You are gravely mistaken. There was no rollup of U.S. agents in Iran during Iran-Contra (1986-1990).
Posted on 06/17/2006 7:30:56 PM PDT by fight_truth_decay
The American spy who persuaded Libya to renounce its weapons of mass destruction is to return to the Central Intelligence Agency, where he will direct an aggressive drive to recruit informants inside Iran to aid possible negotiations over Teheran's nuclear capability.
Stephen Kappes, a former United States Marines officer who resigned from the CIA after a clash with its then director, Porter Goss, has been brought back from self-imposed exile in London by George W Bush.
Iran will be top of his agenda. "He's a remarkable guy, a talented leader and among the finest officers of his generation," said Gary Berntsen, the CIA's key commander during the invasion of Afghanistan, who has worked for Mr Kappes in the Middle East. "He knows the target [Iran] intimately."
The return to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, of Mr Kappes, 54, has boosted flagging morale at the spy agency. A former CIA station chief in Moscow, he led successful efforts to penetrate the network of A Q Khan, the rogue Pakistani scientist, who supplied Iran and Libya with nuclear know-how.
He will be deputy to Gen Michael Hayden, who took over from Mr Goss and characterised his predecessor's tenure as "amateur hour". Mr Kappes is the first career undercover operative to ascend to this level for more than 30 years.
The CIA's first priority is to gather intelligence from inside Iran about the theocratic regime's nuclear capabilities and intentions, and the locations of its secret weapons sites. Such information would be crucial in the event of direct talks - or in launching military strikes if negotiations collapsed.
Mr Kappes is a Farsi and Russian speaker who, while stationed in Frankfurt in the late 1980s, was in charge of collecting information about Ayatollah Khomeini's regime and debriefing Iranian exiles.
Mr Kappes is understood to have told friends months ago that he favoured direct engagement with Iran, even suggesting that there might be a case for restoring diplomatic relations with the country and reopening the American embassy in Teheran, closed since the 1979 hostage crisis.
Earlier this month, the Bush administration made an about-face by proposing direct talks on the nuclear issue if Teheran suspended uranium enrichment. Mr Kappes would be a likely candidate to lead any such negotiations.
Robert Baer, a former CIA agent handler in the Middle East, said: "The CIA has a terrible track record in Iran. In the late 1980s, they lost all their human resources [informants] after the Iranians got into the mail." More than 30 CIA informants were arrested when the Iranians intercepted and deciphered CIA communications in 1989.
In October 2003, Mr Kappes led a 15-strong American and British team that went into Libya to test an overture by President Muammar Gaddafi, suggesting that he might be willing to give up his weapons of mass destruction. The information gathered by Mr Kappes helped to persuade the Libyans that the West had clear evidence of the military intent of their nuclear programme.
Mr Baer, author of Blow The House Down, a novel about 9/11, said that a similar outcome would be difficult to achieve with Teheran while America had poor intelligence-gathering capability in Iran. "We have to open up a negotiating channel to Iran, if nothing else to figure out what they're thinking."
But Mr Berntsen said he believed that negotiations were unlikely to succeed and military action against Iranian nuclear sites would have to be taken.
Exactly right - Having Kappas back in is a good thing - His expertise and talents are very much needed at this current time -
Interesting post. Outstanding thread. Thanks to all who contribute.
You are gravely mistaken. There was no rollup of U.S. agents in Iran during Iran-Contra (1986-1990).
WOW CATCH OF THE WEEK. Nice job!
L
bookmarking
ANOTHER file? LOL --- you're awesome, Peach.
The '89 for '98 switch is interesting. It's on the FRadar now. Thanks.
I don't read Kappas as being a Clintonista. I think he is a real spook and suffers the government weasels poorly. I would want nothing else from somebody who has balls big enough to go to Libya and ask for them to turn over their weapons program. We need ballsy MFs in the CIA, pre Church-commission types, to do the work that hasn't been done enough in the last 30 years. We have become way too dependent upon technology and too afraid of political fall-out to take the risks which accomplished great feats like stealing Russian nuclear subs from right under their noses and bugging the Kremlin or overthrowing communist governments without bring in the Army.
Outstanding analysis exposing more attempted disinformation. Unfortunately, this will just be the beginning of this new campaign. In any event, although having Kappas back seems like a very good thing, it will take years to develop a new intelligence network in Iran.
Excellent Post
BUZZFLASH: Another factor in terms of the relationship that you’ve described as sleeping with the devil, and that you detail in your book, is that the Saudis have very shrewdly given jobs and consulting contracts to politicians and American government officials as they leave their government jobs.
BAER: I could have sat down and done a list of all my former colleagues from the CIA who ended up on the Saudi Arabian payroll. Some of them are known, like Ray Close. Others have gone public, but there are others that haven’t. A bunch of my colleagues went to work for a public consulting firm where the initial capital was paid for by the Saudi embassy to lobby the Hill for the Gulf countries. A former member of the National Security Council under Reagan set this up. And it’s not like it’s a secret. Even Bandar [Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi prince and U.S. ambassador] has said, according to the Washington Post, that if I take care of people coming out of office, the new ones coming in are going to be a lot friendlier to Saudi Arabia once it gets known.
BUZZFLASH: And it’s worked.
BAER: It works great. I’d be really popular in Washington if I could throw around a couple hundred million dollars every year to law firms and others. Another thing the royal family does is cultivate the press through public relations firms.
save
The Decision to Test
Pres. Bill Clinton made a last-minute plea to Sharif, Wednesday night. According to presidential spokesman Mike McCurry it was a "very intense" 25-minute call in which the president implored the prime minister not to conduct a test. It was the fourth presidential call to Sharif since India's first explosion on May 11. But the test time had been set - 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon of 28 May 1998.
Dust raised on Koh Kambaran in the Ras Koh mountains by the Pakistan-I test, 28 May 1998
Yes, that was during the "mad scramble." 4 Presidential phone calls to the President of Pakistan from President Clinton himself.
The Clinton Administration had been blind-sided by India's nuclear tests, and the entire Administration was looking completely impotent to stop the Pakistan nuclear tests that followed in that same month of May, 1998.
It was during this "mad scramble" that the Clinton Administration ordered all of our agents in Iran, our field ops, our runners, even our sleeper cells, everyone, to immediately report **everything** that they knew or suspected. The Clintonistas were frightened out of their wits that Iran might further embarrass them with yet another surprise nuclear test that the CIA had missed. They missed India. They couldn't stop Pakistan. A third nation setting off yet another surprise nuclear test right then would have impeached President Clinton (or cost the Dems dearly in the November mid-term elections, at least).
This data dump caused a massive communications surge...to the **same** foreign address.
But Baer and his traitorous allies will lie to your face, saying that wasn't when the Iranians broke our entire spy network in Iran. They'll lie to you saying that the ill-thought order to demand an immediate data dump from all of our agents in Iran came from former CIA Director and current (at that time) President GHW Bush.
Baer will lie to you claiming that our network was busted DURING THE IRAN CONTRA AFTERMATH in 1989 rather than admit the truth that our network there was crushed in 1998.
Look at your own news clip of the mad scramble put on by the Clinton Administration after the Indian nuclear tests, just prior to the Pakistan nuclear tests.
Who was in the mindset to demand an ill-thought-out data dump from our agents in Iran: the caught-off-guard Clinton Administration in May of 1998, or the CIA Director President Bush who was guiding us out of President Reagan's Iran-Contra affair way back in calm 1989?
You'd have to believe in the tooth fairy to believe Baer and his ilk...
Robert Baer ping
You're good.
Actually, you misjudge Bob Baer.
Get him started on Clinton's approach to clandestine operations some time. He was involved in a military coup that was going to overthrow Saddam. At the last minute WJC pulled the plug.
It's in Baer's book "See No Evil," which is not political in a partisan sense. Neither is his book bashing Saudi Arabia -- it whacks both Republican and Democratic administrations pretty hard.
My personal impression is that he's simply trying to understand the middle east. A big job.
As far as Iranian sources are concerned -- there have been several times we have needed intel on Iran only to discover that our human intelligence sources in the country are poor (best case) to nonexistent (frequent case). Espionage-wise, it's a hard target.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Thank you, Southack, for capturing and noting this. Marking.
Great post. Thanks for the insight.
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