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Iranian Possibilities Update: January 2008 Iranian Possibilities Update
Offering a Public/Private Sector Dialogue Gulf Policy Iranian Newsletter Monitoring the latest news
18th January, 2008
Dear Reader,
It has been a whirlwind tour of the Gulf by President Bush with news of uranium being sent to Iran by Russia and behind it all has been the story about the confrontation - or not - involving three US warships entering the straits of Hormuz. We therefore start the commentary with this analysis by Gareth Porter, a US-based historian and investigative journalist. It is followed by analysis of changes in thinking on the Gulf in Washington. Please share with us your thoughts and any other commentary.
Kind regards,
Benoit Lambrechts, Editor MEC International Ltd. Fax: 020 7591 4801 Email:projects@meconsult.co.uk Commentary
POLITICS-US: How the Pentagon Planted a False Hormuz Story Analysis by Gareth Porter WASHINGTON, Jan 15 (IPS) - Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the Jan. 6 U.S.-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational story demonstrating Iran’s military aggressiveness, a reconstruction of the events following the incident shows.* The initial press stories on the incident, all of which can be traced to a briefing by deputy assistant secretary of defence for public affairs in charge of media operations Bryan Whitman, contained similar information that has since been repudiated by the Navy itself. Then the Navy disseminated a short video into which was spliced the audio of a phone call warning that U.S. warships would "explode" in "a few seconds". Although it was ostensibly a Navy production, IPS has learned that the ultimate decision on its content was made by top officials of the Defence Department. The encounter between five small and apparently unarmed speedboats, each carrying a crew of two to four men, and the three U.S. warships occurred very early on Saturday Jan. 6, Washington time. But no information was released to the public about the incident for more than 24 hours, indicating that it was not viewed initially as being very urgent. The reason for that absence of public information on the incident for more than a full day is that it was not that different from many others in the Gulf over more than a decade. A Pentagon consultant who asked not to be identified told IPS that he had spoken with officers who had experienced similar encounters with small Iranian boats throughout the 1990s, and that such incidents are "just not a major threat to the U.S. Navy by any stretch of the imagination". Just two weeks earlier, on Dec. 19, the USS Whidbey Island, an amphibious warship, had fired warning shots after a small Iranian boat allegedly approached it at high speed. But that incident had gone without public notice. With the reports from 5th Fleet commander Vice-Adm. Kevin Cosgriff in hand early that morning, top Pentagon officials had all day Sunday, Jan. 6, to discuss what to do about the encounter in the Strait of Hormuz. The result was a decision to play it up as a major incident. The decision came just as President George W. Bush was about to leave on a Middle East trip aimed in part at rallying Arab states to join the United States in an anti-Iran coalition. That decision in Washington was followed by a news release by the commander of the 5th Fleet on the incident at about 4:00 a.m. Washington time Jan. 7. It was the first time the 5th Fleet had ever issued a news release on an incident with small Iranian boats. The release reported that the Iranian "small boats" had "maneuvered aggressively in close proximity of [sic] the Hopper [the lead ship of the three-ship convoy]." But it did not suggest that the Iranian boats had threatened the boats or that it had nearly resulted in firing on the Iranian boats. On the contrary, the release made the U.S. warships handling of the incident sound almost routine. "Following standard procedures," the release said, "Hopper issued warnings, attempted to establish communications with the small boats and conducted evasive maneuvering." The release did not refer to a U.S. ship being close to firing on the Iranian boats, or to a call threatening that U.S. ships would "explode in a few minutes", as later stories would report, or to the dropping of objects into the path of a U.S. ship as a potential danger. That press release was ignored by the news media, however, because later that Monday morning, the Pentagon provided correspondents with a very different account of the episode. At 9 a.m., Barbara Starr of CNN reported that "military officials" had told her that the Iranian boats had not only carried out "threatening maneuvers", but had transmitted a message by radio that "I am coming at you" and "you will explode". She reported the dramatic news that the commander of one boat was "in the process of giving the order to shoot when they moved away". CBS News broadcast a similar story, adding the detail that the Iranian boats "dropped boxes that could have been filled with explosives into the water". Other news outlets carried almost identical accounts of the incident. The source of this spate of stories can now be identified as Bryan Whitman, the top Pentagon official in charge of media relations, who gave a press briefing for Pentagon correspondents that morning. Although Whitman did offer a few remarks on the record, most of the Whitman briefing was off the record, meaning that he could not be cited as the source. In an apparent slip-up, however, an Associated Press story that morning cited Whitman as the source for the statement that U.S. ships were about to fire when the Iranian boats turned and moved away -- a part of the story that other correspondents had attributed to an unnamed Pentagon official. On Jan. 9, the U.S. Navy released excerpts of a video of the incident in which a strange voice -- one that was clearly very different from the voice of the Iranian officer who calls the U.S. ship in the Iranian video -- appears to threaten the U.S. warships. A separate audio recording of that voice, which came across the VHS channel open to anyone with access to it, was spliced into a video on which the voice apparently could not be heard. That was a political decision, and Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros of the Pentagon’s Public Affairs Office told IPS the decision on what to include in the video was "a collaborative effort of leadership here, the Central Command and Navy leadership in the field." "Leadership here", of course, refers to the secretary of defence and other top policymakers at the department. An official in the U.S. Navy Office of Information in Washington, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that decision was made in the office of the secretary of defence. That decision involved a high risk of getting caught in an obvious attempt to mislead. As an official at 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain told IPS, it is common knowledge among officers there that hecklers -- often referred to as "Filipino Monkey" -- frequently intervene on the VHF ship-to-ship channel to make threats or rude comments. One of the popular threats made by such hecklers, according to British journalist Lewis Page, who had transited the Strait with the Royal Navy is, "Look out, I am going to hit [collide with] you." By Jan. 11, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell was already disavowing the story that Whitman had been instrumental in creating only four days earlier. "No one in the military has said that the transmission emanated from those boats," said Morrell. The other elements of the story given to Pentagon correspondents were also discredited. The commanding officer of the guided missile cruiser Port Royal, Capt. David Adler, dismissed the Pentagon’s story that he had felt threatened by the dropping of white boxes in the water. Meeting with reporters on Monday, Adler said, "I saw them float by. They didn’t look threatening to me." The naval commanders seemed most determined, however, to scotch the idea that they had been close to firing on the Iranians. Vice-Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, the commander of the 5th Fleet, denied the story in a press briefing on Jan. 7. A week later, Comdr. Jeffery James, commander of the destroyer Hopper, told reporters that the Iranians had moved away "before we got to the point where we needed to open fire". The decision to treat the Jan. 6 incident as evidence of an Iranian threat reveals a chasm between the interests of political officials in Washington and Navy officials in the Gulf. Asked whether the Navy’s reporting of the episode was distorted by Pentagon officials, Cmdr Robertson of 5th Fleet Public Affairs would not comment directly. But she said, "There is a different perspective over there."
What follows is an account of changing attitudes in Washington
In Iran Reversal, Bureaucrats Triumphed Over Cheney Team (14th January 2008) As President Bush arrives in Saudi Arabia today, America’s Arab and Israeli allies have been buzzing about the recent sea change in Washington’s perception of Iran. The December report by the U.S.’s top spy office stating Iran had abandoned its effort to build nuclear weapons was one of the biggest U-turns in the recent history of U.S. intelligence. Behind the scenes in Washington, it marked a reversal of a different sort: After years in which Bush appointees and White House staff won out on foreign-policy matters, career staffers in the intelligence world had scored a big victory. The authors of the Iran report -- career officials in the intelligence and diplomatic corps -- are among the same people who were on the losing side of the Iraq and Iran debates during the first Bush term. In 2002, some argued that Iraq didn’t have an active nuclear-weapons program. They were sidelined by the more-hawkish foreign-policy strategists on the Bush team. Now, the more-cautious intelligence camp is grabbing the reins. The power shift can be seen in other areas where U.S. policy appears to be softening. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is supporting cultural exchanges and direct dialogue with Pyongyang. The White House recently invited a Syrian delegation to a Middle East peace conference. At the same time, longtime government career officials across Washington are taking on important posts once held by Bush loyalists. In the case of the Iran report, the about-face was made possible in part by a 2004 restructuring that gave intelligence chiefs more autonomy. New procedures for vetting and authenticating reports also helped insulate analysts from White House involvement. Critics of the report, including European and Arab diplomats and hawkish U.S. legislators and strategists, believe it is politically motivated payback. By focusing on new intelligence which reveals that Iran dismantled its weapons program in response to international pressure, they say, the authors are making a case for diplomacy rather than military action. Less prominent in the report is a second key finding -- that Iran is rapidly moving ahead to develop a nuclear-fuel cycle. "This all smells of policy validation," says David Wurmser, who served as Vice President Dick Cheney’s top Middle East adviser up until this September. "These guys were State Department bureaucrats....It is hardly surprising that they now use their new positions to try to prove they were right." The Iran National Intelligence Estimate, as the report is called, has also complicated President Bush’s approach to the Middle East. During the president’s trip to the region this week, one task has been to reassure Arab and Israeli allies that the U.S. has a consistent policy toward Iran. RELATED ARTICLE
• Bush, on Mideast Trip, Shifts Focus to ’Justice’ • Iran Promises to Answer Remaining Nuclear Questions Yesterday, in Abu Dhabi, Mr. Bush sought to rally Arab states against Tehran, saying in a speech: "Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere." The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, meanwhile, announced in Vienna yesterday that Iran had agreed to a new road map to resolve "all remaining verification issues" concerning its nuclear program within the next month. The Iran intelligence report "really confused many people in the Gulf," says Bruce Riedel, a former Middle East expert at the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council. "No one could understand what the hell we were doing." Senior officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the umbrella organization that coordinates the U.S.’s 16 spy agencies and that oversaw the report, say payback wasn’t a factor. They defend the report as a righting of the ship after the Iraq intelligence failures. Sources Vetted Hundreds of officials were involved and thousands of documents were drawn upon in this report, according to the DNI, making it impossible for any official to overly sway it. Intelligence sources were vetted and questioned in ways they weren’t ahead of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Thomas Fingar, 62 years old, is one of the lead architects of the Iran report. A veteran State Department official, Mr. Fingar helped lead the office that argued in 2002 that evidence of Iraq’s nuclear program was faulty. He is now a senior official at the DNI. Of the backlash against the report, Mr. Fingar says, "A lot of it is just nonsense. The idea that this thing was written by a bunch of nonprofessional renegades or refugees is just silly." Tensions between career intelligence and diplomatic officers on one side, and the White House and Pentagon on the other, trace back decades. The White House and Pentagon have regularly challenged the loyalty and patriotism of the State Department’s diplomats and linguists. State’s focus on persuasion and negotiation, meanwhile, has landed it a reputation for softness and liberalism. President Richard Nixon approached China behind the back of the State Department. Former Secretary of State George Shultz opposed what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration sold arms to Iran and diverted the funds to support anticommunist guerrillas in Central America. The most recent conflict traces back to President Bush’s first term when the development of U.S. policy toward the "axis of evil" -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- was still in its early stages. At the time, Mr. Fingar served as the deputy chief of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, crafting analysis for Washington’s diplomatic corps. A China expert and onetime gymnast, Mr. Fingar began his career as an academic at Stanford University and was the director of its U.S.-China Relations Program. His colleagues describe him as enraptured by the East, displaying in his office Asian art and photos of his younger days in East Asia. He also developed a reputation for being laid back -- by State Department standards. When staffers are called to Foggy Bottom’s seventh floor, where the Secretary of State works, they tend to comb their hair and pause in front of the mirror before leaving their office. Mr. Fingar would often ascend jacketless and with his shirtsleeves rolled up. In 2002, Mr. Fingar vigorously quizzed his analysts’ assumptions on Iraq, according to people who took part in the process. He particularly liked running "red teaming" exercises where competing groups sought to expose flaws in the bureau’s judgments. Mr. Fingar told top State Department officials, including former Secretary of State Colin Powell, what his analysts had concluded: Saddam Hussein didn’t have an active nuclear-weapons program. In particular, they disputed evidence cited by the White House relating to Iraq’s purchase of aluminum tubes, purportedly for use in making weapons-grade nuclear fuel. Mr. Powell ultimately broke from his analysts’ beliefs, arguing before the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 that Mr. Hussein was actively seeking a nuclear weapon. Mr. Fingar’s department’s Iraq position, a lonely one, infuriated top Bush administration officials, say current and former U.S. officials. The two sides clashed on other issues. One of Mr. Fingar’s State Department colleagues, Vann Van Diepen, for example, repeatedly battled with John Bolton, the close ally of Vice President Cheney who served as the State Department’s top counter-proliferation official at the time. Big Battle One big battle was over the export of technologies from China to Iran and other regimes that could be used in developing nonconventional weapons and ballistic-missile systems. Mr. Bolton considered China’s action government-sponsored proliferation and pushed for sanctions. Mr. Van Diepen disagreed, arguing that Beijing didn’t have the ability to control all the players inside China, say U.S. officials who worked with both men. Mr. Bolton says the rift grew so wide he designated a subordinate to monitor Mr. Van Diepen’s work. Toward the end of President Bush’s first term, the State Department began to shrink the scope of Mr. Van Diepen’s responsibilities. Now the National Intelligence Officer for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Proliferation for the DNI, Mr. Van Diepen is a co-author of the Iran National Intelligence Estimate. Mr. Van Diepen declined to comment on the dispute with Mr. Bolton’s office. His former boss at the State Department, John Wolf, says Mr. Van Diepen never sought to undermine Bush administration policy on weapons proliferation. "Vann Van Diepen wasn’t anti-President Bush, he was anti-John Bolton," says Mr. Wolf. "He didn’t believe we could do things irrespective of the law and our treaty obligations." With the reconfiguration of the intelligence landscape in late 2004, Mr. Fingar moved to the newly created DNI, along with John Negroponte, another career diplomat who became the spy agency’s first director. Mr. Fingar became director of the National Intelligence Council, which coordinates the writing of all National Intelligence Estimates, or NIEs, among the U.S.’s spy agencies. Mr. Fingar was tasked with implementing many of the reforms called for by Congress. This included putting new safeguards into the system to authenticate reports’ sources and to prevent intelligence being cherry-picked to support previously developed theories. One of the Iraq NIE’s biggest failures was that it drew heavily on an Iraqi defector nicknamed "Curveball" who never met with American intelligence officials and later proved to be a fabricator. New Systems Under these new systems, officials from the U.S.’s principal spy agencies, such as the CIA and the National Security Agency, were required to compare every piece of intelligence they collected with how it was reflected in the report. They signed forms stating that the information from their sources was accurately reflected. Analysts also examined a half-dozen alternate explanations for the facts they had gathered to test their conclusions. Another significant change, Mr. Fingar says, has been reevaluating "our judgments and the sourcing used in previous estimates," rather than just trusting the conclusions of the old intelligence reports. Mr. Van Diepen, as a co-author of the Iran report, drew on thousands of documents and sources in writing the final estimate and cooperated closely with 20 other officials in the last stages, say people involved in the process. Representatives from all 16 spy agencies ultimately had to sign off on this final version. Outside experts, who were expected to challenge its conclusions, were given a day to analyze the report for flaws. The result was that the White House was essentially locked out of the process. This marked a big change from the years leading up to the Iraq war, when Mr. Cheney and his top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, made repeated visits to Langley to query analysts about their findings on Iraq’s weapons capabilities. Through the summer and fall of 2007, as rumors leaked, officials in Mr. Cheney’s office and on Capitol Hill grew increasingly concerned about the report’s possible conclusions, according to people working at the White House and on Capitol Hill. White House and DNI officials say President Bush first got notice from DNI chief Mike McConnell in August that significant new intelligence had emerged on Iran. DNI officials met with White House staff a week before the report’s release to go over the sources behind their assessment. Intelligence officials involved in this process say it wasn’t a forum to invite changes. Knowing the report would probably leak, and given the importance of its conclusions, the White House decided to make public the main conclusions. Most of the report is still classified. People in Vice President Cheney’s office saw the Dec. 3 announcement as a death blow to their Iran policy. The report’s authors "knew how to pull the rug out from under us," says a long-time aide to the vice president, referring to the way the key judgments were presented. Few publicly question the underlying intelligence behind the report. But a number of critics are challenging the analysts’ conclusions. Some counterproliferation experts and diplomats see Iran’s efforts to develop a nuclear-fuel cycle as a more important assessment than the revelation that Tehran stopped seeking to develop actual weapons. They say once the fuel cycle is accomplished, weapons can be developed in a matter of months. "The elephant that’s in the room is being ignored," says Rep. Brad Sherman of California, the Democratic chairman of a House subcommittee on proliferation issues. "You couldn’t read the key judgments [of the report] and not assume that this was intended to change policy," says Mr. Bolton. "It shredded the Bush administration policy." Mr. Fingar warns against judging the whole report based on the two-and-a-half pages that were declassified. He says it is more than 140 pages long and has nearly 1,500 source notes. As for Mr. Bolton’s critique, "it didn’t say what he wanted it to say, I guess," Mr. Fingar says. Write to Jay Solomon at jay.solomon@wsj.com and Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com
What follows is an article about the Iranian nuclear MOSCOW (Reuters) - Israel said on Thursday that Russian deliveries of nuclear fuel to Iran might help Tehran develop nuclear weapons. Russia last month delivered the first shipment of nuclear fuel to Iran’s first nuclear power plant in Bushehr, a step which both Moscow and Washington said should convince Tehran to stop its own uranium enrichment programme. But Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said during a visit to Russia that the fuel might help Iran develop its nuclear weapons programme. "Now Russia has started delivering nuclear fuel to Bushehr, (Iran’s) uranium enrichment may serve military goals," Russian news agencies quoted Livni as saying. Israel, Washington’s staunchest ally in Middle East, says Iran could have a nuclear bomb by 2010 and says an Iranian nuclear weapon would threaten the existence of the Jewish state. Israel itself is widely believed to be the only Middle East country with a nuclear arsenal. Iran has said it will not halt its efforts to enrich uranium -- fuel it says it needs for other power plants but which foreign powers fear could be used in a nuclear bomb. The United Nations Security Council has imposed two rounds of sanctions on Iran for its refusal to halt enrichment. Iran says its nuclear programme is purely civilian. The U.N. sanctions have put "certain pressure" on Tehran, but their overall effect "has not been critical", Livni said in a speech at the Russian Diplomatic Academy which news agencies quoted in Russian. "Those taking decisions on Iran are being watched by everyone in our region, including Israel and moderate Arab regimes," she said. "We expect the world will not allow the appearance of a nuclear Iran." "When I am being told about the inadmissibility of a nuclear Iran, I understand that these words should be translated into action." (Reporting by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Dominic Evans)
Main Articles
IAEA presses Iran on co-operation (11th January 2008)
Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has urged Iran to intensify its cooperation with the agency to aid investigation efforts regarding the history of its disputed nuclear programme.
Iran nuclear answers ’in a month’ (13th January 2008)
Iran has agreed to clarify all outstanding questions over its past nuclear activities within a month, the UN nuclear watchdog has announced.
Bush says Iran threatens the world’s security (13th January 2008)
U.S. President George Bush said Iran is responsible for threatening world security and called for Arab allies to help confront the danger "before it’s too late."
US fails to isolate Iran from Arabs (14th January 2008)
George Bush, the US president, has urged Arab states to think of Iran as the greatest threat to their security, but his warnings are likely to fall on deaf ears in the Middle East.
Did a Radio Prank Escalate Iran-U.S. Confrontation? (14th January 2008)
Could the Persian Gulf’s infamous "Filipino Monkey" have struck again? Veteran mariners say hecklers known throughout the region as "the Filipino Monkey" may have broadcast a threatening radio message that nearly prompted U.S. warships to open fire on Iranian naval boats.
Oil rises on US-Iran tensions, weaker dollar (14th January 2008)
NEW YORK, Jan 14 (Reuters) - Oil rose more than $1 on Monday as the dollar slipped and tensions between the United States and Iran stoked supply concerns. The gains came amid a wider commodity rally and snapped three days of losses for crude that had been triggered by concerns a potential U.S. recession would cut demand growth in the world’s top consumer.
Iran responds to Bush portrayal of it as a threat (15th January 2008)
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said yesterday that US President George W. Bush has resorted to make unfounded allegations against Iran to cover up his failures in the Middle East.
Bush’s Mideast Mission Doomed (15th January 2008)
TEHRAN, Jan. 14--US President George W. Bush has failed in his mission to the Middle East, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Sunday evening.
Iran to file court protest over Turkmen gas cut (15th January 2008)
TEHRAN (AFP) — A senior Iranian MP on Tuesday said the Islamic republic is going to file an official complaint against Turkmenistan in court for cutting gas supplies, the state news agency IRNA reported.
Saudi - Iranian ties new phase: minister (15th January 2008)
Iran-Saudi Arabia bilateral cooperation has entered a new chapter, said Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi in a meeting with Iran’s Ambassador to the kingdom, Mohammad Hosseini, on Sunday.
King Hamad on investment in Iran and gulf future (15th January 2008)
Bahrain’s King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa said on Saturday that the Arab states eye Iran for investment and Iran is expected to provide the investors with opportunity to have a share in investment projects.
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