Alright, welcome back to the show y'all, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our first guest on the show today is Phil Giraldi, he's the Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation, writes for the American Conservative Magazine and AntiWar.com, and oh yeah, he's a former CIA and DIA counterterrorism officer.
Welcome back to the show Phil, how's things?
Everything's fine Scott, how's it going?
It's going pretty good, except Brian Ross has got some news at ABC, they're rerunning the story at Yahoo as well, exclusive CIA spies caught, fear execution in the Middle East, and this is about spies in Lebanon and Iran, apparently have been rolled up.
Can you tell us what you know about the story so far?
Well I don't have any special insider knowledge except from what I know derived from my own experience with running Iranian operations and that sort of thing, I think I have a pretty good idea what happened.
Obviously we're talking about two separate major spy operations, the operations being run against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and also the operations being run inside Iran.
That's what the article says, is that they were two different CIA operations and they were rolled up in two different busts basically, it wasn't that one led to the other apparently.
Well I'm not so sure that's true actually, I would rather suspect that there might have been some, shall we say, contamination from one to the other.
The agency has a tendency to meet people like, if it's running Iranian agents, it would be meeting them obviously when they get out of the country in a third country, and that well could be Lebanon.
And I would not be awfully surprised if the poor tradecraft that was exercised with the Lebanese agents might have been a factor in identifying also some Iranian agents.
So I wouldn't rule that out.
And now according to the story, that sloppy tradecraft you're referring to there, they apparently met these guys repeatedly at the same pizza hut in Beirut?
Yeah, the Beirut Pizza Hut apparently was the favorite venue, and I can say that having been there and done that, you know, the CIA officer will never turn down a free lunch.
So it's lazy, it's sloppy, everybody does it on occasion, but these guys apparently were making a practice of it, even to the point where they were not just meeting an agent there, they were meeting all their agents there.
And when the Hezbollah inserted a double agent into the process, the double was obviously able to identify the restaurant, was able to identify the CIA officers, and was able to identify all of the agents that the CIA was running, all of whom probably have been killed by now.
Now the reason I'm concerned about this is not because I was hoping the CIA could do another 1953 coup and overthrow the government in Iran.
I'm concerned because it seems like it'll be easier for the war party to lie if the CIA is not reporting back to the United States the truth that they cannot find any evidence of a nuclear weapons program in that country, as they have done up until including this year with the 2011 update to the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate.
Well, yeah, that's certainly a possible consequence of this, in that the people who support a stronger position against Iran will trot out this argument that we don't know what they're doing.
Obviously, they could well be up to something.
I mean, that argument will certainly be used.
I don't know to what extent that the several, apparently there were as many as 30 CIA agents in Iran that were arrested, and they were apparently arrested, again, because of sloppiness or lack of security in the way that they were being contacted.
They were being contacted, allegedly, through an internet site, and I can just see how this works.
You know, having been there, somebody gets lazy, and we got 30 agents in Iran.
He probably sent a message to all of them at the same time.
And you know, this kind of stuff, patterns and stuff like that, that's what counterintelligence officers look for in terms of identifying people that are enemy agents.
And you know, I could just see something really sloppy having gone on.
We may never find out the details, but I would suspect it's something like that.
Now, can you clarify for me, agents this and assets that?
Well, in jargon of the CIA and all the other intelligence agencies in the world, a case officer is your own government official.
It's the person that is, in our case, an American citizen who is usually in an embassy, working out of an embassy staff undercover, and that's a case officer.
He handles the cases, which include your agents and assets.
Now, an agent is, of course, the person who actually gives you the information.
An asset can be anything.
An asset can be either an agent or a technical operation like a TELTAP or something like that.
So when you say agent, you're not necessarily referring to somebody who's been recruited by CIA headquarters, but somebody who's been recruited by a CIA officer.
He's not a government employee.
He's someone who's recruited by a CIA officer to provide information to the U.S. government.
So that's an agent.
So the agent is a foreigner normally.
Right.
Gotcha.
Because, you know, these terms are thrown around and used interchangeably in ways.
In fact, in a way, I think quite different than what you would say.
Usually agent, it would be conflated with officer, your job, when you actually, you know, directly a CIA employee.
And then anybody who's just recruited by them, I would have thought was just called an asset, not an agent.
Yeah.
Well, it's, you know, the jargon is basically that it's somewhat confusing.
I mean, the media will often refer to a CIA agent when they're actually referring to a CIA officer who is a case officer.
Right.
So he handles agents that he recruits who are usually foreigners.
And as I say, an asset can be an agent or it can be something else.
It can be some some other source of information.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, are you worried at all that these guys cover was blown deliberately, that they were set up?
No, I'm not worried about that at all.
I mean, they probably deserve whatever they got.
But the problem because of the stupidity with which they were carrying out their plan.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm talking about the Americans now.
But they won't get punished.
They'll be reassigned somewhere else.
And the problem is that they walk away from it and you get a dozen Lebanese who got killed and you're going to get maybe 30 Iranians who got killed.
And there is something wrong if you read if you read the article.
And I know you have read the ABC article on this.
They had a couple of mealy mouth bureaucrats in Washington commenting on it, say, you know, spying is a high risk business.
You know, some guy sitting on his fat butt in Washington, it's not a high risk business for him.
It's a high risk business for that poor sod over there that's getting there, putting his life on the line and getting killed.
Right.
And this to me is just another symptom of of of how mean a country we've become in terms of how we view, you know, torture is OK.
It's OK to to send people to foreign prisons where we know they're going to be tortured.
You know, all this stuff has become a drone attack, which wipes out a wedding party.
It's perfectly fine to recruit a traitor and then leave them hanging out to dry and not even do a good job trying to protect them at all.
That's right.
That's right.
And certainly in my day in the agency, I'm not saying it was it was a perfect environment or anything, but it was different.
And you had a you had an obligation when you took on somebody as an agent.
They weren't just a disposable product.
They were somebody that you had to if they were doing a good faith job for you and for the U.S. government, you had an obligation to protect them.
And that was the way it was.
And I've just you know, I just read this stuff and I'm freaking out.
And I certainly know there were cases back in my time that were just as bad where agents died because some American screwed up and then nobody was punished.
I mean, that seems to be a pattern of the U.S. government.
It's it's still something that people at that time looked at and said, how awful is this?
I mean, somebody screwed up and somebody got killed.
And now we have a whole parcel of people got getting killed and all they're all they care about is that we don't we don't have the information coming in.
I bet it was most of the information was garbage anyway.
Yeah.
Well, now, the reason I ask about whether you think even it's possible or worried at all whether they were deliberately, you know, set up or whether this was just stupidity, you know, it's often the question, stupidity or the plan show, regardless of the topic we're covering.
But, you know, there was the story where the CIA mailed out checks to all of their spies in Iran from the same snail mail address.
And they all got rolled up a few years back.
I think it was James Risen that broke that story.
Well, actually, I was involved with that.
I'll tell you about that after the break.
Well, right on.
I want to hear it.
All right.
And more.
Phil Giraldi from Antiwar.com.
More after this.
All right.
So looking back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Phil Giraldi.
He's a former CIA guy, officer, that is.
And now he writes for the American Conservative Magazine and Antiwar.com.
Of course, he's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
And we're talking about this Brian Ross story at ABC News.
Dozens, apparently, a couple of dozen or more CIA agents have been rolled up in Lebanon and in Iran.
And Robert Baer, the Iran expert and former CIA officer, is quoted in here saying this is a catastrophe and the only way this could ever happen is when you're mishandling sources.
And that's what Phil was saying on the other side of the break there.
And Phil, there was the example of the CIA mailing paychecks out to all their agents in Iran and getting them all rolled up a few years back, like I think it was in the James Risen story in his book.
I forgot which one.
Anyway, there's that.
And you were going to comment on that because you know all about it.
But then I was also going to bring up in the question of stupidity or the plan, I'm suspicious that the real reason that Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby outed Valerie Plame was not really to embarrass her husband, Joe Wilson, who had embarrassed Dick Cheney by disproving the Saddam Hussein Niger uranium forgery scam, but that that was really the two birds with one stone.
The real reason was they wanted to destroy Brewster Jennings.
They wanted to destroy the ability, or at least try their best to destroy the ability of the CIA to get information about Iran's participation in the global nuclear black markets.
It was my wife, Larissa, broke the story at Raw Story all about how Plame was working on Iran.
And that's what Brewster Jennings was up to, that her CIA front company was monitoring the nuclear black market and Iran's participation in it.
And so wouldn't that be the real reason that Dick Cheney would want to out Valerie Plame would be part of his war against the CIA, again, because it's easier to lie about Iran if the CIA isn't showing up telling the truth about it every day?
Yeah, I mean, I think there's no question, but that Valerie Plame was working against Iran.
She was showing up in Turkey and she was involved with Turkish groups and Iran at that time, its main access point to the West and to get technology in, technology out, and everything was through Turkey.
So I believe that that's correct.
And whatever motivations Dick Cheney might have had, you know, the case you're making is very plausible.
I mean, obviously he hated the CIA anyway, and essentially he didn't want, it was clear in the whole Iraq business that he didn't want the CIA delivering any messages that contradict what he wanted to be the truth.
So it's quite plausible, sure.
And now, at least in the movie, and I don't know the entire Valerie Plame story, but at least in the movie, her outing helped get a bunch of very good sources inside Iraq, scientists, nuclear scientists, etc., rolled up inside Iraq who were delivering those messages Cheney didn't want to hear as well.
Yeah, I don't know about that aspect of it.
I think that was invention for the movie.
Because they couldn't talk about what happened in Iran.
Right.
She's been very careful about not providing any details about the specific operations she was working on.
So I suspect that that's kind of a Hollywood thing.
But it could be true.
It could be that, you know, they kind of worked their way through it somehow, where she was explaining what she was doing without being too explicit.
All right, now tell us about this thing where all these agents got rolled up by the mailman.
Well, yeah, let me tell you what happened.
The Reisen story is not completely accurate.
This was back around 1990.
There were at that time 19 CIA agents operating inside Iran.
And the Center for CIA Operations Directed Against Iran was in Frankfurt, Germany.
And anyway, they used to communicate with these 19 agents by way of what we call secret writing.
It's a system whereby you write a letter with like a chemical and you write the letter and then over it you write another letter like, you know, how's mom and the kids doing and so on and so forth.
And you send it off to the person and if somebody opens it, it looks innocuous.
But since if they have the chemical used to develop it, they can get the secret message underneath.
So anyway, that's how they communicated with these 19 agents.
Anyway, again, they got really lazy about what they were doing.
They turned this was a boring job, as you can imagine, writing these these letters.
And they turned it over to a secretary.
And the secretary didn't particularly like the job either.
So she would sit down once a month and do all the 19 letters at the same time.
And she would drop them at a German mailbox.
And they would all go off to to Iran.
And after this happened two or three times, the Iranians noticed these letters all in the same handwriting, all with the same postmark, and all at the same day arriving.
And they they figured out what it was.
And they realized that, hey, these 19 people these letters are going to are the CIA agents that we have inside Iran.
They arrested them, they tortured them, and they killed them.
And I had a particular interest in the story because four of the agents that were arrested, tortured, and killed had been recruited by me.
And I recruited them when I was in Istanbul.
And I was in Barcelona when I found out about this.
And how did I find out about it?
There was an article in the International Herald Tribune that came from the Iranian government sources.
And I said, holy Christ.
And I went ballistic.
And I said, you know, how could this happen?
You've killed all these people.
I still remember their names, I remember their faces.
And how could you do this?
And the reply I got back was pretty much, yeah, rough stuff happens in the intelligence business, which was one of the reasons why ultimately I left.
But you know, it's that kind of crap.
It's like, you know, you don't leave your ethics at the door when you when you work for an intelligence service.
And if you do, there's something wrong with you.
And well, I just I have to tell you, I'm surprised that the CIA ever accomplishes a thing the way they operate.
I mean, it is a government program after all.
Well, you know, you could argue that it doesn't.
I you know, I think that certainly in my time in the agency, there was very little information came from the massive effort of trying to recruit spies in places like Russia and among terrorist groups and stuff like that.
Most of the information they got came from technical means where they would be listening in the phone calls, they would be putting in bugs in various offices and stuff like that.
There's a lot of truth to that proverbial legacy of ashes there.
Yeah, exactly.
Legacy of ashes is right.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so now what does this mean for the propaganda war, though, you know, as Justin Raimondo says, we an antiwar dot com are locked in mortal combat with the war party.
They lie.
We debunk it.
Now, what does this mean for the future of that?
Well, I think it means a couple of things.
I think it's just one more indication of this dark path that we've been going down.
And the fact that, you know, these people can can people are out there willy nilly recruiting people as spies and then not taking care of them and letting them get killed and just assuming, all right, we'll go on and get a few more now that these are dead.
It's just another indication of our moral decline, I think.
And that's what bothers me the most as a former intelligence officer.
Yeah, but you're right.
This whole message is going to be exploited that, OK, gee, we really don't know what's going on in Iran.
They probably have a secret weapons program and it'll be that kind of thing, that kind of argument.
Well, if we have anything going for us, it may be, as Seymour Hersh has reported, that the Joint Special Operations Command has U.S. boots on the ground in Iran collecting their own intelligence and they can't find anything either.
Apparently, they've been untouched by this.
Yeah, they would.
They've been operating out of Kurdistan and and also from Pakistan.
Yeah, that's been going on in Afghanistan.
That's been going on for quite a while.
I mean, Seymour, I think, first started reporting that, geez, I mean, to 2005.
And it's certainly an ongoing effort.
I mean, they kind of try to do it in what they think is a safe way by darting in and darting out.
But I don't think they have any permanent bases.
But they have, of course, probably local recruits who are permanently there.
So I, yeah, we're just, you know, we're involved in all these wars and without declarations of war, without any clear understanding of what we're doing, why we're doing it and how we're going to get out of it.
And it's, as Justin puts it, it is a fundamental issue.
We're at war with these people and we have to figure out what to do.
There was a piece in the New York Times, an op-ed by Ruel Gorek and somebody named Dubowitz from the Future of Freedom Foundation.
No, it couldn't have been from FFF.
Oh, yeah, yeah, it could have been.
No, I'm talking about the other one, FDD, Future Democracy, you know, it's the foundation for the defense of democracy.
Defense of democracy.
Right, right.
Very different from Hornberger's operation.
All right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
I'm not trying to implicate the other one.
But anyway, the whole point of the thing was that we should create this funny sanctions regime to pressure Iran, enable the Chinese to buy oil from Iran, because that will, in some crazy way, reduce the price of oil for everybody.
You know, it was like this fantasy being concocted by these people to give one more justification to go to war, to say to the American people, hey, your gas prices will actually fall if we go to war with Iran.
I mean, so ridiculous.
And it was a featured op-ed in the New York Times over the weekend.
Amazing.
I'm glad I missed that one.
I can't stand reading anything he says, although I really should.
Like you're saying, there's a lot to be gained from reading them.
And now, look, we're fixing to be over time by a second here.
But I wanted to ask you real quick about this piece in the Independent Britain and Secret Talks with Syrian rebels.
This really is the Libyan model, an attempted Libyan model to set up one of these governments in exile that Europe and America are soon to recognize as the only legitimate government of Syria.
And the regime changes on.
Am I right?
I think so.
Yeah.
And I think that the Arab League having kicked Syria out is a precursor to that.
It's a way of saying that they lack legitimacy.
I agree with you.
I think that that's what's coming next, I think.
And then, you know, I'm sorry for doing the slippery slope argument.
I know it's a logical fallacy and all that, but war with Syria means war with Iran, doesn't it?
Well, it depends.
I'm not hopeful.
I'm just...
Yeah.
Depends on how they play it.
But I think, obviously, what we're seeing is that, yes, slippery slope, these things all have a way of escalating.
They don't actually diminish.
They escalate.
And I think that's what we're going to see.
All right.
Everybody, that's Phil Giraldi.
He's a former CIA and DIA officer, writes for the American Conservative Magazine and Antiwar.com.
You can also find him at the Council for the National Interest Foundation, where he is executive director.
Thanks very much, Phil.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
