2/17/20 Gareth Porter on the History of the Iran Crisis

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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the Greg Gareth Porter, historian and journalist, author of Perils of Dominance about Vietnam, Manufactured Crisis about the Iran nuclear program, and the latest, co-authored with John Kiriakou, is called The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis.
Of course, it's Kiriakou who's former CIA, not Gareth.
Anyway, welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Gareth?
I'm fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back on.
Very happy to have you here.
And so the first thing is, is I'm going to try to crack some joke about how I hope I'm not in trouble for plagiarizing your book, except I'm not sure if there's such a concept as plagiarizing footnotes, or is that just research?
As long as I actually search them all out and verify that they say what you say they say, then it's okay if I poach like half of what you say in your book here, right?
Well, I've never heard of anybody accusing somebody of having too many footnotes from the same source, if that's what you mean.
But no, this is just great, man.
I love this thing.
And by the way, everybody, it's like 100 pages, and you know, hey, it's like 125 pages, including all the notes at the end, all the appendices, and the documents reprinted and everything.
It's 95 pages long, the prose of the text.
So you'll get right through it, and man, it's really great.
And so we should talk about it now.
It's on sale now, the CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis, from CIA coup to the brink of war.
So I guess it seems like maybe that's where we should start, would be with, well, in fact where your book starts is not just American, but with Western intervention in Iran, namely British intervention in Iran.
And you guys really do a great job of covering that whole, you know, first half of the 20th century era in there.
And this is something that I don't think you and I have actually ever discussed before.
So please go ahead and tell us everything.
Well, I'm not going to try to do that.
But even the short take on it in the book, I can try to summarize it very quickly.
I think what we did here is to make people aware of just how deep the Iranian experience has been with Western imperialism.
And, you know, in the case of the British and Russian imperialists, it was a matter of seizing all of their productive assets, essentially anything that was being grown or was under the soil in Iran that had value or potential economic value.
The British and the Russians seized in the 19th century and continued in the 20th century, into the 20th century.
And so therefore, the point that we're making here is that the Iranian people have been just about as thoroughly exploited and for a longer period of time than any other country that I can think of.
You know, all the other Western imperialist efforts began in the mid to late 19th century.
And in fact, the Russians began to seize the Iranian assets in the early 19th century.
So that's a major fact that I think Americans just aren't aware of.
And that helps to understand why the Iranians are so steadfast, so strong in their resistance to American imperialism in Iran.
It is, I mean, there's just no doubt about the fact that the vast majority of Iranians are extremely supportive of the Iranian government's stance against the United States.
In fact, just to skip forward, because it's quite relevant at this point, there is a public opinion poll that was taken last fall by the University of Maryland and another partner organization in Iran.
And they found that huge majorities, something like four-fifths of the population, support the Iranian government's view of the United States, blame the United States for Iran's situation economically, and support the Iranian missile program as a deterrent, a necessary deterrent against the United States and Israel, and support the Iranian position, the Iranian role in Syria.
And so this is simply a snapshot, but it's an important indication of just how strongly the Iranian population does, in fact, support this fundamental stance by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Which doesn't mean that there aren't lots of people unhappy, and some people, a significant number of people, although certainly a small minority, relatively speaking, are ready to do something about it.
But this is a country whose history, very much like the Vietnamese, has prepared them to have a unique role in resisting pressure and even resisting efforts to take over by the United States.
Yeah, and that makes sense.
Listen, people can hate the Ayatollah's guts all day in Iran, but independence first, right?
Just as discontented as people are with the government here in the United States, it doesn't mean we would favor any foreign intervention to come and fix it for us.
And look how much they freak out over the Russians not even doing anything, which is getting accused of it.
Indeed.
And just to make it clear, I mean, this issue of the Western imperialism control of over Iranian resources came to a head in 1953 when the United States- Wait, rewind.
No, go back.
Go back.
Let's talk about the British here, because I really like the part where you say in here about the way that the British organized the deals with the Iranians, like the complete lack of respect there were.
Oh yeah, no, don't worry.
You'll get your 3% or whatever it is, but then they always still screw them and they never got anything.
The British were taking all the oil and all the money and the Iranians were getting nothing.
Is that really right?
That's right.
I mean, for like 15 years, Iran got virtually zero compensation for the British taking all their oil or using all their oil to their complete freedom, basically, and selling it on the international market.
I mean, they were making a huge profit from this Anglo-Iranian oil company, AOIC.
It was such a fantastic moneymaker that it was actually supporting British imperialism in the Middle East and beyond because it was creating such profits that the British government, which became the primary owner, the majority owner of AOIC, they could use that money to support the British military presence in that part of the world and beyond.
So this was an extremely important part of British imperialism in the 20th century.
All right.
Now, I forget, I'm 90% sure I learned this reading Bob Dreyfuss' book before yours, Devil's Game, I reread recently, where he talks about how, well, actually the CIA had supported the rise of Mossadegh before they stabbed him in the back to reinstall the Shah.
And in fact, they had installed the Shah's father and then stabbed him in the back in favor of the Shah before they overthrew him in favor of Mossadegh, before they overthrew him in favor of Pahlavi again.
Well, I can tell you what I know from looking at the documents in the U.S. government files, the ones that have been published, you know, the annual U.S. foreign relations files.
The CIA, I don't know if you can say that they actually supported Mossadegh in the sense of doing something covert to keep him in power, but I don't think that's true.
But they did, in fact, write a very important national intelligence estimate in early 1953.
It actually repeated, but updated and strengthened one that they had done previously under the Truman administration.
But in early 53, they told the new incoming Eisenhower administration that Mossadegh was the best bet that they had for keeping the Tudeh party, the Communist Party of Iran, which was pro-Soviet and was being supported by the Soviets at that point, out of power in Tehran because he had very strong popular support.
He was well aware of the danger coming from the Tudeh party, that they were growing rapidly.
And he was carrying out policies that, if they were successful, could help to prevent a communist takeover.
So there was no doubt that the CIA recognized that Mossadegh was, that is to say, the CIA analyst, the intelligence people, the intelligence analysts were very clear that Mossadegh was the best bet.
On the other side, however, and this gets us into a discussion of the 1953 CIA coup against Mossadegh, the operations people had no interest in that.
All they cared about was getting more business.
I mean, that's my version of the reality.
They wanted to carry out a huge, what they figured would be the biggest CIA covert operation since World War II, since the CIA was created.
And indeed, that's what they got.
But they had to somehow change Eisenhower's mind because he had come out, not publicly, but in a meeting of the National Security Council, really reflecting that CIA analyst view that Mossadegh was a potential ally against the commies.
He wasn't an ally, but he was potentially a successful ally against the communists being able to take power.
So it's, to say the least, it's an ironic situation that- Well, you say in the book, too, that Ike Eisenhower agreed with that and said, yeah, this Mossadegh guy, we can work with him, right?
Absolutely.
But then it was the Dulles brothers, the Rockefeller's lawyers that had a different opinion.
Is that it?
It was the Dulles brothers, that is the current CIA director, Alan Dulles, the former, I mean, the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, and the former CIA director, whose name now is going to escape me, but he was the Undersecretary of State at that moment.
Walter Bedell-Smith, excuse me, Walter Bedell-Smith, the three of them together somehow changed Eisenhower's mind.
And there's no, to my knowledge, there's no record of how they did that.
But that is the mystery, it seems to me, about what happened to bring about this coup.
And look, let's take our time, because, you know, there's so much to go over here, but I don't want to get in too much of a hurry either, because there's so much kind of interesting stuff in here.
I mean, I think this is sort of like, this could be the crux of a major argument about all regime changes from here on and everywhere else.
You can make the parallel all over the place, that they should have just left it the way it was.
It was fine.
They didn't have to overthrow this guy and create this crisis.
Same thing with Nasser in Egypt.
He wasn't a communist.
He was a nationalist.
So does that mean he's going to not be our total sock puppet?
Sure.
But does that mean that we can't deal with this guy?
Why should it mean that, you know?
They're nuts to do what they do, you know?
I think you're right that Iran provides the model for what is wrong with U.S. national security policy and U.S. foreign policy.
Which, by the way, I'm sorry, because I didn't mean to say that they killed Nasser, but they just made an enemy out of him when they didn't need to.
There was definitely an effort to promote that idea from the British.
And I would think that there are people in the CIA who were not so opposed to that by any means.
But of course, they didn't actually carry out a plan.
That's right.
Yeah.
He did die a natural cause.
I didn't mean to say otherwise.
But anyway, you get what I mean.
We're like, they totally could have left well enough alone, got along with Mossadegh, let them keep their measly 2% royalty and let the, you know, Exxon keep the rest or whatever the gangster deal was going to be.
And that would have been just fine.
Yeah, this is this is the master lesson that the American people have to absorb in order to somehow release themselves from the grip of the national security state.
That's correct.
Couldn't agree more.
Yeah, man.
All right.
So now talk about how they did this coup d'etat in 1953, because it's really interesting and exciting.
Yeah, this is this is interesting is for sure.
The British, of course, were the ones who started the process.
They approached the United States in 1952 with a proposal to overthrow Mossadegh.
And again, we've already gone over the the sort of internal politics within Washington, within the U.S. government, within the Eisenhower administration that somehow brought about this the shift in policy.
But once it was given to the Covert Operations Directorate, they had a guy who was an expert on black and gray propaganda who was given the job of taking care of that aspect of the plan.
And, you know, I would argue that that, in fact, it was his work in cooperation with the British that really made the difference between success and failure, because the original plan was relatively simple.
It was going to be that they had identified that this General Zahidi, who was a prominent figure, a pro-Shah figure.
And the idea was that and he was he was he lost his position.
He was taken away from the command.
And the idea was that they would get the Shah to name him to be the prime minister.
And therefore, Mossadegh would be out of a job.
And this, of course, would be backed up by by military taking taking Mossadegh into custody and all of his all of his followers, his his aides.
But the fact is that that that plan collapsed immediately because it fell into the hands of people who were pro-Mossadegh, a part of the government.
And they were able to round up most of the people who were trying to carry out that plan very quickly.
So in fact, the the CIA people were down in the dumps.
They were they thought that they had failed and and they were trying to figure out what to do then, what to do next.
But then you had the the final move, which was that the the British had a a fake two day crowd that they were able to muster up from the weightlifters and others who were available for their purposes in Tehran.
And so they mounted this protest, this violent protest.
They went on a rampage in Tehran and were knocking over, they were breaking windows of stores and banks and and they defaced the graves of the Shah's father and thus tried to make it look like they were the communists carrying out their mischief.
And so then the the U.S. ambassador, who was in league with the CIA on this whole plan, he knew everything was going on.
He then called up Mossadegh and said, you've got to take every you've got to you've got to clear the streets.
No more no more movement in the streets.
There should be no nobody who's present.
It should be peace and quiet.
And he demanded that, threatened that the United States would take steps to to sanction to to further penalize the government if they didn't do it.
And Mossadegh went along with that.
And he took his loyal loyalist troops off the streets, whereupon the remaining forces of the coup group then took to the streets and did their mischief and basically captured Mossadegh and and others.
So that's how it all happened.
And it was because of essentially black propaganda, a creation of a fake two day crowd, that they were able to do it.
And this was not because of any genuine support for the Shah or anything like that.
It was because of just deception.
It was it was entirely a deception.
And you know, it's interesting here, too, right, that the Ayatollah Khomeini and his branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Iran at the time, that they were part of the right wing reaction to this fake left wing mob, right, that helped to do the putsch.
And we'll get back to old Ayatollah Khomeini in a little while here, but not very long.
I think that's and this is the mission where they were they coined the phrase blowback.
We got to be careful about blowback coming down the line from this thing.
Well, Scott, I mean, I've heard that argued, but I did not see any evidence of that in any of the records.
I mean, there was nobody.
Oh, it's in devil's game.
He is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He goes he goes all through that in devil's game.
OK.
I didn't see I hadn't seen that.
But, you know, the people that I've seen identified were clearly very different from the kinds of people that were followers of Khomeini later on.
I mean, well, you know what?
I may have oversimplified.
You know, I'm not sure that they were actually that they took any real actions necessary that the group that that Khomeini was part of.
But they certainly did turn out to the street to protest on that side.
I don't know if they had actually participated in deposing Mosaddegh or anything like that.
The reason I said that the reason I said that is because there were specifically named Islamic leaders and they were part of the Mosaddegh coalition originally, and then they turned against him.
And that was an important part of the plot that they were that that gave the British and the Americans some hope that they could succeed in this.
So that's what I was thinking of.
I see.
All right.
So now, I mean, everything worked great for 26 years.
Right.
So what's the problem?
Yeah.
What went wrong?
What could go wrong with that?
Right.
You know, everything went wrong for the Iranians, that's for sure, because the Shah's regime was was a peculiar one in the sense that maybe not peculiar.
Maybe there's others that can be cited historically that would have similar features.
But but he was hell bent on modernizing Iran in a single generation without regard to any consequences of that.
And the result was, first of all, a huge increase in the inequality, economic and social inequality in Iran, which which was a major shift because Iran was not a society where you had extreme wealth and and poverty up to that time.
It was relatively more equitable in the division of wealth.
So that that was clearly a factor in his downfall ultimately.
And he was able to get away with it up to a point because of the enormous income that was coming in to to Iran's coffers during the Shah's regime from from oil sales.
And and because oil was a huge moneymaker, he was able to spend that on development projects and to some extent to show some social progress in that regard or economic progress in that regard.
But then in 1976, in the book, we we talk about how the U.S. alliance with the Shah suddenly went aground because of a really a fundamental conflict of economic interest, because the Shah was dependent on those oil in the oil income for everything that he was doing.
And he was overspending.
He was spending really beyond his means.
And that meant ultimately that he had to increase the price of oil in order to prevent himself from, you know, essentially emptying his coffers.
And that was precisely the opposite of the interests of the Nixon administration at that point.
In fact, you know, the story, it's not well known, but we talk about the fact that that the Nixon administration was very strongly intent on making sure that there was no increase in the price of oil.
In fact, they were hoping for a slight diminution in the price.
And therefore, the interests of the U.S. and the Shah's regime were directly at odds.
And in the end, the United States, the Nixon administration went to the Saudis and the Saudis were willing to help to, in fact, make sure that there was no increase in the price of oil.
And therefore the Shah was in trouble economically.
And from that time on, there was a building social crisis within the within the country.
Excuse me.
And when you say overspending, that's on American weapons.
Well, he was spending on American weapons.
Absolutely.
That's true.
I mean, this is Iran's fearsome air force of F-4s and F-14s we're always hearing about that our government might have to go up against sometime soon here.
Right.
And that was for some people in the United States, that was an issue.
I mean, there was some questioning within the United States government of whether the U.S. should continue to sell these very expensive weapons to the Shah and whether that was in the interest of Iran.
But in any case, that was that was continuing a pace.
And so so there was there was really a there was a crisis both between U.S. and Iran and a crisis in Iranian society and economy because of this.
And and that gave additional impetus to the movement that Khomeini was was organizing.
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All right.
Well, Garrett, so before we get to 79 and the rise of Khomeini here, talk a little bit about the SAVAK.
You guys give that a treatment in the book.
Well, this was the intelligence, secret intelligence agency of the Shah's regime, which was created with the help of the CIA and Mossad, and the two of them together basically advised the SAVAK on how to organize itself and how to get its people up to speed on tracking down communists, which was the first order of business.
Almost immediately within a matter of weeks, a matter of months, I should say, the SAVAK was or its progenitor, the people who would become SAVAK were beginning to track down all members of the two day party that they could find and anyone who's suspected of being associated with the two day party.
And in over a period of a few months, I believe the figure was 5000, possibly 3000.
It was a 3000, 3000 two day party members or suspects were jailed.
And many of them, of course, were were executed.
So so that was the original that was the first wave of a long period of political, highly political, surveilled population and of repression of any political opposition or or descent within Iran.
And that that was another element of the the movement that was was forming to overthrow the regime because the middle class people in particular, the intellectuals, the people with education were particularly unhappy with the political surveillance and repression because they're the ones who were suffering from it the most.
So just to be clear here, to recap a little bit, America did not overthrow a dictator to install a democracy.
They overthrew a democracy to install a dictator, his royal highness, the Shah Pahlavi, essentially a king, a monarch, and helped build for him a fascist, totalitarian police state that tortured all its enemies to death.
That pretty much sums it up.
Yes, that would be an accurate statement to make, making sure we're all on the same page here for a minute.
And I would just add that I've done quite a bit of research on the Cold War period in general about US policy toward democracy.
And I found what you would expect me to find.
And I'm sure you've noticed this as well, that in virtually every case, the United States chose to oppose elected democratic governments who were not already on board with the United States, which is virtually all of them, all of the democratically elected governments in the developing world, and to support dictatorships which were obviously ready to play ball with the United States.
So, this is in line with the pattern that is almost completely uniform on the part of the United States government during the entire Cold War.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, it's important, too, what you guys say in the book, I think, about how all this attention on killing all the leftists, rounding them up, jailing them, killing them, and the nationalists as well, meant that the only faction left outside of the power of the state was the clerical establishment, because, hey, police state, you still can't cross this line and come in here.
So, this is sort of like in Saudi Arabia.
It's the only place where anybody can say anything radical is in the name of Muhammad.
That's right.
I think you can argue that it certainly paved the way for Khomeini to create a very powerful movement.
Without, however, the right message coming from Khomeini, there's reason to doubt that it could have succeeded.
I mean, I think that it struck a chord with the Shiite population, which makes up the loyal Shiite population of Iran is roughly half, perhaps more than half, of the Iranian population.
Whereas the rest of the population are Muslim, nominally Shiite, but secular in their orientation.
But the people who take their Shiite Islam seriously, I think it's pretty clear they make up a majority of the population, although not a huge majority, not a large majority.
I think the fact that Khomeini was able to rally them with a message that was very new in Iranian history, which was that the Shah's regime represented a devilish invention, which was against religion, which was opposed to religion, opposed to Islam.
That had never been discussed.
It had never been believed before in the history of Iran, as I understand it.
So that was, I think, really crucial to building a very powerful, popular Shiite movement.
And that's really what made it possible to overthrow the regime, because they were ready to take great risk to overthrow the regime.
And that, of course, happened then in 1979.
OK, one more thing before we do the Iranian revolution here.
I can't help it.
I'm a libertarian.
You point out in the book, price controls led to the devastation of the agricultural aspect, the rural population of the country, to the benefit of the people in the cities there.
Right, right.
That'll get your revolution, too.
Well, this, of course, is another pattern that is very widely replicated in various developing countries and maybe not so developing countries.
I mean, developed countries as well.
But in developing countries, that policy of holding down the price of rice to satisfy urban elites at the expense of the rural population is obviously a formula that is popular in a minority of the country, but unpopular in the rural majority.
Right.
And all to correct for the government's debasement of the money in order to pay for a bunch of F4s and F14s.
So we know how that goes, right?
That's why the farmers are trying to raise their prices in the first place.
The value of the local currency is going down.
So OK, so now the country is good and tyrannized and good and destabilized and religious as hell.
And they've got some charismatic leadership who put him on the plane home from France, Gareth.
Who put him on the plane?
Yeah.
Is that what you're asking?
It's the Carter administration told the French, go ahead and send him home.
The CIA and the State Department assure us that Khomeini's fine.
We know him from 53.
He's an old friend of ours.
We can work with him.
Right.
So it was indeed they were ready to give in at that point.
That's my favorite part of all of this is just is never ending blunders, too.
You know, but but but at that point, it was pretty far advanced.
Let's face it.
I mean, there was a lot of water over the over the bridge over the over the dam.
Excuse me.
Well, in other words, the government was certainly falling.
The installation of Khomeini was.
I mean, I'm not saying that the Americans had the right to tell the French to keep him from going home or anything like that.
In the scheme of things, those are the kinds of powers that they do exercise when they feel like it.
And in this case, they went ahead and greenlit his return.
You're right.
And they didn't really anticipate just how strongly anti anti-American this movement would be.
I'm quite sure that's true.
Although, you know, there was plenty there are plenty of people led by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who regarded keeping the Shah in power and keeping the Khomeini movement out of power as a vital U.S. national security interest worth killing however many protesters was necessary, as we point out in the book.
Wasn't the big problem.
I never really understood this part.
Gareth was they knew he had cancer for years and they knew he was dying.
And again, Dreyfus talks about this in Devil's Game.
They knew he was dying for sure by 78 or something.
And it was sort of like Mubarak in Egypt, right, where they didn't have a good runner up to take over as pharaoh after he was gone.
So what were they going to do?
They didn't really know.
I don't know the answer to that.
I honestly can't answer that.
I have no clue as to whether they had given any thought to it.
I've never seen anything about it.
Because it's strange, right?
Brzezinski saying, call out the death squads, massacre the protesters in the street, send the rest home the hard way and, you know, prop up the regime that is times ticking on no matter what and where they don't have.
I mean, am I right that the Shah hadn't groomed a replacement of any kind?
No, he named somebody to become prime minister on the spur of the moment just before he left.
He left the same day that he named the prime minister.
Yeah.
So clearly, this was not a long term plan at all.
Absolutely.
There was no plan for what would go, you know, who would come after the Shah.
And maybe this is a combination of the Shah's own lack of realism and the unwillingness or inability of the U.S. government and the intelligence community in particular to have the guts, the wherewithal to actually ask serious questions about the Shah's regime.
Because as I'm sure you know, it's notorious just how much the CIA bowed down to the Shah and did not gather intelligence really seriously because the Shah objected.
This is a notorious fact about the CIA's role in the final years of the Shah's regime.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, well, and they say that he was just as isolated, right?
No one's allowed to tell him any bad news at all.
So he essentially knows nothing, which happens.
So this whole period of decision making by the U.S. government, I think it just represents the ultimate case of complete failure of the U.S. government to operate in any way that resembles, you know, a servants of of the American people.
I mean, you know, they were they were just completely they're lying down on the job.
Yeah.
Well, and even then, so in the year 1979, I was in preschool.
I don't remember it that well, but I do remember it.
In 1979, essentially, the revolution happened in February, right?
And then so it was a year.
People always truncate this thing.
It was one big hostage crisis and all this.
But it wasn't till November that the hostages were taken.
So tell me all about America and Iran in March through October.
Man, what was the deal?
Right.
Well, the deal was there was kind of a hysteria that went on.
It was an exaggerated example of the effect of patriotic enthusiasm being stirred up by various interests.
Not because it really was necessary for the vital interest of the United States, but because it was in their own narrow personal interest.
And I'm thinking here particularly of the mass media, the major news media outlets who milked this for everything it was worth and turned it into a into an audience producing machine, if you will.
You know, it was it was basically a way of getting more people to watch the evening news and even to create new news organization, new news programs at night.
Yeah, this is the origin of Ted Koppel's Nightline, right?
The origin of Ted Koppel's Nightline.
And and, you know, basically, this was a mechanism that heightened clearly the anger of the American people about what Iran was doing, but also heightened their irritation, if not anger at the administration, the Carter administration.
And and that certainly played a role in the decision making of that administration.
I mean, they did not feel they had much time in which to make a decision about what to do.
And, you know, that's one of the reasons why you ended up with that horrible idea of a hostage rescue mission, which was not well planned and turned out to be a complete, complete flop with the loss of of aircraft, U.S. helicopters.
And, you know, it was it was just a general a general failure of the American system.
So in the book, you really pretty much skip the Reagan years and Iran-Contra and all those weeds and get right to the Clinton administration's designation of Iran as an enemy in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War there.
Is there a good reason for that?
And then go ahead and tell that story, please.
Well, first of all, we can't skip the Reagan administration because that was when essentially the United States did two things that were crucial to set up this enmity between the United States and Iran.
The first one was to support the Saddam Hussein regime's war against the against Iran, its invasion of Iran and continued war for eight years.
Now, of course, the war did go on for eight years because Iran quickly stopped the invasion, stopped the momentum of Saddam's troops and went on the offensive and tried to capture important territory within Iraq, wanting to overthrow the regime in Iraq because of his invasion.
But what the United States, what the what the Reagan administration then did was to support the Iraqi government's military campaign against Iran and specifically and more precisely what we write about in the book is that the Reagan administration supported the use of chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein's troops against Iran.
And they did so beginning in 1982 through the end of the war in 1988.
So at least six years of war in which chemical weapons were being used on a large scale.
With the knowledge and with the explicit approval, or at least with the with the approval, whether it was explicit in terms of some exchange of messages or not, it was clear that that the Iraqi government knew the United States did not have a problem with their carrying out a chemical war against Iran and the use of both mustard gas and ultimately sarin nerve gas.
In the last period of the war, it was sarin nerve gas that was being used particularly against Kurds, but not limited to them.
And that was certainly a violation of international law.
Those those nerve, the nerve agent and mustard gas had both been outlawed in 1925 by an international agreement.
And it was believed it was never used in World War Two, and it was believed up until the use against Iran, that this had this phenomenon had ended, that there was not going to be any more war using those kinds of gases.
So this this was a major factor in the in the Iranian view of of U.S. policy, because they knew that the United States knew and the United States was was allowing this to happen.
In fact, they knew that the United States was passing on high level sensitive intelligence on Iranian military emplacements to the Iraqi government, and that was being used to carry out gas attacks, as well as other conventional military attacks.
So that's the first thing that I think is very important to understand about the role of the United States and particularly the Reagan administration during the 80s, in regard to a new stage of US Iran relations.
And you know, I'm not sure how widely known that is.
I think people may have heard of that a lot.
But it's really important.
I think the way you phrase it, that the Iranians knew that the Americans were helping Saddam do this.
So I think Americans might know Saddam did it probably a lot less likely to know that America helped them do it.
And they probably have no idea that the Iranians saw the whole thing as Saddam is just a leader of an American kind of puppet army, in a way.
He's a client state of the Americans.
We're the ones behind him, supporting him in every bit of that.
Including, as you say, helping him target the Iranian troops with this stuff.
If the U.S. media and political elites had any integrity whatsoever, they would have known that.
And of course, they did know from news coverage that I think it was covered.
No, maybe it wasn't.
I'm sorry.
I take that back.
That Rumsfeld was sent as a special envoy in 1982 to meet with Saddam, carrying a gift of golden spurs as his special gift to our new friend there.
Our old friend and new friend, because the CIA put him in power a decade earlier.
But what messages was he carrying with him?
The messages were that the United States agreed that there should be relations, there should not be a state of non-recognition between the two countries, that they should resume embassies in each other's countries.
And secondly, that the United States would take Iraq off the terrorist list, a very important gesture of friendship, which is given only when we think we're going to get something in return.
So this very clearly conveyed the message to Iraq that the United States was on board with what it was doing against Iran.
And of course, we know that the U.S. helped to provide arms to Iraq, helped get its allies to make sure that he had plenty of arms to fight that war.
And there's even some reason to believe that the U.S. was knowledgeable of and had no opposition to European companies providing the wherewithal to make the sarin gas and other chemical weapons.
Geez, I don't know, Gareth.
I thought the history of the 1980s was Ronald Reagan selling weapons to Iran during the Iran-Iraq war.
What about that?
Yes.
Well, of course, that's the time when it did happen.
And it happened because the Israelis wanted the United States to support their policy, which was pro-Iran and anti-Saddam.
And Reagan went along with it because of his aides wanting him to do that.
And so there was this deal in the making, in the offing, which was the Israelis providing some arms to Iran in return for having the Saudis giving money to support the Central American satraps, the Central American agents of the United States, who were trying to bring about regime change there.
So this was a very deep, deep state, the ultimate deep state deal that was being carried out.
But it didn't stand in the way of the United States carrying out its policy of trying to smash the Iranian state through the Saddam regime during that period.
I don't know, though.
Some sarin gas.
Seems like they shouldn't still have hard feelings about that.
Okay, well, now you've forced me to give some figures, which we give in the book.
Roughly 100,000 Iranians were injured by the gas attacks, whether it was mustard gas or nerve gas.
And 7,000, at least 7,000 were killed.
And as many as 20,000, I believe it is, who are still suffering from those attacks 15 or 20 years later.
Yeah, man.
And it was a deadly war.
And, you know, I need to go back and triple check these estimates.
But I guess it's kind of commonly understood that approximately half a million people were killed on each side of the Iran-Iraq war, right?
That sounds roughly right to me.
I don't remember any specific figures.
But that would be reasonable.
Yeah, I'm not right at that part of my book right now.
But I'm going back over that to make sure.
But it really was a whole absolutely horrific World War One style trench warfare and, and tanks and gas and, and, of course, air and sea battles to all kinds of stuff.
But and America on both sides of it, mostly Iraq side, but sometimes back in the Ayatollah.
Okay, so then that brings us to, well, you want to talk about the aftermath of Iraq War One in the Bush senior years here for a minute?
Okay.
There's one other thing that I want to say about the Reagan administration, which is that it was the Reagan administration that first took the step of forbidding Iran from having a peaceful nuclear program.
This is a huge deal, the one that Nixon and Ford had built for them.
Right, exactly.
I mean, this is this is a, a nuclear program that was inherited from the Shah, which the originally the the Iranian mullahs and Carmenian in particular, was not in favor of he saw it as a symbol of American imperialism, and he was opposed to it.
But he was convinced after very cold winter is the way I understand it, that it would be in Iran's interest to have nuclear power as a way of providing heat and other power for for the society.
And so they made a compromise and they kept the Bushehr reactor.
But they were planning to have no enrichment capability.
They weren't going to enrich uranium themselves to support that reactor to provide the power.
And they were going to depend on the French to create the nuclear power for the reactor to turn the uranium into the kind of support for the reactor.
And they were depending on the Russians to actually enrich the uranium.
So the new regime in Tehran was not planning to have a program that would provide the wherewithal to have nuclear weapons by any means.
And they were, by being given this, essentially, a yellow card or red card from the the Reagan administration, they were being given a choice between bowing down to the US demand and basically making a decision to get their own capability to enrich uranium.
And that's exactly, of course, what they did.
It shouldn't be any surprise, given the background of the Iranians that we've talked about earlier.
Yeah, you know, that's such an important point.
And this is something that Gordon Prater used to talk about all the time, too, was that in the Clinton years, they forbid the Iranians from buying turnkey facilities from the Chinese and things like that.
So that's why they bought junk from AQ Khan's garage sale.
They're the Pakistani guy who'd stolen his blueprints and everything from the Urenko Corporation in, I guess in Germany under the watchful eye of the CIA who let him do it.
But anyway, that but it was always interpreted like, Oh, well, if they went to the black market for their equipment, it must be for illicit purposes.
But no, it's just because the Americans prevented them from buying electricity stuff on the open market.
And so they went to these lengths.
This is an absolutely central point.
And, you know, I talked about it in manufactured crisis, we're gonna skip around and get back to the nuclear problem more later, too.
But that is an important point of kind of laying down the groundwork for all of that.
And, and it is and you know what, let me go ahead and say here to that, because most people don't know anything about nuclear technology, whatever you tell them nuclear, they got nuclear, then that sounds like you can make a bomb out of that.
But as you're saying, if they can't enrich uranium themselves, and if they can't harvest and reprocess the waste from a reactor into weapons grade material, then they can't get weapons grade uranium or plutonium, they can get electricity, but they cannot get bomb material.
But the average person doesn't know the first thing about that.
So if a scaremonger says, Hey, look at this guy's funny hat, can you imagine him with a bomb that people say, Hey, I give you the benefit of the doubt if you tell me that's what you're protecting me from.
And because learning about it is too complicated.
You tell me I got to go to college and learn about physics to understand, or I got to go to Georgetown foreign relations school to understand the the treaties involved, just forget it and defer to fear.
Right, so so this is this is at the center of the whole, you know, escapade of, you know, the fake, the fake narrative about Iran's wanting to get nuclear weapons.
And one of the stories that I do mention in the book, you know, this is something that I found out from an interview with the head of the wartime, that is the Iran-Iraq wartime head of military supply, who's still alive and still in Tehran.
And I interviewed him about his contacts with Ayatollah Khomeini during the Iran-Iraq war, because he had proposed to Khomeini early in the war in 1982, that the IRGC, he was a member of the IRGC at that point, they were the ones in charge of the war.
He said to Khomeini, I want you to approve my plan to have three kinds of weapons of mass destruction programs, chemical, biological and nuclear.
And I have the people who are ready, all set to go and to work on these things to to help us ward off the threats that we're getting from from Iraq.
And Khomeini said, no, you can't do that.
This is this is illicit.
It's illegal under Shia Islam.
And we are not allowed to possess, much less use weapons of mass destruction of any kind.
And he went back again, later in the war, after the Saddam troops were beginning to attack the concentrations of population with chemical weapons, specifically, in this case, nerve gas.
And he again asked Ayatollah Khomeini to approve, in this case, just the idea of starting to manufacture chemical weapons to have mustard gas.
He said, we've already purchased the precursors, and we have a place in which to do it.
All we need is your approval.
And again, Khomeini said, no, he wouldn't, he wouldn't approve of that.
He said, you can't have any such weapons of mass destruction.
And they never did it.
And there's no other reason, there's no plausible reason that anyone has ever offered why Iran did not go ahead and manufacture and use chemical weapons to scare Saddam into stopping his use of chemical weapons against Iran.
All right.
So a couple of things about that.
First of all, the article, if people want to find this separately, it's at foreignpolicy.com.
And it's called When the Ayatollah Said No to Nukes, where Gareth went to Iran and talked with these guys in charge who explained all this.
And I think the context is important, that yes, we are talking about essentially unelected, not exactly dictatorship, but let's say an extremely flawed republic with a theocrat on top, appointed by a small council of his own friends.
And so any politician says a thing, he's a damn liar.
Any theocrat who claims his political authority comes from the Almighty, give me a break.
There's no reason to take any of that seriously at all, unless you got other reasons.
Right?
And then so this is the part where the context cooperates the story.
As you said, if the Ayatollah hadn't told them no, then they would have done it.
And essentially, and I don't know, I guess he doesn't have to answer like this to every kind of thing, but seems pretty apparent, too, that at least a lot of times and on the bigger questions, he invokes his religious authority, not just his political position to say so.
So it's not just that I don't approve of Sarah and even against Saddam's guys, it's that God would not approve of that.
And I say so, which is a whole other level of authority.
So regardless of whether you think he is really pious or not, or any of those kinds of things, whether you think he really means what he says, in a sense of a political leader moving his lips or what have you.
In reality, what we have is apparently religious edicts by him that have been followed ever since.
They are in fact, in practice, quite apparently forbidden by their supreme leader, the old one, and you can elaborate about the new one, to pursue weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological or nuclear.
Yeah.
And just to underline that point further, it's also the fact that this position against any weapons of mass destruction is held by, overwhelmingly by the Shiite clergy who are in Qom, the religious capital of Iran, where the Shiite religious institutions are headquartered there.
They have overwhelmingly supported, not just supported, but advocated this position of no weapons of mass destruction.
It is definitely regarded not just by Khomeini and his successor, Ali Khamenei, but generally the Shiite clergy in Iran, that it is unacceptable to have weapons of mass destruction.
It's very much central to their view of their religion.
And their current supreme leader, Khamenei, he has said that as well?
Yes, he has.
He started saying that in the 1990s.
But now the hawks say, why won't he put it in writing and show me then?
Okay, well, that's simply a misunderstanding of what it means to have a fatwa.
A fatwa is not necessarily something in writing.
It's simply a judgment by a Shiite clergy, a Shiite figure who is qualified to make judgments about Shiite law.
And it can be in writing or it can be verbal.
And in fact, we know that Khamenei did write a letter to people, I can't remember who it was addressed to at this moment, but he did write a letter in the 1990s to some people that explicitly laid out the same rationale for weapons of mass destruction in general and nuclear weapons in particular being opposed to Shiite law and thereby being unacceptable.
But the letter was not sent.
It was seen by Ambassador Mousavian and he told me about it.
For some reason, it was never sent in 1995, but it was seen by people who were in the National Security Council at that point.by the great Sheldon Richman.
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Okay, so now let's skip around and get back to the nuclear program because this is going to become a real issue in the Bush and Obama years and the Trump years as we get to them here.
But you know, you're one of the very few and very best on the question of the state of America and American and Iranian relations at the end of Iraq war one and or right around in that transition period into the Bill Clinton years and the dawn of the dual containment policy and all that.
So you know, and I think once the USSR is gone, I'm old enough, I remember when the globe had USSR over like a quarter of the land mass of the planet.
Once that was gone, it seems kind of silly to say, yeah, I don't know what we're going to do about these rogue states like North Korea and Iran.
Couldn't we just carpet bomb them with kindness?
Couldn't we just send our ambassadors over there to shake their hands till their arms fall off and figure out you know, Dick Cheney in the 1990s committed the high treason of criticizing his government from foreign soil in speeches in Australia where he denounced Bill Clinton for his sanctions regime against Iran and said, these guys are people too.
Let's do business.
What's going on here?
So what is going on here?
Why would Dick Cheney do that?
I wonder why?
Well, he had a specific financial interest in providing oil services to their companies.
And apparently, he wasn't afraid that the Ayatollah would turn around and use that oil to kill us all either.
Right, right.
And that or he was being terribly negligent at the time.
No, sorry, go ahead.
That gives us a very important clue as to what motivates, you know, policymakers or ex-policymakers to take certain stands towards national security policy, I would suggest, without going any further than that.
I'll just leave it there.
But I think the key point that you've introduced here is that the end of the Cold War did have a key influence, a crucial influence on US policy toward Iran.
And, you know, I think that in the book, there are three points about this, if I can remember them, all three of them, they're all related.
I mean, the first one is that it, of course, the end of the Soviet Union meant that the United States didn't have a rival or didn't have an opponent, an enemy that would justify Cold War levels of military spending, or Cold War levels of CIA personnel and budget.
So they had a problem.
What were they going to do about it?
They had to come up with some equivalent of the Cold War enemy, Cold War enemy slash enemies, that would work to get Congress to continue to fork over something like the level of Cold War spending on these programs.
And in the book, the story of what happened to the opening that was being proposed by then President George H.W. Bush is a key point, a key story in the entire book, because it was an opportunity in the late 1980s for the United States and Iran to end the state of enmity that had developed in the 1980s.
And it was because you had a new president in both the United States and Iran, you had Rafsanjani, who was very eager to have Western business to integrate Iran into the global capitalist economy, and was willing to make some concessions to do that, which was not at all necessarily shared by other people in the leadership of the Iranian government, certainly not by the IRGC.
And on the American side, you had George H.W. Bush, who was eager to get US hostages out of Lebanon.
He knew there were hostages being held by allies of Iran.
And so there was a deal to be made here, which was a limited deal, but it was one that could get the United States and Iran away from the total enmity that they had at that moment.
And the mean old Ayatollah had died.
And that sort of provided an opening to write.
That's right.
Yeah.
I mean, it was it was Ayatollah Khomeini's death that made for a leadership change where Khamenei became the supreme leader and Rafsanjani, who had been the president, then became the, I'm sorry, Rafsanjani, who had been the, I think he was minister of defense, or he was in charge of defense, became the president.
So that offered this opportunity, but it never came about.
Why is that?
Well, the book explains that you had a new director of CIA, Robert M. Gates, whose interests were clearly in shooting down this opportunity for a rapprochement between the United States and Iran, even a limited rapprochement.
Why is that?
Because, well, one of the aspects of it is that he never forgave Rafsanjani, who called out the people, he called out the Americans just at the moment when they thought they were going to make, they were going to have a direct contact with the leadership of Iran.
And that was something that cost him his future for a few years, because after Iran-Contra came out, he was linked to the contacts with the leadership of Iran and the failure of that whole Iran-Contra deal.
And he was quite upset about that.
So he blamed it on Rafsanjani.
And that's one part of it.
But I think the larger part is that he understood that he needed to have Iran as an enemy in order to justify saying that Iran was a serious threat to American security because of the danger of proliferation.
The idea of weapons of mass destruction proliferation had become the equivalent of the Soviet Union, very explicitly.
He was the one who was pushing that line.
And so Iran became the best bet that they had for trying to keep the Congress in line so that they wouldn't completely cut the budgets of the CIA and of the Pentagon very, very sharply.
And they did succeed ultimately in avoiding that.
But I think it was mainly because of the first Gulf War that Cheney, of course, played the key role in.
But anyway, to get back to Robert M. Gates, he was the one who really pulled the strings to make sure that George H. W. Bush couldn't go ahead with his opening to Iran.
He leaked to the media that Iran was still carrying out terrorist operations, that Iran was hostile to the United States, and that they wanted to get nuclear weapons, all of which were not in line with what the CIA analysts were saying in their still classified national intelligence estimate, which has been declassified more recently, but not the nuclear part of it.
So basically, we know that Robert M. Gates was really poisoning the well here deliberately in order to sabotage that opening.
That Bush Sr., he doesn't hold a grudge.
When Mickey Herskowitz talked about how Bush Jr., as governor, talked about how he was going to invade Iraq so he could get reelected and get all his agenda through, Sr. hired him to write a biography of Prescott after that.
And here, Robert Gates completely ruins his Iran policy for him.
And what does he do?
He turns around and he tells his son, you ought to replace Rumsfeld with Gates.
He'll do your surge for you.
What a nice man.
Well, that's a very interesting point.
I'm not sure whether George H. W. Bush was aware of the degree to which Gates was ready to sabotage this.
Basically, he went on the warpath after he became CIA director, not before that.
I mean, he was in a position to know all that he needed to know in order to do it before that because he was the NSC coordinator of intelligence.
But it was only after he became CIA director that he began to leak and to testify before Congress and so forth.
So, I'm just not sure that Bush would have known that.
Interesting.
You know, you could write a book about all the different things that Gates screwed up.
And that could be the theme of the thing.
I've been writing this book and I keep coming up with hilarious stuff by Zalmay Khalilzad throughout the years where I'm thinking you could do a whole book just about Zalmay Khalilzad said we should back Osama.
Zalmay Khalilzad said we should do this, said we should do that.
And every bit of it is completely crazy and wrong this whole time for 40 years.
It's incredible.
I have a whole little, it could be like a sidebar in a, I don't know, anyway.
M. Neocons, man.
Okay, so let's see.
Let's talk about the Israeli role in the, in the, in Iran, America's Iran policy in this era, Bush senior through early Clinton here.
Yeah, there is a very important tie in with Israel, obviously, with the Clinton administration coming into office in the early 1990s.
And, you know, the more I studied that problem of Clinton and the Israelis, the more I began to realize that it was not just the Israelis putting pressure on Clinton, it was a reciprocal set of influences.
Because the original, the start of this really is, Clinton was running for president, he named Martin Indyk to be his Middle East advisor.
And Indyk was a former specialist on media, meaning propaganda, for the Likud party's prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, back in the very early 1980s.
And so he was not a specialist on the Middle East.
He was not an academic specialist.
He was not a historian or somebody who specialized in the politics of each of the countries.
He was basically somebody who was pushing the Israeli agenda.
And so he was obviously influencing Clinton to be a hard liner.
But what really is the big surprise here is that when Clinton meets with Prime Minister, newly elected Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, during the campaign, when Rabin's visiting Washington, they start talking about Iran.
And what happens is that Clinton then just speaks up and says, our policy toward Iran, U.S. policy toward Iran is not tough enough.
It's not enough just to contain them.
We should force them to change their policy.
Basically, we should go beyond containment.
And clearly, Rabin must have been impressed by that.
And when he got back home, he began to craft a new policy.
And it happened to be in the circumstances where Rabin wanted to negotiate with the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
And this was a policy that was very unpopular in Israel.
And he had to have a very strong national security reason for doing so.
So he came up with one that would be that we need to unify the home front in order to oppose the real enemy of the future, which is Iran, because they're not only spreading Shiite revolution throughout the region, but they're going to get nuclear weapons and missiles, and they're going to threaten us, and it's going to be an existential threat.
And so I believe now that he knew they would have Clinton's support in that, and that that's what encouraged him to come up with that rationale for the policy toward the PLO.
You know, there's a great quote in Trita Parsi's book, Treacherous Alliance, where he interviews a foreign policy expert from the university there, wherever it says, well, what we were trying to do was essentially we needed new glue for the alliance with us in America, after the fall of the Soviet Union, a new rationale for why the Americans needed us.
And the answer was...
That was another useful tool, another way in which the policy toward Iran, calling it an existential threat, was a useful tool for Rabin, no question about it.
And radical Islam is explicitly vague.
And so you can apply it to whoever you want, even Saddam Hussein, the guy in the French beret with the clean shaven chin.
Right.
I mean, just one more point about this.
And that is that before he met with Clinton, Rabin had actually made a speech in which he talked about the danger of nuclear proliferation in the region.
But it wasn't Iran that he was talking about.
It was Saddam Hussein.
Saddam Hussein was the proliferation risk.
So that convinces me that he believed that this was a good bet.
He could milk the desire of Clinton to come off as a hardliner and use it for his own purposes.
But definitely Rabin did push this very hard.
And it was a very big propaganda line.
And the U.S. government then fell into line with the Clinton-Rabin policy and demonized Iran.
And here's where demonization really played a big role, because we know that the former guy who was in charge of proliferation in the National Security Council has written a book in which he talks about the fact that the United States needed to have a way of getting people like France and Japan to fall in line with their policy toward Iran.
And the way to do that was to demonize them, to call them terrorists and to talk about the danger of their proliferation risk, and just generally to portray Iran as the worst case of all of the rogue states.
And so to some extent, there was a conscious manipulation of opinion about Iran going on during the Clinton years.
Well, and it's important, too, that this policy—I just reread this speech by Martin Indyk about the announcing the policy of dual containment and saying that, listen, because the Soviet Union is gone, America is so powerful.
It's straight out of your book on Vietnam, The Perils of Dominance.
America is so much more powerful than everybody else that we don't need to balance Iran and Iraq off of each other, which apparently these are the only two choices available, by the way.
Leaving everybody the hell alone is not one of the options.
But we don't need to offshore balance, and we don't need to support one side versus the other and then switch back and forth.
America is so powerful, what we can do is we'll keep all our bases in Saudi Arabia, and then that way we can contain Iraq and Iran both through the rest of the century.
We won't get peace with either.
We'll keep it this way.
And then, you know, so we all know how that story played out.
And Scott, that represents the view of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration at the end of the Cold War.
They were arguing when the Cold War ended.
That's exactly the line that they were taking, both to justify a much stronger U.S. military posture in the region, and for taking a hard line towards Iran.
So Martin Indyk was taking a page straight out of the neocon line in that period of the early 1990s.
Yep.
And then what was great about that is, you know, it's a government program, so the more they screw everything up, the more work they have to do.
So it turns out that dual containing Iraq and Iran from Saudi Arabia got our towers knocked down, which turned into a great excuse for America to go and weaken Iran by getting rid of Saddam Hussein.
I'm not sure if I read that right.
So, yeah, I mean, just to add to that storyline about the Clinton administration, this was also the period when the United States nearly went to war.
This is not in the book, but it could have been if it had been any longer.
The United States nearly went to war with Iran over the idea that Iran had carried out the Kobar Towers bombing against U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.
And please talk about that a lot.
Well, the National Security Council had meetings about it, and they were discussing actually the options for retaliation against Iran.
And in the end, they decided not to do it.
But it was not for trying.
I mean, there were people who were definitely pushing for that.
When the Defense Secretary Perry thought that it was al-Qaeda correctly.
Well, only later on.
Only later.
OK.
Not at the time.
No, nobody was dissenting, apparently, from this.
There was nobody who was saying, oh, wait a minute, maybe we should maybe we should study this a bit more before we go to war over this.
Because it was within days, not days, but within a couple of weeks of the event of the Kobar Towers bombing.
So they were quick on the trigger, man.
Well, and it's so important that, you know, that story is so important for so many different reasons.
And, you know, first of all, it should have illustrated to the American people that, oh, no, Carter and Reagan's mercenaries are turning against us because we've got our combat forces occupying their holy land in order to commit genocide against their northern neighbors there.
Maybe we should kind of back off of that.
And instead, they blamed it on the country across the way that just had this weird kind of target of opportunity for some reason to do it, even though those planes weren't flying against Iran.
Why would they bomb American airmen there?
And so the whole the truth got all jumbled up and the American people were deprived of an extremely important narrative about the, you know, ongoing series of al Qaeda attacks against American targets around the region.
This allowed them to muddle all that up for these political reasons.
And then I forgot what I was going to say.
Go ahead and interrupt me.
This episode really illustrates the degree to which the Clinton administration was a really dedicated totally to the idea that our real enemy is Iran and Hezbollah and not al Qaeda.
I mean, this was this was a very clear cut choice.
And and they were they stuck to it up until the U.S. embassies were bombed.
And then they began to turn away from that.
But up until that time, that was a an absolute policy that they were quite dedicated to.
And I think the implications that are very interesting.
Well, this is after the the, you know, sort of combination between the Azzam group and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, this what was then kind of proto al Qaeda.
They'd already killed Rabbi Kahane.
They'd already tried to blow up the world or had blown up the World Trade Center, almost succeeded in toppling one building over into the other, had already tried to kill Americans at a hotel in Yemen, had already successfully killed Americans training Saudi National Guard in 1995.
And and clearly something's going on here, guys.
But anyway, no, we got a political agenda that the Saudis say, look away.
And the Israelis say, look at the Shia.
Right.
That's it.
Exactly.
I mean, it was it was the Saudis and the Israelis who were our friends.
And the policy was was very tight, tightly woven into the relations with both countries.
And no question about that.
And that also means that whoever murdered those 19 American airmen got away with it.
And it was it was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Osama bin Laden who did it, wasn't it?
Well, Osama made no bones about it.
I mean, he did take credit for it afterwards.
I'm sure there is an article in the Palestinian, the yeah, it's a Palestinian publication in London where they did interviews with Osama bin Laden twice over a period of months.
And in the second interview after Kobar Towers, he did, in fact, take credit for it.
That's all Araby.
And it's Abdel Bari Atwan is a journalist and he wrote a book about it, too.
The Secret History of Al Qaeda tells the whole story.
So I have never understood how people in the intelligence community can say, well, he didn't take credit for it and he never does anything he doesn't take credit for.
He never takes credit for anything he doesn't do.
Well, he did take credit for it.
And, you know, so the fix was on.
That's all I can say.
I don't know.
Yeah.
And the thing is, too, is if they had only told the truth about that, I mean, it wasn't just American G.I. stationed there.
It was American pilots.
What would they do when they were bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi?
That was the key to the whole thing.
And they obscured it like that.
You know, training National Guard guys.
There's a little bit of like, hey, you're trespassing.
I don't want you around here.
Kind of a little bit of that.
But American airmen who are stationed there for the ongoing air campaign against the Iraqis.
Well, that is a whole other thing that makes sense.
You know, although I could have even if they hadn't been bombing, you know, bin Laden could have made a strong case with with regard to Saudi, you know, conservative Islamists that Sunni Islamists that we need to get the United States out.
They are a threat to our to to the religion.
Well, as Bob Pape says, I mean, the mathematics show it when it comes to these suicide attacks.
It's the presence of combat forces.
And again, I mean, what's worse?
G.I.'s driving Humvees around in circles or pilots actually going on sorties and delivering high explosives to targets in the country next door?
I mean, that is, you know, the first thing is extremely objectionable.
The second is absolutely intolerable.
Would we let the Saudis have a base in Texas that they could use to bomb Mexico right adjacent to the Alamo?
No, we'd kill them.
The question answers.
Yeah, of course.
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So listen, before we get back to the book, I was thinking that we should probably address the issue of just how much you favor Iran and their government, because apparently it's a lot or something like that.
Well, if anyone is concerned about that, I can assure people that I have no brief for the government of Iran except for those matters that directly relate to the issues presented by the U.S. government as a cause for potential war with Iran.
And that has to do with, of course, the narratives that have been created over a few decades, four decades to be exact, that portray Iran as a implacable foe, an enemy of the United States for which the U.S. must be prepared to go to war.
I mean, that has been an official doctrine for all these decades.
And, you know, the narratives that have been created are really quite fictional in character.
And so that's where I come into the picture.
I mean, you know, I recognize that there are serious faults with the government of Iran having to do with the lack of freedom for political opposition in the country.
You know, there are serious limitations on that.
And of course, like the United States, but I think you could say it's probably worse, you know, the process of selecting candidates for the legislature and for the leadership of the executive branch of Iran are strictly limited to people who are acceptable to the top echelon of people in the regime.
So, you know, those are facts that, you know, no serious analyst would really disagree with.
And I certainly don't, I don't try to challenge any of that in my writing.
And, you know, I would say that, I mean, I haven't addressed those issues.
But that is not the way I define my duty as an investigative journalist and historian of the U.S. national security policy.
Well, and listen, whenever anyone is on the receiving end of this, it's ridiculous, that if you disbelieve this, or you try to debunk that, then that means you are on the side of whoever is the beneficiary of your argument, when there's a huge stretch in almost any case.
And if it ever happens to you, you know, it's ridiculous, but people still do that to others who disagree with them and assume bad motives.
And that's been happening to me ever since the 1970s, when I was writing about Vietnam.
I mean, I was accused by ferocious pro-Saigon government people and anti-communist people of being a propagandist for Hanoi.
I remember the phrase very well.
And indeed, one anti-communist opponent of mine, who singled me out, actually denounced me before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and had very long testimony against me.
And I demanded the right to respond to it and answered back and refuted what he had to say.
And they published the testimony that I gave, although it was not before the committee.
They simply took my statement and published it.
Right.
Well, and you just have to ask yourself, what American is a big fan and defender of the person of Manuel Noriega or David Koresh or Saddam Hussein or any other official enemy, Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar al-Assad, any official enemy of the government of the United States, the ayatollahs and the mullahs in Iran?
What possible point of view could we have that would lend favor to those people, other than just the things our government is saying about them are not true?
I mean, have you ever met anywhere?
Have you ever heard of a pro-Manuel Noriega partisan?
And does such a person even exist outside of the CIA before they turned on him?
No, of course not.
I mean, I'm not familiar with...
But there are plenty of people who oppose the war against Panama.
Right, right.
That's the point.
This is not to say that there aren't people who are defenders of those regimes who will...
Right now, people are listening to this going, we had a war against Panama?
Right, right.
Yeah.
But, you know, the point I wanted to make is that, you know, there are people who do, in fact, defend anything that is done by regimes, which are the target of US policies.
I'm not among them.
I mean, I don't choose to just believe everything that those governments do is good, or that criticisms of them are necessarily always wrong.
And there are very few people like that anyway.
I mean, that's almost entirely just a caricature.
Who would deny that?
The Supreme Leader stays the Supreme Leader, no matter who gets elected president over there.
You know what I mean?
It is what it is.
Yeah, but there are cases of, you know, where regimes have been defended all the way without any criticism and, you know, responding to every single thing that's said about them, whereas I think that's a mistake, you know, both in terms of tactics and strategy, as well as just telling the truth.
So I just wanted to make that distinction.
Yeah, good.
All right.
Now let's talk about Iran's lack of a nuclear weapons program.
You wrote the book, Manufactured Crisis, The Truth About the Iran Nuclear Scare.
I know you changed the subtitle, but I can never remember the new one.
I learned the first, you know, anyway, but you got a great treatment.
It's a miniature and still a great treatment of this subject in the book.
Again, the CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis.
And I think you start here with, essentially, there's this narrative, even among the doves, even when the CIA and the National Intelligence Council debunked the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon in the fall of 2007, they said that Iran did have a nuclear weapons program between 2001 and 2003.
But don't worry.
And I like this.
And this was the way Seymour Hersh reported the story, too.
Once America got rid of Saddam Hussein for them, they didn't think that they had any purpose for even really researching into nuclear weapons at that point.
Because, of course, they can never match America's arsenal or Israel's arsenal.
They have hundreds.
And so, they're already way too late to even start in that race.
And if they didn't have it as a deterrent to keep out Saddam, they didn't need it at all.
But you make the case in your last book and in this book that even the research program, never mind a bomb program, actual manufacturing program that never happened, even this research into nuclear weapons 2001 through 2003 is not correct.
So, now go ahead and tell us about why you think that so much.
Right.
I mean, this is a very important point, as you say, which is virtually unknown in the popular press and even beyond or within among people who are really trying to follow this closely.
I think the key thing here is to recognize that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which was the organization that came into being in response to the Iran-Iraq war, they were the ones who really handled the defense of Iran against the Saddam Hussein invasion and then, you know, tried to take land and did take land in Iraq and suffered enormous casualties, as I think we've talked about in previous session, previous interview.
And those people, as I had mentioned before, were very interested in trying to have weapons of mass destruction.
They believed that it was perfectly legitimate for Iran, which was the victim of weapons of mass destruction, to have their own programs, even if it was only to deter the Saddam Hussein regime.
You're talking about the IRGC.
The IRGC, right.
And so, you know, I've told the story in both of the books that, well, in the first book, I hadn't interviewed the IRGC director for military supply during the Iran-Iraq war, but it's in the new book, that he was pressing for approval of weapons of mass destruction and it was turned down.
Now, that doesn't mean that the IRGC gave up its own view that it was perfectly legitimate.
Their view is not governed by the same Islamic law that the supreme leader of Iran holds to be the key to all policies that are pursued by that government as a Shiite regime.
And so I have no doubt that they were, people within the IRGC, were doing their best to try to learn what they could about nuclear weapons.
And by the way, that in itself would not be a violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, nor would it be a violation of Iran's commitments to the IAEA if they were doing research in their offices to learn the inside knowledge of what went into nuclear weapons, as long as they were not doing something to actually work on the production of weapons.
But this is the IRGC tendency, which I think is clear from the history of the Iran-Iraq war.
And there are indications that the IRGC people who were researchers, military researchers, were doing their own work, pursuing the knowledge of nuclear weapons.
We don't know exactly what they were doing.
It's never been revealed by anybody, except for the exception that I will mention in just a moment.
But the government of, at that point, President Mohammed Khatami and the Supreme Leader were not on board with that.
This was not being done, as far as anybody can tell, with the approval of the Iranian government.
And indeed, in 2003, after the Supreme Leader had made clear his opposition to nuclear weapons, any work on nuclear weapons, any production of nuclear weapons in Iran, in a fatwa, more than once, he came out with it again.
And this time, he actually, in 2003, October 2003, he made moves to put pressure on these IRGC people to drop all their work by saying that they would be guilty of violating Islamic law.
And that's when it's clear that any work that had been done was stopped.
Now, I think that the Israelis picked up on this drama, this little drama in Iran.
And they decided at that point that they were going to come up with a propaganda coup that would convince the world that the Iranian government had been carrying out a secret nuclear weapons program.
And that is why we had, in 2004, the appearance of a set of documents, which have often been called the laptop documents, which were allegedly coming from an engineer or a scientist who was part of this purported Iranian secret nuclear weapons program, research program.
And in fact, I was able to find out through research into the various sources of this, that this was a complete fiction that was created by the CIA.
They came up with a cover story that this was on the laptop of this Iranian who was part of the program.
But in fact, what happened was, and I found this out from a German Foreign Service officer who had been retired since 2010, gave me an on the record interview in which he told the story of being brought into the office of the German Foreign Intelligence Service, the BND, who told him that they were quite well aware of the documents that were being mentioned by Secretary of State Colin Powell in November of 2003, excuse me, 2004, November 2004.
And that they had actually received those documents themselves and passed them on to the CIA.
And the CIA, of course, paid no attention to the warning that they gave them, which was that these documents are not reliable.
We do not regard the source as reliable.
And therefore, we don't think the documents should be relied upon because the source was a member of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq.
And therefore, the CIA, we know, was on warning from the German Intelligence Service that they should not use these documents as the basis for American policy.
All right.
Now, let's recap a couple of things here real quick.
Yeah.
All right.
So, first of all, you're telling me that there's reason to believe that the IRGC, did I hear you right, that you said that they're not bound by the fatwas, they'll go ahead and claim some other authority to do something outside of the Supreme Leader's wishes there?
I think that they are so, they're so convinced that they're right about the the necessary policy of Iran that they believe that they could get away with carrying out this research.
I don't think that they asked official permission.
I think that they went ahead with it.
I think there were rumors in, you know, in Tehran that they were doing it and that they had reached the central government level, the National Security Council of Iraq.
You're saying this, is this because this is the prelude to the Merlin story, right?
That the CIA thought that and so then tried to entrap the Iranians by giving them some blueprints, some obviously flawed blueprints, that then the IAEA could catch them with later, something like that.
Well, I mean, there is a relationship between the two things, yes, because this was 1999, 2000, when the Operation Merlin was getting underway.
And it was on the premise that Iran was indeed trying to get nuclear weapons.
Now, bear in mind that at that point, the CIA had not made any official finding that Iran did, in fact, have a nuclear weapons program.
They were saying that Iran is trying to have a nuclear weapons capability, meaning that they would have the enriched uranium if they made the decision to go for nuclear weapons.
That's a very different matter, of course.
But at that point, the CIA had not yet made that decision.
That was in 2001.
And, you know, I've written the story and that's what you're referring to, I think, that the CIA covert operations people not only tried to convince Iran that they were getting a secret nuclear weapons blueprint from them or a key part of a nuclear weapon, and hoping that they would use it to draw them away from a good nuclear weapon plan.
It was kind of a crazy idea, as we now know.
But also, the head of covert operations in the CIA was basically poisoning the well, or another way to put it, a better way to put it, is putting his thumb on the scale of CIA intelligence analysis by essentially depriving the CIA analysts of a key piece of information that had been received in 2001 that essentially made it clear it was from a very important and well-respected Iranian human resource, human source, that the Iranian government had no intention of weaponizing the enriched uranium, the uranium that they were planning to enrich.
They hadn't started enriching yet, but that was the plan.
So the CIA was essentially disrupting the intelligence analysis process and skewing it in the direction they wanted it to go in order to justify Operation Merlin, which was still going at the time that the CIA's 2001 NIE was being carried out.
So that's a side story, but it does help to further understand the degree to which the CIA was on the wrong track beginning in 2001 especially, even before that, but especially from 2001.
Okay, but then you're saying to me though also that even though you think that it's true that the IRGC was looking into getting maybe some good blueprints from somewhere other than the CIA or something else like that, that the major indications that they actually did any experimentation on any level or even really planned to, that all of that is made up.
And the reason we know it's made up is because the Americans who claim they got it from an Iranian scientist's smuggled laptop were exposed instead as having just received the documents, they put it on their own laptop, they received the documents from the Mujahedin-e-Khalq.
Well, what's the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, Gareth?
Yeah, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq is the armed opposition to the Islamic Republic of Iran, starting way back at the beginning of the Islamic Republic when the MEK was carrying out bombings of civilian gatherings in Tehran and killing dozens of people, wounding many others.
And then the Iranian government came down extremely violently against the MEK, drove them out of the country.
But they then went to, moved into Iraq, went to work for Saddam Hussein.
And finally, after the Iran-Iraq war, they landed in an alliance with Israel and were well known to be laundering Israeli intelligence.
The Israeli Mossad would give them reports, information, or in this case, documents that they were to represent as coming from Iran and make public through, you know, either a press conference as they did in 2002, identifying the Natanz site, a nuclear site, or by passing them on to an intelligence agency as they did in 2004, giving them to the German BND.
And that is an essential part of the evidence that these documents were fraudulent, but it's not the only one.
I mean, there are more indicators than that.
And I go into that in some detail in the previous book, but not in as much detail in this one.
Well, we're going to talk about it in a sec.
But so first of all, though, the whole thing about the Natanz facility, that wasn't MEK intel.
That was the Israelis just funneled the intel through them, probably only to help establish their legitimacy as a source for this kind of thing, right?
Exactly.
You're absolutely right.
There's no doubt that they gave them the coordinates of this site and told them to make it public.
And as many people will recall, the MEK had a press conference in Washington, D.C., and dramatically revealed that this Natanz site was, I think they called it, something to fabricate nuclear fuel.
And that was, of course, wrong.
It was a uranium enrichment site.
The MEK did not really have any inside information at all.
They were simply passing on what the Israelis told them, which was based on, obviously, satellite photography.
That's all they had.
It was a guess.
Yeah.
Well, and then, of course, the BBC went there on a tour, and it was just a big, empty, underground Walmart at that point.
Not a single centrifuge had been installed, so they made it a big scandal, like, oh, big, secret nuclear facility.
But according to the safeguards agreement with the IAEA, all they had to do was notify the IAEA six months before they introduced nuclear material into any machine, any part of any cycle.
So they were totally in the clear as far as that goes.
No, that's true.
It was a secret, soon-to-be enrichment facility, so it was true enough that they got a big point by exposing it, really, right?
Well, they were obviously given huge credit for that.
And as you said, this was certainly a large part of the reason why the Israelis wanted this to come out through the MEK.
They wanted to give them more credibility, because the MEK was to be used later on for making public information that the Israelis knew would not be true.
All right, now, so let's talk about how you're so sure that these laptop documents were not, in fact, smuggled out of Iran, stolen from an Iranian scientist, or smuggled out by him, or what have you, but instead are a big fraud.
Right.
And this gets into real arcana, arcane stuff.
And it's a little bit difficult to avoid getting down into the weeds so far that people lose interest.
But let me just mention...
No, you know what?
If it's okay, I mean, usually you do an article, we do, you know, half an hour or so.
But in this case, it's a special occasion.
You guys have this really important new book out.
And this stuff's really important.
And it's really interesting for the interested.
And I want to talk about Gordon Prather in the laser green salt experiments, too.
So you start.
Right.
Well, so you mentioned green salt.
And that's one of the indicators that this set of documents doesn't really add up.
One of the documents, the key document that was highlighted in making this stuff public, you know, leaking it to the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, the New York Times, was what they called the green salt document.
It was a a technical paper, two pages, as I recall, which showed a bench level model of how to enrich, or how to prepare uranium for enrichment, how to make it available for enrichment.
And this was something that didn't make sense at all.
I mean, if you really know anything about the Iranian nuclear program, the idea that there was this secret nuclear weapons program that was going to come up with a way of basically preparing the uranium for enrichment makes no sense, because they had already spent years preparing to make a decision on the system that they were going to use.
It was tested, and they spent, I believe it was five years before they made the decision to try a particular model.
And this bench version of it would have made no sense whatsoever, because they already knew something that was going to work for them.
They had spent years testing it, and they were satisfied with it.
And, you know, you simply cannot come up with a plausible explanation for this.
But we know that the real reason was that they knew that there was an Iranian contractor that had reached an agreement with the civilian nuclear program, and they were supposed to work on the uranium mine.
There was a mining project that involved the processing of the uranium.
And so the Israeli intelligence had obviously gotten a hold of the fact that this contract existed, this program existed.
It was actually a matter of public record.
It wasn't well known, but it was not a secret at all.
There was no secret to it.
But Iranian intelligence had it, and they were going to use that.
They had a document that they had gotten through their usual methods of going around to all technology outfits in Tehran and elsewhere, and just hoovering up any documentation that might be relevant to the Iranian nuclear program.
So they had this document, and they were going to use this letter that came from the contractor, as I recall.
But they were going to use it to show that there was a connection between that contractor and the nuclear weapons program.
How did they do it?
They had handwritten notes on it that linked it to this fictional nuclear weapons research program by having the name of somebody who was, they said, was connected with that nuclear weapons research program.
That's the reason.
It doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure out what the connection between that particular document and the whole idea of the laptop documents to discredit Iran as going for nuclear weapons, what that connection was.
In other words, you're saying the Israelis knew that they had contracted with this one company, and then from there, they sort of extrapolated out that one of the things they could have this company do would be maybe some of this green salt experiment stuff, and just kind of forge that around the kernel of truth of the association with this company, you're saying?
That's exactly right.
In fact, there was more documentation, which has apparently not been made public.
It was not mentioned specifically what document it was.
But Olli Heinemann, in his briefing of member states of the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, at one point claimed that there was a sub-project in this overall nuclear weapons research project that involved this Iranian contractor.
He used a date for the agreement that was reached for this program that was actually two or three years before the start of the earliest date of the start of this alleged nuclear weapons research program.
I interviewed Olli Heinemann face-to-face, and I confronted him with this.
I said, how can this be?
He was clearly surprised.
He was taken by surprise.
He said, well, who told you that there was this date?
I said, well, it's in your own report.
A few days later, I talked to him on the phone, asked him about it again, and he admitted, well, I can't really answer that question.
So this is a key weakness, a key sort of indicator of the fraud that was involved in that particular green salt issue.
By the way, I know one little thing about this.
I want to say it.
I learned this from the great Gordon Prather, who's retired now, but he wrote a great many articles for us at antiwar.com years ago in the Bush era.
I guess maybe in the very beginning of Obama years.
Anyway, he is a nuclear weapons physicist from the National Laboratories, was the former chief scientist of the Army, knows how to make an H-bomb for you, for real.
One of his things that he talked about, about this green salt, was what's going on here is they're describing conversion, essentially, is what they call it, from whether it's exactly yellow cake, but refined or to the gaseous forms.
What you need to enrich is uranium hexafluoride gas.
And yet, with green salt, the best you can do, green salt is uranium tetrafluoride.
It ain't a gas.
It's a salt.
It looks like salt.
That's why they call it that.
It's these granules and stuff.
And you can hardly enrich that in a centrifuge, can you?
And so here, as you were saying, I'm just being a little more specific, they already had, I don't know if it was done yet, but they were already building, or were already moving forward on building what we now know as the Isfahan Conversion Facility, where they go, I don't know what the process is, but it isn't lasers, where they go from the ore to uranium hexafluoride gas that they introduce into their centrifuges.
So in other words, just to a little finer point on what you were saying, it makes no sense in the world.
They're going to stop and divert off onto this project that can only get them halfway to where they're going anyway, when they already have a path to their actual goal.
Right.
It was an extremely suspicious concept from the get go.
I mean, you know, I'm a bit surprised that the Israelis thought they could get away with that one.
I must say that was, it was so far fetched.
Well, and I guess I'd have to go back and look at the timeline, but maybe they just didn't grok what was going on with that Isfahan facility yet.
And they thought that, or I don't know, I guess I should ask Gordon about, I should call Gordon and ask him to tell me more about green salt and the conversion process from this to that and how Isfahan works.
I wonder if he knows about that.
But anyways.
They already knew, they already knew that there was a fundamental plan that the Iranian government, the Iranian nuclear program, civilian nuclear program had contracted for and was committed to and they were already in the process of building it.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I guess they really just screwed up on that one.
Well, they did the same thing.
Go ahead.
Yeah, they were counting on the capability of American media and other political elites to be duped by anybody who, you know, waved a certain flag in front of their face.
That's all.
You know what?
It's been known to happen.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
Well, and it started happening with the rockets to another educated guest by the Israelis that went a little bit askew.
Right.
And, but it worked though.
David Sanger in the New York Times, he's like, hey, whatever you guys say.
But then even David Albright, the nuclear expert who's wrong at least half the time, actually put the New York Times in check and said, you guys, this doesn't make sense, this rocket blueprint here, right?
Right, right.
And that's a key point and even more important, in my view, than the Green Salt one.
And that is these technical drawings, these drawings that were part of the cache of laptop documents that were the primary evidence.
They're the ones that Colin Powell was referring to in November of 2004.
That was the primary evidence that Iran was going for nuclear weapons.
They had these drawings of a Shahab-3 missile that had a circle in it, which represented the bomb.
And they had various ways that they did 18 different varieties of approaches to match the bomb with the warhead or the reentry vehicle of that Shahab-3 missile.
Now, the problem, there are many problems with this.
For one thing, in an interview with me in 2009, I believe, 2008, Albright told me that people who had read these documents, he had not seen them himself, he admitted that, but people we talked to who had looked at the documents said, these drawings are so crude, they're so far from being well done that it just looks like this is not a serious outfit at all that did them.
And, you know, in other words, it was highly flawed, it was seriously flawed.
That's the first point.
Then the second point is that I found that, you know, if you look at the history of the Iranian missile program, the ballistic missile program, you see that in around 2000, the Ministry of Defense decided that the Shahab-3 that they'd been working on was just not going to make it.
It didn't have the requisite range to reach Israel or other Middle Eastern capitals.
It had failed its tests, the first two of the first three tests had failed miserably on, and it simply was not going to do the job of deterring the United States and Israel.
And so, they had begun in 2000, 1999-2000, working on a complete revision of the Shahab-3 missile.
And in fact, they never called it Shahab-3 missile after that, they called it something else, which would have a totally different reentry vehicle, a different shape.
The old reentry vehicle was like a dunce cap.
But the new reentry vehicle was like a baby bottle shape.
It had two sort of rounded parts to the outline of it, the round head of the reentry vehicle.
So, it's very clearly different.
And this drawing that they did was of the original Shahab-3 missile, which they had already discarded, they weren't going to work on it.
They'd started developing this other one, and that's the one that they tested in 2004.
But nobody outside the Iranian Defense Ministry knew that they were working on this new missile until it was tested and there were pictures of it.
And it was at that point that the world's intelligence agencies, including Mossad, knew that they had been working on this other missile.
But in 2003, they still thought they were working on the original Shahab-3.
So, they drew a bunch of drawings, technical drawings that showed the original reentry vehicle.
And that is the primary evidence that this could not have been done by an outfit that was commissioned by the Ministry of Defense or the Iranian military.
It just doesn't make the least bit of sense.
Okay.
Now, I know you give it a shorter version in this book compared to in Manufactured Crisis, but I don't remember what it was.
But in the back of my mind, I'm thinking there was one or two, maybe more aspects, claims made in the laptop documents that were also debunked besides the green salt and the missile.
Can you tell me?
Yes, there's one more aspect.
And that is that the documents showed that there was some use of high explosives to show that the Iranians were trying to prepare for testing of nuclear weapons.
And to make a long story short, but what the Iranians showed the IAEA in documentation that it could not refute was that the high explosives had nothing to do with a nuclear weapons program, and in fact, not even anything to do with the nuclear program itself.
The high explosives were being used for non-military purposes.
I mean, they had documentation that showed that the high explosives research that they were doing were really not connected with a nuclear program.
And again, consistent with building fake intelligence around a kernel of truth that they can kind of expand on and make seem right.
And this is actually a great segue into the kind of other half of the debunking of this supposed research project, which is the Telexes.
Which is the same kind of thing where, yeah, it's true that they bought it, but it's not what you think.
Yeah, this goes to the nature of U.S. intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program, and how early it went into a completely fraudulent character.
Because the problem was that in the early 1990s, U.S. intelligence analysts, and apparently some foreign intelligence analysts as well, began to get evidence that some of the requests for buying various kinds of technologies that were regarded as somehow related to a nuclear weapons program were coming from the Sharif University.
And that there was a Telex number associated with these requests for technology that matched the Telex number that they knew was an Iranian military contractor doing military research for the Ministry of Defense.
And so the immediate conclusion was that it must mean that all of the requests for these technologies coming from Sharif University must be on behalf of the Iranian military.
And that means that there's reason to believe that Iran is in fact engaged in a military nuclear program.
Now, the kinds of requests that we're talking about were all dual-use technologies.
There were things like computers that could be used for a nuclear program, or they could be used for non-military uses.
Obviously, complex computers have a wide variety of uses.
And so the fact that they were ordering these kinds of computers was not by itself evidence of military intent at all.
It was simply the fact that the Telex number matched that of a military contractor.
Now, it wasn't until 2007-2008 that Iran turned over documents to the IAEA to explain everything.
And this was one of the things they explained.
And the documentation showed that the guy who was making these requests for Sharif University, he was a member of the faculty of Sharif University, but he was also a former head of this Iranian military contractor.
And so he was doing this using that Telex number, but he was doing it to respond to requests from the faculty of Sharif University, because they wanted these various kinds of dual-use technologies for teaching in their courses.
And the IAEA got this huge range of documents, letters of requesting from faculty members requesting the technologies, the kinds of bill of sales, and everything.
It was so complete and so convincing that the IAEA could not deny that this proved that this had nothing to do with a nuclear weapons program.
I kind of like that part of the story, because, I mean, obviously, they have their biases and so forth.
But this is the closest part of it, I think, to an honest mistake, right?
That you're looking at all these receipts coming in that, wow, they're buying these magnets and these computers and this spinny thing and all these different things.
And then they go and actually, you know what?
Believe it or not, we have an alternative explanation for every bit of it, and we can prove it.
Yeah.
And the intelligence analysts apparently felt that the policy people were listing very strongly in the direction of suspecting Iran of having nuclear weapons.
They knew that because it was being leaked to the press that that was the case.
It was hardly possible to avoid that conclusion.
And analysts, generally being the way they are, thinking of their future in their career, are definitely going to tend to come up with explanations that are consistent with the policy.
And that's exactly what happened.
And indeed, you know, the Clinton administration, the high officials of the Clinton administration, were citing that evidence, although they didn't do so explicitly, to make the claim that they knew that Iran was going for nuclear weapons.
So this was extremely important as a turning point in the whole affair.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny, you look at just reporters getting stuff wrong with their two sources for whatever story.
And then you go and anytime you look at some old CIA document that comes out or whatever, and you see how it's really sloppy compared to sloppy journalism.
They don't even claim to have a source or even two sometimes.
It's like, well, it kind of seems to us, we think that maybe, and that's it.
No, they'll go way out on a limb.
And you know, oh, well, we have a medium amount of confidence or, you know, you could, the whole fate of the world turns on some semantics like that, based on these guys essentially acting like just a bunch of truthers on an email list, and seeing if they agree with each other about what their speculation is, really.
Yeah.
But you know, the worst thing about this whole story, Scott, is that the error, which was, you know, translated into a lie in US propaganda, was never corrected, despite the fact that the IAEA published in its reports, the truth, in enough detail to make it very clear and, you know, without, you know, the possibility of refuting it, that this had all been wrong.
But guess what, the US press never, never published the reports, never published any news item that covered the substance of those reports.
No surprise.
The public was never able to find that out.
And the lie went around the world 100 times, the truth never got its boots on.
Exactly.
You know, and here's the thing about that, too, is, and this is really important.
Sometimes I think even you might lose sight of this.
I know that I do from time to time, because I'm not really as exposed to, well, I don't know, like TV, media, or this kind of thing.
But the reality is that the American people spent the entire last 20 years, or at least, you know, 15 to the last 20 years, being told that the Iranians were making nuclear weapons.
And the only question was whether we're going to let them get away with it.
Are we going to attack them now?
Are we going to attack them later?
And what are we going to do to stop them?
And everybody knows you can't trust a guy like the Ayatollah with a nuke.
Mao Zedong, sure.
But this guy, no way.
And so I'm not sure exactly the map there.
Israel.
Yeah, exactly.
But anyway.
But the thing is, like, for example, you're driving your truck down the highway, and you hear the AM top of the hour radio news, and they talk about the danger of Iran's nuclear weapons program, and the debate about it today in the UN about what we're going to do about it, and whatever, etc. like this.
But the premise is just baked in.
You want to tell people that they never had one in the first place.
Not only did they not have a nuclear weapons program, they didn't even really have a research program beyond Google.
I mean, that's, you know, pretty shocking.
And I know you're right.
But so that's not the shocking part is the truth that you're bringing.
The shocking part is just how misled and misinformed people can be.
And just how skewed the consensus, you know, we haven't attacked him yet.
But in essence, it's no different than the lies they told about the weapons of mass destruction about Gaddafi's impending genocide in eastern Libya, or whatever, you know, narrative they come up with to justify their crazy wars.
Yeah, we are in a serious pickle about, you know, these narratives that lead us toward war.
And in this case, right up to the brink of war.
And I'm, I'm afraid, you know, that we are still facing the real possibility of getting into a war because of these false narratives.
That's, that's what we're up against.
Yeah, that's the thing.
You know, it makes sense when people say, look, nobody's ever going to drop a nuke on anybody, because just think how bad that would be megatons detonating?
No way, it'll never happen.
But the thing is, is don't underestimate underestimation.
Right?
I mean, that's the whole thing of it, miscommunication and misunderstandings.
And they send one signal, but you thought they sent another.
And especially when you're talking politicians and generals, they're all colorblind.
None of them know what the hell they're doing.
None of them know what truth is, or, you know, what the other side must mean by the thing that they do.
Why would you trust them to interpret those things correctly?
And they make, of course, they miscalculate on everything all the time, as, as they are determined to, right?
That's why I say military intelligence.
It's an oxymoron.
It's just they can't accomplish what they say that they can.
And so big problem when you let them get into confrontations like this, where everything goes on, well, many things go on bluster and signals and brinksmanship and threats.
And even though we haven't gone to war, a very, very real economic war against the people of Iran, really, since the 90s, since the 80s, but, you know, under Obama, they call them the crippling sanctions.
And those are the same ones that Trump has brought back, that are really lowering the standard of living for people, which means on the margin, they're dying of, you know, otherwise treatable diseases, and just lack of electricity and, and, and water and whatever things, again, on the margins, I'm talking about the poorest people are end up being deprived to death.
And this should lead us into a discussion of Obama's policy because, yeah, of the fact that the Obama administration totally bought into the entire narrative, without exception.
And its policy was was shaped by the acceptance of those narratives that you're talking about, precisely, you know what, I'm sorry, because I got off on a tangent there.
But what I really wanted to tee up for was to talk about this doctrine of sort of half ass deterrence of theirs, this latent nuclear deterrent posture that they have, because after all, fatwa and religious edict, and this and that, the Ayatollah is making these calculations based on very real world things like, does it make sense for me to try to get a nuke or doesn't it?
And it doesn't, does it?
But so what is tell me about you talk all about in here, their deterrent posture, the Iranians deterrent posture, including their civilian electricity nuclear program?
Yeah, I mean, the Iranians have had a conscious deterrent program policy since the 1990s, based on ballistic missiles.
And as I said, you know, we talked about the fact that they, the missile that they had in the late 1990s, they understood was insufficient to do the job.
You know, they had put out the word in 2003, that they were going to mass produce the Shahab three missile.
It was a lie.
They had no intention of doing that, because they knew it wouldn't work.
But they were so desperate that they let the Americans and the Israelis know that they were going to mass produce it.
And that's just one indication of how difficult their situation was in terms of deterrence.
And so what did they do in 1999-2000?
They began to pursue a very different policy of deterrence, a different strategy of deterrence, which was not based on the immediate availability of missiles that would convincingly tell the Americans and the Israelis that they would suffer serious damage to bases and military encampments and cities.
But it was based on giving weapons, rockets and missiles to Hezbollah in Lebanon, because Hezbollah is across the border from Israel.
And with even short range missiles, even very inaccurate missiles, they can, if you give them enough, they can potentially deter the Israelis from attacking.
Now, you know, it didn't work in 2006, because the Israelis did attack.
And that was a lesson for the Iranians.
And instead of pulling back from that strategy, they doubled down or not doubled down, but tripled and quadrupled and more down.
They increased the number of missiles that they gave to rockets and missiles that they gave to Hezbollah from about 100,000, about 10,000 to more than 100,000.
And at that point, the missiles were getting a bit more sophisticated in many cases.
And so they, by the 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, the arsenal that Hezbollah disposed of for responding to any attack on Iran, or of course, on Hezbollah itself, on Lebanon itself, had become much more credible.
The Israelis had to take it very seriously.
And I think it's very arguable, you know, I think one's safe in arguing that the Israelis have in fact been deterred from an attack on Hezbollah ever since 2006.
And that this strategy of deterrence has been recognized by Iran as a successful one.
And therefore, they have continued to expand that through their relations with Syria, with the Syrian government, with Syrian militias, with Iraqi militias that came up during the late period of the Iraq War and since.
And of course, their relationship with the Houthis.
And all of those relationships, which the Trump administration and the Obama administration before it have portrayed as malign activities, supposedly aimed at destabilization of the region, have in fact been primarily, overwhelmingly, for the purpose of making sure that they have friends who are willing to cooperate in deterring the United States and Israel.
And now, of course, Saudi Arabia.
And that involves the Houthi regime and military, which have played an extremely important role over the last year in this process of deterring Saudi Arabia, as well as the United States and Israel.
And this strategy, which the Iranians have never talked about, finally has been referred to explicitly by a former, an official of the Iranian foreign affairs ministry.
And in an interview with the state media, this former official talked explicitly about the fact that they knew that their deterrent had been inadequate with the existing ballistic missiles that they had available.
And therefore, they went to a regional deterrent strategy of depending on their allies.
And that's why the Iranians cannot give in to demands by the Trump administration to bow down and basically break off their relations with their regional allies, because their deterrence still depends primarily on that.
Now, you know, I think that they're getting to the point in relatively future years where they can depend on ballistic missiles for their deterrent, but I don't think they feel they're there yet.
Well, and so you talk about the nuclear program as part of this whole thing in the book, and mentioned the Japan model there for this kind of latent deterrent.
Okay, now you're talking about a different aspect of their deterrent strategy.
I was talking about the primary element that is dealing with the immediate threat that they felt from Israel, in particular, in the late 1990s and into the 2000s, and more generally from the United States, particularly during the George W. Bush administration.
But the latent strategy of deterrence or theory of deterrence is one that was discussed in the very early period, in the mid-1990s.
I talk about the fact that an Iranian-American professor who was in Tehran during that period, doing research for the think tank of the foreign ministry of Iran, was interviewing people, including IRGC people, senior IRGC officials, about the nuclear program and what role it could play in Iran's strategy for security, how it would affect Iran's security in the future.
And what people were telling him was that they believed that even without nuclear weapons, to have a program that would give them enriched uranium automatically would translate into latent deterrence, because the rest of the world, and of course, the Israelis and the Americans in particular, would know that they always would have that option.
So in other words, instead of, you can't attack us, because we'll nuke you.
And then our side says, if you try to make a nuke, we'll attack you.
But then at the same time, as long as they have this civilian program, they can say, look, if you do attack us, then we'll make a nuke, and put the whole paradox on it all, right?
This whole theory, of course, in a very interesting way, reflects the reality that the Americans would never take seriously the Shiite restrictions based on Islamic law against weapons of mass destruction, and therefore would believe that Iran could do that, regardless of whether it had already done so or not.
And regardless of what the Iranians tell the rest of the world, it would never be believed.
And that's why the latent deterrence strategy could work, that it would help to restrain the United States, because the US would be worried that if they did attack Iran, they could provoke Iran into deciding to have nuclear weapons.
Which does make sense, too.
I mean, I gotta say, some religious politician tells me what God tells him.
I figure he could change his mind tomorrow if he wants to, because God sure can, so why not the Ayatollah?
But it would have to make sense to do so.
And of course, at this point, the whole world knows about every scrap of their nuclear program in every way.
So if we're talking about a post-war situation, where now they start to make nukes, we're talking about building a whole new program, or at least moving everything they have to a whole new location in the mountains, and starting all over again in a long period of time before they could even be successful at that, and they'd have to figure out how to hide it all, then they'd be more successful at hiding it, I guess, since obviously, they would be outside of the nonproliferation treaty at that point.
Well, two points about- Sounds like the Bolton plan, doesn't it?
Yeah, but two points about what you just said.
One is that Iran began in 2002 or 2003 to build tunnels throughout the mountainous areas of Iran, which make up a large part of the geography of Iran.
They had these very long, deep tunnels that would be safe from American bombing.
Why did they do that?
Well, because starting in 2002, 2003, the George W. Bush administration was making noises like they were ready to treat Iran as a key enemy, and the military option could not be ruled out.
And then, of course, we know that Dick Cheney was making news around 2006, 2007, making noises that this is the year of Iran, meaning that this is the year we'll go get them militarily.
So there were various times during the George W. Bush administration where Iran had reason to believe that the U.S. was weighing the possibility of an attack on Iran.
And so the tunnels were, of course, a way of preserving key programs, key technologies, and so forth from American bombing.
And that was part of their deterrent strategy.
They're very explicit about that.
They had a whole ministry or sub-ministry that was devoted to dealing with using those tunnels for various ways of preserving the key technologies and programs that Iran needed to have safe from American bombing.
And they believe that that would help to deter the United States from actually carrying out a bombing because they would believe that Iran would not be as seriously hurt because of that.
But the second point is that we know that Robert M. Gates was convinced that Iran would probably turn to nuclear weapons if we did attack them.
That was the argument that he was making against Dick Cheney in 2007, when Cheney was trying to make the argument that we should go for that.
We should try to take advantage of an incident in Iraq with American casualties to blame it on Iran and then bomb a target in Iran, which would start a potential war with Iran.
And he was saying, no, don't do that because the Iranians would begin to go to work on nuclear weapons.
Yeah, there you go.
Imagine Robert Gates getting something right and saving the day.
Yeah, he was on the right side on that one.
That was one of the few times I agree.
Amazing.
Okay.
So, and now speaking of Bush T, we talked all about the nuclear program, which, you know, stretches through in time, but is it okay if we take a minute to talk about America's relationship with Iran in the time after September 11th?
And then, you know, with the axis of evil speech and the start of the Iraq war and the golden offer and all of that?
You want to talk about that?
Right.
Yeah, this is something that, as you know, I was very interested in around 2006, 2007, because I wrote the first long form piece that detailed the the Iranian diplomatic approach to the George W. Bush administration in 2003.
And, you know, had the actual document in hand before it was ever made public.
And, and so I was- And the article is burnt offering.
It's at the American Prospect.
And I have the document reprinted at scotthorton.org slash fair use, if people want to go look at that.
Go ahead.
Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, this was a very interesting episode, because this came just before the US invasion of Iraq.
And one of the interpretations of this approach to the Bush administration by Iran was that they were afraid the United States was going to attack them.
And this was a response to try to fend that off.
And, and this was an argument that was being made has continued to be made by the neoconservatives to to argue for a hard line towards Iran, because they're arguing, partly based on this, and this is a key part of their argument, that Iran will always will tend to pull back if you really threaten them.
And, and that's what the United States needs to do.
We need to continue to keep the threat of an attack very real to them, if not to actually carry it out.
So, so that's one interpretation.
But what I found in my research, and this research continued after I wrote the piece, is that what was really going on here was that the, that the people who were closely watching what was going on in Washington, DC within the foreign ministry, were noticing that there was a split between Colin Powell, Secretary of State, and Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense.
Rumsfeld was threatening, you know, Iran, and, you know, basically refusing to have make any move towards even talks with Iran, whereas Colin Powell seemed to be sending different signals.
And so Iranians, being very assiduous in their interest in trying to exploit any diplomatic opportunity with the United States, if they think it's promising, were looking to try to exploit that, that split, which they saw within the Bush administration.
Now, I think, to some extent, that they were, they were over, they were overly optimistic about the degree to which Colin Powell was willing to buck the Dick Cheney wave within the administration.
Obviously, Dick Cheney had the, had the upper hand there.
Because if Colin Powell had his way, we would not have attacked Iran, Iraq.
But this was clearly the intention in this diplomatic note to the United States, which made a number of what appeared to be concessions to the United States, suggesting that, that they were willing to agree to reach a peace with Israel, you know, based on, you know, some arrangement that would give the Palestinians an opportunity to, to have self-determination.
But, but they were not interested in trying to, to overthrow the regime in Israel.
And, and they were making various other, other gestures toward the United States saying that they're willing to, to curb their nuclear program in keeping with an agreement that would, would, you know, fall far short of anything that would be seen as threatening.
So, you know, they were, they were trying to reach out and try to start a process of negotiations with those people in the United States that seemed to be interested in it.
But unfortunately, the die was already cast.
It was too late.
And this, this note was simply not going to make any difference.
And, you know, I mean, it may also be true that people who were making this, who were behind this initiative were eager to avoid the, the hawks in the Bush administration taking advantage of a situation to, once they had succeeded in, in Iraq to, to take on Iran as well.
So the two, the two possibilities are not necessarily in, in violation of one another.
They're not contradictory at all.
Yeah.
Well, it's important too, for the context that what they're saying is, if you'd like to talk about our nuclear program that doesn't even really exist yet right now, except for what we have left over from the Gerald Ford years, then, you know, let's talk.
And hey, you've invaded Afghanistan.
We hate the Taliban.
You like the Hazaras.
We like the Hazaras.
Oh, you're invading Iraq and you're getting rid of Saddam Hussein and you're enthroning the Supreme Islamic Council in power in Baghdad.
That's great.
Maybe we could help cooperate with you on that.
Well, that's right.
Of course, they, they, knowing that the United States intended to go into Iraq you know, they obviously believed that there was some possibility for cooperation with the United States.
Although, you know, they had their very grave concerns about how far the United States would go as well.
And understandably so.
Yeah.
But that's one of the best ironies of that whole war was that America went ahead and did exactly what they would have done in full partnership with the Ayatollah anyway, only while demonizing him the whole time and refusing to negotiate in any way.
And went ahead and put in the Dawa and the Skiri exactly like he wanted.
Yes, yes.
I mean, you know, that is the ultimate irony of the entire war and indeed of that whole period of US foreign policy.
Indeed.
Well, and as we joked yesterday, but it's not just a joke.
It's also true that in 1998, which is pretty late, kind of, you know, in the scheme of things, Dick Cheney was saying, we can get along with these guys.
Hey, you know, he had done the minority report, helping cover up Iran-Contra and saying that Ronald Reagan could sell missiles to the Ayatollah if he wants to.
Right?
When Dick Cheney was in the house.
And so he's the perfect guy to say, I'm so gruff that I can get along with the Ayatollah.
Why the hell not?
And get away with that.
Right.
Dick Cheney has his two faces, one being the face of somebody who was out to make a lot of money, which was his corporate face in 1998.
And then the face that involves close relations with the Zionist regime and its followers in the United States, his Middle East advisor and the Middle East advisor to John Bolton.
Before that, David Wormser was, of course, the guy who was whispering in his ear all the time as he was vice president about how to get into a crisis with Iran that would allow the United States to attack.
Because that's what Wormser was preaching to Cheney.
And he apparently was on board with it.
That's what I mean.
Importantly, yeah.
I mean, that part of the story in what I guess May of 07 was that they were really leaking as a trial balloon.
I don't know how they were brave enough to do it this way, that they sent Wormser to leak it to the guys at the AEI.
And then I guess Steve Clemens at New America got a hold of it.
And that was that.
What we want to do is an end run around President Bush.
He doesn't want to attack Iran.
So what we want to do is work with the Israelis, provoke a crisis in the Gulf so that he'll be forced to respond, which is the height of insubordination and sedition.
And I'm not exactly sure how you phrase that.
But vice presidents and their neocons are not allowed to do that.
Absolutely.
That's Horton's Law right there.
I got a new one.
You're not supposed to end run the president of the United States into a war from the vice president's office.
I'm pretty sure.
But there's something about those warmongers, the people connected with the Likudniks in Israel, like David Wormser, that makes them want to somehow boast about their success in what they're about.
And that seems to be at least part of the explanation.
When he's talking to Trump now, you saw that a couple weeks ago that he's been rehabilitated.
He has been rehabilitated.
And unbelievably, he is somehow informally advising Trump.
I just can't explain that at all.
I don't know.
Well, for the newbies, you'll get a full treatment on David Wormser in my new book, when and if it's ever finished in a million years from now.
Hey, so it'll be new then.
It won't be.
It'll be old by now, then, now.
All right.
So let's talk about the Obama years again with this whole policy about coercion works.
And you know what?
The Democrats will tell you to this day that it works, that Obama's coercion worked because look, crippling sanctions, nuclear deal.
Ipso facto, ergo, Proctor-Hawk, now you.
Well, I mean, to begin with, the idea of the coercive diplomacy, if you will, was one that was embraced by a pretty broad segment of his advisors.
Gary Samor was his advisor on weapons of mass destruction.
And Samor actually had publicly talked about the idea of exploiting the threat that Netanyahu was making of attacking Iran for diplomatic purposes.
He said it would be good to, that was not exact words, but essentially he was arguing that the incoming administration would do well to use that to put pressure, additional pressure on Iran.
And there's no doubt that he pushed that idea with Obama very early in the administration, because in April of 2009, the administration was trying to use the danger of an Israeli attack on Iran to put pressure on Iran diplomatically, to get the Iranians to be more cooperative on its nuclear program.
And that was the first clue that they were heading in that direction.
And they continued to do that throughout the Obama administration, particularly to get France, China, and other UN Security Council members to support the very hard line that they were pushing in the UN Security Council.
So they would tell people that we're not going to be able to restrain the Israelis, they're just on the war path.
And so if you can do anything to try to get Iran to be more cooperative, that would be really wise, because otherwise we can't guarantee that the peace will be maintained.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, then they said, too, that, you know, if you deprive these people of their chemotherapy enough, that eventually their government will come to the table and accede to your demands.
Yeah, yeah.
This is the all-out economic sanctions, which the Trump administration has pushed.
The Obama administration, however, was the one who really came up with the idea of these extraterritorial sanctions first, as the key to really putting pressure on Iran's economy.
Before that, you know, the Bush administration hadn't really come up with that idea.
They were sort of talking about old-fashioned sanctions, which really were not going to hurt Iran that much.
But it was the Obama administration's Treasury Department that came up with this idea, and it was written into the 2010 UN Security Council resolution on Iran, which had a sanctions section in it, that all countries are called upon to make sure that those governments do not allow any new investments in technology or financial investments, which could further the Iranian nuclear program or contribute to terrorism.
And they were taking advantage of the they were taking advantage of the concept that this fanciful idea that the IRGC already controlled most of the Iranian economy, which is an absurd idea.
I mean, they have a very strong presence in many sectors, but the idea that they control the economy is ridiculous.
But that was the argument that was being made, and they were hoping that governments would take the bait and forbid any business with Iran that would basically strengthen the economy, because they believed that they could use this threat that they would be targeted by the United States.
And that's what the Trump administration now has put into law.
And this has been the most effective part of their sanctions policy.
It's criminalizing the Iranian economy.
Any contact with the Iranian economy is now criminalized, potentially.
Well, this is the thing, right, is it's all, I think it's probably quite deliberate, but it's not explicit.
It's just that no major firm is willing to risk it.
And so that means, yeah, I won't even sell you chemotherapy, because I don't know what the US Treasury might do to me.
And I owe my shareholders the responsibility to not risk it.
Exactly.
They know that corporations are risk averse, and they're taking full advantage of it, that's for sure.
And they totally are completely abusive with the way they enforce that, too.
They make an example out of a couple, and then you got every shipping company in the planet sailing the other direction.
It's horrible.
And the people, and we are getting reports, just like in the Obama years, we're skipping ahead, we're going to skip back in a second.
But just like in the Obama years, we're getting reports right now, people are dying of cancer that could have been treated.
People are dying of bacterial infections, because they don't have the antibiotics and this kind of thing.
And it's because of this breakdown in trade.
Yeah.
And the Trump administration, being the people who they are, are totally unsympathetic to the Iranian people.
They claim that they're, oh, we care about the Iranian people.
This is only against the government.
But in fact, they know perfectly well that they're hurting people, and they're doing it deliberately, as you indicated earlier, in the hope that this would ultimately somehow bring about enough disaffection to bring down the regime.
Yeah.
Well, and it's important that, or even to force them to the table over their dumb nuclear program, or whatever it is.
I mean, that was the issue in the Obama years, there was not so much regime change, it's just sign this JCPOA.
And then they did.
And this is the problem with the whole post hoc, proctor hoc thing here, is there's really another interpretation that I think probably is a lot closer to reality.
And that is, as Trita Parsi says it, and I think you guys say it in this book, too, that what really happened was Obama sanctions did not bring Iran to the table.
Iran had been offering to go to the table.
It was Iran's advancements and their nuclear program that brought Obama to the table.
And so you could take the whole lesson of how effective the sanctions were, and just completely throw that out.
That's not really what happened.
What happened was they went, man, these guys have enough uranium that now we're...
Now maybe we should go and figure out a way to reduce that stockpile back down again.
And that was it.
So the point is that the Obama administration in 2009 through 2011 was making the demand that Iran had to give up its enrichment program entirely.
They were not going to allow them to have any enrichment except for the most symbolic enrichment, nothing more than that.
And of course, that was not going to sell with Tehran.
I mean, they were not going to accept that.
They didn't accept it.
And they would not come back to the table under those circumstances.
And in 2012, then, Iran actually made the key decision to begin...
They had already made the decision in 2010 to begin 20% enrichment.
20% enrichment is a huge step toward having the the level of enriched uranium necessary to enrich for weaponization.
It's regarded as like 80% of the way towards weaponization.
And so it's a symbolic move to tell the Obama administration, you're going to get saddled with this problem unless you back off this demand and be more reasonable.
And then in 2012, they let it be known that they would stop the 20% enrichment if the Obama administration was willing to start negotiating seriously.
And that's exactly what happened basically in 2014.
So that, I mean, in the meantime, they had, as you suggested, they had increased the level of enriched uranium enormously.
And they did so in a way that at the same time was telling the Obama administration that they were not doing it to 20%.
They were holding back on that, even though they had the wherewithal to do it.
They could do it, but they were holding back to make it possible to reach an agreement.
So I think the overall lesson is precisely what you said, that the Obama administration had not been successful in getting the Iranians to agree to get rid of their nuclear program.
They were going to have to compromise on it.
They knew that.
And so the negotiating started from a different point, which was acceptable to the Iranians.
Whereas before that, it was a no-go.
It was a no-brainer.
It was a no-deal.
They couldn't go along with that.
All right.
So let's recap a couple of things here and make sure everybody's caught up on the conversation as far as the nuclear program and the controversy over the nuclear program goes in the Obama era there.
So their program, as you said, they're members of the Nonproliferation Treaty, and they have a safeguards agreement with the IAEA.
They have a civilian nuclear program that's safeguarded.
They're guaranteed to not be diverting nuclear material off to any military purpose and all of this kind of deal.
But they're under all these crippling sanctions because the Americans want them to get rid of their nuclear program, which could be converted into a nuclear weapons program.
And as you said, is sort of a latent deterrent on the kind of Japan, don't make me make a nuke model, right?
So there's that.
And then, but at the same time, we have all the hawks led by the Israelis in their amen corner in America saying, constantly accusing the Iranians of making nuclear weapons and saying that we need to have a war against them in order to, you know, prevent that, prevent them from ever getting a nuke, which they'd be sure to use against Israel on their first day, this kind of thing.
And then, so when Obama comes in, and as you said, it wasn't so much the sanctions work as the program got sophisticated enough that, and he was motivated enough, I think it's fair to say, that he wanted to stop a war.
And he thought, you know what, we'll take, since for whatever reason, I'm putting words in his mouth, but this is essentially the reasoning behind the thing.
Since Iran's nuclear program being safeguarded by the IAEA hasn't been good enough to deflate the narrative of their nuclear weapons threat, then we'll make them double extra safeguarded.
And then the hawks will have to shut up.
And so that was essentially what the deal was, is it wasn't Iran really changing their policy from one thing to another.
It was them scaling back their program to non-panic levels, as far as that goes, right?
And expanding the inspections regime in a way that for the hawks in America over at National Review, they kind of can't pretend that we don't all know that they're not just safeguarded, they're double safeguarded now.
And the IAEA says that they're completely within the limits.
And the controversy over their nuclear weapons program, it really was taken off the table by that JCPOA.
And that's the Obama nuclear deal, the Joint Plan of Action.
It didn't really do anything, Gareth, except succeed in changing the narrative in a positive way, right?
Well, it did that.
It did that for sure.
But it basically postponed what the Iranian government envisions as a serious nuclear power program for a number of years.
I mean, they had to put it off.
They wanted to go ahead with it.
But they have been basically under such international pressure that it has proved to be impossible to do that anytime soon.
And so they agreed to, as you say, scale down the level of enrichment, give up virtually all of their high enriched uranium, give up all their high enriched uranium, and their enriched uranium to a very low level.
And when you say highly, that's only technical definition.
20% is still far short of the 90% for a gun type nuke, which is essentially worthless.
And so they agreed to give all that up as a good faith gesture.
And on the other side, of course, the United States agreed to stop the sanctions against Iran and allow Iran to do full business with the international community so that they could take full advantage of their role in international trade.
And that, of course, is what the Trump administration has completely denied them and brought about a most serious crisis, in my view, that we faced so far.
And we are not out of it by any means, because the Trump administration has decided to go for the jugular and to prevent Iran from being able to sell oil to its seven major customers, China being the primary one.
Now, they are selling some on the side through various maneuvers, but that's not going to be enough for them to be able to get out of this economic crisis.
So the United States is forcing Iran into a situation where it has a choice between submitting to this situation of not being able to escape from an economic crisis, on one hand, and doing something which will force the United States hand, force them to pull back and go back to some kind of bargain that was represented, such as the JCPOA bargain, to allow Iran to develop.
And that's why I would argue, and I can talk about this in greater length, if we have more time later, that we are still facing a very serious crisis between the United States and Iran.
Yeah, man, so we are going to get into that right now.
So Donald Trump comes in into his humiliation, and this was a perfect poison pill, wasn't it, that the Republicans built in.
Trump has to certify every quarter that Iran's doing great.
And he just refuses to do that.
And especially, he's got Netanyahu and Adelson's guns to his head.
So on top of that, there's the humiliation of saying attaboy Ayatollah every three months.
And so he just says, forget it.
Right.
And, you know, this was, the particular turning point here was last April, when the decision was made to essentially go for the full, you know, for the full juggler, as I've just been talking about, to cut off Iran's oil exports, not just to reduce them, but to reduce them to zero.
$50 billion a year in oil export revenues are going to be denied, with a very small exception to that, through various maneuvers, various means that Iran has to try to escape the complete embargo on their oil exports.
But that was the decision that I think tipped the situation into the beginning of a crisis.
And the first stage of it was, you know, the operations to warn through the shooting holes in the hulls of the four ships near the Strait of Hormuz in April and June of 2019.
And you're satisfied that was the Iranians that did that?
I believe it was the Iranians, mainly because E.J. Magnier has quoted his own sources as saying that this had to be done.
This was needed to warn the United States.
Well, you know, I talked to him about that.
And it was, the way he put it was, they refused to say exactly that, of course, but it was more like, well, there is a lesson there, or, you know, this kind of ambiguous thing, which makes sense for them to, you know, I guess, take deniable half-assed credit for it in that way, whether they did it or not.
But I wasn't sure whether that was conclusive, you know?
Well, I mean, that in itself is not conclusive evidence.
But it is, overall, I think the situation, the overall history of that period of 2019, I think, makes it clear that Iran needed to do some things to get the attention of the US government.
And, you know, that was one of them.
The shootdown of the drone, the US drone over the Strait of Hormuz in June, was another one.
And, of course, the drones that were hitting the Abqaiq Saudi oil facility in September was a third wave of warnings.
These are deterrent mechanisms that the Iranians are using.
And that was the Houthis that did that.
I mean, they've been doing better and better drone attacks against the Saudis for a long time before that.
I would say that the evidence is stronger for a Houthi attack than an attack that came from Iran.
But, of course, this was a decision that would not have been taken by the Houthis without the Iranians' consent.
And both the Houthis and Iran had a strong interest in this attack being carried out for obvious reasons.
The Iranians for deterrence, the Houthis for compellence of Saudi, of the Saudi government to stop its bombing of the Houthi part of Yemen.
Yeah, I mean, I could judge with medium confidence that the Houthis would check with the Iranians and make sure this was consistent with their short-term goals too, you know, kind of thing.
It made a huge point to Washington that Iran has capabilities that they had not been aware of before.
This was a surprise.
And they knew it was a surprise.
Because the fact that the Houthis had that technology had been published, but it was not being taken seriously.
Well, and importantly, the UAE at least announced they were pulling their troops out of Yemen the next day.
I don't know that they really did, but they left some marks, but pulled out much of their main force and then immediately, you know, sent somebody's cousin off to Iran to start talks, right?
Right.
No, that was a very important move.
And I think it does reflect a sense that, you know, the situation is, you know, not one that can be so easily managed the way they might have thought.
It was when Trump flinched on the drone, and they went, this guy's not committed, he might like violence, but he's also a coward.
So, you know, I think that's what it was, right?
And they saw that the Iranians were not cowed by the United States.
That's the two parts of it fit together.
Just, you know, two pieces of a puzzle.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so unfortunately, your book is done before the recent doings in Iraq got to play into the end of the chapter here.
But yeah, this is, I mean, you do talk about the attacks in Iraq, the previous attacks down in Basra, where importantly, and Jason Ditz, of course, covered this at antiwar.com, that you have these riots down in Basra for the uninitiated.
This is deep in Iraqi Shia-stan near Kuwait and Iran.
And I forget, you tell me the details on what exactly, some mortar landed in a parking lot adjacent to a thing near a thing that had USA written on it or something.
But then also, the same day, they attacked the Iranian consulate and burned it down.
And then Mike Pompeo says, yeah, this is the work of the Iranian-backed militias attacking us, which didn't seem too likely that day.
Absolutely.
The duo of Pompeo and Bolton were coming up with a new premise for, you know, a whole campaign, which unfolded in the subsequent months.
And so this was- And remind me, I'm sorry, this is the summer of 18, is that right?
The fall of 2018, September 2018.
And the short of it is that what was going on was that people are sympathetic to the protesters in Basra in September of 2018, who were, as you said, burning down the Iranian consulate, the pro-Iranian militia offices in Basra, and generally raising hell over government corruption and their dependence on Iran, were clearly the ones who were carrying out the rocket attack on the Green Zone, and also carrying out a rocket attack on the Basra International Airport.
Now, you know, that was treated by Bolton and Pompeo as an attempt to attack the U.S. consulate.
But in fact, it wasn't really close to the consulate, it was on the outer perimeter of the Basra International Airport security perimeter.
And so, you know, it was approaching the airport itself.
The airport is both a civil and military airport.
It's a symbol of Iraqi government authority.
So, you know, it makes sense that people who were protesting the Iraqi government in Basra would target the airport rather than, you know, people who were pro-Iran would target the airport.
So basically, this was a completely bogus argument being made by Pompeo and Bolton.
But it was very clearly and cleverly designed to set up a whole long campaign to try to create a crisis atmosphere between the United States and Iran based on the premise that Iran was threatening U.S. diplomats and military personnel in the region, and particularly in Iraq.
Yeah.
So I want to point this out here before we run too far out of time, Gareth, and that is this quote from former senior Israeli Defense Force officials, Yadlin and Orion.
And this is about I guess during the timeframe of last summer and the crisis in the Persian Gulf there with the ships and all of that.
And that then Netanyahu started bombing Syria and Lebanon, and these guys thought that he had an ulterior motive.
What was that?
Yeah, particularly, you know, there were two parts to this.
This was a series of attacks on pro-Iran militias in Iraq beginning in July of 2019, and then continuing through August and into September.
And then this was capped off by a particularly virulent, violent series of raids against pro-Iraqi militias August 25th, which killed dozens of pro-Iraqi militiamen, as well as the commander of a brigade of militia.
And on the same day, they carry out this drone attack on the Hezbollah headquarters in South Beirut.
And it was not clear exactly what they were planning to do.
They claimed that they were hitting a target that had to do with a mechanism to make the missiles that were being given by Iran to Hezbollah and others more accurate.
Now, whether that's true or not, who knows?
But in fact, it was very near the Hezbollah headquarters, blew the windows out of a Hezbollah media office.
And so it was extremely provocative.
And this was what these former retired IDF generals were commenting on.
This was a remarkably provocative set of attacks.
And they were suggesting that it looks like this must be, or may be, an effort by the Israeli government to prevent or to discourage Trump from having any talks with Iran.
Because it turns out that that was precisely the time when Netanyahu was afraid that Trump had the idea that he wanted to start negotiations with the Iranians.
And he didn't want that to happen by any means.
And he would have found out about that, we know, from Pompeo, because Pompeo was the guy that he was talking to, not every day, but frequently.
He was his main contact within the Trump administration.
And whenever anything important was going on, he was on the phone with Pompeo to find out what was going on there.
And so it's clearly the case that the Israeli government was carrying out a series of raids that were deliberately provocative, and that at the very least, they wanted to prevent talks with Iran.
But clearly, this was in the context of this Pompeo-Bolton effort to try to create a crisis between the United States and Iran.
And the hope would be that the Iranians would overreact and do something that would make it possible for Pompeo especially to convince Trump to retaliate militarily against Iran.
And that fits the overall situation perfectly.
That's a perfect explanation for what was going on, particularly in late August of 2019.
All right.
And then if people want to catch up on what Gareth has to say about all that's taken place since the December 27th rocket attack on the base that killed the translator, and then later the assassination of Soleimani and all that, well, you just got to check the archives.
They're all at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
You can find all that stuff there.
And of course, he's written about it for the American Conservative Magazine, and probably Truthout, Truthdig, and all those things too.
And so the book ends with the big question, can war be avoided the way things are now?
But I think I'll just cut it here and let them all go and get the book and read it themselves and find out.
Then they'll know the future like you.
Thanks, Scott.
Thank you very much, Gareth.
All right, you guys, that is The Great Gareth Porter.
The book is The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis by Gareth and his co-author John Kiriakou, who of course is the CIA insider referenced above there.
The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis from CIA Coup to the Brink of War.
And you know what I'm going to go ahead and mention too, for people who don't know, when Gareth's last book came out, Manufactured Crisis, I'm going to say it would have been in 2015.
What happened was, wait, Gareth, are you there?
Hey, was it 2015?
Yes.
Yes, 2015.
So what happened was I interviewed Gareth 10 weeks in a row for an hour at a time about the 10 chapters of the book.
And then if you go to my website, if you just Google Manufactured Crisis and my name and his name and hours or some kind of keyword like that, you'll find where it's all combined too, into one big 10 hour interview where we just go through chapter by chapter, every little facet of the brilliant Manufactured Crisis, the most important book you could ever read about Iran's nuclear program.
And you can, if you like what you just heard, then you might like that even more.
So check all that out.
And thank you again, bud.