Israel’s False Flag Operation Against Iran

 ISLAMIC INTELLIGENCE

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Israel’s False Flag Operation Against Iran

By Stephen Sniegoski,

This article in  “Foreign Policy” describes  one of Israel’s recent “false flag” operations. A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad agents posed as American spies to recruit members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran. This type of “false flag” operation was not directed against the US, but it could provide a model to bring about a US/Iran war.  If Iranians could be made to think that the US was behind extreme terrorist attacks  in their country, this could force the Iranian government to take belligerent action  against the US that would mean war. The Iranian government could not afford to look like a  ”paper tiger,” too weak to make any effort to defend its citizens.

One cannot absolve America’s government leaders of  the  responsibility for these Israeli actions.  That the US government  fails to do anything significant to stop such “false flag” operations  makes it appear that it actually supports them.  And it certainly could appear this way to the Iranians. In fact, since Israel is allegedly America’s close ally, the US should demand that it stop any type of terrorism against Iran, since such activity makes it appear that it has, at the very least,  America’s tacit support.   And Israel’s rejection of such a demand should have serious consequences, such as the termination of US military collaboration.

Ofcourse, for political reasons US government  leaders are  too fearful  to take such a step against Israel, even though allowing Israeli terrorist attacks against Iran  to continue could bring the US into a war. Unfortunately, most American politicians  are far more concerned about  the harm that an angry Israel lobby could  do to  them, than the harm that an unnecessary war could do to the United States and the rest of the world.

Interesting comments about this article are made at the Mondoweiss website, especially those that relate to the power of the Israel lobby: http://mondoweiss.net/2012/01/bombshell-israeli-intelligence-posed-as-cia-to -recruit-terror-group-for-covert-war-on-iran.html

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False Flag

A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad agents posed as American spies to recruit members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran.

 

by Mark Perry

Buried deep in the archives of America’s intelligence services are a series of memos, written during the last years of President George W. Bush’s administration, that describe how Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundallah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives — what is commonly referred to as a “false flag” operation.

The memos, as described by the sources, one of whom has read them and another who is intimately familiar with the case, investigated and debunked reports from 2007 and 2008 accusing the CIA, at the direction of the White House, of covertly supporting Jundallah — a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization. Jundallah, according to the U.S. government and published reports, is responsible for assassinating Iranian government officials and killing Iranian women and children.

But while the memos show that the United States had barred even the most incidental contact with Jundallah, according to both intelligence officers, the same was not true for Israel’s Mossad. The memos also detail CIA field reports saying that Israel’s recruiting activities occurred under the nose of U.S. intelligence officers, most notably in London, the capital of one of Israel’s ostensible allies, where Mossad officers posing as CIA operatives met with Jundallah officials.

The officials did not know whether the Israeli program to recruit and use Jundallah is ongoing. Nevertheless, they were stunned by the brazenness of the Mossad’s efforts.

“It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with,” the intelligence officer said. “Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn’t give a damn what we thought.”

Interviews with six currently serving or recently retired intelligence officers over the last 18 months have helped to fill in the blanks of the Israeli false-flag operation. In addition to the two currently serving U.S. intelligence officers, the existence of the Israeli false-flag operation was confirmed to me by four retired intelligence officers who have served in the CIA or have monitored Israeli intelligence operations from senior positions inside the U.S. government.

The CIA and the White House were both asked for comment on this story. By the time this story went to press, they had not responded. The Israeli intelligence services — the Mossad — were also contacted, in writing and by telephone, but failed to respond. As a policy, Israel does not confirm or deny its involvement in intelligence operations.

There is no denying that there is a covert, bloody, and ongoing campaign aimed at stopping Iran’s nuclear program, though no evidence has emerged connecting recent acts of sabotage and killings inside Iran to Jundallah. Many reports have cited Israel as the architect of this covert campaign, which claimed its latest victim on Jan. 11 when a motorcyclist in Tehran slipped a magnetic explosive device under the car of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a young Iranian nuclear scientist. The explosion killed Roshan, making him the fourth scientist assassinated in the past two years. The United States adamantly denies it is behind these killings.

According to one retired CIA officer, information about the false-flag operation was reported up the U.S. intelligence chain of command. It reached CIA Director of Operations Stephen Kappes, his deputy Michael Sulick, and the head of the Counterintelligence Center. All three of these officials are now retired. The Counterintelligence Center, according to its website, is tasked with investigating “threats posed by foreign intelligence services.”

The report then made its way to the White House, according to the currently serving U.S. intelligence officer. The officer said that Bush “went absolutely ballistic” when briefed on its contents.

“The report sparked White House concerns that Israel’s program was putting Americans at risk,” the intelligence officer told me. “There’s no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we’re not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians.”

Israel’s relationship with Jundallah continued to roil the Bush administration until the day it left office, this same intelligence officer noted. Israel’s activities jeopardized the administration’s fragile relationship with Pakistan, which was coming under intense pressure from Iran to crack down on Jundallah. It also undermined U.S. claims that it would never fight terror with terror, and invited attacks in kind on U.S. personnel.

“It’s easy to understand why Bush was so angry,” a former intelligence officer said. “After all, it’s hard to engage with a foreign government if they’re convinced you’re killing their people. Once you start doing that, they feel they can do the same.”

A senior administration official vowed to “take the gloves off” with Israel, according to a U.S. intelligence officer. But the United States did nothing — a result that the officer attributed to “political and bureaucratic inertia.”

“In the end,” the officer noted, “it was just easier to do nothing than to, you know, rock the boat.” Even so, at least for a short time, this same officer noted, the Mossad operation sparked a divisive debate among Bush’s national security team, pitting those who wondered “just whose side these guys [in Israel] are on” against those who argued that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

The debate over Jundallah was resolved only after Bush left office when, within his first weeks as president, Barack Obama drastically scaled back joint U.S.-Israel intelligence programs targeting Iran, according to multiple serving and retired officers.

The decision was controversial inside the CIA, where officials were forced to shut down “some key intelligence-gathering operations,” a recently retired CIA officer confirmed. This action was followed in November 2010 by the State Department’s addition of Jundallah to its list of foreign terrorist organizations — a decision that one former CIA officer called “an absolute no-brainer.”

Since Obama’s initial order, U.S. intelligence services have received clearance to cooperate with Israel on a number of classified intelligence-gathering operations focused on Iran’s nuclear program, according to a currently serving officer. These operations are highly technical in nature and do not involve covert actions targeting Iran’s infrastructure or political or military leadership.

“We don’t do bang and boom,” a recently retired intelligence officer said. “And we don’t do political assassinations.”

Israel regularly proposes conducting covert operations targeting Iranians, but is just as regularly shut down, according to retired and current intelligence officers. “They come into the room and spread out their plans, and we just shake our heads,” one highly placed intelligence source said, “and we say to them — ‘Don’t even go there. The answer is no.’”

Unlike the Mujahedin-e Khalq, the controversial exiled Iranian terrorist group that seeks the overthrow of the Tehran regime and is supported by former leading U.S. policymakers, Jundallah is relatively unknown — but just as violent. In May 2009, a Jundallah suicide bomber blew himself up inside a mosque in Zahedan, the capital of Iran’s southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan province bordering Pakistan, during a Shiite religious festival. The bombing killed 25 Iranians and wounded scores of others.

The attack enraged Tehran, which traced the perpetrators to a cell operating in Pakistan. The Iranian government notified the Pakistanis of the Jundallah threat and urged them to break up the movement’s bases along the Iranian-Pakistani border. The Pakistanis reacted sluggishly in the border areas, feeding Tehran’s suspicions that Jundallah was protected by Pakistan’s intelligence services.

The 2009 attack was just one in a long line of terrorist attacks attributed to the organization. In August 2007, Jundallah kidnapped 21 Iranian truck drivers. In December 2008, it captured and executed 16 Iranian border guards — the gruesome killings were filmed, in a stark echo of the decapitation of American businessman Nick Berg in Iraq at the hands of al Qaeda’s Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In July 2010, Jundallah conducted a twin suicide bombing in Zahedan outside a mosque, killing dozens of people, including members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The State Department aggressively denies that the U.S. government had or has any ties to Jundallah. “We have repeatedly stated, and reiterate again that the United States has not provided support to Jundallah,” a spokesman wrote in an email to the Wall Street Journal, following Jundallah’s designation as a terrorist organization. “The United States does not sponsor any form of terrorism. We will continue to work with the international community to curtail support for terrorist organizations and prevent violence against innocent civilians. We have also encouraged other governments to take comparable actions against Jundallah.”

A spate of stories in 2007 and 2008, including a report by ABC News and a New Yorker article, suggested that the United States was offering covert support to Jundallah. The issue has now returned to the spotlight with the string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and has outraged serving and retired intelligence officers who fear that Israeli operations are endangering American lives.

“This certainly isn’t the first time this has happened, though it’s the worst case I’ve heard of,” former Centcom chief and retired Gen. Joe Hoar said of the Israeli operation upon being informed of it. “But while false-flag operations are hardly new, they’re extremely dangerous. You’re basically using your friendship with an ally for your own purposes. Israel is playing with fire. It gets us involved in their covert war, whether we want to be involved or not.”

The Israeli operation left a number of recently retired CIA officers sputtering in frustration. “It’s going to be pretty hard for the U.S. to distance itself from an Israeli attack on Iran with this kind of thing going on,” one of them told me.

Jundallah head Abdolmalek Rigi was captured by Iran in February 2010. Although initial reports claimed that he was captured by the Iranians after taking a flight from Dubai to Kyrgyzstan, a retired intelligence officer with knowledge of the incident told me that Rigi was detained by Pakistani intelligence officers in Pakistan. The officer said that Rigi was turned over to the Iranians after the Pakistani government informed the United States that it planned to do so. The United States, this officer said, did not raise objections to the Pakistani decision.

Iran, meanwhile, has consistently claimed that Rigi was snatched from under the eyes of the CIA, which it alleges supported him. “It doesn’t matter,” the former intelligence officer said of Iran’s charges. “It doesn’t matter what they say. They know the truth.”

Rigi was interrogated, tried, and convicted by the Iranians and hanged on June 20, 2010. Prior to his execution, Rigi claimed in an interview with Iranian media — which has to be assumed was under duress — that he had doubts about U.S. sponsorship of Jundallah. He recounted an alleged meeting with “NATO officials” in Morocco in 2007 that raised his suspicions. “When we thought about it we came to the conclusion that they are either Americans acting under NATO cover or Israelis,” he said.

While many of the details of Israel’s involvement with Jundallah are now known, many others still remain a mystery — and are likely to remain so. The CIA memos of the incident have been “blue bordered,” meaning that they were circulated to senior levels of the broader U.S. intelligence community as well as senior State Department officials.

What has become crystal clear, however, is the level of anger among senior intelligence officials about Israel’s actions. “This was stupid and dangerous,” the intelligence official who first told me about the operation said. “Israel is supposed to be working with us, not against us. If they want to shed blood, it would help a lot if it was their blood and not ours. You know, they’re supposed to be a strategic asset. Well, guess what? There are a lot of people now, important people, who just don’t think that’s true.”

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Mark Perry is a military and political analyst and author of eight books, including Partners In Command, George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace, and the recently released Talking To Terrorists.

Prof. Stephen J. Sniegoski, Ph.D. earned his doctorate in American history,with a focus on American foreign policy, at the University of Maryland. His focus on the neoconservative involvement in American foreign policy antedates September 11, 2001. His first major work on the subject, “The War on Iraq: Conceived in Israel” was published February 10, 2003, more than a month before the American attack. He is the author of “The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel”. Read more articles by Stephen J. Sniegoski at:  http://home.comcast.net/~transparentcabal/

Also see:

• Sayanim — Israeli Operatives in the U.S.

Editing: Debbie Menon

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/01/14/israels-false-flag-operation-against-iran/

Posted by Abu-Suleyman 

Saturday, January 14, 2012

IRAN: US/Israeli “False Flag” Attack May Be Underway

by Jim Fetzer and Joshua Blakeney

Several warnings of an imminent “false flag” attack by the Israeli-influenced United States on one of its own warships, which will be attributed to Iran, have been reported by several reliable sources. In recent years “false-flag” terrorism has been utilized multiple times by US and Israeli political actors to provide pretexts for otherwise unjustifiable, anti-Islamic military excursions. The plan is to justify an all-out assault on Iran based upon a new fabricated “Pearl Harbor”.

Israel is the primary motivator behind the attempts to destabilize Iran. US traditional foreign policy was one of attempting to foster stability in the Middle East for oil markets. The Zionist impulse, conversely, is to destabilize all potential regional hegemons and carve the Middle East up into ethno-religious statelets. Thus, since the fraudulent events of 9/11, we’ve seen a policy of Middle East disintegration being pursued by Israeli-influenced American politicians. Indeed, recently released CIA memos reveal that Mossad agents have been posing as CIA agents and conscripting anti-Iranian terrorists.

Former Israeli intelligence officer, Avi Perry, startlingly wrote in a January 9th Jerusalem Post article of a forthcoming “ ‘Pearl Harbor’ scenario, in which Iran [will] launch…a “surprise” attack on the US navy,” giving the US “the perfect rationalization to finish them [Iran] off.” Tellingly, Perry chose to put the word “surprise” in quotation marks. Is Perry telling us something?

Perry asserts: “[an] Iranian attack on an American military vessel will serve as a justification and a pretext for a retaliatory move by the US military against the Iranian regime.” However, Perry identifies “a US aircraft carrier” as the likely target of this imagined Iranian attack.

USS Vincennes returns to San Diego (October 1988)

We beg to differ. There are major indications that the vessel of choice is to be the USS Vincennes. The fourth USS Vincennes (CG-49) is a US Navy Ticonderoga class Aegis guided missile cruiser. On July 3, 1988, the ship shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 civilian passengers on board, including 38 non-Iranians and 66 children.

This would be an ideal vessel for the staged provocation as it could be easily sold to the world as having been Iranian retribution for the 1988 downing of Flight 655. That way the evident lack of motive for Iran to provoke the US and Israeli military titans will be replaced by a perceived “motive.” No one will stop to ask themselves why Iran would thereby invite its own national annihilation.

If we were to believe the Wikipedia version of history, the Vincennes has already been scrapped. The Wikipedia article for the Vincennes states, “The Vincennes was completely scrapped by 23 November 2011.” If that were true it could not be used as the target of this “false-flag” attack. Yet we have photographic and testimonial evidence suggesting otherwise.

The USS Vincennes afloat in Puget Sound. The ship has an orange hue.

It cannot have been "completely scrapped" and still be afloat in Puget Sound.

A reliable source interviewed by one of us has brought us up to speed on the latest developments:

“We now know what that INACTIVE Ticonderoga class AEGIS missile cruiser got towed out of here under cover of darkness for. It’ll likely be the sacrificial lamb that starts the war with Iran….

“Why else would they move it when all the rest sit at a buoy here for months before they finally leave to be sunk?

“I told this to a former 9/11 Truth person back when that ship got moved that it was likely to be used for a FALSE FLAG attack. Well, we’ll soon see if I was right about this one.”

Since the ship left Puget Sound in the dead of night about two months ago, it’s most probable location today is at the 5th Fleet Headquarters in Bahrain for safe keeping until the time comes for its deployment.  The ship would have been refurbished and repainted and provided with remote control capabilities.

“That is the only location in the region outside of Haifa Harbor where she could probably be at least partially concealed by cocooning the superstructure to make it less obvious who she is. Meanwhile, the US Navy is compiling a list of casualties based upon deceased sailors, very much as was the case on 9/11,” we were advised.

Former Israeli false-flag attacks, such as on the USS Liberty in 1967, and the Argentine attacks in 1992 and in 1994, demonstrate Israel’s willingness to attack US targets, on the one hand, and its own people, on the other. It’s highly probable that, having shipped the Vincennes into an acceptable location, that the Mossad, which has also been implicated in the events of 9/11, would do the rest of the dirty work.  Or the United States, which has become Israel’s lackey, might blow up one of its own ships, which would be a literal and a figurative sign of how low the US has sunk.

 
YouTube - Veterans Today -

 

“As a Marine Corps officer, I swore an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic”, Jim Fetzer observes. “Neither I nor any other officer I know ever swore allegiance to the State of Israel.  Our leaders are not only betraying our own Constitution but have turned our nation into a servant of an unworthy, brutal and tyrannical master, who couldn’t care less about the best interests of American citizens–and our own leaders not only permit this to happen but actually promote it.”

In light of recent “deep political events” in Iran, including the recent murder of Iranian nuclear physicist Professor Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, it would not be surprising if the US and Israel were to raise the ante by implementing a fraudulent trigger incident, which may very well ignite World War III.

 

YouTube - Veterans Today -

Because of the pervasiveness of US-Israeli deceptions, an increasing number of public intellectuals are awakening to the prospect of these fraudulent events BEFORE THEY HAPPEN, as appears to be the case with this initiative. We can’t be certain about all of this, because we are on the outside, looking in.  Perhaps the USS Vincennes actually has been scrapped.  But on this point the world can rest assured: they haven’t scrapped the plan!

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Jim Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer, is McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth and the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth.

Joshua Blakeney is a graduate student at the University of Lethbridge, member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Staff Writer at Veterans Today.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/01/14/iran-usisraeli-false-flag-attack-may-be-underway/ 

 

Posted by Abu-Suleyman