Posted on 02/11/2002 8:20:24 AM PST by Rodney King
Unnoticed Bombshell
Key information in a new book.
By Michael Ledeen, NRO contributing editor & resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. He is author, most recently, of Tocqueville on American Character and is writing The War Against the Terror Masters, to be published shortly by St Martin’s Press.
February 11, 2002 8:45 a.m.
The reception of Robert Baer's terrific book, See No Evil, speaks volumes about what people read nowadays, and how they read it. See No Evil is many things. It's a thumbnail autobiography of a really interesting man, with exceptional physical skills and plenty of courage, who went into the CIA's Directorate of Operations because he wanted to fight bad guys. In the course of 20-plus years, he damaged his share of bad guys, learned that the CIA is hopelessly politicized and morally corrupt, and quit.
It's also a bit of a kiss-and-tell book about the agency, which always attracts attention, and so it has in this case. Bob Baer is plenty disgusted with the CIA, which is nothing new; lots of disgruntled former agency employees have lambasted the place for one reason or another, and usually they have been good reasons. Baer's indictment is rather unusual, and particularly important at this time: He thinks it's incompetent, and he's certainly made a convincing case.
From case officers who spend most all their time trying to convert their colleagues and agents to a modernistic form of Christianity, to superiors who will not, under any circumstances, take any risks (so what do we need a CIA for anyway? I mean, the State Department can avoid risks with the best of them), and regional bureaus at Langley where hardly anyone is fluent in the major languages of the region, he paints a really distressing picture of the place. Sy Hersh wrote the introduction, and of course all he cares about is the anti-CIA stuff.
But See No Evil is much more than this. It's a real blockbuster, a revelation. But I have yet to see a review that mentions it. So here goes.
Bob Baer was terribly shaken by the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983, in which several of his buddies were killed. His obsession for the next 15 years was to figure out who had done it, and how. As he kept looking for the answers, he was astonished that the CIA apparently didn't know very much about it, and didn't seem to obsess about it nearly as much as he did. But he kept at it, and finally arrived at a minor epiphany:
In my last months (at CIA)," he tells us, "I unraveled the...bombing, at least to my satisfaction: Iran ordered it, and a Fatah network carried it out."
So our guys were killed by an unholy alliance between the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The same deadly duo that recently organized the very short voyage of the Karine A, loaded with tons of explosives and weapons from Iran headed for Palestinian territory.
If that's not a headline story, I don't know what is.
If Baer is right, then we're just going to have to add Yasser to the axis of evil. His evidence is quite convincing, and wonderfully presented. Despite all the unfamiliar names and the scouring of documents and archives all over the Middle East and Langley, Virginia, and conversations everywhere, he ties it all together like a suspense novel.
And then, having found the truth he had sought so long, he figures out something else, which is also of great importance to us today:
It was clear from the documents I dredged up that, by at least 1997, the CIA knew the Pasdaran's command structure inside and out, just as it knew that Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i and President Rafsanjani approved every terrorist operation to come out of Iran. As I looked at the evidence in front of me, the conclusion was unavoidable: The Islamic Republic of Iran had declared a secret war against the United States, and the United States had chosen to ignore it.
So the CIA had the book on Iran at least five years ago, but either Bill Clinton never noticed, or John Deutch and George Tenet never let him in on the secret.
Somehow I don't have the impression that George Tenet told "W." about it before September 11th, either. If he had, I think we'd have heard a lot more about Iran before the State of the Union. I think it took the "Karine A" to get the spooks to fess up.
Now we have a desire to go after Iran, after fifteen years and they trot out this very old story. Boy are you gullible.
Then, you call me gullible. What am I gullible about? I don't get it.
Anything we can do to help spur the overthrow of the Iranian government is fine by me. If I read him right, Ledeen says the time is ripe, and I don't think this convergence of information is coincidental.
Me too! He looks like dork from a liberal think tank or something so I gave him a quarter of a second.
Why the cover up of TWA800? Maybe the country behind it is not a convenient target right at that time. So we don't let the people decide what the government should do with its power, we keep it hidden from the people so we can keep to some plan. Now this plan might be well-intended. I am not suggesting a malevolent conspiracy. But I AM suggesting that our government was/is too arrogant about how it deals with terrorism, and that this arrogance is the reason we had 9/11.
Another one that smells real bad is the Centennial Park bombing at the Atlanta Olympics that killed two and injured a fairly large number. It was first pinned on some fat redneck security guard, a frame that unraveled spectacularly badly. THEN it was pinned on Eric Rudolph who shot some abortionist(?). Why would he want to set off a bomb at the Olympics? So now we have what is probably prosecutors fabricating a case in front of agrand jury in order to cover up a security failure at an Olympics. When will our government learn that honesty can be effective policy?
It isn't something that you forget easily.
You appear to just be jumping on the Bandwagon and trying to tar Iran. As I've said many times: Just because we don't like them, or just because they are fighting another sovereign nation, doesn't mean that we should be seeking to interfere in their internal affairs. Persia/Iran hasn't been an external threat to much of anyone since Cyrus the Great/ Xerxes in the time of Alexander. Why now Michael? Are you just trying to build support for another imperial adventure? There was plenty of time to take on Iran before, and a lot more immediacy in the past and we didn't. Now all of a sudden its number one on the agenda. Why the drumbeat? Do you have an agenda?
Actually, I think the Fatah connection is relatively recent.
Did you not read what Ledeen posted to you? His point was that the news did not concern Iran. The Iran link is "old news". Instead, the news concerned the direct link to Fatah...and, thus, Arafat.
If you want to defend Iran, you should be taking out your spleen on the postre, Rodney King, who put Iran in the article title (mistakenly, as Iran is not the "bombshell").
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