IRAN
updated:

Secret CIA-Mossad meeting ?; Preparation for new war?

Mon, 01 Feb 2010

A secret meeting between the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Leon Panetta and Israeli officials has reportedly centered on Iran's nuclear program. In a flying visit to Israel on Thursday, the head of the CIA reportedly discussed Iran's nuclear issue in a sit-down with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Mossad Chief Meir Dagan. The trip, which was originally scheduled to take place in May, follows a recent wave of developments in the Middle East that are strongly imply preparations for a possible new military conflict in the region.

Israel has allegedly increased the scope of its undercover operations in the region, particularly against Lebanon, Iran, Syria and the Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas. The extent of this could be seen in recent remarks by Israeli cabinet minister Yossi Peled, in which the former army general explicitly said that another confrontation with Lebanon's resistance movement Hezbollah was almost inevitable. Lebanon's Prime Minister Saad Hariri responded to the claims on Thursday, saying that Israel's threats against Hezbollah are perceived as threats against Lebanon. "We consider the Israeli threats on Lebanon to be a threat to the Lebanese government as a whole, rather than to one particular person," said Hariri during a joint news conference with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo, Reuters reported.

Meanwhile, Hamas officials say they have concrete evidence that the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, staged the recent assassination of a senior Hamas commander, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in Dubai on January 20. Their claims have been somewhat supported by Dubai Police Chief Dhahi Khalfan. "It could be Mossad," AFP quoted police chief Dhahi Khalfan as saying on Sunday.

To add to the controversy, sources in Turkey's ruling party told Russia's Mignews on Saturday that Israeli spy agents ran an advanced electronic monitoring station from the Ankara military headquarters to keep tabs on communication networks in Iran and Syria. According to the sources who were speaking on condition of anonymity, the Signals Intelligence station was solely managed by Israeli intelligence personnel and had become off-limits for members of the Turkish government.

For years Israeli politicians have masterminded a wave of undercover operations and terror plots in numerous countries, including Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Switzerland, and the US. However, much of Israel's espionage operations have lately been focused on the Tehran government, largely because of Iran's uranium enrichment activities, which Tel Aviv has been seeking to portray as a mortal threat.

Tel Aviv, which is reported to have an arsenal of 200 nuclear warheads itself, accuses Iran of developing nuclear weapons and routinely threatens to reduce the country's enrichment sites to rubble. This is while Iran, unlike Israel, is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has opened its enrichment facilities to UN inspection.

On Saturday, US presidential aid James Jones rejected prospects of an Israeli attack against Iran. Although US officials normally deny having any plans to stage new war in the region, there have recently been strong hints to the contrary. The New York Times reported Saturday that Washington will further increase its military presence in the Persian Gulf — allegedly to soup up its defense against possible Iranian missile attacks. Meanwhile, US President Barack Obama has approved the deployment of new combat equipments, including advanced missile systems and special warships, to the region.

SBB/DTPress TV http://www.presstv.com/detail/117579.htm?sectionid=351020202

'West using Israel as proxy to dominate Mideast'
Wed, 13 Jan 2010

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad slams the US, Britain and Israel for what he calls instigating another war in the region.

Speaking to thousands of people in the southwestern city of Ahvaz, Ahmadinejad said that the fabrication of Israel and the sending of arms to the Middle East were aimed at dominating the region and maintaining Western interests.

"The Zionist regime [of Israel] has been fabricated for the sake of dominating the Middle East region," he said. "Realizing the fact that they cannot achieve their goal through deception, they have resorted to military expeditions, launching wars and occupation."

President Ahmadinejad said that even the 9/11 attacks are believed by many experts to have been a US-Israeli plot to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Iranian president slammed Saudi Arabia's involvement in the Yemen war, saying that Riyadh had better used its weapons against the Zionists.

"The arms sold by the West to Saudi Arabia are being used against the people of the region and Muslims instead of protecting them against the Zionists," Ahmadinejad said, urging the Saudi government to contribute to the establishment of peace in Yemen.

The Iranian president also urged Yemeni parties to resolve the crisis through negotiation, be wary of the plots hatched by the enemies and protect the region from insecurity.

"Insecurity will help the arrogant powers of the world to interfere in regional affairs and we should hamper the opportunistic objectives of the enemies."

The president also urged the Pakistani government and nation to maintain their unity and be vigilant in the face of US plots.

"The US is only thinking of its own interests and the Pakistani people and government should not trust the United States," President Ahmadinejad said.

Addressing the global arrogance, the Iranian president said that they have faced a deadlock and the people of Iran and the region have today realized their schemes and will resist their conspiracies.

"You have no choice but to end your inhumane actions and respect the rights of the Iranian people and the region," he said, emphasizing that they would not be able to harm the people of Iran in any manner.

TE/HGH/MMN

Report Ties Dubious Iran Nuclear Docs to Israel 

by Gareth Porter 
IPS 
June 5, 2009 


A report on Iran’s nuclear programme issued by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month generated news stories publicising an incendiary charge that U.S. intelligence is underestimating Iran’s progress in designing a “nuclear warhead” before the halt in nuclear weapons-related research in 2003. 

That false and misleading charge from an intelligence official of a foreign country, who was not identified but was clearly Israeli, reinforces two of Israel’s key propaganda themes on Iran – that the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran is wrong, and that Tehran is poised to build nuclear weapons as soon as possible. 

But it also provides new evidence that Israeli intelligence was the source of the collection of intelligence documents which have been used to accuse Iran of hiding nuclear weapons research. 

The Committee report, dated May 4, cited unnamed “foreign analysts” as claiming intelligence that Iran ended its nuclear weapons-related work in 2003 because it had mastered the design and tested components of a nuclear weapon and thus didn’t need to work on it further until it had produced enough sufficient material. 

That conclusion, which implies that Iran has already decided to build nuclear weapons, contradicts both the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, and current intelligence analysis. The NIE concluded that Iran had ended nuclear weapons-related work in 2003 because of increased international scrutiny, and that it was “less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005?. 

The report included what appears to be a spectacular revelation from “a senior allied intelligence official” that a collection of intelligence documents supposedly obtained by U.S. intelligence in 2004 from an Iranian laptop computer includes “blueprints for a nuclear warhead”. 

It quotes the unnamed official as saying that the blueprints “precisely matched” similar blueprints the official’s own agency “had obtained from other sources inside Iran”. 

No U.S. or IAEA official has ever claimed that the so-called laptop documents included designs for a “nuclear warhead”. The detailed list in a May 26, 2008 IAEA report of the contents of what have been called the “alleged studies” – intelligence documents on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons work — made no mention of any such blueprints. 

In using the phrase “blueprints for a nuclear warhead”, the unnamed official was evidently seeking to conflate blueprints for the reentry vehicle of the Iranian Shehab missile, which were among the alleged Iranian documents, with blueprints for nuclear weapons. 

When New York Times reporters William J. Broad and David E. Sanger used the term “nuclear warhead” to refer to a reentry vehicle in a Nov. 13, 2005 story on the intelligence documents on the Iranian nuclear programme, it brought sharp criticism from David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security. 

“This distinction is not minor,” Albright observed, “and Broad should understand the differences between the two objects, particularly when the information does not contain any words such as nuclear or nuclear warhead.” 

The Senate report does not identify the country for which the analyst in question works, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff refused to respond to questions about the report from IPS, including the reason why the report concealed the identity of the country for which the unidentified “senior allied intelligence official” works. 

Reached later in May, the author of the report, Douglas Frantz, told IPS he is under strict instructions not to speak with the news media. 
After a briefing on the report for selected news media immediately after its release, however, the Associated Press reported May 6 that interviews were conducted in Israel. Frantz was apparently forbidden by Israeli officials from revealing their national affiliation as a condition for the interviews. 

Frantz, a former journalist for the Los Angeles Times, had extensive contacts with high-ranking Israeli military, intelligence and foreign ministry officials before joining the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff. He and co-author Catherine Collins conducted interviews with those Israeli officials for “The Nuclear Jihadist”, published in 2007. The interviews were all conducted under rules prohibiting disclosure of their identities, according to the book. 

The unnamed Israeli intelligence officer’s statement that the “blueprints for a nuclear warhead” – meaning specifications for a missile reentry vehicle – were identical to “designs his agency had obtained from other sources in Iran” suggests that the documents collection which the IAEA has called “alleged studies” actually originated in Israel. 

A U.S.-based nuclear weapons analyst who has followed the “alleged studies” intelligence documents closely says he understands that the documents obtained by U.S. intelligence in 2004 were not originally stored on the laptop on which they were located when they were brought in by an unidentified Iranian source, as U.S. officials have claimed to U.S. journalists. 

The analyst, who insists on not being identified, says the documents were collected by an intelligence network and then assembled on a single laptop. 

The anonymous Israeli intelligence official’s claim, cited in the Committee report, that the “blueprints” in the “alleged studies” collection matched documents his agency had gotten from its own source seems to confirm the analyst’s finding that Israeli intelligence assembled the documents. 
German officials have said that the Mujahedin E Khalq or MEK, the Iranian resistance organisation, brought the laptop documents collection to the attention of U.S. intelligence, as reported by IPS in February 2008. Israeli ties with the political arm of the MEK, the National Committee of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), go back to the early 1990s and include assistance to the organisation in broadcasting into Iran from Paris. 

The NCRI publicly revealed the existence of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in August 2002. However, that and other intelligence apparently came from Israeli intelligence. The Israeli co-authors of “The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran”, Yossi Melman and Meir Javeanfar, revealed that “Western” intelligence was “laundered” to hide its actual provenance by providing it to Iranian opposition groups, especially NCRI, in order to get it to the IAEA. 

They cite U.S., British and Israeli officials as sources for the revelation. 

New Yorker writer Connie Bruck wrote in a March 2006 article that an Israeli diplomat confirmed to her that Israel had found the MEK “useful” but declined to elaborate. 

Israeli intelligence is also known to have been actively seeking to use alleged Iranian documents to prove that Iran had an active nuclear weapons programme just at the time the intelligence documents which eventually surfaced in 2004 would have been put together. 

The most revealing glimpse of Israeli use of such documents to influence international opinion on Iran’s nuclear programme comes from the book by Frantz and Collins. They report that Israel’s international intelligence agency Mossad created a special unit in the summer of 2003 to carry out a campaign to provide secret briefings on the Iranian nuclear programme, which sometimes included “documents from inside Iran and elsewhere”. 

The “alleged studies” collection of documents has never been verified as genuine by either the IAEA or by intelligence analysts. The Senate report said senior United Nations officials and foreign intelligence officials who had seen “many of the documents” in the collection of alleged Iranian military documents had told committee staff “it is impossible to rule out an elaborate intelligence ruse”. 


*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.