Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is also from the American Conservative Magazine, as well as Antiwar.com, the American Conservative Defense Alliance, and now the Council for the National Interest, Philip Giraldi.
Welcome back to the show, how are you doing?
Hi Scott, I'm doing fine.
Alright, so, oh by the way, Phil is a former DIA and CIA officer as well, and that's relevant for this interview for certain.
Alright, tell us Phil, who really was Shahram Amiri?
Well, Shahram Amiri, insofar as I can determine, was a relatively low-level scientist working for the Iranian government.
He was, in a sense, a nuclear scientist, and his expertise was in radiology, but it was in radiology as applied to medicine and other industrial uses.
He was not involved in the Iranian nuclear energy program, nor was he involved in what people have been supposing to be a hidden secret nuclear weapons program.
He was a volunteer to the CIA, he provided some very low-level information to the CIA for a while, maybe as much as two years.
He then defected while he was on a religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia when there were concerns raised that he might be under suspicion from the Iranian government.
He came to the United States, he was very highly touted as a major intelligence breakthrough when he appeared about a year ago, and after a while became homesick, went back home, and the Iranians, of course, are now playing him for all the propaganda value they can, while the United States has done its best to burn him by claiming that he was a major source for a number of years, seeking to sow distrust among the Iranians.
All right, well, it sounds like you're contradicting all kinds of people and basically everybody and every other narrative about this.
And, of course, you are a former CIA guy, and you say in your article, which I'm sorry, I should have said this at the beginning, it's the article, it's the most important news article of the week, if you ask me, the National Security Product by Philip Giraldi.
It's at antiwar.com slash Giraldi right now.
So, you're being critical here.
This article's not towing the CIA's line, but it's not towing the Iranians' line by a long shot either.
You're saying that this guy's claims that he was kidnapped are not true, but you're also saying that the Washington Post and New York Times intelligence sources are also not telling the truth when they talk about how important this guy was and what they learned from it.
Yeah, I'm saying that very definitely.
And I'm saying that as a, you know, I don't have any particular special knowledge on this, except I have talked to a number of other former agency officers about it.
And, you know, basically, I know how the system works.
I mean, I've done this stuff myself.
I've recruited Iranians that were of marginal value that were sent back to Iran or otherwise used up.
I mean, this is the way the system works.
As I point out, this guy is a very small cog in a much bigger story about the way that intelligence agencies, you know, they're a business.
That's really what they are.
And they try to, when they get something that they think is exploitable, that will look good to Congress, that will look good to the White House, that will look good to the media, they really sort of, you know, blow their own trumpet on this.
And this is what they did with this guy.
And and this guy basically will be the victim of the whole thing.
He was victimized by the United States.
He produced basically no intelligence that makes you or me any safer.
He's now gone home and everybody's doing their best to exploit him.
And and this guy will wind up dead.
Yeah, sad story.
Now, how does this work where he's living in Tucson for a year, whatever he's under house arrest with a CIA guy hanging out in his living room all day or what?
Well, it kind of depends what they did, what they saw as the issues or the security profile.
If he was in Tucson, he was there in as part of the program to resettle him under a new name and a new identity with a big fat bank account and and so on and so forth.
And, you know, sometimes in a case like this, if they figure the guy is in danger of running, they might have a guy as a minder.
But you can imagine that gets kind of expensive.
And in other cases, they just sort of figure that he has no real reason to want to go back home because he'll get he'll get fried by his own people.
So they don't really have very high security with him.
It really depends on the case.
If it's a high profile, direct defector, they certainly would have some security arrangements around around him.
You might recall the the other Iranian defector recently, Ali Reza Asghari, who disappeared in Turkey a couple of years ago.
Well, anyway, he was he was a he was a kidnap.
I mean, they they with the assistance of the Turks, the CIA snatched him.
And basically he then agreed to cooperate.
And he was resettled in a third country, which I believe is Egypt, and was given a nice fat bank account and a new identity and so on and so forth.
You don't hear much about him these days because he was a guy that genuinely had real information that they wanted to protect about the Iranian nuclear program and also about Hezbollah.
So, you know, there's a whole difference, a world of difference between the way these two these two cases were handled.
And in the recent case, Amiri, the case is the guy really had very little value.
So it was a question of trying to exploit his his his persona, in a sense.
And if the guy were a real intelligence resource with major information, they would handle it completely differently.
All right.
Well, and yeah, I mean, in other words, they wouldn't have brought him here.
They were if it was the kind of thing where they were going to kidnap him or something, he would have disappeared off the face of the earth, not gone to Tucson.
Well, they certainly wouldn't have brought him to Tucson.
I mean, it might he might have wound up in Tucson, depending on what they wanted to do with him.
But in this case, the fact that as soon as he defected, it was it was in the news.
That means that he wasn't, you know, really considered to be a serious intelligence source.
Now, for example, look, like that was the op, right, was getting Diane Sawyer in on the thing.
Yeah, absolutely.
That was that was the real op.
But look at it this way.
If if you had a guy who just defected to you and had really, really good information, you would keep it secret for as long as you want it, because you would know that the Iranians on the other end would be sanitizing like crazy to change everything this guy knew or had access to or or try to find out what exactly he might have revealed.
So the fact that they made it public right away should indicate to everybody that this was this was kind of a phony.
And in fact, as I recall, there were even people in the mainstream media at the time saying, well, you know, he knows about medical radiology.
What what's going on here?
Crazy.
Well, all right, so there's a note in the chat room here, Phil, that says this story is very confusing.
So let me just see if I can make sure I understand it right and see if I can walk the audience through this here.
This guy is a low level nuclear, basically nobody in Iran.
The CIA recruited him while he was still in Iran.
They got a little bit of information from him.
Then one day he's on the Hajj in Saudi Arabia, decides to make contact and come to the U.S. They decide he's really not good for anything because the first thing he tells them is now there's no nuclear weapons program.
I don't really know that, but that's what I hear.
The scuttlebutt, as Gareth Porter quotes, he was saying in his most recent article on this.
And so his real use to them is to put him on TV.
And then so he's kind of, you know, chilling in Tucson.
He misses his family, wants to go home.
So he makes up this story about, oh, they kidnapped me and all this.
You know what?
Here's where a part where I'm confused.
First of all, tell me if that's more or less the narrative, as you understand it.
And then how was it that he got away from Tucson and ended up at the Pakistani embassy in D.C.?
That kind of seems like somebody must have screwed up there.
Well, it depends on what you consider a screw up.
I mean, you know, he hopped on a bus, hopped on a plane, hopped on a train.
You know, if he wasn't being guarded, if he was there and he had some money, he could have easily made it to the Pakistani embassy because he knew the Pakistani embassy is where the Iranian intersection is.
And, you know, I don't think the CIA had already made the decision.
They didn't care whether he came or went.
Anyway, I think probably decided at that point they weren't going to spend any more money on him.
And, you know, that's the harsh reality of this stuff.
You get when you're when you're a CIA ops officer, you go through a lot of bodies.
You know, you you you you meet a lot of people.
You talk to a lot of people.
You recruit some of them.
Some of them turn out to be good, that they have good information.
Most of them turn out to be a waste of time.
And this is one of these cases where there was propaganda that things take place.
All right.
Well, I'm glad I got everybody interested with this whole defector and kidnapping and all this story, because the real story is the new national intelligence estimate that's being cooked up right now.
And we get back from this break, we'll be talking about that with Phil Giraldi from antiwar dot com slash Giraldi.
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All right.
So looking back to the show, it's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Wharton.
And if you're anywhere nearly as lazy as I'd like to be and you can't get around to reading much news, read this one.
This is the one news article this week.
If you're one of those one news article a week, people, the national security product at antiwar dot com slash Giraldi.
Now, Phil, you make reference to the national intelligence estimate in here.
And I think most of the audience is familiar with the idea that at the end of or the end of November 2007, the National Intelligence Council, which is, I guess, the the Big Oak table with the leaders of all the different 16 intelligence agencies that they admit exist sitting around it, agreed and put out this national intelligence estimate that said that the Iranians do not have a nuclear weapons program and they haven't made the political decision to start one and that there's been immense pressure, especially, of course, by the Israelis and the Israeli lobby in the United States to have that national intelligence estimate rewritten to say that, uh-huh, they are, too.
And so what do you know?
Well, I what I'm hearing is is that basically this this has been a work in progress for over over a year.
In fact, it's been a work in progress that actually went back to to the Bush administration before Obama even came in.
And there's been incredible pressure, as you note, to rewrite this thing.
The under Bush, the pressure was basically to rewrite it to reflect the fact that the findings were wrong under Obama.
It's been maybe a little more subtle in that what they're trying to do is is rewrite it so that you look for a different conclusion.
And the different conclusion in this case would be that the important issue about Iran is that they have they will soon have what they call breakthrough capability.
In other words, the ability in a relatively short time to produce a nuclear weapon.
So in other words, we're no longer worrying about an actual nuclear weapon.
We're worrying about the capability to do it, which, of course, about 100 countries in the world have and the intentions to do it, which is impossible to assess.
So basically what Obama would like to see is a document that comes out that will give him all kinds of options, including very nasty options to deal with Iran.
And the analysts, the CIA and other analysts that are working on this, on the contrary, are not going to get conned again like they were with Iraq.
And are fighting back or pushing back.
They're saying, look, the evidence just does not exist that Iran is either close to a nuclear weapon or intends to build a nuclear weapon.
So it's a question of how you package it that they're fighting about now.
And it's not by any means clear when this document will actually come out.
Well, what about the scuttlebutt as to whether anybody at the CIA or the National Intelligence Council has integrity like Thomas Fingar had back in 2007, who basically put his foot down and said, no, look, I'm not going to go along with this.
Not again is the CIA going to take a blame for lying, take the blame for lying the American people into war.
Let the Pentagon take the blame this time or so.
Well, I think that's what you're seeing.
You're seeing that the analysts in general who are working on this, I don't know who the head analyst or the chief analyst is on it, but clearly they're not going to be pushed into producing something that will turn out to be something that will lead to another war like Iraq and will be something that will be blamed on the intelligence community.
So they are digging in their heels.
Yeah, thank God for the self-interest of the CIA over there.
You know, somebody's got to contradict these people.
And, you know, the thing is this and I talked about this with Gareth on the show the other day.
And now I've been talking about it with you on the show for years now, five years now, the Iran subject.
And the whole thing is this.
There's nothing new, Phil.
Nobody's got a thing that stands up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.
The worst they got is the London Times and a bunch of nonsense, nonsense where if you forward it to Gordon Braithwaite, he laughs out loud.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's there's a lot of disinformation, obviously, most of it originating with the Israelis that indicates that, you know, this bomb program is imminent.
I mean, you like, you know, they've been saying that for five years and it's maybe more imminent now and in certain measurable ways in that Iran probably has somewhat more lowly enriched uranium than it had before.
But, you know, this this there's no solid evidence that there is anything but a program to to generate electricity.
And that's the bottom line.
Yeah.
Well, if we just let them run their nuclear program, they would.
Well, if Obama just taken the Iranians acceptance of his offer, then all that 20 percent would have been enriched outside of the country and they would only been imported in the form of fuel rods or targets for their isotope reactor.
And they wouldn't be sitting there contributing to this so-called breakout capability.
And the three point six percent would be running through the through the Boucher, the whichever other reactor, I forget the name of it.
And it wouldn't be weapons.
It wouldn't even be possible weapons fuel sitting there, even at three point six percent in a pile, even though that's safeguarded by the IAEA right now.
It would be being used right now.
And this so-called breakout capability would be gone because they'd be making electricity out of the uranium they've already got.
Yeah, I mean, it's to me inexplicable why why Obama did not accept the the Turkish and Brazilian media is offered to to have this stuff taken care of outside the country.
You know, it's just it's just but it shows you how powerful the people who want war with Iran are.
They don't really care what the answer is ever.
They they only care about the bottom line, which that essentially they they foresee a war against Iran.
All right now.
Yeah.
And well, and that is the important point, that the nuclear issue is simply a pretext for regime change here.
But while there's so many different questions, I want to ask you, actually, let's talk about the Jandala attacks that took place in Iran recently.
Of course, there are news articles going back years that say that the CIA and or the DOD support these guys.
Do you think that America was behind these bombings in Iran recently?
I think America was probably an enabler of these bombings.
I don't think that the United States directed these people to attack the targets, the civilian targets that they did and kill what they killed, 80 people, something like that.
You had a mosque.
They had a mosque.
And so I don't think they were directed to do that by the United States.
But the United States is is basically giving them money and giving them arms and and supporting them in other ways.
So it's you know, it becomes a question as to what extent is the United States culpable, probably not culpable of the actual act, but culpable of permitting it to happen.
Well, and now that story broke.
It was first, of course, Andrew Coburn at Counterpunch and then Seymour Hersh and then The Telegraph and Brian Ross at ABC News over and over again.
The story was confirmed.
But did anybody ever even imply that any of this changed when Obama became the president's support for, say, for example, the Mujahideen al-Khalq or Jandala?
Well, I mean, I think the reality is that nothing has changed under Obama.
I mean, there's been some cosmetic changes, but the tone is different.
The language is different, which is maybe is a plus.
Mec now it looks like Mec is going to be legalized.
Mujahideen al-Khalq, I think that's coming.
So that's actually a step backwards.
I mean, they're as if they're as much a terrorist group as some of the other groups that are being called terrorists by the administration.
And, you know, as you know, I personally believe that the terrorist list published by the State Department is nonsense anyway.
But, you know, it's like, is Obama besotted with power or what has what's happened to this guy?
Did did did they did they arrange something?
There was actually a double out there and they shifted him when when we weren't looking.
I mean, it's it's absolutely astonishing that a guy with this much common sense, I thought.
Can actually be pursuing some of these policies.
I mean, Afghanistan is is unbelievable.
Yeah, well, and supporting John Dalla to do bombings in Iran.
I mean, this is it's not smart.
It's not just immoral.
It's like you're saying, it's ridiculous from a statecraft point of view to be doing things like this.
And oh, and this is what I was going to say about.
I'm sorry, I kind of spaced out there earlier when you mentioned why Obama didn't take the deal with that that Turkey and Brazil reached with the Iranians, their second attempt to accept his offer to them to export their uranium and swap it.
Do you think that the raid on the Gaza flotilla, that way overdone raid had anything to do perhaps with making Turkey the bad guy of the week or the month so as to help disrupt any chance that somebody in the State Department or somebody would convince Obama to go ahead and go for that thing?
Oh, yeah, I think that's definitely an issue.
The the Hillary Clinton and Obama have both fired warning shots at Turkey.
There have been a couple of comments about how Turkey is slipping into into Islamic authoritarianism, you know, language like that, and even more coming from Congress.
Yeah, Turkey.
See, when Turkey became adversarial, for want of a better word, with Israel, suddenly Turkey had to be taken care of.
And I think to a certain extent that that's what we're seeing.
And Turkey has very good reasons to have good relations with Iran if they share a border.
That's about a thousand miles long.
Yeah.
And how dare you try to make peace with us?
We'll show you how to work things out.
We're trying to have regime change here.
Right.
The nuclear issue is just a pretext.
Somebody tell the Brazilians and the Turks, send them a memo.
They're late.
All right.
Well, thanks, Bill.
I really appreciate it.
OK, thanks, Scott.
Good to be on again.
Hey, everybody, I really strongly urge you to go read the National Security Parada by Phil Giraldi at Antiwar.com right now.
It's a good one.
