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All right, y'all, introducing Julian Borger from The Guardian, shades of a long time ago again here.
White House pressuring intelligence officials to find Iran in violation of the nuclear deal.
You have to go back in your archives, because he's very prolific, but it's here at The Guardian.
Welcome to the show, how you doing, Julian?
Good, thanks for having me on.
Good to talk to you again.
Hey everybody, Julian's the guy that wrote The Spies Who Pushed for War, back in 2003, that you should read, all about the last time around.
So, this time, shades of Scooter Libby here.
The pressure is on, on the analysts, in Langley, Virginia, at CIA there, to come up with a story about Iran, is that right?
Yes, I mean, there was pressure to go back into everything that was known about Iranian compliance, non-compliance with the Iran nuclear deal, the 2015 deal, and a request from the president himself, to go back and find evidence of non-compliance.
What I would say is, the difference this time around, is that from what I understand, there has been pushback, and CIA intelligence analysts, and the other intelligence agencies, are not going to be used this time around.
They're very, very aware of what happened over Iraq.
They are not going to be, and have been very careful not to get what they have said, in their analysis, misread for political ends.
So my, in general impression, my understanding is, this time, the intelligence agencies are not going to play ball in the same way as they did over Iraq, or to be, have their, what their findings misrepresented.
And so, the Trump administration have gone another route, a different route, and which is really a route using a certain amount of legal sophistry, to reinterpret a line in the preface of the Iran nuclear deal, which is a kind of catch-all, that is going to be their main drive for, if they decide to declare Iran in non-compliance.
Really, sort of a general welfare clause kind of a thing, that they're taking out of the preamble?
Can you explain that a little bit more?
Yeah, absolutely.
In the preface, there is a line that says, the signatories on this deal anticipate that it will contribute to the peace and security of the region.
Now, the intent behind that was just really, almost a truism, that by doing this deal, we will at least defuse the tension, the growing tension that there was back in 2015, the years running up to 2015, the great tension there was over the Iran nuclear program, and at the time, Israel was threatening to take military action, and so it was really all the signatories saying, this deal, we hope, will make things better by taking the nuclear element out of it.
What the Trump administration are doing, are saying, by signing this deal, you Iran said that things were gonna be better, things in Syria were going to be better, things in Yemen were going to be better, that's the region, and things aren't better in the region, they're not better in Yemen or Syria or Iraq, therefore, you're not living up to the spirit of the deal.
Now, no other signatory to this deal agrees with that interpretation.
Yeah, well, and nevermind the fact that, I mean, even if you really have a chip on your shoulder about Iran, it's hardly fair to blame them for everything going on in Yemen and in Syria, and leave out America and its allies' role on the other side of both of those conflicts, all of those conflicts, I should say, I guess.
Yeah, absolutely, I mean, and especially you could pick out the Yemen war, where the US is behind the Saudi-led coalition, supplying them, arming them, as well as the UK, I might add, and they are supporting a bombing campaign that is killing thousands, tens of thousands of civilians.
So, obviously, that game could be played both ways.
But the central point is, all the signatories of this deal intended it to be an exclusively nuclear deal.
They deliberately separated off the nuclear element from all the other regional tensions that they were, because they realized if you bring everything in, you never solve anything.
So they said, let's just try and see if we can isolate the nuclear element and deal with that.
And in the preface, they said, we hope that this will make things better.
And that single line, the Trump administration is using to try and justify abrogating the deal.
Well, now, so as far as the specifics of the deal, it's in the news this morning that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joseph Dunvirt, along with all different types, as I know you've reported, and it's been all over the media, all different agencies, European agencies, UN agencies, the IAEA, and the different American, you know, departments and agencies involved, they're not lying about this.
They're saying, as you said, kind of in the beginning, it's just too obvious this time around.
There's no way for them to sit here and pretend that, oh, yeah, all of a sudden, we think that they're secretly, they must have a secret program.
We don't know where it is, but it must be there somewhere, or we think they must have a secret reactor at Parchin in some building we haven't inspected or asked to inspect yet, or something like that.
No one's gonna buy that.
So instead, I mean, it seems like a pretty thin read, though.
I think you already said the European allies, they certainly don't interpret that sentence to mean that the nuclear deal was supposed to solve every problem, and they're not gonna buy any interpretation that says Iran is in violation of the deal because everything in the world didn't work out.
I mean, any idiot, any Republican can see that that's shifting goalposts in a way that really gives the advantage to the Iranians because it's just too ham-handed, can't work, right?
Yes, but you did raise another important point, and this will be a second avenue of exploration.
There's an agreement there are no technical violations, but the other avenue of attack, if you like, that is being supported by Netanyahu's government in Israel is this idea of the IAEA, the UN nuclear watchdog, is not being assertive enough in carrying out inspections of undeclared sites.
Now, the IAEA say, listen, you bring us convincing evidence that something nefarious is going on at a particular military site, then we will press to carry out an inspection.
And until now, they have not been given convincing evidence.
This is what the IAEA says.
You bring us evidence, Elise, and we'll go and have a look.
But what the Israelis and the Trump administration, Nikki Haley in particular, in her speech, are saying, there are all these sites out there.
We should be able to inspect them as a matter of course.
The IAEA should be able to walk in there as a matter of course, even if we don't have anything specific there.
There's no way Iran is going to agree to that.
So that is a second avenue of attack, trying to make the IAEA inspection authority to be almost unlimited.
And that also would lead to a breakdown over the deal.
All right, so the deal is two years old.
And now if you go back three years, then the Leveretts, Flint Leverett and his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, they had put out their book, Going to Tehran.
And their argument was that if Obama doesn't just go to Tehran and say, you know what, let's settle the nuclear issue and Israel-Palestine and Hezbollah and this, that and rockets and whatever other things that we can possibly deal, that if we try to do just the nuclear deal, it's going to end up falling apart.
And I think they were probably surprised to see that he actually was able to get the nuclear deal done.
But the same logic applies, it seems like, that unless we have a real rapprochement with Iran, then we have, as you're saying, what Trump is using as his excuse here, that this wasn't enough of a deal, it didn't cover enough different topics.
There's still missiles outstanding, there's still support for forces fighting against ISIS in Syria and these kinds of things.
And so they're able to ratchet tensions that far back again.
So it sort of seems like their wisdom kind of played out there, that what we really need, that Obama, in a way he was smart to just push the nuclear deal the way he did, but ultimately it seems like they were really right, that unless he was willing to take all of the outstanding issues and deal with them kind of all at once, that it was going to end up blowing back this way.
Yeah, I'm not sure about that.
I'm not sure if I agree with that.
I think, A, as you pointed out, if you brought everything into the pile, you weren't going to get an agreement.
They had to separate out the nuclear and make sure that at least whatever conflicts blow up will not be nuclear conflicts.
And I don't think there's many people now in ISIS who think that that was wrong, because you can't solve all the conflicts going on.
I think it is going to be hard to come to agreements with Iran over Syria in that I think the Iranian all out support for the Assad regime, I think is unacceptable to the Europeans, the Western Europeans, and most Americans.
I mean, it is a murderous regime, and Iran has supported it to the hilt.
And so that is going to be a much tougher conflict to resolve.
And to some extent, there is reason to believe that because the moderates around Rouhani were able to secure this deal, then the IRGC, the Revolutionary Guard Field, they have a free hand in Syria and maybe have a more aggressive stance in Syria and Iraq than they did before.
And so those may have worsened slightly, but the general argument, certainly put forward by the Europeans is that is not a reason to torpedo something that works.
And the hope is that if this agreement is allowed to work, then the moderates in Iran are strengthened, the middle class gets stronger, more prosperous in Iran, and you get a more moderate regime all around, and that the relative strength of the hardliners, the Revolutionary Guard, and the real conservatives is weakened over time, but it will take time.
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Well, and it's clear, well, I don't know how clear it is.
Well, certainly it seems like it would be much more likely for all these things to work out much better if the Trump regime, the Trump administration, as they call it euphemistically, was acting in good faith here, and was actually saying, hey, all right, we got a nuclear deal, it's not perfect for whatever reasons, Netanyahu says it's not perfect, but oh well, let's build on that, and let's try to do better that they could do so much better, right?
And this is what, Dunford, as you mentioned, Joseph Dunford was talking yesterday, and he was saying, if we just walk out of this deal in the absence of any kind of material breach, we will lose all our credibility.
And this is a very important point that the European ambassadors were bringing up in a joint appearance a couple of days ago, is if you blow off this deal, having spent years negotiating it, but you're named to it, and it's not only a multilateral deal, but one enshrined in a UN Security Council resolution, i.e. it's international law, if you walk out on that, just because you've changed your mind, how are you ever going to have credibility to try and do another kind of non-proliferation deal?
How are you ever going to have credibility to even get close to carrying out negotiations with the North Korean regime?
Your credibility will be shot.
And for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to be saying something like that is a very powerful message.
Well, I mean, I don't know, what exactly, do you think that there's, I mean, it's easy to say, well, Trump is just a fool, and he's listening to the worst hawks, and they're trying to cause a war, or some kind of thing like that, but that doesn't really seem right.
He's trying to give himself some kind of advantageous position for further negotiation, and yet it sounds like you and I both seem to think, well, this deal is this deal.
If they're going to have a new deal, that would have to be a new one, but they're not going to renegotiate this entire nuclear deal based on some bombastic threats by the president like this, even if he decertified them.
They still have a solid deal with the rest of the UN Security Council, and as I know you know, they already had a deal with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and therefore a safeguards agreement with the IAEA before that.
They have now the additional protocols and all these things.
None of that's going to go away, even if the Americans break the deal.
So in other words, it doesn't really help America to break the deal, but so what does it help them do?
Because it doesn't seem like it's going to help them to renegotiate the thing either.
Well, yeah, you come to the point of motivation.
Why is Trump motivated to do this when we're pretty sure that neither Mattis nor Tillerson is in favor of this, it's a self-destructive move.
And you know, there are various theories.
One is, you know, the really stupid one.
He wants to obliterate everything that was done by President Barack Obama, and this is a deal that he is, you know, is a deal made by Obama.
And he just wants to, he has decided, wants to obliterate the legacy of Obama.
That's one motivation.
Second one is that he is heavily influenced by Israel and Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
They have been able, they have been very smart in terms of flattering him, in terms of getting access to him through Kushner.
And they have, it is clear, a disproportionate influence over him.
Now, whether there is something hidden there, whether there is anything, you know, financial when it comes to Saudi or UAE that we are not seeing, that's a separate, you know, unknown here.
But it is clear that they have a disproportionate influence, and they are pretty much Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, pretty much the only three major countries who are against this deal.
Well, and a lot of that is a synonym for the American War Party and all of K Street and the neoconservatives and all of that.
So now, as far as the replay, the second time is farce kind of a thing here in terms of trying to pressure the CIA.
It's hard to admit, probably for you as well as it is for me, how much time has passed since then.
But there are a lot of people listening to this show who don't remember how it was back then, who don't know the story of how Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby had gone personally to the CIA to force them, basically, to come up with something, go through the trash.
And when that didn't work, they had the Pentagon neocons go through the CIA's trash to cherry pick out the story to get us into the war.
That's your article, The Spies Who Push for War about the Office of Special Plans there.
But so now, tell us everything you can, I guess, about, because you have some really important quotes here about that they say, go through the trash, find anything you can, and all this kind of thing.
Yeah, and also, remember that back in 2002, 2003, the Pentagon set out a separate intelligence collecting machinery that relied very heavily on Iraqi exiles, Ahmad Chalabi's guys, who were very happy to make up stuff.
And all this bogus stuff got into the works through the Pentagon Parallel Intelligence System and led to second guessing of the more conservative CIA analysis of some of these defectors.
And so, the analytical ability of the CIA was diluted by a much less pernickety and rigorous Pentagon.
And so that opened up the way for all this bad intelligence to get into the system.
That's one of the silver linings, I hate to even put it that way, really, of the Iraq War, right?
Is that Bush spent 2002 saying, the CIA are magic, high-tech supermen who know everything and no one can question.
If American intelligence says something is true, then forget about it.
And then the war happened, and then they said, well, it's all the CIA's fault.
They said there were a bunch of weapons there.
And so, it was clearly a White House and Pentagon-led thing.
The CIA, John Kiriakou was actually on the show talking about how the CIA was against the war with the State Department.
But they were basically being corralled into the thing, and then they took all the blame for it.
So now they're pissed.
And they stood up against Obama in 2013, too.
A bunch of them threatened to resign rather than come out.
That's why they had the government assessment instead of a legitimate CIA assessment about the attack in Ghouta in August of 2013.
Yeah, I mean, I think the CIA are once bitten, twice shy.
And you talk to people who've come out of it, and they say that when you go into the CIA, part of basic training 101 is to learn the lessons of the Iraq War.
And one of those is to keep political pressure out of it, and B is to red team all your assessments, expose them to maximum rigor, second-guess them all the way along.
And so there is great institutional resistance now to be being used as a political tool.
Now, the problem is, of course, that a political operative in the shape of Mike Pompeo has been put in charge.
But he is going to find a great deal of institutional resistance if he tries, once again, to politicize the intelligence collection and analysis functions.
Well, you know, it's interesting, though, too, how they can flip that around, right?
And say, ah, see, no, we need to red team your assessment that everything is fine, and we need to be extra.
This is actually a James Mattis essay that he wrote about the CIA.
It's actually a James Mattis, a famous thing of his is, oh, yeah, then what?
Oh, yeah, then what?
And you think, oh, good, we have like a wise questioner, you know, double checker type of a person in this role.
But then you find out that, no, what he was saying was, oh, yeah, if you try to make peace with Iran, then what?
Then what?
And that was what he was doing.
He was red teaming, trying to do anything right.
And that's what you have in here, too, where they're, in this article, where you have these guys talking about how they're being told that, oh, no, it's this permanent Obama deep state that says that the deal is fine.
So now we need to make sure that, you know, in other words, twist it all around and say that that's the bogus intelligence that needs to be double checked.
Yeah, I mean, I do think that, obviously, you know, rigor and second guessing and not assuming that the deal is a good thing, you know, is a good thing in itself.
But it is hard to come away from any analysis of the JCPOA and say, you know, we can get to a better situation.
I mean, the stock of enriched uranium held by Iran has diminished by 99%, nearly 99% compared to the stock that they were holding before this deal.
The main heavy water reactor up in Iraq, the corridor, the core of it, has been filled with concrete.
And so in terms of a proliferation risk, the JCPOA deal is probably the most effective piece of non-proliferation in modern history in terms of, you know, almost reducing a nuclear program to near zero.
It's an incredibly effective deal.
If you come out of that deal, you are immediately, from the proliferation point of view, in a worse position.
And there is no getting around that.
So no amount of red teaming.
And obviously, this is what's happened.
They have red teamed it in defense and state and CIA.
And they've come back and said, I'm sorry, boss.
Any way you move away from this deal, you get into a worse position.
And so Trump and the immediate circle, and Haley is clearly going along with this, have gone for this two-track approach.
One is to deliberately misread the preface.
And second is to push on inspections and push for almost unlimited inspections as a way of breaking the deal.
Well, so yeah, that's interesting.
I guess we'll see.
As you said, Mattis and Tillerson, they don't want, and they'll probably advise him to, and Trump will probably, it seems like to me, will probably stay within the deal.
He will, you know, for now, or, you know, in a couple of weeks here, it's October the 15th, I think is the day, he probably will recertify them.
But as you're saying, continue to try to pick the fight.
He can't say, as you're saying, he can't say they're making nukes or anything like that.
They just have these sort of barely side issues, not credible ones, so I don't know.
Do you think that they're actually gonna fail to recertify the thing?
It just doesn't, it seems too outlandish, I don't know.
I don't know.
By strictly speaking, if he does not certify on October the 15th, he is not, strictly speaking, violating the deal.
It's an American, it's a US political issue, this question of recertification.
It's got nothing to do with the deal.
And he's putting it on Congress to see what they're gonna do with it.
He's putting it on Congress, and he has his get out because under that piece of legislation, he can say either they're not in compliance or that this deal is no longer in the general interest of US national security.
So he could say that.
He could say they may be in technical compliance, but this is no longer in the interest of national security.
Therefore, I will not certify.
And then Congress would have 60 days in which to frame new legislation that would impose new sanctions that would break the deal.
And so it would be put back on, the onus would be put back on Congress to make a decision and potentially lead to the trigger, the violation of the deal.
All right, well, thank you again for coming back on the show.
I appreciate it.
Pleasure.
All right, you guys, that is Julian Borger reporting for The Guardian.
This one is called White House Pressuring Intelligence Officials to Find Iran in Violation of Nuclear Deal.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
Thanks for listening.
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