The Seymour Hersh/New Yorker article

Everybody seems to be talking about Seymour Hersh's article in the New Yorker, concentrating entirely on a relatively small portion of it: The statement that the US has covert operations going on in Iran to identify and target possible nuclear weapons facilities in preparation for destroying them either through bombing or Special Forces attacks.

It would hardly be surprising if true, perhaps more surprising if not true, given the perceived danger of Iran's current government developing nukes to put on missiles they already have which can reach all of Europe.

The article covers a good deal more and is well worth a read. Clik on the title or copy/paste below. A power struggle is going on between the Pentagon and the CIA, and Donald Rumsfeld is doing what he can to consolidate power in his office.

The Europeans are described as usual as being in favor of pinning their hopes on negotiation with the Iranians, but that is hardly surprising as they have no viable military options.

The Israeli government is, not surprisingly, skeptical of the European approach. Silvan Shalom, the Foreign Minister, said...“I don’t like what’s happening. We were encouraged at first when the Europeans got involved. For a long time, they thought it was just Israel’s problem. But then they saw that the [Iranian] missiles themselves were longer range and could reach all of Europe, and they became very concerned. Their attitude has been to use the carrot and the stick—but all we see so far is the carrot...”

In a recent essay, Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (and a supporter of the Administration), articulated the view that force, or the threat of it, was a vital bargaining tool with Iran...

Hence, of course, any US covert ops in Iran: to establish a credible threat.

In 1981, the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor, setting its nuclear program back several years. But the situation now is both more complex and more dangerous, Chubin said. The Osirak bombing “drove the Iranian nuclear-weapons program underground, to hardened, dispersed sites,” he said.

This is likely exactly what the renewed American interest in low-yield, burrowing, bunker busting nukes is designed to address. It isn't just command centers, it is underground labs, factories, storage, and launch facilities.

The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites... The goal is to identify and isolate...targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids.

A former C.I.A. clandestine-services officer told me that, in the months after the resignation of the agency’s director George Tenet, in June, 2004, the White House began “coming down critically” on analysts in the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Intelligence (D.I.) and demanded “to see more support for the Administration’s political position.” Porter Goss, Tenet’s successor, engaged in what the recently retired C.I.A. official described as a “political purge” in the D.I. Among the targets were a few senior analysts who were known to write dissenting papers that had been forwarded to the White House. The recently retired C.I.A. official said, “The White House carefully reviewed the political analyses of the D.I. so they could sort out the apostates from the true believers.” Some senior analysts in the D.I. have turned in their resignations—quietly, and without revealing the extent of the disarray.

This jibes with what I have read elsewhere, altho the spin is different. Alt spin: Tenet was thrown out for lousy CIA performance, Goss has indeed engaged in a purge of Tenet-types who were seen as working to undermine needed changes, and the disarray was in fact a major and long-needed house cleaning. Note that I am not taking sides here: just pointing out that Hersh's spin is not the only one. Nota bene: the quote above is from a "recently retired C.I.A. official."

Update: It seems clear that the CIA (which is not alone in this regard) needs considerable changing. Going way back, they missed the Iranian Revolution, they missed the coming collapse of the Soviet Union, they missed the Sept 11 attacks until Sept 11, they missed either the non-existance of WMD in Iraq or the clandestine removal of same prior to the war, and they missed Saddam's plans for the guerrilla war we find ourselves fighting there.

They figured all the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms, as tho the Sunni Baathists would love the overthrow of their power source. It seems the CIA needs radical change, and that if that change takes place there will be a lot of screaming. However, a lot of screaming does not necessarily mean that productive change is happening. The flip side of that tho is that if no screaming is going on we know that the changes aren't being made. Therefore in my mind the complaints give cause for hope but are not in themselves proof that good stuff is going on. This will take a lot of time.

Copy/paste: http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?050124fa_fact

UPDATE: Michael Ledeen, author of The War Against the Terror Masters, and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, critiques Hersh's column in National Review Online. He calls Rumsfeld timorous and meek. http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen200501210807.asp