For Pacifica Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio here on Pacifica.
I'm Scott Horton, and tonight's guest is Philip Giraldi.
He's a former CIA and DIA officer, contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine, and regular writer for AntiWar.com.
He's also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
Hey, Phil, how are you doing?
Hi, Scott, good to be back.
Well, very happy to have you here, and I think you got the most important story of the week breaking at original.antiwar.com/Giraldi, Washington's secret wars, and you say that Barack Obama has signed a new finding about covert action, authorizing covert action against Iran.
What's the finding, Wendy?
Sign it, and what's it say?
Well, a finding is basically the White House approval for a covert action by the CIA, usually, and the reason why they have a finding is it's usually in an instance where there is a particular sensitivity or something is particularly dangerous to be carrying out, and in this case, we're basically seeing a series of findings from the Bush administration and Barack Obama approving what is essentially a covert war against Iran, and the reason why there's a series of findings is because they've gradually been kind of building up what they've been doing, and they've been making the offensive against Iran more dangerous in many ways.
And now, so this does go back to the Bush years.
Of course, Andrew Coburn and then Seymour Hersh broke the story, I think it was in the spring of 07 or 08, I forget now, about Bush's signing of these findings, and of course the WikiLeaks came out and showed where Mayor Dagan and Nicholas Burns, the Undersecretary of State, were conspiring to support, they say, the Balookis, and I think, I forget exactly the language they used to refer to the Mujahedini caulk, but they're clearly talking about continuing to back these terrorist groups.
Yeah, I mean, right from the beginning, the United States was stirring things up in the Kurdish region.
They were basically using the existing Kurdish terrorist group, Pajak, to run missions inside Iran.
From the beginning of the Iraq war, you mean?
Pretty much, yeah.
2004, 2005, it started then.
But at that time, the military was in charge, so they weren't doing intelligence findings, per se.
But then there have been a series of intelligence findings since about 2005, 2006, and they've been directed against Iran based on the premise that Iran has been involved in destabilizing Iraq, if you can imagine that, and later on for reasons of destabilizing Afghanistan.
So that's the pretext that's used, but basically what's been happening is the U.S. has been supporting dissident groups and insurgent groups that operate along the fringes of the Iranian borders.
Most people don't realize Iran is not homogeneous at all.
It's about 50% Persian, ethnically, and then it's about 50% other.
And the biggest other group is the Azeris.
Then there are quite a few Kurds, and there are quite a few Arabs, and there are quite a few Baluchis.
So in other words, from an imperialist point of view, this is just a recipe ripe for regime change, or at least disruption and destabilization, just pit these groups against each other somehow.
Well, I think the idea is that it ties up Iranian resources, and it makes them less capable of doing things outside their own borders.
I think that's probably the theory.
I don't think anybody expects that this kind of activity is going to overthrow the government.
It's a nuisance, and it's essentially something that makes it, shall we say, the situation less stable inside Iran, when you can have dissident and insurgent groups staging attacks and blowing up bombs and killing people and that sort of thing.
Well, you know, people might remember it was just a few weeks back that there was announced a giant terrorist plot by the Iranians to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, and not to argue from authority or anything, but I think it's important that in the first week, six retired CIA officials, including yourself, said they didn't believe this plot and added their own spin on what they thought it probably was.
But that was you, Phil Giraldi, Ray Close, Ray McGovern, Flint Leverett, Michael Scheuer, and Robert Baer, all said, oh, come on, the Israeli, pardon me, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is going to outsource to some DEA-informant Mexican narco-terrorist a hit on the Saudi ambassador when he's not even a member of the royal family or on the...
Nobody believed this, and at the time, I think we discussed on the show, jeez, could this really be a costus belli?
Is this the kind of thing that could get us into a war, another one of these big fake FBI terrorist things?
And yet, you're reporting here in your article, this new finding to step up covert action against Iran was based exactly on that bogus plot, Phil Giraldi, is that correct?
Yeah, that is correct.
I mean, basically, even though Washington has stopped talking about the plot for some time now, they clearly still believe in it at a certain level, and the fact is that this was the justification for putting more pressure on Iran.
And of course, there have been other steps to put more pressure on Iran coming from Congress in terms of stepping up sanctions and passing Acts of Congress, saying that U.S. diplomats cannot talk to Iranian diplomats.
There are a bunch of things going on, and what I fear is that we're just creating this environment where essentially Iran is constantly under attack by us and Israel, and all we need is an incident, and the whole thing could blow up.
It's, I think, that dangerous.
I think there are a lot of people that are watching this very closely who are saying that we are really on the brink of a war.
Well, and yeah, speaking of things blowing up, things keep blowing up.
Assassinations keep happening in the streets of Tehran, and then you have things like this missile base that exploded, and I guess I should have watched press TV that night to see Ahmadinejad with his big fake smile saying, oh yeah, I promise that was just an accident, which I guess is within the realm of possibility.
You probably know better.
But how many times in a row can these acts of sabotage and assassination take place in the country before the Iranian government can't pretend on TV for their domestic consumption any longer that this is anything but a series of acts of war by the United States and or Israel against them?
Well, that's precisely what it is.
And the latest one, of course, is the drone that was either shot down or forced down or enticed down.
That was a U.S. drone, a CIA drone that was flying over Iranian territory.
But yeah, the assassinations and everything are very definitely, they're not kind of acts of God.
I mean, someone's killing them.
And as I said in the article in Anti-War, I believe that since CIA officers and Mossad officers cannot operate inside Iran, these killings are being carried out by some of these surrogates, by either Baluchis or MEK.
I think MEK is probably, Mujahideen-e-Khalq is probably the group that's carrying out the assassinations because they're Persian, so they can move around freely and they can move within the population.
But anyway, it's these groups that are carrying out the killings and the bombings.
Outsourced, working as agents, as you would call them, for the United States and or Israel?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
They're agents of the intelligence services of the United States or Israel.
And since the whole world is outsourcing everything, I guess it's reasonable that we should do that too.
Yeah.
All right.
It's Phil Giroldi.
He used to be a CIA officer.
Now he writes for the American Conservative and AntiWar.com.
He's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
And we're talking about this covert war against Iran.
And now I want to get back to the Mujahideen-e-Khalq in a second, Phil, because of course there's important politics on Capitol Hill surrounding that issue as well.
But I wanted to say or I wanted to check my knowledge off of yours here about this group, Jandala, this Baluchi group.
Now, I had confused them with the same Jandala that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Youssef's uncle, and one of the ringleaders of the September 11th plot, was a part of.
But before the Pakistani ISI murdered him, Salim Shahzad explained to me on the show that actually there are two different groups called Jandala.
And the one that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the head of for a while there was different than the one that we're using against Iran as a matter of personnel.
But, you know, under the American police or military or CIA definition, hey, these guys are linked.
And that basically, ideologically, we might as well be talking about Ayman al-Zawahiri.
These are al-Qaeda-like, Salafi, radical, Islamist, jihadist types, the very same that we backed against the Soviets, the very same that were our enemies for the last ten years in the terror war, but apparently now are our allies in Iran as well as Libya.
Maybe we can get to that in a minute.
But, I mean, is that really your take on this, that this group Jandala is basically al-Qaeda West focused on Iran here?
Well, I think we make a mistake sometimes when we think that because these groups have their roots in certain places that they are essentially groups that we can manipulate or we can turn around.
The fact is I think what you have to consider about the Jandala group that the U.S. has been working with is that it is an insurgency against Iran.
It basically is a group that wants to establish a Balochistan.
And so in that sense it's an insurgency.
But what the CIA case officers or whoever is handling these guys don't really understand is that these guys have a lot of other agendas too.
They come from somewhere else.
They have a religious agenda.
They have a social agenda.
All these things are things that essentially wind up blowing up in your face.
And that's because you haven't understood really what the guy is all about.
You focused on the one aspect, which is, yeah, he's an enemy of Iran.
Yeah, well, he's that, but he's other things too.
And that happens again and again.
It's happening obviously with the Kurds that are being exploited by the U.S.
It's happening with, well, Mecca is a separate case, but Mecca is a perfect case also.
Mecca has all kinds of agendas that are not compatible with what the United States would like to see them do.
I guess they've been attacks inside Iran have been attributed to MEK, the Mujahideen caucus, since at least 2005, right?
Cheney and Rumsfeld were using them.
The way I remember the story from back then was that the CIA was sick and tired of them and turned them over to the DOD.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's right.
Mecca has been around since the 70s, and in the 70s it was a group that was active against the Shah, and it was a Marxist group.
It still is a Marxist group, and it killed Americans.
So they've been around for a long time.
They have friends in high places in Washington because at the present time in the current incarnation, they're enemies of the regime in Tehran.
So it's idiotic.
These people are not nice people.
They're not people we should be dealing with.
They are terrorists who have killed Americans.
Well, and there's a Rand Corporation study and an FBI report and all kinds of anti-MEK stuff or just documentaries, all kinds of things about them, and it's just an inescapable conclusion that they really are comparable to the Bowen T. Heavensgate cult chasing the comet out there in California.
I mean, they're completely off their rocker, right?
Yeah, they basically are a cult, and I don't know if they run around with tin hats on their heads or anything like that.
Well, they set themselves on fire if any of their leaders get arrested.
Yeah, that's right.
They have done that and have committed suicide on other occasions, not just by killing themselves with guns and things like that in Iraq.
So yeah, they're a bunch of crazies.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of their kids are separated from their parents apparently and indoctrinated and, you know, nothing but pure cult education for their entire young life.
Yep.
And now these are the guys that the Republicans are on the front page of the New York Times crying and complaining at the top of their lungs, Phil, that it just isn't fair that the Mujaheddini communist terrorist cult is on the terrorist list.
Why is that?
What difference does it make if they're on the list or not as long as there's a Barack Obama finding behind it all anyway?
Well, I think the fact is that if you're dealing with terrorism, if these people are on the terrorist list, it raises legal issues about, you know, the interaction.
And ultimately I think a lot of these people want to avoid that taint.
But the fact is that, you know, these people have the Mujaheddini cult have a lot of money, and a lot of the money is coming from Republican sources.
They have right now in Washington, D.C., on the sides of many of the metro buses that go around the Capitol, there are huge posters saying that the MBK should be taken off the terrorist list.
That's amazing to see this here in Washington.
And there have been full-page ads in Washington Post and New York Times lately calling for the same thing.
These people have a lot of supporters.
They have a lot of money.
And the sole thing that I can see is that essentially they are people who are willing to go into Iran and kill Iranians, and for that reason they're being supported.
Well, and apparently they're not good for anything else from the empire's point of view.
They have absolutely no support whatsoever inside Iran.
I mean, that is agreed by experts from all sides on this.
From, you know, I talked with Mohammed Sahimi not too long ago on the very show, on this very show.
He said he hates Ayatollah more than anyone.
I didn't really realize, but the Ayatollah had murdered his family members.
Mohammed Sahimi's family members.
He says, look, I'm as anti-the government in Tehran as anyone in all of L.A., in all of America, in all of the world.
But I'm just telling you, no one in Iran supports the Mujahideen-e-Khalq.
They're traitors since the early 80s when they and Ronald Reagan were backing Saddam Hussein against Iran.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
I mean, these people, you know, essentially the whole thing is ridiculous.
It's so ridiculous, and it's so ridiculous that there have even been, you know, congressional hearings about the MEK, in which former heads of the CIA, Woolsey, and retired generals will get up and say nice things about this group.
And then you find out, of course, that these people are making 10-minute speeches at $50,000 a pop, which may be a reason why they're so supportive.
Well, it's amazing.
I mean, under the laws as they write them, it seems to me like all these generals and Rudy Giuliani and the rest of them, everybody can read all about it in the Christian Science Monitor for one, they could all be imprisoned by the military for the rest of their lives for providing material support to a terrorist group.
Well, you know what the trick is, though?
They don't get their money from MEK.
They get it from a MEK associate.
Every one of these groups that we call terrorists basically has what they call a political front, and the political front is legal.
It doesn't engage in terrorism.
It doesn't do this.
It doesn't do that.
They all do that, and MEK has its own front in the United States.
I can't think of the name of it.
The National Council for Resistance in Iran.
Right, right.
They're basically Sinn Fein to the IRA kind of thing.
Exactly.
It's Sinn Fein to the IRA.
That's exactly how it works, and the contributions go to the national front.
Yeah, so that's how it works, and then they give their $50,000 a crack to people like Wolsey and to people like Giuliani, and that's how the system works, but it's pathetic because they're ultimately supporting a terrorist group.
I wish the Department of Homeland Security would do something about them.
Wouldn't that be funny to see Rudy Giuliani arrested?
That would be a good day.
Yeah.
All right, well, now, so I guess, first of all, I ought to explain to the audience again who they're listening to.
It's Philip Giraldi, former CIA and DIA officer and contributing editor to the American Conservative Magazine as well as regular contributor at AntiWar.com, executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation, and obviously expert on all these things, and he's breaking the story today.
His sources tell him Barack Obama signed a new finding authorizing stepped-up covert operations inside Iran.
Hell, we've seen the results just in the last couple of weeks, apparently, and now there's another new one regarding regime change in Syria as well.
Phil, do I have that right?
Yeah, basically the intelligence agencies have been ordered to carry out some training and provision of communications equipment and of intelligence to the Free Syria Army, which may or may not exist in fact at all.
But basically, yeah, the U.S. is getting involved in Syria.
It's kind of the same way it got involved in Libya and essentially for the same alleged motives, the humanitarian motives.
But of course, I mean, my bottom line of this is that I don't believe anything I read about Syria.
If you read most of the press that's coming out about Syria and you read the article very carefully, you find that the information on who's shooting whom usually comes from a very biased source.
So I really don't believe anything, and the U.N. even has put out reports, and the U.N. reports admit that they really don't have anybody on the ground, and they're basing their reports on other reports that are given to them, which is kind of like what the IAEA did with the Iranian nuclear program.
It based its report on reports coming from Israel and the United States.
So what kind of unbiased reporting are we getting about Syria?
Hillary Clinton has already predicted that there's going to be a civil war there.
Right.
Well, now, okay, so let's see if we can try to compile the best sources that we can.
I mean, first of all, you're saying that you have, I guess, intelligence sources, old friends, from back when you were in the CIA, something like that, who are telling you Obama signed a new finding authorizing covert intervention inside Syria?
Right.
Yeah, there is an agenda.
It's not very intensive.
I mean, there aren't any armed assets controlled by the U.S. government that are going into Syria, but we don't have to do that because the Turks are doing it.
So the U.S. is providing technical assistance, it's providing communications assistance, it's providing intelligence.
Well, maybe this could be a good opportunity for Israel and Turkey to patch things up if they want to work together to wage a regime change in Syria.
Is Netanyahu on board with this, or do you know how much of this is his doing?
Well, you know, actually, I don't know.
The Israeli role in all this is kind of fuzzy.
Well, I guess if America's taking a back seat, they probably would prefer to go ahead and let the Turks do it themselves.
Well, you know, the only thing I can see in terms of – for one thing, I can't really understand what the Turkish objective is in overthrowing Assad because they don't really gain anything by it, I don't think.
But for the Israelis, there's a clear gain, which is essentially that they would like to see most of the Arab states around them precisely in a situation of civil war where they're weak and they're fighting themselves and they're internalized in the whole thing.
So the Israelis would have an objective in doing this.
I can't see much of why the Turks are doing it.
I have a lot of Turkish friends, and I've asked them repeatedly about what they see developing there, and they're quite confused by it too.
All right, well, we have Pepe Escobar's article, and I interviewed him about it.
It's called The Shadow War in Syria, where he talks about NATO, and again, like you're saying, America taking a back seat in this, but I guess to some degree financing, directing it, and trying to build up this rebel army in Turkey to invade across the border.
And then, of course, he's pointing fingers at the Saudis as well and saying this is their attempt to export as many angry young men as they can.
And then, of course, supposedly that's happening in Libya too.
The most radical of the fighters that Obama just used to overthrow Gaddafi are apparently, I think, was it Pepe that said 600 of them were exported off to fight the holy war in Syria now?
Yeah, that's right.
Pepe has reported that, and I've seen it in other places too, that some of these people are showing them how to fight armed soldiers as guerillas.
And so I don't know if it's true or not.
I suspect it is true.
Certainly there have been other reports independently verified of armed shipments of Libyan weapons being shipped over to arm these people.
The whole thing is scary because it's another one of these situations where we don't really understand what's going on.
We're supporting somebody because we have a political agenda to do so, and it's going to have a bad result.
There's no question about it.
There's going to be a bad ending to this.
Well, you know, Eric Margulies is very experienced in that area himself, and he's out on a world tour right now.
Last I saw he was hailing from Egypt, but as soon as he gets back we'll have him on.
He wrote in one article that appeared at LewRockwell.com that, yeah, there are Americans in Turkey.
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
I don't know if it's the U.S. government helping organize this thing.
Sure, absolutely, no question about it.
And I would bet you the National Endowment for Democracy is there already too, teaching them how to create democracy.
Yeah, well, do they even have a disputed election to pretend to cry about or what?
Well, you don't need an election.
I mean, democracy is in your heart, isn't it?
Yeah, I suppose so.
It certainly doesn't have a definition more definite than that, depending on who you're asking.
All right, it's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Phil Giraldi, former CIA guy, writes for Antiwar.com.
And now the excuse for all of this, of course, is the same old beaten dead horse about this nuclear program in Iran.
And now, Phil, you're a former CIA guy.
You write for something called the American Conservative, which is not the American Hollywood Liberal or something like that.
You must take the Iranian nuclear threat seriously.
Come on now.
Well, I would take it seriously if it really existed.
But I'm not convinced yet that it does exist.
I think there's more evidence to suggest that the program was indeed stopped in 2003 and really didn't exist beyond kind of a computer diagram, even at that time.
And I see no evidence of the Iranians having a nuclear weapons program.
But it's kind of interesting.
There's talk now, certainly within the debate among the Republican candidates, that Iran has to be stopped because it can't even have the capability to know how to make a weapon.
And this has been surfacing.
And apparently it's also becoming, it's my understanding, the policy position of the White House, that Iran not only cannot have this breakout capability, but they can't even have the pre-breakout capability of mastering the technology, which many countries in the world have been able to do.
So it's getting kind of, again, this underlines the point.
The thing is they're already past that red line, if that's how they want to word it, because they've been spinning centrifuges since, what, 2006?
They've been enriching up to 3.6 percent industrial grade for their electricity program.
They've already proven that they know how to enrich up to 20 percent in very small amounts for the fuel for their medical reactor.
So if they're saying the knowledge, then hell, all they've got to do is point to that time that the CIA gave them finished blueprints for a plutonium implosion bomb and one major glaring error and say that, hey, they received the document we planted on them.
There's the knowledge right there.
I mean, what are we talking about, pre-breakout capability now?
Yeah, I think so.
And it's just another example of why they can't win in this debate.
I mean, there's no way that they can prove a negative and keep proving a negative.
And so nobody's going to accept that.
And unfortunately these idiots we have running for office don't seem to be interested in anything that even smacks of the truth or smacks of credibility.
It's just a question of Iran is the enemy, and they're going to work out a way to get them.
And it's just real scary because this is not a fun venture that will be started.
I mean, the Pentagon, as you saw Panetta during the past week, basically telling the Israelis how about starting negotiations with the Palestinians to defuse this situation and being rebuffed.
Basically, this is a no-win situation for the United States, and I don't see anything good coming out of it.
Yeah, well, this kind of thing just seems like a tripwire waiting to happen, especially to find out that these new findings authorizing this new covert activity are based on the bogus assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador there.
I mean, that makes the Gulf of Tonkin look legitimate.
That makes Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons stockpile look true.
I mean, give me a break.
Yeah, I think that the fact is that our elected leaders are intent on a war here.
I think basically President Obama does not want one right now, but I think he's essentially on board the Hillary Clinton train here, which accepts that somewhere down the road Iran is going to have to be sorted out.
And, you know, Ron Paul is the only voice in the wilderness.
I mean, just saying that, you know, why don't we try to talk to them?
I mean, we've been threatening them for five years.
Well, you know, he was on CNN the other day, and the entire thing was, yeah, but you can never win because you're so outside the norm on foreign policy issues.
And it was left to him to say, look, you're basically saying that we have to have a war with Iran.
You know, to finish his thought, you would think they would have to even make a case, but they don't even make a case.
It just simply is the unstated but embedded premise in every TV argument on Iran that they're making nukes, that the bombs must start falling sooner or later.
That's it.
You know, today's Washington Post had a lead editorial that basically said we have to get tougher and more tougher and tougher with Iran.
And then there was an article from an op-ed from someone from the American Enterprise Institute basically saying the same thing, only worse.
It was absolutely amazing.
I mean, it's like when is somebody going to present a contrary view on any of this stuff?
And, of course, nobody is.
I mean, it's not going to happen.
Yeah, well, and there we're stuck.
And, well, hopefully it'll only stay this bad and not get too much worse too soon anyway.
Yeah, that's what we have to hope for.
All right, thanks very much for your time tonight.
Thanks, Bill.
Okay, Scott.
That's Philip Giraldi, everybody.
He is a former CIA and DIA officer, writes for the American Conservative Magazine and Antiwar.com, and he's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
That's it for the show tonight.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
This has been Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I keep all my foreign policy archives from this show and my other radio shows at Antiwar.com/radio.
Thanks very much for listening.
