Seymour M. Hersh, one of the most diligent – and therefore
prescient – journalists when it comes to covering US-Iran relations, April 6
had this piece published in the New
Yorker. A friend, Brad Hernlem, commented:
Our Men in Iran?
From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy’s
Nevada National Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain
peaks, has the look of northwest Iran. The site, some sixty-five miles
northwest of Las Vegas, was once used for nuclear testing, and now includes a
counterintelligence training facility and a private airport capable of handling
Boeing 737 aircraft. It’s a restricted area, and inhospitable—in certain
sections, the curious are warned that the site’s security personnel are
authorized to use deadly force, if necessary, against intruders.
It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of
the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West
as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led
group and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six
American citizens. It was initially part of the broad-based revolution that led
to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. But, within a few years, the group
was waging a bloody internal war with the ruling clerics, and, in 1997, it was
listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. In 2002,
the M.E.K. earned some international credibility by publicly revealing—accurately—that
Iran had begun enriching uranium at a secret underground location. Mohamed
ElBaradei, who at the time was the director general of the International Atomic
Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency, told me later
that he had been informed that the information was supplied by the Mossad. The
M.E.K.’s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall of the Iraqi
regime in 2003, and JSOC
began operating inside Iran in an effort to substantiate the Bush
Administration’s fears that Iran was building the bomb at one or more secret
underground locations. Funds were covertly passed to a number of dissident
organizations, for intelligence collection and, ultimately, for anti-regime
terrorist activities. Directly, or indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up with
resources like arms and intelligence. Some American-supported covert operations
continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials
and military consultants.
Despite the growing ties, and a much-intensified lobbying
effort organized by its advocates, M.E.K. has remained on the State
Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations—which meant that secrecy
was essential in the Nevada training. “We did train them here, and washed them
through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern
Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official told me. “We were
deploying them over long distances in the desert and mountains, and building
their capacity in communications—coördinating commo is a big deal.” (A
spokesman for J.S.O.C. said that “U.S. Special Operations Forces were neither
aware of nor involved in the training of M.E.K. members.”)
The training ended sometime before President Obama took
office, the former official said. In a separate interview, a retired four-star
general, who has advised the Bush and Obama Administrations on
national-security issues, said that he had been privately briefed in 2005 about
the training of Iranians associated with the M.E.K. in Nevada by an American
involved in the program. They got “the standard training,” he said, “in commo,
crypto [cryptography], small-unit tactics, and weaponry—that went on for six
months,” the retired general said. “They were kept in little pods.” He also was
told, he said, that the men doing the training were from JSOC, which, by 2005, had become a major instrument in the
Bush Administration’s global war on terror. “The JSOC trainers were not front-line guys who had been in the
field, but second- and third-tier guys—trainers and the like—and they started
going off the reservation. ‘If we’re going to teach you tactics, let me show
you some really sexy stuff…’ ”
It was the ad-hoc training that provoked the worried
telephone calls to him, the former general said. “I told one of the guys who
called me that they were all in over their heads, and all of them could end up
trouble unless they got something in writing. The Iranians are very, very good
at counterintelligence, and stuff like this is just too hard to contain.” The
site in Nevada was being utilized at the same time, he said, for advanced
training of élite Iraqi combat units. (The retired general said he only knew of
the one M.E.K.-affiliated group that went though the training course; the
former senior intelligence official said that he was aware of training that
went on through 2007.)
Allan Gerson, a Washington attorney for the M.E.K., notes
that the M.E.K. has publicly and repeatedly renounced terror. Gerson said he
would not comment on the alleged training in Nevada. But such training, if
true, he said, would be “especially incongruent with the State Department’s
decision to continue to maintain the M.E.K. on the terrorist list. How can the
U.S. train those on State’s foreign terrorist list, when others face criminal penalties
for providing a nickel to the same organization?”
Robert Baer, a retired C.I.A. agent who is fluent in
Arabic and had worked under cover in Kurdistan and throughout the Middle East
in his career, initially had told me in early 2004 of being recruited by a
private American company—working, so he believed, on behalf of the Bush
Administration—to return to Iraq. “They wanted me to help the M.E.K. collect
intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program,” Baer recalled. “They thought I knew
Farsi, which I did not. I said I’d get back to them, but never did.” Baer, now
living in California, recalled that it was made clear to him at the time that
the operation was “a long-term thing—not just a one-shot deal.”
Massoud Khodabandeh, an I.T. expert now living in England
who consults for the Iraqi government, was an official with the M.E.K. before
defecting in 1996. In a telephone interview, he acknowledged that he is an
avowed enemy of the M.E.K., and has advocated against the group. Khodabandeh
said that he had been with the group since before the fall of the Shah and, as
a computer expert, was deeply involved in intelligence activities as well as
providing security for the M.E.K. leadership. For the past decade, he and his
English wife have run a support program for other defectors. Khodabandeh told
me that he had heard from more recent defectors about the training in Nevada.
He was told that the communications training in Nevada involved more than
teaching how to keep in contact during attacks—it also involved communication
intercepts. The United States, he said, at one point found a way to penetrate
some major Iranian communications systems. At the time, he said, the U.S.
provided M.E.K. operatives with the ability to intercept telephone calls and
text messages inside Iran—which M.E.K. operatives translated and shared with
American signals intelligence experts. He does not know whether this activity
is ongoing.
Five Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated
since 2007. M.E.K. spokesmen have denied any involvement in the killings, but
early last month NBC News quoted two senior Obama Administration officials as
confirming that the attacks were carried out by M.E.K. units that were financed
and trained by Mossad, the Israeli secret service. NBC further quoted the Administration
officials as denying any American involvement in the M.E.K. activities. The
former senior intelligence official I spoke with seconded the NBC report that
the Israelis were working with the M.E.K., adding that the operations
benefitted from American intelligence. He said that the targets were not
“Einsteins”; “The goal is to affect Iranian psychology and morale,” he said,
and to “demoralize the whole system—nuclear delivery vehicles, nuclear
enrichment facilities, power plants.” Attacks have also been carried out on
pipelines. He added that the operations are “primarily being done by M.E.K.
through liaison with the Israelis, but the United States is now providing the
intelligence.” An adviser to the special-operations community told me that the links
between the United States and M.E.K. activities inside Iran had been
long-standing. “Everything being done inside Iran now is being done with
surrogates,” he said.
The sources I spoke to were unable to say whether the
people trained in Nevada were now involved in operations in Iran or elsewhere.
But they pointed to the general benefit of American support. “The M.E.K. was a
total joke,” the senior Pentagon consultant said, “and now it’s a real network
inside Iran. How did the M.E.K. get so much more efficient?” he asked
rhetorically. “Part of it is the training in Nevada. Part of it is logistical
support in Kurdistan, and part of it is inside Iran. M.E.K. now has a capacity
for efficient operations that it never had before.”
In mid-January, a few days after an assassination by car
bomb of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran, Secretary of Defense Leon
Panetta, at a town-hall meeting of soldiers at Fort Bliss, Texas, acknowledged
that the U.S. government has “some ideas as to who might be involved, but we
don’t know exactly who was involved.” He added, “But I can tell you one thing:
the United States was not involved in that kind of effort. That’s not what the
United States does.”
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