth spon­sored and fos­tered by the CIA, as Farah Man­soor revealed. As we’ve also seen in the the report­ing by Robert Drey­fuss back in 2006, the Iran­ian rev­o­lu­tion itself grew out of a Shia Mus­lim Broth­er­hood affil­i­ate, the Devo­tees of Islam, which includ­ed the Aya­tol­lah Ruhol­lah Khome­i­ni.

    In fact, as we’re going to see in the Drey­fuss arti­cle excerpt below, the first instance of Islamist ter­ror in the US — the July 22, 1980, assas­si­na­tion of Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a for­mer press coun­selor at the Iran­ian Embassy in Wash­ing­ton — was exe­cut­ed by David Belfield, an Amer­i­can Mus­lim who first met Mus­lim Broth­er­hood lead — and sus­pect­ed CIA assets — Said Ramadan in 1975. Belfield went on to become Ramadan’s “per­son­al sec­re­tary, spe­cial emis­sary and devot­ed ser­vant.” That’s who com­mit­ted the first act of Islamist ter­ror on US soil. Said Ramadan’s per­son­al sec­re­tary, who killed a crit­ic of the Iran­ian rev­o­lu­tion. It’s the kind of his­to­ry that could be espe­cial­ly impor­tant when try­ing to make sense of a sit­u­a­tion that risks mor­ph­ing into a broad­er Mus­lim Brotherhood/Iranian allied wave of con­flict.

    Ok, first, here’s an AP men­tion the Egypt­ian claims that this was­n’t a sur­prise attack. Instead, the attack came after Egypt­ian intel­li­gence warned Israel that ‘some­thing big’ is com­ing. Soon:

    Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    What went wrong? Ques­tions emerge over Israel’s intel­li­gence prowess after Hamas attack

    By TIA GOLDENBERG
    Updat­ed 2:47 AM CDT, Octo­ber 9, 2023

    TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — For Pales­tini­ans in Gaza, Israel’s eyes are nev­er very far away. Sur­veil­lance drones buzz con­stant­ly from the skies. The high­ly-secured bor­der is awash with secu­ri­ty cam­eras and sol­diers on guard. Intel­li­gence agen­cies work sources and cyber capa­bil­i­ties to draw out a bevy of infor­ma­tion.

    But Israel’s eyes appeared to have been closed in the lead-up to an unprece­dent­ed onslaught by the mil­i­tant Hamas group, which broke down Israeli bor­der bar­ri­ers and sent hun­dreds of mil­i­tants into Israel to car­ry out a brazen attack that has killed hun­dreds and pushed the region toward con­flict.

    Israel’s intel­li­gence agen­cies have gained an aura of invin­ci­bil­i­ty over the decades because of a string of achieve­ments. Israel has foiled plots seed­ed in the West Bank, alleged­ly hunt­ed down Hamas oper­a­tives in Dubai and has been accused of killing Iran­ian nuclear sci­en­tists in the heart of Iran. Even when their efforts have stum­bled, agen­cies like the Mossad, Shin Bet and mil­i­tary intel­li­gence have main­tained their mys­tique.

    But the weekend’s assault, which caught Israel off guard on a major Jew­ish hol­i­day, plunges that rep­u­ta­tion into doubt and rais­es ques­tions about the country’s readi­ness in the face of a weak­er but deter­mined foe. Over 48 hours lat­er, Hamas mil­i­tants con­tin­ued to bat­tle Israeli forces inside Israeli ter­ri­to­ry, and dozens of Israelis were in Hamas cap­tiv­i­ty in Gaza.

    “This is a major fail­ure,” said Yaakov Amidror, a for­mer nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er to Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu. “This oper­a­tion actu­al­ly proves that the (intel­li­gence) abil­i­ties in Gaza were no good.”

    ...

    Some say it is too ear­ly to pin the blame sole­ly on an intel­li­gence fault. They point to a wave of low-lev­el vio­lence in the West Bank that shift­ed some mil­i­tary resources there and the polit­i­cal chaos roil­ing Israel over steps by Netanyahu’s far-right gov­ern­ment to over­haul the judi­cia­ry. The con­tro­ver­sial plan has threat­ened the cohe­sion of the country’s pow­er­ful mil­i­tary.

    But the appar­ent lack of pri­or knowl­edge of Hamas’ plot will like­ly be seen as a prime cul­prit in the chain of events that led to the dead­liest attack against Israelis in decades.

    Israel with­drew troops and set­tlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, strip­ping it of a close han­dle on the hap­pen­ings in the ter­ri­to­ry. But even after Hamas over­ran Gaza in 2007, Israel appeared to main­tain its edge, using tech­no­log­i­cal and human intel­li­gence.

    It claimed to know the pre­cise loca­tions of Hamas lead­er­ship and appeared to prove it through the assas­si­na­tions of mil­i­tant lead­ers in sur­gi­cal strikes, some­times while they slept in their bed­rooms. Israel has known where to strike under­ground tun­nels used by Hamas to fer­ry around fight­ers and arms, destroy­ing miles (kilo­me­ters) of the con­cealed pas­sage­ways.

    Despite those abil­i­ties, Hamas was able to keep its plan under wraps. The fero­cious attack, which like­ly took months of plan­ning and metic­u­lous train­ing and involved coor­di­na­tion among mul­ti­ple mil­i­tant groups, appeared to have gone under Israel’s intel­li­gence radar.

    Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli gen­er­al, said that with­out a foothold inside Gaza, Israel’s secu­ri­ty ser­vices have come to rely increas­ing­ly on tech­no­log­i­cal means to gain intel­li­gence. He said mil­i­tants in Gaza have found ways to evade that tech­no­log­i­cal intel­li­gence gath­er­ing, giv­ing Israel an incom­plete pic­ture of their inten­tions.

    “The oth­er side learned to deal with our tech­no­log­i­cal dom­i­nance and they stopped using tech­nol­o­gy that could expose it,” said Avivi, who served as a con­duit for intel­li­gence mate­ri­als under a for­mer mil­i­tary chief of staff. Avivi is pres­i­dent and founder of Israel Defense and Secu­ri­ty Forum, a hawk­ish group of for­mer mil­i­tary com­man­ders.

    “They’ve gone back to the Stone Age,” he said, explain­ing that mil­i­tants weren’t using phones or com­put­ers and were con­duct­ing their sen­si­tive busi­ness in rooms spe­cial­ly guard­ed from tech­no­log­i­cal espi­onage or going under­ground.

    But Avivi said the fail­ure extends beyond just intel­li­gence gath­er­ing and Israel’s secu­ri­ty ser­vices failed to put togeth­er an accu­rate pic­ture from the intel­li­gence they were receiv­ing, based on what he said was a mis­con­cep­tion sur­round­ing Hamas’ inten­tions.

    Israel’s secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment has in recent years increas­ing­ly seen Hamas as an actor inter­est­ed in gov­ern­ing, seek­ing to devel­op Gaza’s econ­o­my and improv­ing the stan­dard of liv­ing of Gaza’s 2.3 mil­lion peo­ple. Avivi and oth­ers say the truth is that Hamas, which calls for Israel’s destruc­tion, still sees that aim as its pri­or­i­ty.

    Israel in recent years has allowed up to 18,000 Pales­tin­ian labor­ers from Gaza to work in Israel, where they can earn a salary about 10 times high­er than in the impov­er­ished coastal enclave. The secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment saw that car­rot as a way to main­tain rel­a­tive calm.

    “In prac­tice, hun­dreds if not thou­sands of Hamas men were prepar­ing for a sur­prise attack for months, with­out that hav­ing leaked,” wrote Amos Harel, a defense com­men­ta­tor, in the dai­ly Haaretz. “The results are cat­a­stroph­ic.”

    Allies who share intel­li­gence with Israel said secu­ri­ty agen­cies were mis­read­ing real­i­ty.

    An Egypt­ian intel­li­gence offi­cial said Egypt, which often serves as a medi­a­tor between Israel and Hamas, had spo­ken repeat­ed­ly with the Israelis about “some­thing big,” with­out elab­o­rat­ing.

    He said Israeli offi­cials were focused on the West Bank and played down the threat from Gaza. Netanyahu’s gov­ern­ment is made up of sup­port­ers of Jew­ish West Bank set­tlers who have demand­ed a secu­ri­ty crack­down in the face of a ris­ing tide of vio­lence there over the last 18 months.

    “We have warned them an explo­sion of the sit­u­a­tion is com­ing, and very soon, and it would be big. But they under­es­ti­mat­ed such warn­ings,” said the offi­cial, who spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty because he wasn’t autho­rized to dis­cuss the con­tent of sen­si­tive intel­li­gence dis­cus­sions with the media.

    Israel has also been pre­oc­cu­pied and torn apart by Netanyahu’s judi­cial over­haul plan. Netanyahu had received repeat­ed warn­ings by his defense chiefs, as well as sev­er­al for­mer lead­ers of the country’s intel­li­gence agen­cies, that the divi­sive plan was chip­ping away at the cohe­sion of the country’s secu­ri­ty ser­vices.

    Mar­tin Indyk, who served as a spe­cial envoy for Israeli-Pales­tin­ian nego­ti­a­tions dur­ing the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, said inter­nal divi­sions over the legal changes was an aggra­vat­ing fac­tor that con­tributed to the Israelis being caught off guard.

    “That roiled the IDF in a way that was, I think, we dis­cov­ered was a huge dis­trac­tion,” he said.

    ———-

    “What went wrong? Ques­tions emerge over Israel’s intel­li­gence prowess after Hamas attack” by TIA GOLDENBERG; Asso­ci­at­ed Press; 10/09/2023

    “An Egypt­ian intel­li­gence offi­cial said Egypt, which often serves as a medi­a­tor between Israel and Hamas, had spo­ken repeat­ed­ly with the Israelis about “some­thing big,” with­out elab­o­rat­ing.”

    “Some­thing big” was com­ing. That’s what Egypt­ian intel­li­gence was appar­ent­ly warn­ing Israel. Some­thing big was com­ing “soon”:

    ...
    He said Israeli offi­cials were focused on the West Bank and played down the threat from Gaza. Netanyahu’s gov­ern­ment is made up of sup­port­ers of Jew­ish West Bank set­tlers who have demand­ed a secu­ri­ty crack­down in the face of a ris­ing tide of vio­lence there over the last 18 months.

    “We have warned them an explo­sion of the sit­u­a­tion is com­ing, and very soon, and it would be big. But they under­es­ti­mat­ed such warn­ings,” said the offi­cial, who spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty because he wasn’t autho­rized to dis­cuss the con­tent of sen­si­tive intel­li­gence dis­cus­sions with the media.

    Israel has also been pre­oc­cu­pied and torn apart by Netanyahu’s judi­cial over­haul plan. Netanyahu had received repeat­ed warn­ings by his defense chiefs, as well as sev­er­al for­mer lead­ers of the country’s intel­li­gence agen­cies, that the divi­sive plan was chip­ping away at the cohe­sion of the country’s secu­ri­ty ser­vices.
    ...

    So just how big of an intel­li­gence ‘fail­ure’ was this? A gen­uine screw up? Or some­thing clos­er 9/11, with intel­li­gence agen­cies appear­ing to run cov­er for the ter­ror oper­a­tion? It’s too ear­ly to say. But it’s not too ear­ly to revis­it vital his­to­ry for events involv­ing poten­tial col­lu­sion between Hamas and the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment. A his­to­ry of col­lu­sion that involves the CIA too. As Robert Drey­fuss described in this 2006 Moth­er Jones piece, Mus­lim Broth­er­hood leader Said Ramadan did­n’t just play a cru­cial role in estab­lish­ing Mus­lim Broth­er­hood branch­es across the Mus­lim world, includ­ing the for­ma­tion of Hamas in Pales­tine. The Iran­ian rev­o­lu­tion emerged from Mus­lim Broth­er­hood affil­i­ate the Devo­tees of Islam, led by the men­tor of Aya­tol­lah Ruhol­lah Khome­i­ni. Beyond that, the first instance of Islamist ter­ror in the US — the July 22, 1980, assas­si­na­tion of Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a for­mer press coun­selor at the Iran­ian Embassy in Wash­ing­ton — was per­pe­trat­ed by none oth­er than David Belfield, an Amer­i­can Mus­lim who first met Said Ramadan in 1975 and went on to become Ramadan’s “per­son­al sec­re­tary, spe­cial emis­sary and devot­ed ser­vant.” And through­out these decades of Ramadan’s build­ing up of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, doc­u­ments indi­cate he was a CIA asset. Unpleas­ant his­to­ry, but the kind of his­to­ry we should prob­a­bly keep in mind as we appear to be lurch­ing clos­er and clos­er to a region­al war that could drag in both the US and Iran:

    Moth­er Jones

    Cold War, Holy War­rior

    Ike was pres­i­dent. Wash­ing­ton was des­per­ate for Arab allies. Enter an Islamist ide­o­logue with an invi­ta­tion to the White House and a plan for glob­al jihad.

    Robert Drey­fuss
    January/February 2006 Issue

    In the fall of 1953, the Oval Office was the stage for a pecu­liar encounter between Pres­i­dent Dwight D. Eisen­how­er and a young Mid­dle-East­ern fire­brand. In the mut­ed black-and-white pho­to­graph record­ing the event, the grand­fa­ther­ly, bald­ing Ike, then 62, stands gray-suit­ed, erect, his elbows bent and his fists clenched as if to add mus­cle to some force­ful point. To his left is an olive-skinned Egypt­ian in a dark suit with a neat­ly trimmed beard and close­ly cropped hair, clutch­ing a sheaf of papers behind his back, star­ing intent­ly at the pres­i­dent. He is just 27 years old, but he already has more than a decade of expe­ri­ence deep inside the vio­lent and pas­sion­ate world of mil­i­tant Islam, from Cairo to Amman to Karachi. Along­side him are mem­bers of a del­e­ga­tion of schol­ars, mul­lahs, and activists from India, Syr­ia, Yemen, Jor­dan, Turkey, and Sau­di Ara­bia, some dressed in suits, oth­ers wear­ing robes and shawls.

    The president’s vis­i­tor that Sep­tem­ber day was Said Ramadan, a key offi­cial and ide­o­logue of a secre­tive, under­ground fra­ter­ni­ty of Islam­ic fun­da­men­tal­ists known as the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. As he stood at the president’s side, Ramadan appeared respectable, a wel­come guest if not a fel­low states­man.

    Offi­cial­ly, Ramadan was in the Unit­ed States to attend a col­lo­qui­um on Islam­ic cul­ture at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, cospon­sored by the Library of Con­gress. It was an august event, held with much pomp and cir­cum­stance in Princeton’s Nas­sau Hall. Del­e­gates sat neat­ly arrayed in stiff-backed pews in the high-ceilinged Fac­ul­ty Room and attend­ed lav­ish lun­cheons, recep­tions, and gar­den par­ties in the shade of bright fall foliage.

    Accord­ing to the pub­lished pro­ceed­ings, the con­fer­ence was the for­tu­itous result of the fact that a num­ber of cel­e­brat­ed per­son­ages from the Mid­dle East were vis­it­ing the coun­try. “Dur­ing the sum­mer of 1953 there hap­pened to be an unusu­al­ly large num­ber of dis­tin­guished Mus­lim schol­ars in the Unit­ed States,” the doc­u­ment notes. But the par­tic­i­pants didn’t just “hap­pen” to have crossed the Atlantic. The col­lo­qui­um was orga­nized by the U.S. gov­ern­ment, which fund­ed it, tapped par­tic­i­pants it con­sid­ered use­ful or promis­ing, and bun­dled them off to New Jer­sey. Con­fer­ence orga­niz­ers had vis­it­ed Cairo, Bahrain, Bagh­dad, Beirut, New Del­hi, and oth­er cities to scout for par­tic­i­pants. Foot­ing the bill—to the tune of $25,000, plus addi­tion­al expens­es for trans­port­ing atten­dees from the Mid­dle East—was the Inter­na­tion­al Infor­ma­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (IIA), a branch of the State Depart­ment that had its roots in the U.S. intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty; sup­ple­men­tary fund­ing was sought from U.S. air­lines and from Aram­co, the U.S. oil con­sor­tium in Sau­di Ara­bia. Like many of the par­tic­i­pants, Ramadan, a hard-edged ide­o­logue and not a schol­ar, was vis­it­ing the con­fer­ence as an all-expens­es-paid guest.

    A now-declas­si­fied IIA doc­u­ment labeled “Confidential—Security Infor­ma­tion” sums up the pur­pose of the project: “On the sur­face, the con­fer­ence looks like an exer­cise in pure learn­ing. This in effect is the impres­sion desired.” The true goal, the memo notes, was to “bring togeth­er per­sons exert­ing great influ­ence in for­mu­lat­ing Mus­lim opin­ion in fields such as edu­ca­tion, sci­ence, law and phi­los­o­phy and inevitably, there­fore, on pol­i­tics…. Among the var­i­ous results expect­ed from the col­lo­qui­um are the impe­tus and direc­tion that may be giv­en to the Renais­sance move­ment with­in Islam itself.” At the time, the Unit­ed States was just begin­ning to feel its way around the Mid­dle East, and Amer­i­can ori­en­tal­ists and aca­d­e­mics were debat­ing the extent to which polit­i­cal Islam might serve as a tool for Amer­i­can influ­ence in the region.

    For an orga­ni­za­tion estab­lished as a secret soci­ety, with a para­mil­i­tary arm that was respon­si­ble for assas­si­na­tions and vio­lence, to be char­ac­ter­ized as a har­bin­ger of a rebirth of Islam may seem odd. But such a view was entire­ly in char­ac­ter with U.S. pol­i­cy at a time when vir­tu­al­ly any­one who opposed com­mu­nism was viewed as a poten­tial ally. When­ev­er I inter­viewed CIA and State Depart­ment offi­cials who served in the Mid­dle East between World War II and the fall of the Sovi­et Union, they would repeat, almost like a cat­e­chism, that Islam was seen as a bar­ri­er both to Sovi­et expan­sion and to the spread of Marx­ist ide­ol­o­gy among the mass­es. “We thought of Islam as a coun­ter­weight to com­mu­nism,” says Tal­cott Seelye, an Amer­i­can diplo­mat who, while serv­ing in Jor­dan in the ear­ly 1950s, paid a vis­it to Said Ramadan. “We saw it as a mod­er­ate force, and a pos­i­tive one.” Indeed, adds Her­mann Eilts, anoth­er vet­er­an U.S. diplo­mat who was sta­tioned in Sau­di Ara­bia in the late ’40s, Amer­i­can offi­cials in Cairo had “reg­u­lar meet­ings” with Ramadan’s then-boss, Mus­lim Broth­er­hood leader Has­san al-Ban­na, “and found him per­fect­ly empa­thet­ic.”

    Over the four decades after Ramadan’s vis­it to the Oval Office, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood would become the orga­ni­za­tion­al spon­sor for gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion of Islamist groups from Sau­di Ara­bia to Syr­ia, Gene­va to Lahore—and Ramadan, its chief inter­na­tion­al orga­niz­er, would turn up, Zeliglike, as an oper­a­tive in vir­tu­al­ly every man­i­fes­ta­tion of rad­i­cal polit­i­cal Islam. The hard­core Islamists of Pak­istan (see “Among the Allies,” page 44), whose acolytes cre­at­ed the Tal­iban in Afghanistan and who have pro­vid­ed suc­cor to Al Qae­da since the 1990s, mod­eled their orga­ni­za­tion on the Broth­er­hood. The regime of the aya­tol­lahs in Iran grew out of a secret soci­ety called the Devo­tees of Islam, a Broth­er­hood affil­i­ate whose leader in the 1950s was the men­tor of Aya­tol­lah Ruhol­lah Khome­i­ni. Hamas, the Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion, began as an offi­cial branch of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. The rad­i­cal-right Egypt­ian Islam­ic Jihad and allied groups, whose mem­bers assas­si­nat­ed Pres­i­dent Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1981 and which merged with Osama bin Laden’s Al Qae­da in the 1990s, grew out of the Broth­er­hood in the 1970s. And some of the Afghan lead­ers who spear­head­ed the anti-Sovi­et jihad that was run by the CIA in the 1980s, and who helped bin Laden build the net­work of “Arab Afghans” that was Al Qaeda’s fore­run­ner, were Broth­er­hood mem­bers.

    It’s no exag­ger­a­tion to say that Ramadan is the ide­o­log­i­cal grand­fa­ther of Osama bin Laden. But Ramadan, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, and their Islamist allies might nev­er have been able to plant the seeds that sprout­ed into Al Qae­da had they not been treat­ed as U.S. allies dur­ing the Cold War and had they not received both overt and covert sup­port from Wash­ing­ton; Ramadan him­self, doc­u­ments sug­gest, was recruit­ed as an asset by the CIA.

    ...

    SAID RAMADAN was born in 1926 in Shib­in el Kom, a vil­lage about 40 miles north of Cairo in the Nile delta. He encoun­tered Ban­na and joined his move­ment when he was 14; six years lat­er, after grad­u­at­ing from Cairo Uni­ver­si­ty, he became Banna’s per­son­al sec­re­tary and right-hand man. A year lat­er, Ramadan was named edi­tor of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood week­ly, Al Shi­hab, and he mar­ried Banna’s daugh­ter, giv­ing him an impor­tant claim to lead­er­ship with­in the orga­ni­za­tion.

    Ramadan became Banna’s rov­ing ambas­sador, amass­ing a net­work of inter­na­tion­al con­tacts. In 1945, he trav­eled to then British-con­trolled Jerusalem, where the storm clouds of war between Arabs and Jews were begin­ning to gath­er. Over the years that fol­lowed, Ramadan would spend a great deal of time shut­tling between Jerusalem, Amman, Dam­as­cus, and Beirut to build Broth­er­hood chap­ters. At the time, Pales­tine was still British-con­trolled ter­ri­to­ry, a des­per­ate­ly poor desert region inhab­it­ed by war­ring Arab and Jew­ish pop­u­la­tions. Trav­el­ing to mosques and uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus­es and focus­ing on Mus­lim youth like him­self, Ramadan preached a mil­i­tant gospel and helped to cre­ate para­mil­i­tary groups made up of young men angry at British colo­nial­ism and Zion­ist immi­gra­tion. By 1947, there were 25 branch­es of the Broth­er­hood in Pales­tine, with between 12,000 and 20,000 mem­bers. In 1948, Ramadan helped the Broth­er­hood send Islam­ic fight­ers into bat­tle with the Jew­ish armed forces that estab­lished Israel that year. Com­pared to the armies of Egypt and Syr­ia, the Brotherhood’s forces were small and mil­i­tar­i­ly insignif­i­cant, but the sym­bol­ic ges­ture would enhance the group’s pres­tige for decades to come.

    By the 1950s, Ramadan had become an itin­er­ant preach­er, sort of an Elmer Gantry of the Islamist move­ment. In 1949 and 1951 he trav­eled to Pak­istan, tak­ing part in the meet­ings of the World Mus­lim Con­gress in Karachi—the first transna­tion­al body con­nect­ing the world’s Islamist movements—where he flirt­ed with becom­ing sec­re­tary-gen­er­al of the orga­ni­za­tion. Pak­istan, the world’s first state orga­nized around the prin­ci­ple of Islam, was becom­ing a mag­net for fun­da­men­tal­ist ide­o­logues, and it would be a kind of sec­ond home for Ramadan. The fledg­ling gov­ern­ment gave Ramadan a broad­cast slot on the nation­al radio net­work, and Prime Min­is­ter Liaquat Ali Khan wrote the pref­ace to one of Ramadan’s books.

    In Pak­istan, Ramadan worked close­ly with a young Islamist named Abul-Ala Maw­du­di, who had found­ed a Mus­lim Broth­er­hood-style move­ment called the Islam­ic Soci­ety. Just as he had recruit­ed angry young Mus­lims to take up arms in Pales­tine, so Ramadan helped Maw­du­di mold a mus­cu­lar pha­lanx of fanat­i­cal Islam­ic stu­dents into a bat­ter­ing ram against Pakistan’s left. Known by its Urdu ini­tials as the IJT and mod­eled on Mussolini’s fas­cist squadristi, the group deployed its often-armed thugs to do bat­tle with left-wing stu­dents on cam­pus. “Egg toss­ing grad­u­al­ly gave way to more seri­ous clash­es, espe­cial­ly in Karachi,” writes Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, a lead­ing expert on the move­ment. In the process, the IJT trained the gen­er­a­tion of rad­i­cals who seized con­trol of Pak­istan in 1977 under the far-right dic­ta­tor Gen­er­al Zia ul-Haq, spon­sored the jihad in Afghanistan, shel­tered Al Qae­da, and even today rep­re­sents a threat to Gen­er­al Per­vez Musharraf’s shaky regime.

    In between his trips to Pak­istan, Ramadan also worked with Arab fun­da­men­tal­ists, espe­cial­ly Pales­tini­ans and Jor­da­ni­ans, to found the Islam­ic Lib­er­a­tion Par­ty, which would lat­er metas­ta­size through­out Mus­lim Cen­tral Asia. By the 1990s, the party—known by its Ara­bic name, Hizb ut-Tahrir, and increas­ing­ly sup­port­ed by Sau­di Arabia—had become an impor­tant rad­i­cal force aligned with Al Qae­da, with a pres­ence in Lon­don, Ger­many, and through­out Europe. While in Jor­dan in the ’50s, Ramadan also helped found the Jor­dan­ian branch of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, which, as in Pak­istan, became a tool for sup­press­ing the left and Arab nation­al­ists.

    But Ramadan’s efforts in Pales­tine, Jor­dan, and Pak­istan were mere skir­mish­es ahead of the mid-1950s show­down in Egypt. Egypt­ian Pres­i­dent Gamal Abdel Nass­er, a mer­cu­r­ial mil­i­tary offi­cer who led the coup d’etat that top­pled the country’s dis­solute monar­chy in 1952, achieved almost leg­endary sta­tus overnight. By insist­ing on Egypt’s inde­pen­dence, demand­ing that Britain aban­don its mil­i­tary bases in Egypt and turn over the strate­gi­cal­ly vital Suez Canal, Nass­er emerged as a hero to mil­lions of Arabs—and he ter­ri­fied both Great Britain and the Unit­ed States, not least because his brand of nation­al­ism threat­ened U.S. and British oil inter­ests in the Gulf. (British Prime Min­is­ter Antho­ny Eden came up with a vari­ety of schemes to have Nass­er assas­si­nat­ed.)

    The Broth­er­hood saw Nass­er as a hate­ful sec­u­lar­ist who had aban­doned Islam and who was too will­ing to coop­er­ate with communism—beliefs that endeared them to both Lon­don and Wash­ing­ton. In 1954, a Broth­er­hood fanat­ic fired eight shots at the Egypt­ian leader and Nass­er cracked down on the orga­ni­za­tion, arrest­ing many of its lead­ers. Ramadan, by then an unof­fi­cial for­eign min­is­ter for the Broth­er­hood, was in Syr­ia at the time, furi­ous­ly gen­er­at­ing anti-Nass­er pro­pa­gan­da. In Sep­tem­ber 1954, Nass­er stripped Ramadan of his Egypt­ian pass­port. But his exile would not last.

    ONCE AGAIN, it was the Cold War that saved Ramadan and his move­ment. This time, his des­ti­na­tion was Ger­many, an ally of Islam­ic fun­da­men­tal­ism going back to the Nazi era. When Egypt and Syr­ia estab­lished diplo­mat­ic rela­tions with East Ger­many, West Ger­many made over­tures to both coun­tries’ opposition—and that includ­ed the Broth­er­hood. Ramadan got offi­cial West Ger­man help in flee­ing to Munich from his cer­tain death sen­tence in Egypt; a few years lat­er he set­tled in Gene­va, hub of inter­na­tion­al diplo­ma­cy and intrigue. There, in 1961, he cre­at­ed the Islam­ic Cen­ter of Gene­va, which would serve for decades as the base and orga­ni­za­tion­al head­quar­ters for the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in Europe.

    As Washington’s ally in the strug­gle to under­mine Nass­er, Ramadan ben­e­fit­ed from a fate­ful choice made by the Unit­ed States in the 1950s and ’60s. Rather than ally­ing itself with Nasser’s brand of Arab nation­al­ism, the Unit­ed States had made per­haps its biggest mis­take in the Mid­dle East since World War II: It chose to make com­mon cause with Sau­di Arabia’s reac­tionary monar­chy. Start­ing in the 1950s, Wash­ing­ton encour­aged the king­dom to cre­ate a net­work of right-wing Islam­ic states and Islamist orga­ni­za­tions, thus help­ing to build the foun­da­tion on which Al Qae­da would ulti­mate­ly rest. Ramadan’s Islam­ic Cen­ter was a major ben­e­fi­cia­ry of the pol­i­cy, reap­ing gen­er­ous fund­ing from the king­dom.

    The cen­ter soon became a place for Islamists from across the entire Mus­lim world to meet and make plans; it also act­ed as a pub­lish­ing house for Islamist lit­er­a­ture. Its pur­pose was to pro­mote the Mus­lim Brotherhood’s ide­ol­o­gy, accord­ing to Hani Ramadan, Said’s son, who has assumed his father’s man­tle as direc­tor of the cen­ter. “The cre­ation of the Islam­ic Cen­ter was sup­posed to real­ize my father’s desire of cre­at­ing a cen­ter from which he could spread the teach­ings of Has­san al-Ban­na,” he says, “a place where stu­dents com­ing from var­i­ous Arab coun­tries could meet and be trained in the mes­sage of Islam.” Accord­ing to Richard Labeviere, a French jour­nal­ist who has writ­ten about the Brotherhood’s ties to ter­ror­ism, Said Ramadan used Gene­va as the launch­ing pad for the Brotherhood’s inter­na­tion­al expan­sion; the group even cre­at­ed its own Swiss bank, Al Taqwa, with offices in the Swiss town of Cam­pi­one d’Italia as well as the Bahamas. After Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001, Al Taqwa was list­ed by the Unit­ed States as hav­ing sup­port­ed ter­ror­ists.

    There’s anoth­er intrigu­ing ques­tion that emerges from this peri­od in Ramadan’s life: Had he been recruit­ed by the CIA dur­ing his 1953 vis­it to the Unit­ed States? Ramadan’s fam­i­ly denies that he was, but declas­si­fied doc­u­ments in the Swiss Nation­al Archives, uncov­ered by Syl­vain Besson of Geneva’s Le Temps news­pa­per, reveal that in the 1960s the Swiss author­i­ties con­sid­ered him to be, “among oth­er things, an intel­li­gence agent of the British and the Amer­i­cans.” In July 2005, the Wall Street Jour­nal, after exten­sive archival research in Switzer­land and Ger­many, report­ed: “His­tor­i­cal evi­dence sug­gests Mr. Ramadan worked with the CIA.” Doc­u­ments from West Ger­man intel­li­gence archives, uncov­ered by the Jour­nal, reveal that Ramadan trav­eled on an offi­cial Jor­dan­ian diplo­mat­ic pass­port secured for him by the CIA, that “his expen­di­tures are financed by the Amer­i­can side,” and that Ramadan worked close­ly with the CIA’s Amer­i­can Com­mit­tee for Lib­er­a­tion from Bol­she­vism, Amcom­lib, which ran Radio Free Europe and Radio Lib­er­ty (both CIA front groups) in the 1950s and 1960s. Accord­ing to the Jour­nal, in May 1961, a CIA offi­cer with Amcom­lib met with Ramadan to plan a “joint pro­pa­gan­da effort against the Sovi­et Union.”

    As it turned out, the Islam­ic Cen­ter was only the begin­ning of Ramadan’s ambi­tions. In 1962 he helped cre­ate a broad­er, more pow­er­ful orga­ni­za­tion that would become the cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem for far-right Wah­habi inter­na­tion­al­ism: the Mus­lim World League. “My father wasn’t just one of the lead­ers of the found­ing group of the league,” says Hani Ramadan. “He had the orig­i­nal idea for its cre­ation.”

    ...

    In 1970, the Broth­er­hood and Ramadan saw their ulti­mate vin­di­ca­tion when Nass­er died and Anwar Sadat, a mem­ber of the Broth­er­hood decades before, became pres­i­dent of Egypt. The next year, Ramadan returned to Egypt at the head of a Mus­lim Broth­er­hood del­e­ga­tion, orga­nized and financed by Sau­di Ara­bia, to bro­ker a deal with Sadat to reestab­lish the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, 17 years after it was first out­lawed. (In the words of Robert Baer, a for­mer CIA oper­a­tions offi­cer who has writ­ten about ties between the CIA and the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, Sau­di Ara­bia “pimped for the Broth­ers.”)

    At the time, Sadat was try­ing to reori­ent Egypt away from its ties to the Sovi­et Union, mov­ing the Arab world’s most pow­er­ful coun­try into the orbit of the Unit­ed States and Sau­di Ara­bia. But Sadat lacked any real polit­i­cal base, and he had to purge scores of Nasserists from key posi­tions in the gov­ern­ment. He turned to the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood to help cre­ate a new base of sup­port, and the group seized its chance.

    Dur­ing the 1970s, the Egypt­ian Islamist move­ment spread wild­ly, tak­ing over key insti­tu­tions and spawn­ing a host of rad­i­cal Islamist off­shoots, which in turn mobi­lized to sup­port the CIA’s anti-Sovi­et jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s. These vol­un­teers also estab­lished a new orga­ni­za­tion, Islam­ic Jihad, which would lat­er join with Osama bin Laden as part of Al Qae­da. And in 1981, the rad­i­cals turned on their pro­tec­tor: An Islamist assas­sin gunned Sadat down in full pub­lic view dur­ing a tele­vised army parade.

    AS INFLUENTIAL as he was in the Mid­dle East through­out the ’60s and ’70s, Ramadan was vir­tu­al­ly invis­i­ble to the West. The first time Amer­i­cans might have heard his name was in con­nec­tion with a bizarre mur­der in Wash­ing­ton; it would turn out to be the first instance of Islamist ter­ror­ism in the Unit­ed States. On July 22, 1980, the door­bell rang at the home of Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a for­mer press coun­selor at the Iran­ian Embassy in Wash­ing­ton who, after the fall of the shah in 1979, had found­ed the Iran Free­dom Foun­da­tion and had become a lead­ing oppo­nent of the Aya­tol­lah Ruhol­lah Khomeini’s Islamist regime. On his doorstep that day was a young man, dressed as a mail­man. He fired sev­er­al shots into Tabatabai’s abdomen, killing him.

    The assas­sin, who’d bor­rowed a mail truck from an unsus­pect­ing friend, was an Amer­i­can Mus­lim named David Belfield. Inves­ti­ga­tors track­ing Belfield, who was now call­ing him­self Daoud Salahud­din, found that he’d fled first to Gene­va and then to Iran. Then they dis­cov­ered a curi­ous fact: Just before the mur­der, a series of phone calls to Said Ramadan were placed from a pay phone near Belfield’s work­place in Wash­ing­ton. Ramadan—an enthu­si­as­tic sup­port­er of Khomeini’s revolution—also spoke with the fugi­tive in Gene­va, coor­di­nat­ed his escape with the Iran­ian Embassy in Switzer­land, and made a call to Aya­tol­lah Khomeini’s son in Iran to make sure that Belfield made it safe­ly to sanc­tu­ary in Tehran. It lat­er turned out that Belfield had talked to Ramadan before accept­ing a job as a secu­ri­ty guard at the Iran­ian Embassy in Wash­ing­ton; accord­ing to The New York­er, Belfield pock­et­ed $5,000 for the assas­si­na­tion from his “han­dler” in the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment.

    Belfield and Ramadan had first met in June 1975 when Ramadan spent sev­er­al months in the Unit­ed States, a tour that includ­ed speak­ing engage­ments at Washington’s Islam­ic Cen­ter, an Eisen­how­er-era mosque on Mass­a­chu­setts Avenue adja­cent to Rock Creek Park. Their first encounter was in Ramadan’s hotel room; after that, Ramadan stayed for three months at Belfield’s mod­est home on Ran­dolph Street in Wash­ing­ton. Ramadan regaled Belfield with tales of jihad, and the young Amer­i­can began almost to wor­ship the Egypt­ian. Accord­ing to an account of the rela­tion­ship pub­lished much lat­er in the Wash­ing­ton Post, Belfield became Ramadan’s “per­son­al sec­re­tary, spe­cial emis­sary and devot­ed ser­vant. Ramadan became his spir­i­tu­al leader for life.” Ramadan told Belfield that if he were to under­take vio­lent action in sup­port of Islam­ic rev­o­lu­tion, “he wouldn’t be emo­tion­al­ly scarred by it—it would ‘be accom­plished and sim­ply for­got­ten.’” Belfield would lat­er tell The New York­er, “His tone was emphat­ic. And for me it was tak­en as a com­mand.”

    ...

    By the 1980s and 90s, with Khomeini’s regime in Iran and Zia ul-Haq’s Islamist dic­ta­tor­ship in Pak­istan firm­ly entrenched, the Afghan jihad under way, and the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood estab­lished as a potent, under­ground oppo­si­tion move­ment in Egypt, Syr­ia, Pales­tine, and else­where, Ramadan’s ear­ly spade­work had borne fruit through­out the Mid­dle East. But even as Islamism came into its own, an aging Ramadan was fad­ing from promi­nence, and in 1995, at age 69, he passed away. His son Hani took over the reins of the Islam­ic Cen­ter while anoth­er son, Tariq, a pro­fes­sor in Switzer­land, pub­licly eschewed his father’s rad­i­cal­ism. In 2004, Notre Dame Uni­ver­si­ty invit­ed Tariq Ramadan to come to Indi­ana as a pro­fes­sor, but he was barred from enter­ing the Unit­ed States when the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty refused to grant him a visa.

    Today, Ramadan’s lega­cy is evi­dent every­where. The Mus­lim Broth­er­hood remains a pow­er­ful, transna­tion­al secret soci­ety com­mit­ted to the cre­ation of a fra­ter­ni­ty of Islam­ic republics that would be gov­erned accord­ing to their vision of sev­enth-cen­tu­ry Mus­lim laws. And it has used the back­ing of Iran­ian and Arab petro­le­um poten­tates to cre­ate a pow­er­ful polit­i­cal infra­struc­ture, from Egypt to Syr­ia (where its vio­lent under­ground pres­ence pos­es a direct threat to the sec­u­lar, nation­al­ist regime of Bashar al-Assad) to the chaos of Iraq, where the Sun­ni oppo­si­tion is being steered in a fun­da­men­tal­ist direc­tion by, among oth­ers, the Iraqi Islam­ic Par­ty, a Broth­er­hood branch.

    Among Amer­i­can ana­lysts, the Broth­er­hood still has its defend­ers. Pro­fes­sors John O. Voll and John L. Espos­i­to of George­town Uni­ver­si­ty, both schol­ars of Islam, defend it as a mod­er­ate Islamist orga­ni­za­tion that rejects extrem­ism and vio­lence and note with approval that some U.S. offi­cials see the Broth­er­hood as “impor­tant poten­tial allies in the war on ter­ror­ism.” Reuel Marc Gerecht, a for­mer CIA offi­cer who is now a fel­low at the neo­con­ser­v­a­tive Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute, argues in his 2004 book, The Islam­ic Para­dox, that even if the Broth­er­hood were to seize pow­er in Egypt and sup­press democ­ra­cy, “the Unit­ed States would still be bet­ter off with this alter­na­tive than with [the cur­rent] sec­u­lar dic­ta­tor­ship.” From the U.S.-allied theoc­ra­cy emerg­ing in Bagh­dad to the right-wing Islamists of Pak­istan, America’s fatal fas­ci­na­tion with fun­da­men­tal­ism con­tin­ues.

    ———–

    “Cold War, Holy War­rior” by Robert Drey­fuss; Moth­er Jones; January/February 2006 Issue

    By the 1980s and 90s, with Khomeini’s regime in Iran and Zia ul-Haq’s Islamist dic­ta­tor­ship in Pak­istan firm­ly entrenched, the Afghan jihad under way, and the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood estab­lished as a potent, under­ground oppo­si­tion move­ment in Egypt, Syr­ia, Pales­tine, and else­where, Ramadan’s ear­ly spade­work had borne fruit through­out the Mid­dle East. But even as Islamism came into its own, an aging Ramadan was fad­ing from promi­nence, and in 1995, at age 69, he passed away. His son Hani took over the reins of the Islam­ic Cen­ter while anoth­er son, Tariq, a pro­fes­sor in Switzer­land, pub­licly eschewed his father’s rad­i­cal­ism. In 2004, Notre Dame Uni­ver­si­ty invit­ed Tariq Ramadan to come to Indi­ana as a pro­fes­sor, but he was barred from enter­ing the Unit­ed States when the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty refused to grant him a visa.”

    Yes, by the 90s, the fruits of Said Ramadan’s decades of net­work­ing and orga­ni­za­tion build­ing had been borne. Mus­lim Broth­er­hood affil­i­ates were wield­ing influ­enc­ing in Mus­lim pop­u­la­tions across the globe. Includ­ing Iran. Decades of work that appears to include spon­sor­ship by the US — and CIA in par­tic­u­lar — going back to Ramadan’s trip to the US in 1953. How does this his­to­ry help explain what we are see­ing unfold today? Are today’s events being facil­i­tat­ed in part from these old ties between Hamas and the Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion­ary gov­ern­ment? We still don’t know since Iran’s involve­ment remains unclear. But if Iran was involved, this is very rel­e­vant his­to­ry to keep in in mind:

    ...
    The president’s vis­i­tor that Sep­tem­ber day was Said Ramadan, a key offi­cial and ide­o­logue of a secre­tive, under­ground fra­ter­ni­ty of Islam­ic fun­da­men­tal­ists known as the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. As he stood at the president’s side, Ramadan appeared respectable, a wel­come guest if not a fel­low states­man.

    Offi­cial­ly, Ramadan was in the Unit­ed States to attend a col­lo­qui­um on Islam­ic cul­ture at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, cospon­sored by the Library of Con­gress. It was an august event, held with much pomp and cir­cum­stance in Princeton’s Nas­sau Hall. Del­e­gates sat neat­ly arrayed in stiff-backed pews in the high-ceilinged Fac­ul­ty Room and attend­ed lav­ish lun­cheons, recep­tions, and gar­den par­ties in the shade of bright fall foliage.

    Accord­ing to the pub­lished pro­ceed­ings, the con­fer­ence was the for­tu­itous result of the fact that a num­ber of cel­e­brat­ed per­son­ages from the Mid­dle East were vis­it­ing the coun­try. “Dur­ing the sum­mer of 1953 there hap­pened to be an unusu­al­ly large num­ber of dis­tin­guished Mus­lim schol­ars in the Unit­ed States,” the doc­u­ment notes. But the par­tic­i­pants didn’t just “hap­pen” to have crossed the Atlantic. The col­lo­qui­um was orga­nized by the U.S. gov­ern­ment, which fund­ed it, tapped par­tic­i­pants it con­sid­ered use­ful or promis­ing, and bun­dled them off to New Jer­sey. Con­fer­ence orga­niz­ers had vis­it­ed Cairo, Bahrain, Bagh­dad, Beirut, New Del­hi, and oth­er cities to scout for par­tic­i­pants. Foot­ing the bill—to the tune of $25,000, plus addi­tion­al expens­es for trans­port­ing atten­dees from the Mid­dle East—was the Inter­na­tion­al Infor­ma­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (IIA), a branch of the State Depart­ment that had its roots in the U.S. intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty; sup­ple­men­tary fund­ing was sought from U.S. air­lines and from Aram­co, the U.S. oil con­sor­tium in Sau­di Ara­bia. Like many of the par­tic­i­pants, Ramadan, a hard-edged ide­o­logue and not a schol­ar, was vis­it­ing the con­fer­ence as an all-expens­es-paid guest.

    ...

    Over the four decades after Ramadan’s vis­it to the Oval Office, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood would become the orga­ni­za­tion­al spon­sor for gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion of Islamist groups from Sau­di Ara­bia to Syr­ia, Gene­va to Lahore—and Ramadan, its chief inter­na­tion­al orga­niz­er, would turn up, Zeliglike, as an oper­a­tive in vir­tu­al­ly every man­i­fes­ta­tion of rad­i­cal polit­i­cal Islam. The hard­core Islamists of Pak­istan (see “Among the Allies,” page 44), whose acolytes cre­at­ed the Tal­iban in Afghanistan and who have pro­vid­ed suc­cor to Al Qae­da since the 1990s, mod­eled their orga­ni­za­tion on the Broth­er­hood. The regime of the aya­tol­lahs in Iran grew out of a secret soci­ety called the Devo­tees of Islam, a Broth­er­hood affil­i­ate whose leader in the 1950s was the men­tor of Aya­tol­lah Ruhol­lah Khome­i­ni. Hamas, the Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion, began as an offi­cial branch of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. The rad­i­cal-right Egypt­ian Islam­ic Jihad and allied groups, whose mem­bers assas­si­nat­ed Pres­i­dent Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1981 and which merged with Osama bin Laden’s Al Qae­da in the 1990s, grew out of the Broth­er­hood in the 1970s. And some of the Afghan lead­ers who spear­head­ed the anti-Sovi­et jihad that was run by the CIA in the 1980s, and who helped bin Laden build the net­work of “Arab Afghans” that was Al Qaeda’s fore­run­ner, were Broth­er­hood mem­bers.

    ...

    SAID RAMADAN was born in 1926 in Shib­in el Kom, a vil­lage about 40 miles north of Cairo in the Nile delta. He encoun­tered Ban­na and joined his move­ment when he was 14; six years lat­er, after grad­u­at­ing from Cairo Uni­ver­si­ty, he became Banna’s per­son­al sec­re­tary and right-hand man. A year lat­er, Ramadan was named edi­tor of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood week­ly, Al Shi­hab, and he mar­ried Banna’s daugh­ter, giv­ing him an impor­tant claim to lead­er­ship with­in the orga­ni­za­tion.

    Ramadan became Banna’s rov­ing ambas­sador, amass­ing a net­work of inter­na­tion­al con­tacts. In 1945, he trav­eled to then British-con­trolled Jerusalem, where the storm clouds of war between Arabs and Jews were begin­ning to gath­er. Over the years that fol­lowed, Ramadan would spend a great deal of time shut­tling between Jerusalem, Amman, Dam­as­cus, and Beirut to build Broth­er­hood chap­ters. At the time, Pales­tine was still British-con­trolled ter­ri­to­ry, a des­per­ate­ly poor desert region inhab­it­ed by war­ring Arab and Jew­ish pop­u­la­tions. Trav­el­ing to mosques and uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus­es and focus­ing on Mus­lim youth like him­self, Ramadan preached a mil­i­tant gospel and helped to cre­ate para­mil­i­tary groups made up of young men angry at British colo­nial­ism and Zion­ist immi­gra­tion. By 1947, there were 25 branch­es of the Broth­er­hood in Pales­tine, with between 12,000 and 20,000 mem­bers. In 1948, Ramadan helped the Broth­er­hood send Islam­ic fight­ers into bat­tle with the Jew­ish armed forces that estab­lished Israel that year. Com­pared to the armies of Egypt and Syr­ia, the Brotherhood’s forces were small and mil­i­tar­i­ly insignif­i­cant, but the sym­bol­ic ges­ture would enhance the group’s pres­tige for decades to come.
    ...

    And then we get to this fas­ci­nat­ing chap­ter in the his­to­ry of Islamist ter­ror­ism and the US: it appears the first instance of Islamist ter­ror on US soil was com­mit­ted on July 22, 1980, by David Belfield, who first met Said Ramadan in 1975 and end­ed up becom­ing his “per­son­al sec­re­tary, spe­cial emis­sary and devot­ed ser­vant.” Belfield assas­si­nat­ed an Iran­ian crit­ic of the Iran­ian rev­o­lu­tion:

    ...
    It’s no exag­ger­a­tion to say that Ramadan is the ide­o­log­i­cal grand­fa­ther of Osama bin Laden. But Ramadan, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, and their Islamist allies might nev­er have been able to plant the seeds that sprout­ed into Al Qae­da had they not been treat­ed as U.S. allies dur­ing the Cold War and had they not received both overt and covert sup­port from Wash­ing­ton; Ramadan him­self, doc­u­ments sug­gest, was recruit­ed as an asset by the CIA.

    ...

    A now-declas­si­fied IIA doc­u­ment labeled “Confidential—Security Infor­ma­tion” sums up the pur­pose of the project: “On the sur­face, the con­fer­ence looks like an exer­cise in pure learn­ing. This in effect is the impres­sion desired.” The true goal, the memo notes, was to “bring togeth­er per­sons exert­ing great influ­ence in for­mu­lat­ing Mus­lim opin­ion in fields such as edu­ca­tion, sci­ence, law and phi­los­o­phy and inevitably, there­fore, on pol­i­tics…. Among the var­i­ous results expect­ed from the col­lo­qui­um are the impe­tus and direc­tion that may be giv­en to the Renais­sance move­ment with­in Islam itself.” At the time, the Unit­ed States was just begin­ning to feel its way around the Mid­dle East, and Amer­i­can ori­en­tal­ists and aca­d­e­mics were debat­ing the extent to which polit­i­cal Islam might serve as a tool for Amer­i­can influ­ence in the region.

    For an orga­ni­za­tion estab­lished as a secret soci­ety, with a para­mil­i­tary arm that was respon­si­ble for assas­si­na­tions and vio­lence, to be char­ac­ter­ized as a har­bin­ger of a rebirth of Islam may seem odd. But such a view was entire­ly in char­ac­ter with U.S. pol­i­cy at a time when vir­tu­al­ly any­one who opposed com­mu­nism was viewed as a poten­tial ally. When­ev­er I inter­viewed CIA and State Depart­ment offi­cials who served in the Mid­dle East between World War II and the fall of the Sovi­et Union, they would repeat, almost like a cat­e­chism, that Islam was seen as a bar­ri­er both to Sovi­et expan­sion and to the spread of Marx­ist ide­ol­o­gy among the mass­es. “We thought of Islam as a coun­ter­weight to com­mu­nism,” says Tal­cott Seelye, an Amer­i­can diplo­mat who, while serv­ing in Jor­dan in the ear­ly 1950s, paid a vis­it to Said Ramadan. “We saw it as a mod­er­ate force, and a pos­i­tive one.” Indeed, adds Her­mann Eilts, anoth­er vet­er­an U.S. diplo­mat who was sta­tioned in Sau­di Ara­bia in the late ’40s, Amer­i­can offi­cials in Cairo had “reg­u­lar meet­ings” with Ramadan’s then-boss, Mus­lim Broth­er­hood leader Has­san al-Ban­na, “and found him per­fect­ly empa­thet­ic.”

    ...

    There’s anoth­er intrigu­ing ques­tion that emerges from this peri­od in Ramadan’s life: Had he been recruit­ed by the CIA dur­ing his 1953 vis­it to the Unit­ed States? Ramadan’s fam­i­ly denies that he was, but declas­si­fied doc­u­ments in the Swiss Nation­al Archives, uncov­ered by Syl­vain Besson of Geneva’s Le Temps news­pa­per, reveal that in the 1960s the Swiss author­i­ties con­sid­ered him to be, “among oth­er things, an intel­li­gence agent of the British and the Amer­i­cans.” In July 2005, the Wall Street Jour­nal, after exten­sive archival research in Switzer­land and Ger­many, report­ed: “His­tor­i­cal evi­dence sug­gests Mr. Ramadan worked with the CIA.” Doc­u­ments from West Ger­man intel­li­gence archives, uncov­ered by the Jour­nal, reveal that Ramadan trav­eled on an offi­cial Jor­dan­ian diplo­mat­ic pass­port secured for him by the CIA, that “his expen­di­tures are financed by the Amer­i­can side,” and that Ramadan worked close­ly with the CIA’s Amer­i­can Com­mit­tee for Lib­er­a­tion from Bol­she­vism, Amcom­lib, which ran Radio Free Europe and Radio Lib­er­ty (both CIA front groups) in the 1950s and 1960s. Accord­ing to the Jour­nal, in May 1961, a CIA offi­cer with Amcom­lib met with Ramadan to plan a “joint pro­pa­gan­da effort against the Sovi­et Union.”

    ...

    AS INFLUENTIAL as he was in the Mid­dle East through­out the ’60s and ’70s, Ramadan was vir­tu­al­ly invis­i­ble to the West. The first time Amer­i­cans might have heard his name was in con­nec­tion with a bizarre mur­der in Wash­ing­ton; it would turn out to be the first instance of Islamist ter­ror­ism in the Unit­ed States. On July 22, 1980, the door­bell rang at the home of Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a for­mer press coun­selor at the Iran­ian Embassy in Wash­ing­ton who, after the fall of the shah in 1979, had found­ed the Iran Free­dom Foun­da­tion and had become a lead­ing oppo­nent of the Aya­tol­lah Ruhol­lah Khomeini’s Islamist regime. On his doorstep that day was a young man, dressed as a mail­man. He fired sev­er­al shots into Tabatabai’s abdomen, killing him.

    The assas­sin, who’d bor­rowed a mail truck from an unsus­pect­ing friend, was an Amer­i­can Mus­lim named David Belfield. Inves­ti­ga­tors track­ing Belfield, who was now call­ing him­self Daoud Salahud­din, found that he’d fled first to Gene­va and then to Iran. Then they dis­cov­ered a curi­ous fact: Just before the mur­der, a series of phone calls to Said Ramadan were placed from a pay phone near Belfield’s work­place in Wash­ing­ton. Ramadan—an enthu­si­as­tic sup­port­er of Khomeini’s revolution—also spoke with the fugi­tive in Gene­va, coor­di­nat­ed his escape with the Iran­ian Embassy in Switzer­land, and made a call to Aya­tol­lah Khomeini’s son in Iran to make sure that Belfield made it safe­ly to sanc­tu­ary in Tehran. It lat­er turned out that Belfield had talked to Ramadan before accept­ing a job as a secu­ri­ty guard at the Iran­ian Embassy in Wash­ing­ton; accord­ing to The New York­er, Belfield pock­et­ed $5,000 for the assas­si­na­tion from his “han­dler” in the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment.

    Belfield and Ramadan had first met in June 1975 when Ramadan spent sev­er­al months in the Unit­ed States, a tour that includ­ed speak­ing engage­ments at Washington’s Islam­ic Cen­ter, an Eisen­how­er-era mosque on Mass­a­chu­setts Avenue adja­cent to Rock Creek Park. Their first encounter was in Ramadan’s hotel room; after that, Ramadan stayed for three months at Belfield’s mod­est home on Ran­dolph Street in Wash­ing­ton. Ramadan regaled Belfield with tales of jihad, and the young Amer­i­can began almost to wor­ship the Egypt­ian. Accord­ing to an account of the rela­tion­ship pub­lished much lat­er in the Wash­ing­ton Post, Belfield became Ramadan’s “per­son­al sec­re­tary, spe­cial emis­sary and devot­ed ser­vant. Ramadan became his spir­i­tu­al leader for life.” Ramadan told Belfield that if he were to under­take vio­lent action in sup­port of Islam­ic rev­o­lu­tion, “he wouldn’t be emo­tion­al­ly scarred by it—it would ‘be accom­plished and sim­ply for­got­ten.’” Belfield would lat­er tell The New York­er, “His tone was emphat­ic. And for me it was tak­en as a com­mand.”
    ...

    It’s kind of hard to come up with a more illus­tra­tive piece of this com­pli­cat­ed his­to­ry between the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, the CIA, and the Iran­ian rev­o­lu­tion than the fact that Said Ramadan’s per­son­al sec­re­tary com­mit­ted the first act of Islamist ter­ror in US his­to­ry by assas­si­nat­ing a crit­ic of the Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion. A piece of his­to­ry from 43 years ago. And here we are, with some sort of bizarre hyper-provoca­tive attack seem­ing­ly from this same net­work and designed to inflame some­thing much big­ger. Is this pri­mar­i­ly a Hamas oper­a­tion? A broad­er Mus­lim Broth­er­hood oper­a­tion? Or some­thing else? It’s too ear­ly to say, but not too ear­ly to review the rel­e­vant his­to­ry of clan­des­tine pow­er pol­i­tics that we nev­er real­ly learned in the first place.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 10, 2023, 4:35 pm
  6. There was nev­er real­ly going to be a good expla­na­tion for how Israel’s nation­al secu­ri­ty state was appar­ent­ly caught com­plete­ly off guard by Hamas’s Octo­ber 7 mass ter­ror attack. But the more we learn, the worse the expla­na­tion gets. How bad is it ulti­mate­ly going to get? Time will tell, but so far it just keeps get­ting worse.

    Like the lat­est update in NY Times describ­ing a sit­u­a­tion where Israeli intel­li­gence appar­ent­ly decid­ed to just stop eaves­drop­ping on Hamas over a year ago. This includes Israel’s crack Unit 8200 hack­ing team. We’re also told that the Octo­ber 7 attack like­ly took over a year to plan and coor­di­nate. Great tim­ing.

    What’s the expla­na­tion for the deci­sion to effec­tive­ly stop spy­ing on Hamas? Well, on the one hand, we’re told that Israeli intel­li­gence was con­vinced that Hamas had no desire to car­ry out attacks that would trig­ger an Israeli inva­sion of Gaza. Hamas was instead assumed to be focused on foment­ing vio­lence in the Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty-con­trolled West Bank.

    At the same time, we’re also told that Israel had cul­ti­vate exten­sive human sources inside Hamas and was effec­tive­ly rest­ing on those lau­rels. This is a good time to recall the reports that came out days before the Octo­ber 7 attacks about how Hamas was rocked by Israel man­ag­ing to acquire a human asset, Khalil Abu Ma’za, who was oper­at­ing close to Hamas’s lead­er­ship for years. Abu Ma’za obvi­ous­ly was­n’t the only human asset. And yet some­how all of these human assets failed to give Israel a heads up on a plot that took over a year to plan.

    And then we get to a very inter­est­ing addi­tion­al gross intel­li­gence fail­ure that led up to all of this: US intel­li­gence appar­ent­ly decid­ed to stop eaves­drop­ping on Hamas over a year ago too. Beyond that, we are told that US intel­li­gence was try­ing to recruit Hamas assets. In fact, Jonathan Schanz­er, a for­mer Trea­sury Depart­ment offi­cial and now the senior vice pres­i­dent for research at the Foun­da­tion for Defense of Democ­ra­cies, report­ed­ly attend­ed a meet­ing he had in 2015 with Amer­i­can intel­li­gence and law enforce­ment offi­cials about sus­pect­ed Hamas oper­a­tives inside the Unit­ed States. The offi­cials informed him they were try­ing to recruit the sus­pect­ed Hamas agents to be “assets” against ISIS.

    And that, of course, is the kind of sto­ry is eeri­ly rem­i­nis­cent of the 9/11 rev­e­la­tions ear­li­er this year about how the CIA was appar­ent­ly try­ing to recruit some of the 9/11 hijack­ers and end­ed up run­ning cov­er for them and block­ing US law enforce­ment from bust­ing the al Qae­da oper­a­tion on US soil. So when we hear Octo­ber 7 char­ac­ter­ized as “Israel’s 9/11” and all these claims about how Israeli (and US) intel­li­gence had no idea this attack was on the way, we have to ask: were there by chance cer­tain intel­li­gence units that were very aware of the loom­ing attack but did­n’t want to tell any­one out of a fear of dis­rupt­ing their asset recruit­ment efforts? If so, it would­n’t be the first time.

    On top of that all is the real­i­ty that the new­ly elect­ed Speak­er of the House, Mike John­son, is a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the theo­crat Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, which holds dan­ger­ous Chris­t­ian Zion­ist views about an apoc­a­lyp­tic end­ing for the Jew­ish peo­ple. It’s a wild­ly dan­ger­ous state of affairs.

    And that’s all why we still have to ask how bad is the real sto­ry here? Are these ‘oops, we took our eye off the ball’ expla­na­tions plau­si­ble? If not, how bad is the real sto­ry? Because the more we learn, the worse it looks:

    The New York Times

    How Years of Israeli Fail­ures on Hamas Led to a Dev­as­tat­ing Attack

    Israeli offi­cials com­plete­ly under­es­ti­mat­ed the mag­ni­tude of the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas, shat­ter­ing the country’s once invin­ci­ble sense of secu­ri­ty.

    By Ronen Bergman, Mark Mazzetti and Maria Abi-Habib

    Ronen Bergman report­ed from Tel Aviv and the Gaza-Israel bor­der, Mark Mazzetti from Wash­ing­ton and Maria Abi-Habib from Lon­don.
    Pub­lished Oct. 29, 2023
    Updat­ed Oct. 30, 2023, 4:31 p.m. ET

    It was 3 a.m. on Oct. 7, and Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s domes­tic secu­ri­ty ser­vice, still could not deter­mine if what he was see­ing was just anoth­er Hamas mil­i­tary exer­cise.

    At the head­quar­ters of his ser­vice, Shin Bet, offi­cials had spent hours mon­i­tor­ing Hamas activ­i­ty in the Gaza Strip, which was unusu­al­ly active for the mid­dle of the night. Israeli intel­li­gence and nation­al secu­ri­ty offi­cials, who had con­vinced them­selves that Hamas had no inter­est in going to war, ini­tial­ly assumed it was just a night­time exer­cise.

    Their judg­ment that night might have been dif­fer­ent had they been lis­ten­ing to traf­fic on the hand-held radios of Hamas mil­i­tants. But Unit 8200, Israel’s sig­nals intel­li­gence agency, had stopped eaves­drop­ping on those net­works a year ear­li­er because they saw it as a waste of effort.

    As time passed that night, Mr. Bar thought that Hamas might attempt a small-scale assault. He dis­cussed his con­cerns with Israel’s top gen­er­als and ordered the “Tequi­la” team — a group of elite coun­tert­er­ror­ism forces — to deploy to Israel’s south­ern bor­der.

    Until near­ly the start of the attack, nobody believed the sit­u­a­tion was seri­ous enough to wake up Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu, accord­ing to three Israeli defense offi­cials.

    With­in hours, the Tequi­la troops were embroiled in a bat­tle with thou­sands of Hamas gun­men who pen­e­trat­ed Israel’s vaunt­ed bor­der fence, sped in trucks and on motor­bikes into south­ern Israel and attacked vil­lages and mil­i­tary bases.

    The most pow­er­ful mil­i­tary force in the Mid­dle East had not only com­plete­ly under­es­ti­mat­ed the mag­ni­tude of the attack, it had total­ly failed in its intel­li­gence-gath­er­ing efforts, most­ly due to hubris and the mis­tak­en assump­tion that Hamas was a threat con­tained.

    Despite Israel’s sophis­ti­cat­ed tech­no­log­i­cal prowess in espi­onage, Hamas gun­men had under­gone exten­sive train­ing for the assault, vir­tu­al­ly unde­tect­ed for at least a year. The fight­ers, who were divid­ed into dif­fer­ent units with spe­cif­ic goals, had metic­u­lous infor­ma­tion on Israel’s mil­i­tary bases and the lay­out of kib­butz­im.

    ...

    Israeli offi­cials have promised a full inves­ti­ga­tion into what went wrong.

    Even before that inquiry, it is clear the attacks were pos­si­ble because of a cas­cade of fail­ures over recent years — not hours, days or weeks. A New York Times exam­i­na­tion, based on dozens of inter­views with Israeli, Arab, Euro­pean and Amer­i­can offi­cials, as well as a review of Israeli gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments and evi­dence col­lect­ed since the Oct. 7 raid, shows that:

    * Israeli secu­ri­ty offi­cials spent months try­ing to warn Mr. Netanyahu that the polit­i­cal tur­moil caused by his domes­tic poli­cies was weak­en­ing the country’s secu­ri­ty and embold­en­ing Israel’s ene­mies. The prime min­is­ter con­tin­ued to push those poli­cies. On one day in July he even refused to meet a senior gen­er­al who came to deliv­er a threat warn­ing based on clas­si­fied intel­li­gence, accord­ing to Israeli offi­cials.

    * Israeli offi­cials mis­judged the threat posed by Hamas for years, and more crit­i­cal­ly in the run-up to the attack. The offi­cial assess­ment of Israeli mil­i­tary intel­li­gence and the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil since May 2021 was that Hamas had no inter­est in launch­ing an attack from Gaza that might invite a dev­as­tat­ing response from Israel, accord­ing to five peo­ple famil­iar with the assess­ments who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss sen­si­tive details. Instead, Israeli intel­li­gence assessed that Hamas was try­ing to foment vio­lence against Israelis in the West Bank, which is con­trolled by its rival, the Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty.

    * The belief by Mr. Netanyahu and top Israeli secu­ri­ty offi­cials that Iran and Hezbol­lah, its most pow­er­ful proxy force, pre­sent­ed the gravest threat to Israel divert­ed atten­tion and resources away from coun­ter­ing Hamas. In late Sep­tem­ber, senior Israeli offi­cials told The Times they were con­cerned that Israel might be attacked in the com­ing weeks or months on sev­er­al fronts by Iran-backed mili­tia groups, but made no men­tion of Hamas ini­ti­at­ing a war with Israel from the Gaza Strip.

    * Amer­i­can spy agen­cies in recent years had large­ly stopped col­lect­ing intel­li­gence on Hamas and its plans, believ­ing the group was a region­al threat that Israel was man­ag­ing.

    Over­all, arro­gance among Israeli polit­i­cal and secu­ri­ty offi­cials con­vinced them that the country’s mil­i­tary and tech­no­log­i­cal supe­ri­or­i­ty to Hamas would keep the ter­ror­ist group in check.

    ...

    Many senior offi­cials have accept­ed respon­si­bil­i­ty, but Mr. Netanyahu has not. At 1 a.m. Sun­day in Israel, after his office was asked for com­ment on this arti­cle, he post­ed a mes­sage on X, for­mer­ly Twit­ter, that repeat­ed remarks he made to The New York Times and blamed the mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence ser­vices for fail­ing to pro­vide him with any warn­ing on Hamas.

    “Under no cir­cum­stances and at no stage was Prime Min­is­ter Netanyahu warned of war inten­tions on the part of Hamas,” the post read in Hebrew. “On the con­trary, the assess­ment of the entire secu­ri­ty ech­e­lon, includ­ing the head of mil­i­tary intel­li­gence and the head of Shin Bet, was that Hamas was deterred and was seek­ing an arrange­ment.”

    In the result­ing furor, Ben­ny Gantz, a mem­ber of his war cab­i­net, pub­licly rebuked Mr. Netanyahu, say­ing that “lead­er­ship means dis­play­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty,” and urged the prime min­is­ter to retract the post. It was lat­er delet­ed, and Mr. Netanyahu apol­o­gized in a new one.

    ...

    The last time Israelis’ col­lec­tive belief in their country’s secu­ri­ty was sim­i­lar­ly dev­as­tat­ed was 50 years ear­li­er, at the start of the Yom Kip­pur War, when Israel was caught off guard by an assault by Egypt­ian and Syr­i­an forces. In an echo of that attack, Hamas suc­ceed­ed because Israeli offi­cials made many of the same mis­takes that were made in 1973.

    The Yom Kip­pur War was “a clas­sic exam­ple of how intel­li­gence fails when the pol­i­cy and intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ties build a feed­back loop that rein­forces their prej­u­dices and blinds them to changes in the threat envi­ron­ment,” Bruce Riedel, a for­mer top Mid­dle East ana­lyst at the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency, wrote in a 2017 research paper about the 1973 war.

    In an inter­view this month, Mr. Riedel said that Mr. Netanyahu was reap­ing the con­se­quences of focus­ing on Iran as the exis­ten­tial threat to Israel while large­ly ignor­ing an ene­my in his back­yard.

    “Bibi’s mes­sage to Israelis has been that the real threat is Iran,” he said, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nick­name. “That with the occu­pa­tion of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza, the Pales­tin­ian issue is no longer a threat to Israel’s secu­ri­ty. All of those assump­tions were shat­tered on Oct. 7.”

    Ignored Warn­ings

    On July 24, two senior Israeli gen­er­als arrived at the Knes­set, Israel’s par­lia­ment, to deliv­er urgent warn­ings to Israeli law­mak­ers, accord­ing to three Israeli defense offi­cials.

    The Knes­set was sched­uled that day to give final approval to one of Mr. Netanyahu’s attempts to curb the pow­er of Israel’s judi­cia­ry — an effort that had con­vulsed Israeli soci­ety, ignit­ed mas­sive street protests and led to large-scale res­ig­na­tions from the mil­i­tary reserves.

    A grow­ing por­tion of the Air Force’s oper­a­tional pilots was threat­en­ing to refuse to report to duty if the leg­is­la­tion passed.

    In the brief­case of one of the gen­er­als, Aharon Hali­va, the head of the Israeli Defense Forces’ Mil­i­tary Intel­li­gence Direc­torate, were high­ly clas­si­fied doc­u­ments detail­ing a judg­ment by intel­li­gence offi­cials that the polit­i­cal tur­moil was embold­en­ing Israel’s ene­mies. One doc­u­ment stat­ed that the lead­ers of what Israeli offi­cials call the “axis of resis­tance” — Iran, Syr­ia, Hamas, Hezbol­lah and Pales­tin­ian Islam­ic Jihad — believed this was a moment of Israeli weak­ness and a time to strike.

    Hezbollah’s leader, Has­san Nas­ral­lah, accord­ing to one of the doc­u­ments, said that it was nec­es­sary to pre­pare for a major war.

    Gen­er­al Hali­va was ready to tell the coali­tion lead­ers that the polit­i­cal tur­moil was cre­at­ing an oppor­tu­ni­ty for Israel’s ene­mies to attack, par­tic­u­lar­ly if there were more res­ig­na­tions in the mil­i­tary. Only two mem­bers of the Knes­set came to hear his brief­ing.

    The leg­is­la­tion passed over­whelm­ing­ly.

    Sep­a­rate­ly, Gen. Herzi Hale­vi, the military’s chief of staff, tried to deliv­er the same warn­ings to Mr. Netanyahu. The prime min­is­ter refused to meet him, the offi­cials said. Mr. Netanyahu’s office did not respond to a request for com­ment about this meet­ing.

    The gen­er­als’ warn­ings were in large part based on a series of provo­ca­tions on Israel’s north­ern bor­der.

    In Feb­ru­ary and March, Hezbol­lah had sent explo­sive-laden drones toward Israeli gas rigs. In March, a mil­i­tant climbed over the bor­der fence from Lebanon into Israel, car­ry­ing sev­er­al pow­er­ful bombs, weapons, phones and an elec­tric bike on which he trav­eled to a major north­ern inter­sec­tion. He then used a pow­er­ful charge, appar­ent­ly try­ing to blow up a bus.

    On May 21, Hezbol­lah staged for appar­ent­ly the first time war games at one of its train­ing sites in Aaram­ta in south Lebanon. Hezbol­lah launched rock­ets and flew drones that dropped explo­sives on a sim­u­lat­ed Israeli town.

    Israeli offi­cials believed that Hezbol­lah was lead­ing the plan­ning for a coor­di­nat­ed attack against Israel, but not one that would prompt an all-out war.

    The offi­cials’ con­cerns grew through August and Sep­tem­ber, and Gen­er­al Hale­vi went pub­lic with his con­cerns.

    “We must be more pre­pared than ever for a mul­ti-are­na and exten­sive mil­i­tary con­flict,” he said at a mil­i­tary cer­e­mo­ny on Sept. 11, just weeks before the attack.

    Mr. Netanyahu’s allies went on Israeli tele­vi­sion and con­demned Gen­er­al Hale­vi for sow­ing pan­ic.

    In a series of meet­ings, Shin Bet gave sim­i­lar warn­ings to senior Israeli offi­cials as Gen­er­al Hale­vi. Even­tu­al­ly, Mr. Bar also went pub­lic.

    “From the inves­ti­ga­tions we are doing we can say today that the polit­i­cal insta­bil­i­ty and the grow­ing divi­sion are a shot of encour­age­ment to the coun­tries of the axis of evil, the ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions and the indi­vid­ual threats,” Mr. Bar said in a speech.

    Mr. Netanyahu’s gov­ern­ment also ignored warn­ings from Israel’s neigh­bors. As the cus­to­di­an of Mus­lim holy sites in Jerusalem, Jor­dan has tra­di­tion­al­ly been an impor­tant medi­a­tor between Pales­tini­ans and Israel’s gov­ern­ment on the Aqsa Mosque com­pound, the third most holy site in Islam. The mosque com­pound has seen repeat­ed raids by Israeli forces over the years, and Hamas has said that it launched this month’s attack in part as retal­i­a­tion for those acts.

    But Jor­dan found that when Mr. Netanyahu formed a gov­ern­ment late last year, the most far right in recent his­to­ry, it was less recep­tive to their warn­ings that the inci­dents at the Aqsa Mosque com­pound was stir­ring up sen­ti­ment inside Pales­tin­ian ter­ri­to­ries that could boil over into vio­lence, accord­ing to two Arab offi­cials with knowl­edge of the rela­tion­ship.

    The Wrong Focus

    While secu­ri­ty and intel­li­gence offi­cials were right about a com­ing attack, their intense focus on Hezbol­lah and Iran had a trag­ic effect: Far less atten­tion was paid to the threats from Gaza. Since Israel’s with­draw­al in 2005 and Hamas’s evo­lu­tion from a pure­ly guer­ril­la orga­ni­za­tion into the gov­ern­ing pow­er of Gaza in 2007, Hamas had only peri­od­ic skir­mish­es with the Israeli mil­i­tary.

    Under four dif­fer­ent prime min­is­ters, Israel repeat­ed­ly decid­ed that reoc­cu­py­ing Gaza and crush­ing Hamas would cost too many lives and do too much dam­age to Israel’s inter­na­tion­al rep­u­ta­tion.

    Israel knew that Hamas, which Iran sup­ports with fund­ing, train­ing and weapons, was grow­ing stronger over time. But offi­cials thought they could con­tain Hamas with an exten­sive net­work of human spies, sophis­ti­cat­ed sur­veil­lance tools that would deliv­er ear­ly warn­ings of an attack and bor­der for­ti­fi­ca­tions to deter a Hamas ground assault. They also relied on the Iron Dome air defense sys­tem for inter­cept­ing rock­ets and mis­siles launched from Gaza.

    The strat­e­gy, con­firmed by mul­ti­ple Israeli offi­cials, bore some fruit. Over the years, Israel’s invest­ment in pen­e­trat­ing Hamas’s inner cir­cle in Gaza allowed Israel to uncov­er the group’s attack plans and occa­sion­al­ly led to assas­si­na­tions of Hamas lead­ers.

    Strength­en­ing Hamas

    Pub­licly, Mr. Netanyahu used blunt rhetoric about Hamas. His elec­tion slo­gan in 2008 was “Strong Against Hamas,” and in one cam­paign video at the time he pledged: “We will not stop the I.D.F. We will fin­ish the job. We will top­ple the ter­ror regime of Hamas.”

    Over time, how­ev­er, he came to see Hamas as a way to bal­ance pow­er against the Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty, which has admin­is­tra­tive con­trol over the West Bank and has long sought a peace agree­ment in Israel in exchange for a Pales­tin­ian state.

    Mr. Netanyahu told aides over the years that a fee­ble Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty low­ered the pres­sure on him to make con­ces­sions to Pales­tini­ans in nego­ti­a­tions, accord­ing to sev­er­al for­mer Israeli offi­cials and peo­ple close to Mr. Netanyahu. An offi­cial in Mr. Netanyahu’s office, who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty, denied this had been the prime minister’s pol­i­cy.

    But there is no ques­tion that Israeli offi­cials viewed Hamas as a region­al threat, not a glob­al ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion like Hezbol­lah or the Islam­ic State. This view was shared in Wash­ing­ton, and Amer­i­can intel­li­gence agen­cies ded­i­cat­ed few resources to col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion on the group.

    Some parts of the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment even believed that Hamas oper­a­tives could be recruit­ed as sources of infor­ma­tion about ter­ror­ist groups con­sid­ered more urgent pri­or­i­ties in Wash­ing­ton.

    Jonathan Schanz­er, a for­mer Trea­sury Depart­ment offi­cial and now the senior vice pres­i­dent for research at the Foun­da­tion for Defense of Democ­ra­cies, recalled a meet­ing he had in 2015 with Amer­i­can intel­li­gence and law enforce­ment offi­cials about sus­pect­ed Hamas oper­a­tives inside the Unit­ed States.

    Dur­ing the meet­ing, he recalled, the offi­cials told him they were try­ing to turn the Hamas oper­a­tives into “assets” in the fight against the Islam­ic State.

    The Invin­ci­bil­i­ty of the Wall

    Israeli offi­cials firm­ly believed that “The Bar­ri­er” — a near­ly 40-mile-long rein­forced con­crete wall above and below ground, com­plet­ed in 2021 — would her­met­i­cal­ly seal off Gaza. There was also a sur­veil­lance sys­tem at the bor­der based almost exclu­sive­ly on cam­eras, sen­sors and remote-oper­at­ed “sight-shoot­er” sys­tems, four senior Israeli mil­i­tary offi­cers told The Times.

    Senior Israeli mil­i­tary offi­cials believed that the com­bi­na­tion of remote sur­veil­lance and machine-gun sys­tems with the for­mi­da­ble wall would make it almost impos­si­ble to infil­trate Israel, and thus reduce the need for a large num­ber of sol­diers to be sta­tioned at the bases.

    But Hamas’s attack exposed the fragili­ty of that tech­nol­o­gy. The group used explo­sive drones that dam­aged the cel­lu­lar anten­nas and the remote fir­ing sys­tems that pro­tect­ed the fence between Gaza and Israel.

    To get around Israel’s pow­er­ful sur­veil­lance tech­nol­o­gy, Hamas fight­ers also appeared to enforce strict dis­ci­pline among the group’s ranks to not dis­cuss its activ­i­ties on mobile phones. This allowed them to pull off the attack with­out detec­tion, one Euro­pean offi­cial said.

    The group most like­ly divid­ed its fight­ers into small­er cells, each prob­a­bly only trained for a spe­cif­ic objec­tive. That way, the rank and file did not under­stand the scale of the attacks they were prepar­ing for and could not give away the oper­a­tion if caught, a Euro­pean offi­cial said, based on his analy­sis of how the attack unfold­ed and from the videos the group dis­sem­i­nat­ed from the oper­a­tion.

    Hamas may have learned such oper­a­tional dis­ci­pline from Hezbol­lah, which has long con­fused Israeli forces on the bat­tle­field by divid­ing its fight­ers into small­er units of friends or rel­a­tives, accord­ing to Lebanese offi­cials with ties to the group. If the fight­ers speak open­ly on cell­phones to coor­di­nate mil­i­tary oper­a­tions, Lebanese offi­cials with ties to the group said, part of their code is to speak in child­hood mem­o­ries — for exam­ple, ask­ing to meet up in a field where they once played togeth­er.

    ...

    In a con­ver­sa­tion with mil­i­tary inves­ti­ga­tors two weeks after the attack, sol­diers who sur­vived the assault tes­ti­fied that the Hamas train­ing was so pre­cise that they dam­aged a row of cam­eras and com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems so that “all our screens turned off in almost the exact same sec­ond.” The result of all this was a near total blind­ness on the morn­ing of the attack.

    After the fight­ing had stopped, Israeli sol­diers found hand-held radios on the dead bod­ies of some of the Hamas mil­i­tants — the same radios that Israeli intel­li­gence offi­cials had decid­ed a year ago were no longer worth mon­i­tor­ing.

    ———-

    “How Years of Israeli Fail­ures on Hamas Led to a Dev­as­tat­ing Attack” vy Ronen Bergman, Mark Mazzetti and Maria Abi-Habib; The New York Times; 10/29/2023

    Despite Israel’s sophis­ti­cat­ed tech­no­log­i­cal prowess in espi­onage, Hamas gun­men had under­gone exten­sive train­ing for the assault, vir­tu­al­ly unde­tect­ed for at least a year. The fight­ers, who were divid­ed into dif­fer­ent units with spe­cif­ic goals, had metic­u­lous infor­ma­tion on Israel’s mil­i­tary bases and the lay­out of kib­butz­im.”

    Exten­sive train­ing and prepa­ra­tions for over a year that went vir­tu­al­ly unde­tect­ed by Israel’s nation­al secu­ri­ty agen­cies. Even Unit 8200 stopped eaves­drop­ping on Hamas because they saw it as a wast­ed effort. That’s the cur­rent nar­ra­tive we’re get­ting, along­side out­right defi­ance by Ben­jamin Netanyahu over whether or not his admin­is­tra­tion had any­thing to do with this giant intel­li­gence lapse:

    ...
    Their judg­ment that night might have been dif­fer­ent had they been lis­ten­ing to traf­fic on the hand-held radios of Hamas mil­i­tants. But Unit 8200, Israel’s sig­nals intel­li­gence agency, had stopped eaves­drop­ping on those net­works a year ear­li­er because they saw it as a waste of effort.

    ...

    Until near­ly the start of the attack, nobody believed the sit­u­a­tion was seri­ous enough to wake up Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu, accord­ing to three Israeli defense offi­cials.

    ...

    Many senior offi­cials have accept­ed respon­si­bil­i­ty, but Mr. Netanyahu has not. At 1 a.m. Sun­day in Israel, after his office was asked for com­ment on this arti­cle, he post­ed a mes­sage on X, for­mer­ly Twit­ter, that repeat­ed remarks he made to The New York Times and blamed the mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence ser­vices for fail­ing to pro­vide him with any warn­ing on Hamas.

    “Under no cir­cum­stances and at no stage was Prime Min­is­ter Netanyahu warned of war inten­tions on the part of Hamas,” the post read in Hebrew. “On the con­trary, the assess­ment of the entire secu­ri­ty ech­e­lon, includ­ing the head of mil­i­tary intel­li­gence and the head of Shin Bet, was that Hamas was deterred and was seek­ing an arrange­ment.”

    In the result­ing furor, Ben­ny Gantz, a mem­ber of his war cab­i­net, pub­licly rebuked Mr. Netanyahu, say­ing that “lead­er­ship means dis­play­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty,” and urged the prime min­is­ter to retract the post. It was lat­er delet­ed, and Mr. Netanyahu apol­o­gized in a new one.
    ...

    Jux­ta­pos­ing Netanyahu’s denials of cul­pa­bil­i­ty is the real­i­ty that his gov­ern­ment had been warned for months by senior gen­er­als that the polit­i­cal tur­moil cre­at­ed by Netanyahu’s judi­cial ‘reforms’ were fun­da­men­tal­ly under­min­ing Israel’s armed forces. Warn­ings that weren’t sim­ply ignored but instead result­ed in Netanyahu’s allies attack­ing these gen­er­als over the air­waves:

    ...
    Ignored Warn­ings

    On July 24, two senior Israeli gen­er­als arrived at the Knes­set, Israel’s par­lia­ment, to deliv­er urgent warn­ings to Israeli law­mak­ers, accord­ing to three Israeli defense offi­cials.

    The Knes­set was sched­uled that day to give final approval to one of Mr. Netanyahu’s attempts to curb the pow­er of Israel’s judi­cia­ry — an effort that had con­vulsed Israeli soci­ety, ignit­ed mas­sive street protests and led to large-scale res­ig­na­tions from the mil­i­tary reserves.

    A grow­ing por­tion of the Air Force’s oper­a­tional pilots was threat­en­ing to refuse to report to duty if the leg­is­la­tion passed.

    In the brief­case of one of the gen­er­als, Aharon Hali­va, the head of the Israeli Defense Forces’ Mil­i­tary Intel­li­gence Direc­torate, were high­ly clas­si­fied doc­u­ments detail­ing a judg­ment by intel­li­gence offi­cials that the polit­i­cal tur­moil was embold­en­ing Israel’s ene­mies. One doc­u­ment stat­ed that the lead­ers of what Israeli offi­cials call the “axis of resis­tance” — Iran, Syr­ia, Hamas, Hezbol­lah and Pales­tin­ian Islam­ic Jihad — believed this was a moment of Israeli weak­ness and a time to strike.

    Hezbollah’s leader, Has­san Nas­ral­lah, accord­ing to one of the doc­u­ments, said that it was nec­es­sary to pre­pare for a major war.

    Gen­er­al Hali­va was ready to tell the coali­tion lead­ers that the polit­i­cal tur­moil was cre­at­ing an oppor­tu­ni­ty for Israel’s ene­mies to attack, par­tic­u­lar­ly if there were more res­ig­na­tions in the mil­i­tary. Only two mem­bers of the Knes­set came to hear his brief­ing.

    The leg­is­la­tion passed over­whelm­ing­ly.

    Sep­a­rate­ly, Gen. Herzi Hale­vi, the military’s chief of staff, tried to deliv­er the same warn­ings to Mr. Netanyahu. The prime min­is­ter refused to meet him, the offi­cials said. Mr. Netanyahu’s office did not respond to a request for com­ment about this meet­ing.

    The gen­er­als’ warn­ings were in large part based on a series of provo­ca­tions on Israel’s north­ern bor­der.

    ...

    Israeli offi­cials believed that Hezbol­lah was lead­ing the plan­ning for a coor­di­nat­ed attack against Israel, but not one that would prompt an all-out war.

    The offi­cials’ con­cerns grew through August and Sep­tem­ber, and Gen­er­al Hale­vi went pub­lic with his con­cerns.

    “We must be more pre­pared than ever for a mul­ti-are­na and exten­sive mil­i­tary con­flict,” he said at a mil­i­tary cer­e­mo­ny on Sept. 11, just weeks before the attack.

    Mr. Netanyahu’s allies went on Israeli tele­vi­sion and con­demned Gen­er­al Hale­vi for sow­ing pan­ic.

    In a series of meet­ings, Shin Bet gave sim­i­lar warn­ings to senior Israeli offi­cials as Gen­er­al Hale­vi. Even­tu­al­ly, Mr. Bar also went pub­lic.

    “From the inves­ti­ga­tions we are doing we can say today that the polit­i­cal insta­bil­i­ty and the grow­ing divi­sion are a shot of encour­age­ment to the coun­tries of the axis of evil, the ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions and the indi­vid­ual threats,” Mr. Bar said in a speech.
    ...

    And then we get to this puz­zling addi­tion to the expla­na­tion for the mas­sive intel­li­gence fail­ure: part of the rea­son Israeli intel­li­gence offi­cials assumed they did­n’t need to direct their sophis­ti­cat­ed sur­veil­lance tools towards Hamas is because it was believed the exten­sive net­work of human spies already cul­ti­vat­ed inside Hamas would be suf­fi­cient. Again, recall the reports that came out days before the Octo­ber 7 attacks about Hamas was rocked by Israel man­ag­ing to acquire a human asset, Khalil Abu Ma’za, who was oper­at­ing close to Hamas’s lead­er­ship for years. How were all these human assets also kept in the dark about an exten­sive plan that took more than a year to pre­pare for?

    ...
    While secu­ri­ty and intel­li­gence offi­cials were right about a com­ing attack, their intense focus on Hezbol­lah and Iran had a trag­ic effect: Far less atten­tion was paid to the threats from Gaza. Since Israel’s with­draw­al in 2005 and Hamas’s evo­lu­tion from a pure­ly guer­ril­la orga­ni­za­tion into the gov­ern­ing pow­er of Gaza in 2007, Hamas had only peri­od­ic skir­mish­es with the Israeli mil­i­tary.

    Under four dif­fer­ent prime min­is­ters, Israel repeat­ed­ly decid­ed that reoc­cu­py­ing Gaza and crush­ing Hamas would cost too many lives and do too much dam­age to Israel’s inter­na­tion­al rep­u­ta­tion.

    Israel knew that Hamas, which Iran sup­ports with fund­ing, train­ing and weapons, was grow­ing stronger over time. But offi­cials thought they could con­tain Hamas with an exten­sive net­work of human spies, sophis­ti­cat­ed sur­veil­lance tools that would deliv­er ear­ly warn­ings of an attack and bor­der for­ti­fi­ca­tions to deter a Hamas ground assault. They also relied on the Iron Dome air defense sys­tem for inter­cept­ing rock­ets and mis­siles launched from Gaza.

    The strat­e­gy, con­firmed by mul­ti­ple Israeli offi­cials, bore some fruit. Over the years, Israel’s invest­ment in pen­e­trat­ing Hamas’s inner cir­cle in Gaza allowed Israel to uncov­er the group’s attack plans and occa­sion­al­ly led to assas­si­na­tions of Hamas lead­ers.
    ...

    And then there’s the real­i­ty that an empow­ered Hamas was seen as a means of weak­en­ing the Pales­tin­ian lead­er­ship over­all. Which rais­es an obvi­ous ques­tion: assum­ing Hamas isn’t entire­ly destroyed by the ongo­ing Israeli cam­paign, what can we rea­son­ably expect regard­ing Hamas’s rel­a­tive influ­ence vs the Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty? Because it seems like Hamas is going to be more pop­u­lar than ever at this point:

    ...
    Strength­en­ing Hamas

    Pub­licly, Mr. Netanyahu used blunt rhetoric about Hamas. His elec­tion slo­gan in 2008 was “Strong Against Hamas,” and in one cam­paign video at the time he pledged: “We will not stop the I.D.F. We will fin­ish the job. We will top­ple the ter­ror regime of Hamas.”

    Over time, how­ev­er, he came to see Hamas as a way to bal­ance pow­er against the Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty, which has admin­is­tra­tive con­trol over the West Bank and has long sought a peace agree­ment in Israel in exchange for a Pales­tin­ian state.

    Mr. Netanyahu told aides over the years that a fee­ble Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty low­ered the pres­sure on him to make con­ces­sions to Pales­tini­ans in nego­ti­a­tions, accord­ing to sev­er­al for­mer Israeli offi­cials and peo­ple close to Mr. Netanyahu. An offi­cial in Mr. Netanyahu’s office, who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty, denied this had been the prime minister’s pol­i­cy.
    ...

    There’s the very inter­est­ing ques­tions about the oth­er mas­sive intel­li­gence fail­ure: the US’s intel­li­gence fail­ure. The US just stopped mon­i­tor­ing Hamas too, assum­ing the Israelis had it han­dled:

    ...
    Israeli offi­cials have promised a full inves­ti­ga­tion into what went wrong.

    Even before that inquiry, it is clear the attacks were pos­si­ble because of a cas­cade of fail­ures over recent years — not hours, days or weeks. A New York Times exam­i­na­tion, based on dozens of inter­views with Israeli, Arab, Euro­pean and Amer­i­can offi­cials, as well as a review of Israeli gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments and evi­dence col­lect­ed since the Oct. 7 raid, shows that:

    * Israeli secu­ri­ty offi­cials spent months try­ing to warn Mr. Netanyahu that the polit­i­cal tur­moil caused by his domes­tic poli­cies was weak­en­ing the country’s secu­ri­ty and embold­en­ing Israel’s ene­mies. The prime min­is­ter con­tin­ued to push those poli­cies. On one day in July he even refused to meet a senior gen­er­al who came to deliv­er a threat warn­ing based on clas­si­fied intel­li­gence, accord­ing to Israeli offi­cials.

    * Israeli offi­cials mis­judged the threat posed by Hamas for years, and more crit­i­cal­ly in the run-up to the attack. The offi­cial assess­ment of Israeli mil­i­tary intel­li­gence and the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil since May 2021 was that Hamas had no inter­est in launch­ing an attack from Gaza that might invite a dev­as­tat­ing response from Israel, accord­ing to five peo­ple famil­iar with the assess­ments who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss sen­si­tive details. Instead, Israeli intel­li­gence assessed that Hamas was try­ing to foment vio­lence against Israelis in the West Bank, which is con­trolled by its rival, the Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty.

    * The belief by Mr. Netanyahu and top Israeli secu­ri­ty offi­cials that Iran and Hezbol­lah, its most pow­er­ful proxy force, pre­sent­ed the gravest threat to Israel divert­ed atten­tion and resources away from coun­ter­ing Hamas. In late Sep­tem­ber, senior Israeli offi­cials told The Times they were con­cerned that Israel might be attacked in the com­ing weeks or months on sev­er­al fronts by Iran-backed mili­tia groups, but made no men­tion of Hamas ini­ti­at­ing a war with Israel from the Gaza Strip.

    * Amer­i­can spy agen­cies in recent years had large­ly stopped col­lect­ing intel­li­gence on Hamas and its plans, believ­ing the group was a region­al threat that Israel was man­ag­ing.
    ...

    And that brings us to the grim­ly fas­ci­nat­ing appar­ent rea­son con­tribut­ing to the US’s intel­li­gence fail­ure here: US offi­cials were try­ing to turn Hamas oper­a­tives into “assets” against ISIS. Beyond that, Jonathan Schanz­er recalls a 2015 meet­ing about sus­pect­ed Hamas oper­a­tives in the US that US intel­li­gence was hop­ing to recruit. Again, recall the 9/11 rev­e­la­tion from ear­li­er this year about how the CIA was appar­ent­ly try­ing to recruit some of the 9/11 hijack­ers and end­ed up run­ning cov­er for them and block­ing US law enforce­ment from bust­ing the al Qae­da oper­a­tion on US soil. Did “Israel’s 9/11” include a sim­i­lar cat­a­stroph­ic asset-recruit­ment sce­nario?

    ...
    But there is no ques­tion that Israeli offi­cials viewed Hamas as a region­al threat, not a glob­al ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion like Hezbol­lah or the Islam­ic State. This view was shared in Wash­ing­ton, and Amer­i­can intel­li­gence agen­cies ded­i­cat­ed few resources to col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion on the group.

    Some parts of the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment even believed that Hamas oper­a­tives could be recruit­ed as sources of infor­ma­tion about ter­ror­ist groups con­sid­ered more urgent pri­or­i­ties in Wash­ing­ton.

    Jonathan Schanz­er, a for­mer Trea­sury Depart­ment offi­cial and now the senior vice pres­i­dent for research at the Foun­da­tion for Defense of Democ­ra­cies, recalled a meet­ing he had in 2015 with Amer­i­can intel­li­gence and law enforce­ment offi­cials about sus­pect­ed Hamas oper­a­tives inside the Unit­ed States.

    Dur­ing the meet­ing, he recalled, the offi­cials told him they were try­ing to turn the Hamas oper­a­tives into “assets” in the fight against the Islam­ic State.
    ...

    So at the same time we’re told the Israeli and the US intel­li­gence agen­cies decid­ed to just blow off any eaves­drop­ping of Hamas for over a year now, we’re also told that both coun­tries have been eager­ly recruit­ing Hamas human assets. Human assets who appar­ent­ly neglect­ed to informed either the US or Israel about this impend­ing mass attack. At least that’s the sto­ry we’re get­ting. Which is a reminder that when the pub­lic accepts expla­na­tions that don’t add up, that’s anoth­er kind of “intel­li­gence fail­ure”. Let’s hope this does­n’t turn into anoth­er one of those kinds of intel­li­gence fail­ures.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 31, 2023, 3:32 pm

Post a comment