Intel Wars (33 page)

Classified intelligence reports reviewed by the author reveal that
the two top Syrian intelligence services, Syrian Military Intelligence and the General Intelligence Directorate, continue to covertly permit Iraqi insurgents and foreign fighters belonging to al Qaeda in Iraq to freely operate from its soil. Syria's not-so-secret involvement in the war in Iraq between 2003 and 2008 was considerable. According to a study done for the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity by the Center for Naval Analyses, “
Inside Syria, [Iraqi] insurgent leaders could take refuge
, financiers could organize money flows into Al Anbar [Province], foreign fighters could transit en route to Al Anbar, and insurgent cadres could even establish a few training camps. The Syrian government seemed to turn a blind eye to much of this activity, although they never allowed insurgents to truly mass inside their territory.”

Attempts to modify Syria's behavior through the imposition of harsh economic sanctions have not worked. Intelligence reports show that Iran has provided Damascus with substantial economic subsidies to keep the Syrian economy afloat, and Russia has covertly provided the Syrian military with modern weapons and technological assistance in violation of U.S.-backed economic sanctions.

It is not known at present if the CIA has attempted to take advantage of the civil unrest that has wracked Syria since the collapse of the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes in Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011. The Syrian military and security forces have been aggressive in the efforts to suppress the popular uprising, using tanks and elite commando units to quell anti-government demonstrations. Thousands have died in the fighting, which is still continuing as this book heads to press. According to a British security source, since the unrest began, a number of the London-based groups supported by the CIA and MI6 have been actively involved in beaming news and video podcasts into Syria over the Internet using social media vehicles such as Facebook and Twitter.

Iraq, the U.S. intelligence community's top priority for much of the past decade, has not been affected by the popular unrest sweeping the rest of the Middle East, but the country remains in a state of flux. Despite the fact that the Iraqi insurgency was soundly defeated in 2007, the U.S. intelligence community continues to hold that without a comprehensive and binding resolution to the outstanding political differences between the country's Shiite majority and the minority Sunnis and Kurds, all of the progress that had been achieved on the battlefield could easily collapse overnight. Even General David H. Petraeus, the architect of the 2007 victory over the Iraqi insurgents, remains concerned,
telling a group of analysts in Washington in June 2009
that the security situation in the country was, in his opinion, still “fragile and reversible.”

Al Qaeda in Iraq is still very much alive and carrying out terrorist attacks, but it is much smaller and far less capable than it was in its heyday prior to the 2007 Baghdad surge. It is probably purely coincidental, but the number of deadly suicide bombings in Iraq has been steadily rising since Obama's inauguration in 2009. Moreover, Sunni insurgent groups have begun resurrecting themselves in Al Anbar Province, recruiting Sunni officers in the Iraqi Army and the tribal “Awakening Council” militias created and funded by the United States in 2007.

In another ominous portent of things yet to come, the U.S. government's relations
with Nuri al-Maliki's Iraqi government have been slowly slipping because the Baghdad regime has been quietly moving away from the United States toward closer ties with Iran. Iran's ability to influence the policies of the Iraqi government is a source of heated debate within the U.S. government and intelligence community, although nobody disputes the fact that the Iranian intelligence services are striving to ensure that the policies of al-Malaki are to Tehran's liking.

There is, however, widespread agreement within the intelligence community that Iran's attempts to influence Iraqi politics are not directed by its diplomats, but rather by the operatives of the Iranian foreign intelligence organization, the Quds Force. According to a leaked 2009 State Department cable, “
Since at least 2003, Brigadier General Qasem Soleimani
, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps–Qods Force (IRGC-QF), has been the point man directing the formulation and implementation of the [Iranian government's] Iraq policy … Through his IRGC-QF officers and Iraqi proxies in Iraq, notably Iranian Ambassador and IRGC-QF associate Hassan Kazemi-Qomi, Soleimani employs the full range of diplomatic, security, intelligence, and economic tools to influence Iraqi allies and detractors in order to shape a more pro-Iran regime in Baghdad and the provinces.”

Because of the concern that al-Maliki's Iraqi government might move toward rapprochement with Iran, the CIA station in Baghdad has devoted significant resources to closely following the inner workings of the al-Maliki government and its policies toward Iran. According to a senior U.S. intelligence official, we have al-Maliki's government “wired from top to bottom.” It goes without saying that the CIA station is also paying close attention to the activities of Iran's spies in Iraq.

Washington's concerns about the future political course of the Iraqi government are shared by some senior Iraqi security officials, who fear that Prime Minister al-Maliki's government is inept, corrupt, and incapable of fairly addressing the Sunni minority's concerns in a country where Shiites constitute the vast majority of the population. According to an Iraqi security official interviewed in 2010, “Malaki is weak and too dependent on the Shiite parties like [hard-line Iraqi Shiite politician Moqtada al-] Sadr.… He will move us towards Tehran. God help us. I know he will.”

Seeking a glimpse of an intelligence battlefield of the future, one need look no further than the tiny Persian Gulf mini-state of Dubai, which is one of the seven principalities that comprise the United Arab Emirates. Only about 17 percent of Dubai's 2.2 million inhabitants are Emiratis. The rest come from India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and over two dozen other nations; among them are several thousand American expatriates, all of whom have flocked to Dubai because of the emirate's massive wealth.

From an intelligence standpoint, Dubai is critically important because it has become a global financial powerhouse, replacing Beirut as the banking center and tax shelter of choice for the rich and powerful of the Middle East. If there is a major business transaction taking place anywhere in the Middle East or Near East, whether a sale on the world petroleum market or a major construction project, chances are very good that a bank or investment house in Dubai is financing the deal.

Over the past decade, Dubai and the other principalities
comprising the United Arab Emirates have become the principal source of financing for Mullah Omar's Taliban guerrillas and all of the Afghan drug kingpins. According to a leaked September 2009 State Department cable, “It comes as no surprise that Taliban financing originates in and transits the UAE to Afghanistan and third countries. Afghan drug proceeds, including laundered funds, both transit the UAE and are invested here. Cash couriers are believed to carry the majority of illicit funds to and from Afghanistan.” The cable went on to note that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration believed that “over $2 billion in drug proceeds has transited through the UAE over the last three years.”

Dubai's position as the leading banking center in the Middle East has made it a mecca for spies from around the world. According to senior U.S. intelligence sources, Dubai is today the principal listening post for monitoring what is taking place across the Persian Gulf inside America's arch-nemesis in the region, the Islamic Republic of Iran, led by an aging conservative religious autocracy that derives its strength from feeding its people with the notion that they are beset on all sides by enemies. The Iranian government's aggressive, some would say confrontational, attitude toward the United States over the past thirty years, its sponsorship of international terrorist groups, its work on building a nuclear weapon, and its development of long-range ballistic missiles capable of hitting Israel and perhaps even the United States have kept the country near the top of the list of the U.S. intelligence community's most important targets for almost three decades.

The CIA has had no station inside Iran since Washington broke diplomatic relations with the regime after Iranian militants stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, and took sixty-six embassy staff members hostage, including the entire CIA station headed by Thomas L. Ahern Jr. This has forced the agency to improvise. In the 1980s and 1990s, the CIA's “Iran station” was situated inside the I. G. Farben Building in downtown Frankfurt, Germany, from where the agency directed its global efforts to recruit and run agent networks inside Iran. But try as it might, the agency's efforts to penetrate Iran during this time period were marked by one failure after another, with the single greatest loss occurring in April 1989, when Iranian security forces rolled up virtually the entire CIA network of agents inside Iran.

For the last two decades, the agency's “Iran station” has been hidden away inside the U.S. consulate in Dubai because of its close proximity to Iran, which is only one hundred miles to the north across the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranian presence in Dubai is massive. Not only does Iran maintain a sizable embassy in Dubai, complete with a large complement of intelligence officers, but
according to a leaked State Department cable, banks in Dubai currently hold about $12 billion
of Iranian government money, which the Tehran regime secretly uses to finance terrorist groups, its overseas weapons purchases, and its clandestine acquisition of nuclear technology.

By monitoring the flow of money in and out of Iranian government bank accounts in Dubai, the U.S. intelligence community has determined that despite strict United Nations economic sanctions, a number of major European oil companies have continued to covertly purchase large amounts of Iranian oil and natural gas on the international petroleum market, knowing full well that the Iranian government uses the proceeds from these sales to finance its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. According to an American intelligence official, as long as Iran can continue to freely sell its oil and natural gas on overseas markets, “traditional diplomacy and economic sanctions are unlikely to ever work.”

As valuable as Dubai may be to the CIA as a base from which to spy on Iran, it does not come close to compensating for the agency's lack of a presence on the ground in Tehran. In theory, the CIA should not have to be content with watching Iran from the relative comfort of the skyscrapers of Dubai. Compared to North Korea, where a siege mentality and acute paranoia are the norm, Iran is far more open. Thousands of Americans visit Iran every year, many of whom are Iranian expatriates who have settled in the sunny climes of Southern California and are now American citizens. They just can't do any business there, which would violate the economic sanctions that are currently in place to curb Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

There is also an enormous reservoir of residual friendship toward the United States among young Iranians born since the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, who now comprise 50 percent of Iran's population. Thanks to modern technology, like satellite television, cell phones, and the Internet, Iran's under-thirty set are well versed in Western culture and, unlike their parents, generally well disposed toward improved relations with the West, including the United States. Walk down any street in downtown Tehran and you will find yourself surrounded by teenagers and twenty-something college students who want to talk about America and their desire for better relations with the West.

An American television film crew filming a documentary about Iran in 2009 was taken aback by the eagerness of young Iranians to criticize their government on camera, even with a team of glum Iranian plainclothes secret police standing just off to the side. One young Iranian man even went so far as to walk past the plainclothesmen flaunting a copy of
Newsweek
that the Americans had given him, which contained an article highly critical of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In another time, their earnest candor would have gotten the youths arrested and perhaps even a stiff prison sentence for, as one of the wittier of the students put it, “revealing state secrets.” This time, the Iranian plainclothes security men observing the affair, perhaps having teenagers of their own at home, decided that the prudent thing to do was nothing and hope that it would not end up on the nightly news.

In this more permissive environment, America's clandestine intelligence collectors should thrive. But because there is no CIA station inside the country, it is very difficult for the agency to recruit agents or gather firsthand intelligence information. Unable to operate from inside Iran, the CIA has been forced to try to recruit and run agent networks inside Iran from outside the country, which as any intelligence professional will tell you is an extremely difficult proposition, especially given the effectiveness of the Iranian security services in rooting out spies.

The CIA's Baghdad and Kabul stations have been infiltrating Iranian-born agents into Iran since 2003 with marginal success. The agency has been forced to largely depend to some degree on the intelligence services of a number of friendly European and Middle Eastern governments with embassies in Tehran to provide it with much of what it knows about what is going on inside Iran.

The CIA is not the only branch of the U.S. intelligence community actively spying inside Iran. The National Reconnaissance Office's fleet of spy satellites keeps very close tabs on Iran's uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Qom and on the Iranian missile test ranges at Semnan, Shahrud, and Garmsar. American spy satellites are currently maintaining a constant vigil on a new missile launch facility fast approaching completion with the help of North Korean technicians at Semnan east of Tehran. According to Michael Elleman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, who is the author of a new study of the Iranian missile program, this new facility will be used to launch a spy satellite into space on top of a large new booster rocket called the Simorgh, which many analysts believe is the prototype of an Iranian intercontinental ballistic missile. According to Elleman, “The launch, if it occurs as scheduled, will set off a fire-storm, especially by proponents of missile defense” in the United States who want to build a massive new defense system designed to shoot down these missiles before they can strike the United States.