Iran & Intel : When will America learn its lesson?

[Pithy Cherub]

On November 4, 1979 the American embassy was taken over by students in Tehran and thus began a long hostage crisis. The seeds of mistrust were sewn back in 1925 when the CIA via Kermit Roosevelt started a coup and replaced a 200 year old dynasty with a new shah. Fast forward a decade or so,and the Brits & Germany had that first shah replaced at the beginning of WWII with his more youthful and inexperienced son. The Allies needed a caretaker they could count on for the oil fields. After awhile, the new and latest puppet shah asked the US and Great Britain for Iran to have a better financial split and stake in the oil revenues since - gasp - the oil fields belonged to Iran. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company said an unequivocal no.

In 1951, Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq (from the 200 year old dynasty that had been displaced) became the figure many Iranians rallied around as he straight out nationalized the oil industry. Time Magazine recognized the in your face boldness to Allied hegemony and promptly named him Man of the Year. His UN speech was a barn burner. The Anglo-Iranian Company refused to lose another country's resource that made them vasts sums of money so President Eisenhower & Prime Minister Churchill authorized a plot to harass Mossadeq and support the youthful shah and dress it up as a rescue from Mossadeq's power. CIA's Kermit Roosevelt was the go-between. The agreement would be to protect the oil but make it seems as if the shah was in control, but everybody knew who were the puppet masters. Over time the shah became ruthless and seen as a tool of America.

By the end of WWII, according to James Bamford, NSA expert and author of Body of Secrets, the US had already broken all of the Iranian codes. Gary Powers even flew over Iran in U-2 flights on the way into Russia. The NSA had a listening post in Northern Iran in the 50's and 60's but it was managed by the CIA. During the 1980 hostage rescue attempt, the NSA was shut down to assist because of the bureaucratic warfare between the CIA & NSA typified by Admiral Turner of the CIA and Admiral Bobby Ray Inman of the NSA. In 1985, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, went to the NSA as a member of the National Security Council (NSC) staff to procure special laptops that had the best encryption systems so he and his "posse" could communicate their plans with one another. He got the laptops and we know what happened, Iran-Contra. Signals intelligence collected during this time was in some measure given to Iraq during their war with Iran. Then Saddam invaded Kuwait.

At the start of the hostilities for the First Gulf War Bamford uses the following 1998 quote of Gerecht from the CIA on page 474, "Not a single Iran desk chief during the eight years that I worked on Iran could speak or read Persian. Not a single Near East Division chief knew Arabic, Persian or Turkish..." It should seem that the lessons of 1979 were internalized, but alas they were not. The first take over of the US embassy in Iran was February 14,1979. Ayatollah Khomeini returns to Iran from an exile in Najaf February 1, 1979.

Mark Bowden writes beautifully of what transpired in the takeover of the US embassy on November 4, 1979. The very pregnant pause between February and November of 1979 was not used as productively as it might in light of the situation. Bowden's Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam is crafted as a deeply personal non-fiction story with amazing detail and insights. The embassy has both state department and CIA personnel. The State Department group were the group with the most fluent speakers and contacts throughout the country. The CIA group had the longest serving person with 4 months in the country. The CIA mission was to get the listening site back up to monitor Soviet missile activity. They had no agents or insights into the student movement or activities because there were simply no agents. President Carter asked his team early after the first embassy incident what would happen if they did it again. No one believed it would possibly happen again. They couldn't imagine it. President Carter was also told that allowing the shah into the United States for medical reasons would not be a case celebre for the Iranian student movement which had a vast hatred of the CIA.

What makes America so anxious to repeat modus operandi that clearly didn't work on earlier efforts? Iran seems to hold a hypnotic affect and the powers that be in charge of policy seem not to be well read. The policy wonks seem to have lots of ideas but knowledge of the practical is deemed impractical at critical times, especially with Iran. The skies are filled with satellites and the NSA is on the job in full SIGINT collection mode, but that does not replace whether there is a network of humans (HUMINT) willing to pass along critical information to America. After all, America has done things based on bad intel to incredible reverberating effects in the past.

Tomorrow on Sunday June 4, Mark Bowden will be Live on C-SPAN speaking about the hostage crisis of 1979. It would do us well to listen to the past to inform the future.

http://www.booktv.org/indepth/