Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Now all week we've been covering the Mujahideen-e-Khalq.
And they're a group of Iranian dissidents, some say terrorists, who are working very hard to be delisted from the State Department's officially designated terrorist group list.
And so we've been covering the politics of that and the history of all that this week.
And so now, to help add some very informed comment to it, is Phil Giraldi, former CIA and DIA counterterrorism officer, contributing editor to the American Conservative Magazine, and contributor to AntiWar.com.
He's also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation at cnionline.org.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing pretty good.
So now, I'm kind of stuck behind this computer screen reading about the MEK and talking with people who know things about it, and that's as close as I can get to the story, really.
But you used to be a CIA counterterrorism officer, and I wonder what you can tell us about the MEK, not from what you've read recently, but from what you knew back then about these guys.
Do you know a lot?
Well, I can't claim to know a lot, but let me give you a little anecdote that might illustrate where I come from on this.
Back when I was in the CIA, we used to have a special course.
It was called Countering Terrorism and Tactics, and its popular name was the Crash and Bang course.
It was one of these courses where you would ride around in old wrecked cars, and they would teach you where to smash into a car that was trying to block the road, and they'd teach you how to shoot a handgun, and so on and so forth.
So this was the Crash and Bang course.
The course opened with a demonstration of the killing of two U.S. Air Force officers, and the killing that was demonstrated took place just outside of Tehran, and it was carried out by MEK.
And so this is what CIA training basically used as an exemplar of a terrorist attack against American citizens.
So that's something that's always kind of stuck with me, that these people are indeed people that killed Americans.
The question of terrorism lists and stuff like that, I think you probably already know.
I'm very dubious about these lists because I think they're political.
But the fact is that MEK is a group that is a terrorist group that has killed Americans, and it's a group that is being supported, certainly by some people, because the intention is to turn them loose so that they can kill Iranians.
All right.
Now, let's see.
As far as your view from formerly being inside the intelligence community, that kind of thing, do you think that your point of view is shared?
I'm kind of reminded of the story of Jonathan Pollard and how I think Bill Clinton was about to pardon him, and he got word that the entire intelligence community would resign in protest over it, that they would be so pissed that he would never, ever be able to live it down, and that he had to back down on pardoning Jonathan Pollard, and he actually did.
And I wonder if this is that kind of thing, where the average CIA agent is going, what the hell are you talking about?
You're going to delist the MEK and make friends out of them.
I think that the average intelligence officer who knows anything about MEK is probably opposed to MEK being given like a free ticket to start to operate and do what it intends to do against the Iranian government.
But the fact is, it's not a hop-button issue.
It's not like Jonathan Pollard.
Most people are only dimly aware of MEK, and it's not something that they're going to go to the wall about.
So I suspect that MEK is going to get its free pass, because it certainly has bribed enough people in both the Democratic side of the House and the Republican side, and I think that it's not an issue that Obama feels is going to hurt him very badly.
It probably won't hurt him at all.
So I think it will happen.
Well, and now, like you, I'm dubious about all these lists, because they can be used to just persecute innocent people, obviously these assertions and designations, and I'm not even sure there should be a national government at all.
So certainly, to hell with their lists.
However, in this case, when you do have the list, and you take this one group off of it, it really means something.
And it seems like from talking with Scott Peterson from the Christian Science Monitor yesterday, the War Party is intent on basically doing a rerun of the Iraqi National Congress and Ahmed Chalabi and his group in the run-up to the Iraq War with these guys.
They want to make them the official exiles who can go on front line and say, oh yeah, I'm telling you, they're making nukes, all right, etc.
Yeah, that's exactly what's happening, Scott.
This is a complete replay.
And while a lot of the people, the congressmen, the former government officials who are speaking out on behalf of this group are doing it because they've been paid lots of money, there is a hard core there of people like John Bolton who have a definite agenda, and that agenda is going to war against Iran.
So this is going to be that same scenario playing out again.
And quite honestly, I don't care if these guys are on a list or anything like that, but whether or not they're on a list, they should be recognized for what they are, and they should be.
You know, the Attorney General has authority to put restraint on any group that is openly advertising that it is going to be taking some kinds of actions or hostile actions against a country of which the United States is not at war, and we're not at war against Iran.
Well, and now can we talk about the last few years of covert activity inside Iran and the JSOC and the CIA possibly using these guys as terrorists?
I know back in 2005 and 2006 there were certainly reports that they were being used to soften up the ground for the war that Dick Cheney hoped to launch.
Yeah, well, it's not only that.
They were again playing the Chalabi role, which is essentially they've been providing information.
And the information, of course, is always negative information about Iran.
And they claim to have good sources inside Iran.
Well, Chalabi claimed the same thing about Iraq.
So this has been the mantra all along, that these people will help us against the evil Iranians.
And, you know, unfortunately if we let this happen, it's going to be a replay of what we saw in Iraq, because it's clear right now that the United States people have no memory whatsoever.
I mean, we've gotten into one war after another sequentially, all based on lies, and yet somehow the United States keeps doing it.
You know, I can't quite get it.
Yeah, well, it is amazing.
But now back to the point about committing violent acts inside Iran.
I think, you know, I've talked before about MEK and PJAK and Jandala, but what do you know?
Can you tell us about whether you know or you've heard from people who know inside the government that you still know, for example, that the U.S. really did use MEK or has been using MEK inside Iran to kill people?
Well, the consensus in the intelligence community, certainly the talk, is that the United States has been running operations into Iran with the cooperation of the Israelis in some cases, with the cooperation of the Pakistanis in some other cases, and has been basically running destabilization-type operations where you go in and you do a bombing or you shoot some policemen or you do things like that.
And they've been running these operations for quite some time, as you suggested, over five years.
Right.
And now, well, here's the thing, too.
I mean, John Bolton, clearly we know what he's up to with this, but, you know, there's a quote of Rudy Giuliani in the Christian Science Monitor piece where he says, hey, we've had an Arab spring, how about a Persian summer?
Like, yeah, let's just do this.
And I wonder, you know, is there that much consensus about John Bolton's view?
Is it that paper thin, the understanding that our leaders can have that can take us into a war like this?
Like, yeah, it worked in Iraq because the surge worked, everybody knows that, and so let's try it again?
Yeah, I think that's the danger here.
Basically, you know, you're talking about the same small group.
I mean, people like Giuliani who are instinctively hawks on every issue, saying that these things are what we should be doing.
But the fact is, you know, you can flip this thing over and you can say, look, look at it the other way.
The other way is the fact that none of these things have worked over the last ten years.
They've all turned out to be disasters for both the indigenous people and for the countries we've attacked, and for the American people, and particularly for our budget, for our treasury.
These things have been disastrous.
And yet they think with a certain joie de vivre that we can go into yet another country and do it again.
It's scary.
All right, everybody, we're talking with Phil Giroldi here on Anti-War Radio.
You'll find his column at antiwar.com and the American Conservative Magazine.
The Council for the National Interest Foundation is cnionline.org.
And we'll be right back with more on the Mujahideen-e-Khalq Commie Terror Cult right after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the line with Phil Giroldi from antiwar.com and the American Conservative Magazine.
He's a former CIA and DIA counterterrorism officer.
And we're talking about the Mujahideen-e-Khalq terrorist group that the war party is trying to get delisted from the terrorist list so that they can more easily use them to get us into a war with Iran.
And it seems to me, Phil, like if I was an imperialist, maybe a realist and not a neocon, I would think that, hey, the best way to get a regime change in Iran would be to leave them alone for a minute and let this green movement push for reform from below.
And then maybe we'll have a government that's easier to deal with.
Something like that, because what are you going to do, get into a war with them?
I mean, come on, right?
And yet our government supports a terrorist group that apparently their number one mission is to discredit any other dissident group of Iranians, whether inside Iran or outside.
And two, to provide the, as you said, emphasized, provide the bogus intelligence to lead us into a war with that country.
Well, I think the case is here that, you know, it's clear that MEK has no support inside Iran.
So all you're doing, basically, is giving the Iranian government something to beat you over the head with, that the Iranian government will say, see, we're surrounded by enemies and they're being supported by the United States and they're out to get us.
And, you know, the average patriotic Iranian, when confronted with that evidence, even if he didn't support the government before, might consider supporting it then.
So it's totally counterproductive.
The best thing we could do with Iran is to leave it alone.
It has a terrible economy.
It has a government that's mistrusted by virtually everyone under the age of 60.
So if we would leave Iran alone, we would probably have an Iranian spring.
And it would be spontaneous and it would probably change the government there.
But the fact is that the more we meddle with these situations, the more we poison the waters and the result always turns out to be bad.
Now, as far as, you know, the currency with which I guess John Bolton is always the best example, you know, his view on things, how much weight does that really carry in D.C.?
Are there really, you know, people with power, not just on the margins, but really in a position to make these decisions who believe like he does, like Giuliani does, that like, oh, yeah, we'll just support these dissidents and we'll, you know, bomb their nuclear facilities and we just know everything will work out great kind of attitude?
Or tell me somebody up there is, you know, sober enough to say, hold it, guys, you know?
Well, here's the problem.
The problem is that while there aren't too many people that are sensible in the Washington establishment who would per se support someone like Bolton or Giuliani, the fact is there is a broadly based consensus that the Iranian government is bad, is doing bad things, and that it would be a good thing to bring them down, to change them.
And I think, unfortunately, people like Bolton and Giuliani are able to ride that sentiment to a certain extent, and it means that it in a way validates the arguments that they're making.
Now, you and I know from having spoken of this before that there is no evidence that the Iranian government is creating a nuclear weapon, but yet I opened the Washington Post last week and there was an op-ed by, what is his name, Ray Taki?
And he basically led into his article saying they are developing a weapon, and he based his argument on his assertion that they are developing a weapon, but there's no evidence of that.
And yet you see that all the time.
There was a Washington Post editorial about a week and a half or two weeks ago which said essentially the same thing.
They're developing a weapon, we have to get tough with them, we have to do this.
So the problem is these clowns like bonkers Bolton feed off of this sentiment and it legitimizes the arguments that they're making.
Right, you say there's no evidence, but what there is is a lot of smoke, a lot of bogus intel, almost all of it that comes from the Mujahideen in Iraq and their front, the National Council for Resistance in Iran.
That's quite true.
Again, it's a replay of what happened with Iraq where you're getting this false information and these people are claiming they have access to good information sources when they really don't.
And since the U.S. doesn't have tremendous information on what's going on inside Iran, it has to take the information at face value and say this either looks credible or it doesn't look credible, but they don't really know.
Well, I remember Gordon Prather, nuclear physicist and now retired, former chief scientist of the Army and creator of nuclear weapons at Sandia and Lawrence Livermore, etc., used to write for us at Antiwar.com.
And I guess two Augusts ago, the Sunday Times put out this bogus information, I believe from the MEK, about, oh, the Iranians figured out a new way to do an implosion bomb by cutting these grooves into the metal and all this and that.
And I remember Gordon just laughing and laughing until he lost his breath coughing.
He just couldn't believe that this had made it into the newspaper, that they didn't call a single scientist to laugh at it before it got published.
This is the kind of stuff that they put out on a regular basis.
It just doesn't matter if it doesn't hold up in the end.
What matters is that top-of-the-hour AM news on your car stereo on your way home from work says, oh, my God, new information about an Iranian implosion bomb or whatever, and the smoke sticks in your eyes even though they never light it up with actual facts.
Yeah, well, the Sunday Times and the Daily Times, of course, are major sources of these kinds of reports because they're Rupert Murdoch-owned and they've long been an outlet for both Israeli intelligence and for British intelligence.
So if you want to get out a story that the Iranians are doing XYZ, even if you have to make it up, the Monday Times is a perfect place to put it.
Yeah, I also remember when they came out with the story of the tunnel complex outside Tehran, in a suburb of Tehran, and they said, oh, this is a secret nuclear weapons facility, and the State Department came right out because I guess they didn't want to be that embarrassed by this one and said, nah, come on, we've known about those tunnels for years and years and they don't have anything to do with nuclear anything.
Yeah, I mean, that happens all the time, obviously.
But the problem is, you know, once the story is out, it's out.
And the story is out there and people are repeating it, and they never repeat the denial.
The denial never registers with anybody.
Well, in fact, to this day there's a UN resolution that says the Iranian government must answer an endless list of questions based on what we all know are the forged alleged studies documents that the Israelis funneled through the MEK.
Yeah, that's right.
And they're in violation of international law because they're not going along with this UN Security Council resolution to continue answering, you know, when did they stop beating their wife, based on forgeries.
And we already know are forgeries.
That's right, and there's been a consistent pattern of this with reporting about Iran.
And, you know, I'm not saying the Iranians are great people and they're not up to mischief in that part of the world, but, you know, at the same time they're surrounded by about 200,000 U.S. troops and large naval forces.
And we keep threatening, we and the Israelis keep threatening to do things to them.
Yeah, and, you know, and we've talked about this for years on the show too, Phil.
It's not like they could really do damage here.
I mean, I don't know, maybe in the worst of Frank Gaffney's scare story, they could get Hamas to blow up something here somewhere or something.
But mostly what they could do is fight back like hell against our assets in the Middle East, in Iraq and Afghanistan, our naval stuff.
All these things that are threatening them are also targets within their range that we've set up for them to fight back against if we ever do get this thing started.
Yeah, I mean, that's the problem.
We create these scenarios that we didn't have to create, and then we become vulnerable.
And then we wonder why we're vulnerable, and we wonder about why people we're turning into enemies might possibly be contemplating doing something to us.
You know, it's a whole vicious cycle of idiocy, and you wonder when Washington is going to wake up to the reality of this and just say, come on, none of this has made any sense, hasn't made any sense since the Korean War.
Now, here's what I'm confused about, though.
Could Ayman al-Zawahiri just hire a PR firm and some lobbyists in D.C. and walk around the halls of the Capitol bribing politicians and whatever?
I mean, how are they getting away with this in D.C.?
Well, apparently, as I understand it, they have a large slush fund, which probably comes from people like Frank Gaffney, and they're using this money liberally to pay people $20,000 and $30,000 and $40,000 to talk for 10 minutes about how they should be delisted.
You know, if you have money, you can do anything.
They're not doing anything illegal by paying speakers, and I guess they figure if they do enough of this, it's going to get into the mainstream media, which, of course, it has, and most of the coverage has been supportive.
So they've accomplished what they set out to do.
So really it's just legally speaking, it's the same as Sin Fein raising money in the bars in New York?
Yeah, it's precisely the same.
These groups that are labeled as terrorists, they set up a front, which is a political front, which is not labeled a terrorist group because it doesn't have an armed wing or an armed capability, and this political part is the one that goes out and raises the money.
Which is why Peter King is in Congress, not prison right now.
Well, yeah, he should be in, yeah.
Well, I won't go farther on that one.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time today, Phil.
Okay, Scott, take care.
I'm Phil Giraldi, everybody, the American Conservative Magazine and antiwar.com and cnionline.org.
