12/02/10 – Larisa Alexandrovna – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
We're on chaosradioaustin.org and lrn.fm.
I'm Scott Horton.
And introducing our next guest, it's Larissa Alexandrovna, investigative news editor at rawstory.com.
Full disclosure, we're together, but this interview is about journalism.
Welcome to the show, Larissa.
How are you doing?
Scott, thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
So let's talk about your first big piece after a long hiatus at rawstory.com.
Exclusive leaked cable reveals U.S.
-Israeli strategy for regime change in Iran.
First of all, what's this cable?
When is it from?
How can people find it?
They can find it on rawstory.
It's still in the front page top headers.
And the cable is dated August 2007.
August 2007.
And it's a meeting between U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, R. Nicholas Burns, you're right here, with the director of the Israeli Mossad, that's their CIA, Mayor Dagan.
Right, that's correct.
All right, and so what goes down at this meeting that's so important?
Well, several things.
I think the first really important thing that we see from this meeting is that Dagan tells Burns that, essentially, while the analysis from our intelligence, that is United States intelligence services, differs from that of Israeli intelligence on whether or not Iran is any closer to becoming a legitimate nuclear threat, those differences are irrelevant.
And basically that regardless of the analysis differences, Dagan is prepared to say and does say that Israel will go to war with or without the United States or take action of some sort with or without us, essentially blackmailing us into war with Iran.
And so now you don't report on this in the article because it's not directly part of it, but for broader context, we know this was right around the time when the CIA was about to come out with their national intelligence estimate that Dick Cheney had been suppressing and fighting about for right about a year at this point, where the National Intelligence Council finally came out and said that they don't believe that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, that they have a nuclear program, that they have not made the political decision to make nuclear weapons out of their nuclear technology at all.
And so that is presumably the difference in their two assessments that Dagan is speaking of.
Although it's funny because back in 2005, I think it was, right around this time, 2005, Mayor Dagan said, oh, come on, Iran is not a nuclear threat to us.
That's all, you know, that's just what we tell the Rubes or whatever.
Right, but then the following year he tells the Knesset that, you know, they're almost up and ready.
In two years they'll be, you know, it'll be too late.
So, you know, what's interesting is that you've got the Cheneyites here and Dagan on the same page.
Regardless of what our intelligence is saying, they're on the same page.
They want Iran.
And it doesn't matter if our analysis is saying they're no threat.
And Dagan says that.
He basically says, you know, the threat is obvious and we will act with or without you.
Essentially it's blackmail.
And I think that is the first.
Why is it blackmail?
Because we're going to, the United States is going to end up getting involved anyway.
So whether the United States is involved in the planning, perhaps execution of covert operations on its own terms, or whether Israel drags the United States kicking and screaming into a mess, you know, those are the two choices basically.
But either way we would be involved.
So, you know, from our perspective it would be better for the United States to, given those two choices, to be involved from the beginning in terms of applying sanctions or taking covert actions.
Should Israel get involved and just start bombing things, that puts the United States in a very strange and very dangerous position.
So that's why it's blackmail.
Well, you know, was it in March or April of 2007, just two or three months before this, Dick Cheney sent David Wilmser, this was, I forgot who reported it first, but it was then confirmed by Steve Clemens, or Steve Clemens reported it first, then the New York Times confirmed it and named David Wilmser as the one, one of Dick Cheney's little smitherses.
And he sent him to the American Enterprise Institute to say that Dick Cheney no longer had faith in George W. Bush to start a war with Iran and that he was working on a plan to go ahead and get the Israelis to start the war and force us into it and run George Bush and force him into the war.
Well, Hal, you can go back to 2001, December of 2001, when basically a collective sent by Doug Fyfe at the Defense Department, including a spy, Larry Franklin, Michael Ledeen, Harold Rohde, a number of people to meet with Italian intelligence and other members of rather unsavory reputation to basically meet and discuss how to go to war with Iran.
I mean, this is in December of 2001.
We're not even at war with Iraq, let alone, you know, them meddling in Iran or anything else.
This is, you know, the Cheney's trying to find a way, a reason.
There's nothing new.
This has been going on for years.
I just think that whatever initial plan they had was basically sabotaged somehow.
Well, I think it was at least in part sabotaged, one, by the National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007.
That really put the crimp in their plan, I think.
And then also it was pretty clear that the Joint Chiefs of Staff said absolutely not, and they had recommended against the surge as well, but they said, war with Iran?
You've got to be kidding.
There's just no way.
And that was Joe Klein reported that in January of 2007, I believe.
Yeah, but somehow I don't think that was enough.
Bush's meeting in the tank with the chiefs.
Oh, and Admiral Fallon, who was the head of CENTCOM, who said, over my dead body, are we going to have a war with Iran?
Yeah, but you know what?
I still don't think that was somehow enough.
I think something else must have happened, because if you look at the military opposition to a full-out war with Iraq, you look at the disagreements about troop numbers, you look at even disagreements before we invaded Iraq, when we started our campaign of escalated bombings, even before there was any discussion with Congress about what to do.
You look at any number of things, there's always been military involvement in, or rather military opposition to these things.
It's almost like something else was sort of preventing them from acting.
And my theory on this is I think there were a lot of people leaking around this.
They were so worried that we were going to go to war that they started leaking everything they could find, and I think that may have been the preventative factor.
But, you know, that's just my theory.
Yeah, all that great coverage on anti-war radio really made the difference.
You never know, right?
All right, so now I guess there's no indication in this State Department document, as I read it, about how Burns reacted to this.
Because, as you say, it seems pretty clear.
Dagan, the head of Mossad, is telling this Under Secretary of State, this diplomat, that, look, even though you guys don't think they're making nuclear bombs, we do, and we're not going to wait around for you.
We'll go ahead and bomb them ourselves, which they both know means that we'll both be in a war with Iran immediately.
Does this thing, did I miss the part where Burns says, hey, man, you better back off, or anything like that?
No, Burns doesn't say anything.
What's interesting, though, is he makes sort of a flippant note that, and he literally says, well, if the region wasn't destabilized enough, now Israel is worried about the Russians.
That's the only really kind of comment he makes where he's questioning, like, what are these people thinking?
But, no, essentially he doesn't, there's no notes or side notes or addendums to this cable in which you see the perspective that Burns has.
And I did try to reach out to him to get a better understanding of his thoughts during this meeting, but he was unwilling to discuss it.
So we are left to our own imagination, I think.
All right.
Now the second half of this article is the five pillars of Israeli strategy for regime change in Iran, according to Mayor Dagan, the head of Mossad.
Yeah, I'm sure Mossad's behind this leak, right?
Go ahead.
Right.
I've seen that being said, and I'm kind of astonished.
There's basically enumerates five, what he calls five pillars during this meeting.
And essentially they're really all about regime change because he wants them all implemented simultaneously.
So one of the pillars is a political approach, and this is where, and I think this is just strictly for public relations purposes, but this is where they approach the U.N. Security Council and say, here are the issues, let's do sanctions, let's put political pressure on them.
So that's under the umbrella of political approach.
The second pillar is covert measures, which Dagan does not elaborate on, and so we don't really know what that means, but I think we can look at what was going on around that time in and around Iran and certainly ask some important questions about the involvement of various groups in terrorism activities.
The third he points out as one of the pillars is counterproliferation.
And this is where we see that echo again, the moving of the red line from Iran must not acquire a nuclear weapons program to Iran must not even have the know-how to enrich uranium.
Right.
So that's pretty aggressive for one state power to sort of force on another.
The fourth is financial sanctions.
And in this regard, Dagan notes that this is the only part of the pillar strategy that appears to be working, and he sort of celebrates the fact that three uranium banks are failing.
And the fifth is forced regime change.
But, again, he emphasizes that all of these should be implemented simultaneously, and, therefore, if they're trying to get political measures to work while also trying to implement regime change, it kind of makes the whole political overture as a moot point.
So really it is the entire process is really to force regime change, regardless of any of the other so-called pillars.
And that's the brief summary of these five pillars.
Well, and that goes to what Flint Leverett has written this week over at raceforiran.com about Barack Obama's policy and how the political approach and the trying to work things out and have some talks and whatever is always just a ruse, whether it's anywhere on the scale between we'll never talk to them or we'll only talk to them about what's going on in Iraq but not about their nuclear program, which was the Bush policy, or now Obama's saying, oh, yeah, we'll talk to them about their nuke program but then refusing to accept their acceptance of the deal he offers them with a minor caveat that was not worth sabotaging the agreement over.
That's really just to make it look like there's anything but a push for regime change here.
And I think the way that you quote this paragraph here in the article is that when Dagen suggested that the U.S. and Israel should both help force regime change in Iran, he was not really referring to some kind of invasion or war.
He was referring to some kind of coup d'etat.
And it sounds like he's referring back to pillar number two, covert action.
Support, well, first of all, for student democracy movements, that's not that covert.
But then he says ethnic groups, Azeris, Kurds, Baluks, opposed to the ruling regime.
And, of course, that kind of goes to the subheadline of the article.
Seymour Hersh's reporting confirmed, or at least seemingly confirmed here, you have Robert Baer, a former CIA officer, basically interpreting what he said here, as you say, as a violent one.
And so we know from previous reporting from Seymour Hersh, from Andrew Coburn and others, that this means support for the communist Kurdish group PJAK, sisters of the PKK movement that fights in Turkey, only they fight in Iran.
I don't know about Azeri groups, but, of course, the Baluks must be a reference to Jandala, the suicide bomber terrorists, right?
Right.
I mean, it's pretty clear what he's talking about.
And, you know, obviously I can't insert my own opinion into the article, but I called around and one of the people I talked to was Robert Baer.
And, you know, he's one of the foremost experts in this region.
And, you know, I kind of like how he summarized it fairly simply.
He said it, you know, I said, what does it mean exactly?
What does forced regime change mean in this context?
And he basically said, you know, and I quote, it means give them money so they can set off bombs, the Mad Max approach.
And essentially it's what we've always done, you know, whether it's the Contras, whether it's the Mujahedin in Afghanistan, you know, our proxy war with the Soviets.
We always do this.
So I agree with you that the regime change here is not an all-out invasion like in Iraq, but a covert overthrow.
An attempt to destabilize the regime, at least as part one.
Well, yeah, and destabilize the regime by playing factions against one another, by training groups and individuals to commit acts of violence, by providing them with weapons and money.
The stuff we always do that never works in the long run anyway and we never learn.
So, but, yeah, I read it the same way and, excuse me, everyone I talked to read it exactly the same way.
That's, you know, let's do this approach that's worked so wondrously for us in the past.
Well, now, something that's not referred to directly in this article or in this State Department document, but has been reported about many times, including by yourself over the years, is American support for the Mujahedin al-Khalq.
And many people know them as the origin of all sorts of lies about Iran's nuclear program.
Like just a couple of months ago they had this big scare story about these tunnels outside Tehran at Qasvim.
And, oh, goodness, this is the construction of a secret nuclear weapons factory.
And yet right when the story came out, almost immediately our own State Department said, oh, come on, those tunnels have been there forever and that's not what they're for.
Give us a big break.
But so that's how we know the Mujahedin al-Khalq in America.
But how do they know the Mujahedin al-Khalq in Iran?
Who are these guys?
Well, these guys are essentially, they're really a cult.
And I do mean literally a cult, where there's this belief in divine revelation and all of this nonsense.
And they essentially started off as really a communist kind of terrorist organization.
And they were running activities against Iran out of Iraq.
But what's fascinating is that – Well, and even before that, back in 79, they helped with the revolution against the Shah's government.
That's right.
Well, and what's really fascinating is that they have a lobbying firm or front, rather, in D.C., where they openly lobby members of Congress.
Imagine if al-Qaeda set up shop in that same way.
It would be fascinating to see how Congress would react.
And you're reporting on the MEK in the past very quickly here.
Have you reported that they are, in fact, responsible for bombings at the behest of the American government?
The Iranians believe so, and people I've talked to in intelligence also believe so.
There's no absolute proof without catching someone red-handed.
We'll be right back after this.
Thanks, Larissa.
Thank you.