Cue Bruce Willis voice: "Welcome to the party, pal."
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.
Welcome to Free Republic.
Cue Bruce Willis voice: "Welcome to the party, pal."
Not to any appreciable degree.
How do we know that? How do we know WHO to trust at the CIA after what they did? Between Iraq, Joe Wilson, leaking to the media, how on earth do ordinary Americans ever trust anyone at that organization ever again? Good God, they can't even clean out their own trash.
Will we EVER get to look at them as the good guys ever again?
Incorrect. That's the problem with your straw man argument, not with my analysis.
My analysis is that the Clinton Administration was surprised by the Indian nuclear blasts of May, 1998. This is a verifiable fact: President Clinton only made his series of phone calls, and only sent his envoys, to Pakistan **after** India tested (not before).
If the Clinton Administration had known in advance of India's looming nuclear tests, then the Clinton Administration would have first used diplomacy to stop those Indian tests, as well as sent envoys to Pakistan to keep heads calm there prior to the Indian tests. These things didn't happen.
So it is verifiable and provable that the Clinton Administration was surprised by India's 1998 nuclear tests. It is further verifiable that the Clinton Administration went on a mad scramble vis a vis Pakistan.
...And we also know that the U.S. spy network in Iran was rolled up by Iranian counter-intel in that time period.
What I am adding to this discussion is that those events are related. Information in the public domain further confirms that our agents inside Iran were given very unwise orders for a data dump by the scrambling Clinton Administration.
In contrast, what you and Baer want the world to believe is that our spy network inside Iran was given those unwise data dump orders by the FORMER DIRECTOR of CIA, George HW Bush (as President in 1989)!
Didn't happen. Not believable.
So you're full of it. A spy network roll-up inside Iran in the aftermath of Iran-Contra would have been unhidable. It would have been political poison. It would have been major news.
Instead, there's nothing out there in the public domain about a rollup in 1989, save for Baer and you making grand internet claims that run contrary to all available facts.
But for 1998, there is considerable public domain factual support (and coincident events like India/Pakistan nuclear testing).
Whenever an Agent does something questionable, ask yourself the question: "For whom is he really working?"
How does telling the world someone is returning to CIA differ from telling a reporter that Joe Wilson's wife works for the CIA? I thought who worked there and did what was secret. Seems the CIA is the most unsecretive of all organizations lately.
The master of spying, Angelo Codevilla, writes in Informing Statecraft that U.S. foreign policy successes (e.g. winning the Cold War, collapse of Berlin Wall, unifying Germany) were all achieved "in spite of, not due to" U.S. spy agencies.
It's a telling comment that hints at the real state of affairs.
CIA leaks over the past 5 years should serve to disabuse anyone paying attention of your above fantasy spin.
Thanks for all the information you've posted, it's really been helpful.
That's what I'm wondering Southack. For whom was deutsch working???? Was it to keep someone's dun from burning, or to keep his sometimes wife's name from the Balkan fiasco, a place we were to be out of in one year, and now close to 14 years, we're still there.
Anyone who would suggest that all agents were given the same address clearly doesn't either.
You should read more and talk less. All of the Iranian letters went to the same maildrop in Frankfurt (different mailboxes at the same corporate address - think: MailBoxesEtc or any corporate headquarters that has different rooms/floors but the same primary mailing address such as MicroSoft at 1 MicroSoft Way). Further, all of the communications to those agents in the field came from the same CIA official in Frankfurt.
"According to a former CIA official who served in the Middle East at the time, the Iranian informers communicated with CIA officers in Germany via messages in invisible ink on the backs of letters. The spies received messages the same way from a CIA officer in Frankfurt.
It is not clear what aroused Iranian suspicion, "but all of the letters went to a handful of addresses in Germany", the former CIA official said."
I think that his background at NSA will mean that he is more versed in technological means of data collection, but it does not necessarily mean that he doesn't understand the importance of HUMINT. He'll need to continue the housecleaning begun by Goss. If he succeeds in rebuilding the capabilities, we may never know about it. Keep an eye on articles about high level people coming or going, and watch for anti-admin stories leaked by "high level CIA" sources. If we see those, we know the CIA insurgency is still ongoing.
Very interesting. Good catch, Blue State.
You rewriting history or what?
Thanks for the ping onyx. Good post Southack.
My research shows that Iran was busy buying BW (bio-warfare) weapons from India through Iranian contacts located in Germany in 1989. Kappes had been on the job for 10 years that year.
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