Intel, UAE, and Iran
Seeking a glimpse of an intelligence battlefield of the future, one need looks no further than the tiny Persian Gulf mini-state of Dubai, which is one of the principalities that comprise the United Arab Emirates. Only about 17 percent of Dubai's 2.2 million inhabitants are Emiratis. The rest come from India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and over two dozen other nations; among them are several thousand American expatriates, all of whom have flocked to Dubai because of the emirate's massive wealth.
From an intelligence standpoint, Dubai is critically important because it has become a global financial powerhouse, replacing Beirut as the banking center and tax shelter of choice for the rich and powerful of the Middle East. If there is a major business transaction taking place anywhere in the Middle East or Near East, whether a sale on the world petroleum market or a major construction project, chances are very good that a bank or investment house in Dubai is financing the deal.
From left: Harald Dahle-Sladek Editor-in-chief of PTEROFILM.COM at an exhibition and seminar regarding Irans Free Trade Industrial Zone Islands in the Persian Gulf held at the University of Kish, Kish Island together with Iranian business men representing indsutry and trade. April 2000.
Over the past decade, Dubai and the other principalities comprising the United Arab Emirates have become the principal source of financing for Mullah Omar's Taliban guerrillas and all of the Afghan drug kingpins. According to a leaked September 2009 State Department cable, "It comes as no surprise that Taliban financing originates in and transits the UAE to Afghanistan and third countries. Afghan drug proceeds, including laundered funds, both transit the UAE and are invested here. Cash couriers are believed to carry the majority of illicit funds to and from Afghanistan." The cable went on to note that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration believed that "over $2 billion in drug proceeds has transited through the UAE over the last three years."
Dubai's position as the leading banking center in the Middle East has made it a mecca for spies from around the world. According to senior U.S. intelligence sources, Dubai is today the principal listening post for monitoring what is taking place across the Persian Gulf inside America's arch-nemesis in the region, the Islamic Republic of Iran, led by an aging conservative religious autocracy that derives its strength from feeding its people with the notion that they are beset on all sides by enemies. The Iranian government's aggressive, some would say confrontational, attitude toward the United States over the past thirty years, its sponsorship of international terrorist groups, its work on building a nuclear weapon, and its development of long-range ballistic missiles capable of hitting Israel and perhaps even the United States have kept the country near the top of the list of the U.S. intelligence community's most important targets for almost three decades.
The CIA has had no station inside Iran since Washington broke diplomatic relations with the regime after Iranian militants stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, and took sixty-six embassy staff members hostage, including the entire CIA station headed by Thomas L. Ahern Jr. This has forced the agency to improvise. In the 1980s and 1990s, the CIA's "Iran station" was situated inside the I. G. Farben Building in downtown Frankfurt, Germany, from where the agency directed its global efforts to recruit and run agent networks inside Iran. But try as it might, the agency's efforts to penetrate Iran during this time period were marked by one failure after another, with the single greatest loss occurring in April 1989, when Iranian security forces rolled up virtually the entire CIA network of agents inside Iran.
For the last two decades, the agency's "Iran station" has been hidden away inside the U.S. consulate in Dubai because of its close proximity to Iran, which is only one hundred miles to the north across the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranian presence in Dubai is massive. Not only does Iran maintain a sizable embassy in Dubai, complete with a large complement of intelligence officers, but according to a leaked State Department cable, banks in Dubai currently hold about $12 billion of Iranian government money, which the Tehran regime secretly uses to finance terrorist groups, its overseas weapons purchases, and its clandestine acquisition of nuclear technology.
By monitoring the flow of money in and out of Iranian government bank accounts in Dubai, the U.S. intelligence community has determined that despite strict United Nations economic sanctions, a number of major Europe an oil companies have continued to covertly purchase large amounts of Iranian oil and natural gas on the international petroleum market, knowing full well that the Iranian government uses the proceeds from these sales to finance its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. According to an American intelligence official, as long as Iran can continue to freely sell its oil and natural gas on overseas markets, "traditional diplomacy and economic sanctions are unlikely to ever work."
As valuable as Dubai may be to the CIA as a base from which to spy on Iran, it does not come close to compensating for the agency's lack of a presence on the ground in Tehran. In theory, the CIA should not have to be content with watching Iran from the relative comfort of the skyscrapers of Dubai. Compared to North Korea, where a siege mentality and acute paranoia are the norm, Iran is far more open. Thousands of Americans visit Iran every year, many of whom are Iranian expatriates who have settled in the sunny climes of Southern California and are now American citizens. They just can't do any business there, which would violate the economic sanctions that are currently in place to curb Tehran's nuclear ambitions.
There is also an enormous reservoir of residual friendship toward the United States among young Iranians born since the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, who now comprise 50 percent of Iran's population. Thanks to modern technology, like satellite television, cell phones, and the Internet, Iran's under-thirty set are well versed in Western culture and, unlike their parents, generally well disposed toward improved relations with the West, including the United States. Walk down any street in downtown Tehran and you will find yourself surrounded by teenagers and twenty-something college students who want to talk about America and their desire for better relations with the West.
The Editor-in-chief with the English pilot at the Creek in Dubai after flying to the inalnd mountain range and back.
An American television film crew filming a documentary about Iran in 2009 was taken aback by the eagerness of young Iranians to criticize their government on camera, even with a team of glum Iranian plainclothes secret police standing just off to the side. One young Iranian man even went so far as to walk past the plainclothesmen flaunting a copy of Newsweek that the Americans had given him, which contained an article highly critical of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In another time, their earnest candor would have gotten the youths arrested and perhaps even a stiff prison sentence for, as one of the wittier of the students put it, "revealing state secrets." This time, the Iranian plainclothes security men observing the affair, perhaps having teenagers of their own at home, decided that the prudent thing to do was nothing and hope that it would not end up on the nightly news.
In this more permissive environment, America's clandestine intelligence collectors should thrive. But because there is no CIA station inside the country, it is very difficult for the agency to recruit agents or gather firsthand intelligence information. Unable to operate from inside Iran, the CIA has been forced to try to recruit and run agent networks inside Iran from outside the country, which as any intelligence professional will tell you is an extremely difficult proposition, especially given the effectiveness of the Iranian security services in rooting out spies.
The CIA's Baghdad and Kabul stations have been infiltrating Iranian-born agents into Iran since 2003 with marginal success. The agency has been forced to largely depend to some degree on the intelligence services of a number of friendly European and Middle Eastern governments with embassies in Tehran to provide it with much of what it knows about what is going on inside Iran.
The CIA is not the only branch of the U.S. intelligence community actively spying inside Iran. The National Reconnaissance Office's fleet of spy satellites keeps very close tabs on Iran's uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Qom and on the Iranian missile test ranges at Semnan, Shahrud, and Garmsar. American spy satellites are currently maintaining a constant vigil on a new missile launch facility fast approaching completion with the help of North Korean technicians at Semnan east of Tehran. According to Michael Elleman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, who is the author of a new study of the Iranian missile program, this new facility will be used to launch a spy satellite into space on top of a large new booster rocket called the Simorgh, which many analysts believe is the prototype of an Iranian intercontinental ballistic missile. According to Elleman, "The launch, if it occurs as scheduled, will set off a fire-storm, especially by proponents of missile defense" in the United States who want to build a massive new defense system designed to shoot down these missiles before they can strike the United States.
The Eitor-in-chief at the French TOTAL supply base on the island of Kish.
The National Security Agency also devotes a significant amount of its SIGINT intercept resources to listening to Iranian military and internal security communications networks every day of the week. For example, NSA and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), keep a sizable number of Farsi linguists at the huge NSA listening post at Menwith Hill in northern England listening around the clock to Iranian communications. U.S. Navy and Air Force reconnaissance aircraft based in the Persian Gulf States of Bahrain and Qatar, and Air Force U-2 spy planes and Global Hawk high altitude reconnaissance drones based at Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, fly daily SIGINT and imagery collection missions along Iran's borders with Iraq and Afghanistan and along Iran's Persian Gulf coastline. Without live sources on the ground inside Iran, however, these technical intelligence sources are limited in terms of what they can tell us about what the Iranian regime is up to.
The need to know what the Iranian government's intentions have never been greater, as the U.S. intelligence community has become increasingly concerned about the direction that Iran is headed. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Iran has rapidly become a regional political and military power whose influence is seen to be on the rise. According to three Middle Eastern intelligence officials interviewed in 2009 and 2010, Iran, as a matter of national policy, is exporting instability throughout the Middle East, the Near East, and South Asia through coercive tactics, such as its continuing lavish support of terrorist groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. According to Lt. General Ronald L. Burgess Jr., the director of the DIA, "Iran uses terrorism to pressure or intimidate other countries and more broadly to serve as a strategic deterrent."
Iran is also continuing to provide clandestine support to a number of extremist Shiite groups in Iraq. The U.S. intelligence community has a substantial volume of reliable intelligence showing that not only are the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) and Iran's covert intelligence organization, the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, running massive intelligence-gathering operations inside Iraq, but, according to leaked State Department cables, Iran is also providing weapons and money to extremist Shiite political and militia groups in Iraq opposed to the continuing U.S. military presence in that country.
Shahram Amiri, the Iranian nuclear scientist who returned to Tehran left behind some $5 million he was promised by the CIA as part of "benefits package" offered by the CIA's National Resettlement Operations Center, US officials told ABC News. "Anything he got is now beyond his reach, thanks to the sanctions against Iran," one US official said. "We've got his information and the Iranians have him." When Amiri defected, the CIA offered him $5 million for information about the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Typically, the CIA places these kinds of funds in escrow so that an informant is only paid bit by bit, at the agency's discretion.
There is some circumstantial evidence that Iran has covertly become involved in the war in Afghanistan. In September 2007, British forces in Afghanistan captured a shipment of Iranian-made advanced IEDs destined for Taliban fighters in Helmand Province. The British intelligence community's evaluation of the matter, according to a leaked State Department cable, was that it demonstrated that Iranian intelligence operators belonging to the Quds Force were now engaged in the same sort of mischief in Afghanistan that they had exported to Iraq for years. But the British report left open the question of whether the Iranian government knew what the Quds Force operatives were up to, quoting a senior British official as saying that the Quds Force "may have attempted to conceal its activities from other branches of the Iranian government."
The best that the U.S. intelligence community could conclude at the time, according to a DNI briefing, was that it was "likely" that the Iranian intelligence services were supporting the Taliban because they were the "enemy of my enemy," that is to say, the United States. Now the U.S. intelligence community believes that the Iranians were just being prudent, supporting both sides in the conflict to ensure that they have a seat at the table regardless of who wins the war in Afghanistan. As a matter of policy, Iran has consistently opposed the Taliban, whom Tehran clearly views as an equal threat to its security as the American military presence in Afghanistan, if not a greater one.
According to a little-noticed presentation to Congress made by DNI Denny Blair in February 2009, "Iran has opposed Afghan reconciliation talks with the Taliban as risking an increase in the group's influence and legitimacy. Iran distrusts the Taliban and opposes its return to power but uses the provision of lethal aid [to the Taliban] as a way to pressure Western forces, gather intelligence, and build ties that could protect Iran's interests if the Taliban regain control of the country."
The Iranian government has gone out of its way to maintain friendly relations with Afghan president Hamid Karzai and his closest advisers. According to U.S. intelligence sources, CIA surveillance of the activities of senior Iranian diplomats and intelligence officers in Kabul has revealed not only that the Iranian ambassador in Kabul, Feda Hussein Maliki, is a frequent visitor to Karzai's presidential palace but also that the ambassador has for years been giving Karzai's chief of staff, Mohammad Daudzai, a plastic bag filled with cash once a month. The sums involved have never been specified, but according to the New York Times, the payments over the years have totaled in the millions of dollars.
Senior U.S. intelligence officials believe that Tehran's motive in making these large cash payments to Karzai is to drive a wedge between Washington and the Afghan government. According to these officials, Tehran has also been making comparable payments to two other members of Karzai's kitchen cabinet, Information and Culture Minister Abdul Karim Khoram, and Education Minister Farooq Wardak, who are infamous in Kabul diplomatic circles for their attempts to use their positions of influence to push Karzai away from his alliance with the United States. According to a leaked State Department cable, these three men "provide [Karzai] misleading advice and conspire to isolate Karzai from more pragmatic (and pro-Western) advisors in a purposeful effort to antagonize Western countries, especially the United States."
But it has been Iran's extremely controversial nuclear weapons development program that has dominated the U.S. intelligence community's interest in Iran since it began working on the project back in 1985. The CIA's "Iran station" in Dubai has covertly tried to disrupt Tehran's nuclear program for more than a decade by tracking Iranian clandestine purchases of nuclear related technology from countries such as the People's Republic of China and North Korea using money held in Iranian government bank accounts in Dubai. Thanks to cooperation from the UAE intelligence services, the U.S. intelligence community has been able to interdict some of these clandestine nuclear shipments, but American officials admit that most of these shipments have managed to get through despite their best efforts.
Information provided by an Iranian dissident group in 2002 led to the discovery of a secret underground uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, located halfway between the cities of Isfahan and Kashan in central Iran. According to U.S. intelligence sources, the discovery of Natanz led the CIA in 2004 and 2005 to use its Predator unmanned drones to conduct secret reconnaissance overflight missions over the facility and the deployment sites for Iran's long- range ballistic missile units. Some of these drone missions were conducted from Balad Air Base in Iraq; others were launched from Karshi-Khanabad Air Base in Uzbekistan. The Iranians formally protested these overflights, but the U.S. government refused to confirm or deny that it was behind these secret flights.
Five years later in 2007, intelligence information provided by the NSA revealed that a team of Iranian engineers, led by a shadowy figure named Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, had been diligently working on designs for a nuclear weapon to be carried by one of Iran's new generation of long- range ballistic missiles, but that this work had been ordered halted in 2003 shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This new information formed the basis for a controversial November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on the Iranian nuclear program, which concluded, "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."
But two years later, according to senior American intelligence sources, the intelligence community had to reverse many of its 2007 findings after an Iranian nuclear physicist named Shahram Amiri defected in May 2009 while making the pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Sources confirm that Amiri's defection was entirely voluntary, facilitated by the cooperation the CIA received from the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate.
The information Amiri brought with him was deemed so important that the CIA offered him a $5 million cash reward. The CIA leaked his name to the press in March 2010, describing his defection as "an intelligence coup."
But in July 2010, Amiri returned to Iran without the $5 million in cash that the CIA had given him, claiming that he had been kidnapped by CIA officers in Saudi Arabia. The CIA formally denied the allegation, claiming that Amiri had been a willing defector whose information had significantly enhanced the U.S. intelligence community's knowledge of the Iranian nuclear program.
In the U.S. intelligence community, the Amiri re-defection was a huge embarrassment, the latest in a string of high-level defectors dating back to the 1970s who later chose to return home. In the eyes of some intelligence officials, Amiri's re-defection was a stark reminder of the peril innate in placing one's faith in human agents with all their foibles.
Despite doubts about Amiri's reliability, the U.S. intelligence community stuck by the information he provided. Based in part on the information provided by Amiri, as well as information provided by the Mossad, on September 27, 2009, President Obama and the leaders of Great Britain and France publicly accused Iran of building a secret underground uranium enrichment facility one hundred miles south of Tehran on the grounds of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base at Fordow, located outside the holy city of Qom. At the time of the announcement, the Qom site was far from complete, but the analysts believed that at the rate construction was going it would be ready by 2010.
The discovery of the secret uranium enrichment facility outside Qom dramatically changed how the U.S. intelligence community assessed the Iranian nuclear program. What it boiled down to was this: All of the intelligence indicated that the Iranians were not being truthful when they said that their nuclear program was intended solely for civilian purposes. Rather, the intelligence indicated that the Iranians had built just enough centrifuges at Natanz and Qom to process enriched uranium for use in a nuclear weapon, but not anywhere near enough for a civilian nuclear power reactor.
In August 2010, the National Intelligence Council issued a draft National Intelligence Estimate that essentially reversed most of the conclusions of the November 2007 estimate on the Iranian nuclear program. Based in part on information provided by Amiri, the 2010 intelligence estimate concluded that Iran was indeed developing nuclear weapons components and secretly enriching nuclear material that could be used in a nuclear weapon. But the estimate added that it was not known whether the Iranian government had made the decision to go one step further and actually build a nuclear weapon. According to a 2011 interview with Michael Eisenstadt, the director of military and security studies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Iranians currently have enough enriched uranium for three to four nuclear weapons, but they would probably like to have a stockpile of uranium sufficient for about one hundred bombs, even if they do not actually move ahead and build the weapons themselves. Just having the raw materials on hand along with a viable bomb design would be as sufficient a deterrent as having the bombs themselves.
Deep differences remain within the U.S. intelligence community as to whether Iran has resumed work on building an atomic bomb. When asked in late 2010 for his opinion as to whether Iran was actively working on a nuclear weapon, one senior American intelligence official could only shrug his shoulders and say, "Your guess is as good as mine."