Plan nuclear iraní: Mossad pinta la cara de CIA, de nuevo

Israel Exposes Iran's Nuclear Lies, and the Limits of U.S. Intelligence

Advocating for a pact in 2015, John Kerry said American agencies had "absolute knowledge" about the regime's past nuclear efforts. Oops.

Bloomberg



The Bushehr reactor in Iran (shown in 2001). Source: Spaceimaging.com/Getty Images

Since Iran and six world powers reached an agreement to pause Iran's enrichment of uranium and allow weapons inspectors into declared facilities, Israel's prime minister has argued the deal would give Iran a glide path to a nuclear weapon. On Monday he announced that he had proof.

If the West can verify the new Israeli intelligence that Iran had preserved its design and research work into a nuclear weapon, that's a big deal — particularly now in light of the May 12 deadline that President Donald Trump has imposed on U.S. negotiations with Europe to come up with fixes to strengthen the nuclear bargain. The trove of data would be a blow not only to Iran's credibility but also to the reputation of American intelligence gathering.

As negotiations with Iran came to a close in summer 2015, John Kerry, then secretary of state, assured reporters that American intelligence agencies had "absolute knowledge" about Iran's past efforts to build a nuclear weapon.


It was a strange remark. As the intelligence assessments before the 2003 Iraq War showed, intelligence is never absolute. What's more, the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, still had its own outstanding questions for Iran. Indeed, that agency could not give Iran a clean bill of health on the possible military dimensions of its nuclear program nearly six months later.

Now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is claiming that his country's spies have purloined a warehouse full of videos, files, blueprints and designs for nuclear weapons compiled between 1999 and 2003. If verified, the new Israeli intelligence would show there were many details the U.S. didn't know back in 2015.

Much of the case against Iran then was murky. In the George W. Bush administration, for example, U.S. intelligence agencies relied on data from a stolen laptop to prove Iran was building a weapon. Weapons inspectors had found traces of highly enriched uranium on Iranian equipment as well. But the best argument for why Iran was building a weapon was that it endured rounds of international sanctions and censure to build uranium enrichment facilities hidden from the IAEA. If all the mullahs wanted was nuclear power, why build a centrifuge cascade deep inside a mountain?

The Israeli intelligence haul would provide far more specifics about Iran's weapons program than have previously been known to Western intelligence agencies. For example, Netanyahu on Monday showed slides of warhead designs, a map of potential test sites and other details that had previously been inferred, but not verified by Western intelligence. Some intelligence analysts had assessed that Iran had done warhead design work, but the Israelis now claim to have the proof.

David Albright, the president and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, told me Monday that the new intelligence, if verified, would fill many of the holes in the West's knowledge of Iran's weapons program.


But Albright said it does more than that. If verified, the intelligence also reveals Iran's intention to eventually build a nuclear weapon. "The most significant thing is that this is a warehoused collection intended to be used later for reconstitution," Albright said. "They could have destroyed these documents. But these were being carefully protected and hidden with the intention to reuse them when they launch their weapons program."

Beyond the fate of the nuclear deal, the Israeli intelligence also presents a crisis for the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a member. If verified, it shows that Iran has systematically lied to weapons inspectors for nearly 20 years. If Iran doesn't pay a price for its deception, then what is to stop future rogues from following the Iran model?

Contrainteligencia china captura y ejecuta espías de la CIA en China

China 'crippled CIA operations, killed informants': New York Times
A US newspaper has reported that the Chinese government "systematically dismantled" the work of US spies in China from 2010 to 2012. Top US officials have said the intelligence breach was one of the worst in decades.
DW


China killed or imprisoned as many as 20 US intelligence sources from 2010 to 2012 as a network of spies that had taken years to build was unwound, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
The newspaper described what it called a massive intelligence breach responsible for impeding US spying operations in the communist state for several years.

CIA mole?

The Times said investigators are split over whether a mole within the CIA betrayed the sources, or whether the Chinese hacked the intelligence agency's covert communications system. Others think the breach could have been the result of careless spy work.
The newspaper cited 10 current and former American officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity and described how Beijing systematically dismantled the CIA's spying efforts.
They said the breach was a severe setback for the US intelligence network that had been working at its highest level in years. Almost every employee of the US embassy in Beijing was investigated at one point, the Times reported.

At least a dozen CIA sources killed

The CIA had been receiving high-quality information about the Chinese government until 2010, when the data began to dry up.
The CIA sources began disappearing in early 2011, the paper said.
The Times said at least a dozen CIA sources were killed, including one who was shot in front of colleagues in a clear warning to anyone else who might be spying. Several others were jailed.
The investigation ultimately centered on a former CIA operative who worked in a division overseeing China, the newspaper said, but there was not enough evidence to arrest him. He is now living in another Asian country and has been questioned.
The breach was considered particularly damaging, with the number of assets lost rivaling those in the Soviet Union and Russia who perished after information was passed to Moscow by spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, the report said.
Ames was active as a spy in the 1980s and Hanssen from 1979 to 2001.
By 2013, the FBI and CIA concluded that China no longer had the ability to identify American agents, the Times said.
US intelligence agencies have since been trying to rebuild their spy network in the country.

Ahora USA sabe lo que sintieron los chilenos

Now, America, You Know How Chileans Felt
By Ariel Dorfman | The New York Times



Credit Kelly Blair

DURHAM, N.C. — It is familiar, the outrage and alarm that many Americans are feeling at reports that Russia, according to a secret intelligence assessment, interfered in the United States election to help Donald J. Trump become president.

I have been through this before, overwhelmed by a similar outrage and alarm.

To be specific: On the morning of Oct. 22, 1970, in what was then my home in Santiago de Chile, my wife, Angélica, and I listened to a news flash on the radio. Gen. René Schneider, the head of Chile’s armed forces, had been shot by a commando on a street of the capital. He was not expected to survive.

Angélica and I had the same automatic reaction: It’s the C.I.A., we said, almost in unison. We had no proof at the time — though evidence that we were right would eventually, and abundantly, surface — but we did not doubt that this was one more American attempt to subvert the will of the Chilean people.

Six weeks earlier, Salvador Allende, a democratic Socialist, had won the presidency in a free and fair election, in spite of the United States’ spending millions of dollars on psychological warfare and misinformation to prevent his victory (we’d call it “fake news” today). Allende had campaigned on a program of social and economic justice, and we knew that the government of President Richard M. Nixon, allied with Chile’s oligarchs, would do everything it could to stop Allende’s nonviolent revolution from gaining power.

The country was rife with rumors of a possible coup. It had happened in Guatemala and Iran, in Indonesia and Brazil, where leaders opposed to United States interests had been ousted; now it was Chile’s turn. That was why General Schneider was assassinated. Because, having sworn loyalty to the Constitution, he stubbornly stood in the way of those destabilization plans.


President-elect Salvador Allende, of Chile, arriving to pay respects to Gen. René Schneider, who was lying in state, killed by a commando. Credit Robert Quiroga/Associated Press

General Schneider’s death did not block Allende’s inauguration, but American intelligence services, at the behest of Henry A. Kissinger, continued to assail our sovereignty during the next three years, sabotaging our prosperity (“make the economy scream,” Nixon ordered) and fostering military unrest. Finally, on Sept. 11, 1973, Allende was overthrown and replaced by a vicious dictatorship that lasted nearly 17 years. Years of torture and executions and disappearances and exile.

Given all that pain, one might presume that some glee on my part would be justified at the sight of Americans squirming in indignation at the spectacle of their democracy subjected to foreign interference — as Chile’s democracy, among many others’, was by America. And yes, it is ironic that the C.I.A. — the very agency that gave not a whit for the independence of other nations — is now crying foul because its tactics have been imitated by a powerful international rival.

I can savor the irony, but I feel no glee. This is not only because, as an American citizen myself now, I am once again a victim of this sort of nefarious meddling. My dismay goes deeper than that personal sense of vulnerability. This is a collective disaster: Those who vote in the United States should not have to suffer what those of us who voted in Chile had to go through. Nothing warrants that citizens anywhere should have their destiny manipulated by forces outside the land they inhabit.

The seriousness of this violation of the people’s will must not be flippantly underestimated or disparaged.

When Mr. Trump denies, as do his acolytes, the claims by the intelligence community that the election was, in fact, rigged in his favor by a foreign power, he is bizarrely echoing the very responses that so many Chileans got in the early ’70s when we accused the C.I.A. of illegal interventions in our internal affairs. He is using now the same terms of scorn we heard back then: Those allegations, he says, are “ridiculous” and mere “conspiracy theory,” because it is “impossible to know” who was behind it.

In Chile, we did find out who was “behind it.” Thanks to the Church Committee and its valiant, bipartisan 1976 report, the world discovered the many crimes the C.I.A. had been committing, the multiple ways in which it had destroyed democracy elsewhere — in order, supposedly, to save the world from Communism.

This country deserves, as all countries do — including Russia, of course — the possibility of choosing its leaders without someone in a remote room abroad determining the outcome of that election. This principle of peaceful coexistence and respect is the bedrock of freedom and self-determination, a principle that, yet again, has been compromised — this time, with the United States as its victim.

What to do, then, to restore faith in the democratic process?

First, there should be an independent, transparent and thorough public investigation so that any collusion between American citizens and foreigners bent on mischief can be exposed and punished, no matter how powerful these operatives may be. The president-elect should be demanding such an inquiry, rather than mocking its grounds. The legitimacy of his rule, already damaged by his significant loss of the popular vote, depends on it.

But there is another mission, a loftier one, that the American people, not politicians or intelligence agents, must carry out. The implications of this deplorable affair should lead to an incessant and unforgiving meditation on our shared country, its values, its beliefs, its history.

The United States cannot in good faith decry what has been done to its decent citizens until it is ready to face what it did so often to the equally decent citizens of other nations. And it must firmly resolve never to engage in such imperious activities again.

If ever there was a time for America to look at itself in the mirror, if ever there was a time of reckoning and accountability, it is now.

CIA proveyó a los rebeldes sirios con misiles libios

La CIA transfería misiles de Libia a los rebeldes sirios



La CIA transfería misiles tierra-aire desde Libia a los rebeldes en Siria a través de Turquía cuando se llevó a cabo el mortal ataque contra el consulado de EE.UU. en Bengasi, según un informe.

Investigando la muerte del embajador de EE.UU. Christopher Stevens y otros tres estadounidenses en Libia en septiembre pasado, la cadena de EE.UU. CNN descubrió que el consulado de EE.UU. trabajaba en aquel momento en un proyecto de suministro de misiles de los arsenales libios a los rebeldes sirios.

Desde que se produjera el incidente, los detalles de las actividades del Gobierno de EE.UU. en Bengasi han sido tema de controversia. Algunos líderes del Congreso presionaron para que se realizara una amplia investigación sobre el ataque y las operaciones secretas de la CIA en la ciudad africana.

"Desde enero, algunos agentes de la CIA implicados en las misiones de la agencia en Libia han sido objeto de frecuentes exámenes de polígrafo, incluso mensuales, según una fuente en el interior con conocimiento profundo del funcionamiento de la agencia", informó CNN.

La fuente dice que en el ataque resultaron heridos más estadounidenses de lo que previamente se había informado. La CIA, a su vez, afirma que ha sido clara y abierta acerca de sus operaciones en Bengasi. "La CIA ha trabajado en estrecha colaboración con los comités de supervisión para que le proporcionaran una cantidad extraordinaria de información relacionada con el ataque a las instalaciones de EE.UU. en Bengasi ", rezó un comunicado de la CIA.

"Creo que es una forma de encubrimiento y yo creo que es un intento de 'ocultarlo debajo de la alfombra', y pienso que el pueblo estadounidense cree igual", dijo el congresista Frank Wolf.

RIA Novosti