In August 1978 America's premier spy agency assured President Jimmy Carter that Iran was "not in a revolutionary, or even pre-revolutionary situation."
Right. Six months later, chanting "Death to America," Islamic revolutionaries drove the U.S.-backed shah into exile.
On Monday tens of thousands of Iranians marched into central Teheran again, this time chanting "Death to the Dictator," evidently in reference to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's proclamation of a reelection landslide -- if not to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself.
The marchers torched cars and buses. Shots were fired, killing one demonstrator and wounding others.
In a
press conference, Ahmadinejad, clad in his customary windbreaker, blithely compared the demonstrators to unruly fans after a soccer match, who sometimes had to be "given tickets" for unruly behavior.
No one, least of all Ahmadinejad, should be completely surprised if the powers that be toss him overboard. The next two weeks will be critical.
"I think it depends on three factors," Tel Aviv-based Iran analyst Meir Javedanfar
told Voice of America.
"Number one, how senior are the people who are going to become involved in the demonstrating; the more senior they are, the more people will become encouraged. Number two; if the demonstrations spread to other cities. I think the more cities that become involved, the more the leadership will take notice.
"And, also, number three; the duration of this. If this continues for another two weeks, I think the Supreme Leader [Khamenei] will have a serious situation on his hands. Until then, we should sit down and watch the developments and see what the Supreme Leader says," Javedanfar said.
What should the CIA do?
Keep its distance, say covert action veterans.
"If an American hand is exposed -- and the regime is working diligently to find one -- all the elements now protesting the elections will be tarred and discredited as CIA stooges," says one well placed source, who declined to be identified because of the situation's volatility.
Unlike in Poland, where the Catholic church gave the CIA, working with the Vatican, a vehicle to undermine the communist regime, the spy agency has no equivalent infrastructure in Iran, one former spook pointed out Small, fragile human rights activists are no match for the ubiquitous Iranian secret police.
Does that mean the CIA is impotent to affect events there?
No, the covert action veterans say: Iran's political crisis provides the CIA with an opportunity to provoke the defection of Iranian military, intelligence and diplomatic representatives abroad.
(After the Soviet Union crushed the "Prague Spring" in 1968, Czech officials defected in droves to the CIA.)
How it handles a similar scenario now, and the possible windfall of inside information on the Iranian leadership and its nuclear program, will be far more beneficial than clumsy attempts to manipulate the protests sweeping Tehran.
The manipulation of political messages, including breaking Iranian attempts to impose a news blackout on events there, should be left to State Department diplomats and propaganda specialists.
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There was an argument made during the Bush years that an infrastructure for information to get into and out of Iran for defectors and possible defectors but was eventually shut down by the State dept from what I recall.
That would have come in handy now.
The U.S. DOES have a stake in this and should act like it, shouldn't they?
Posted by: Mark Eichenlaub
| June 18, 2009 5:08 PM
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