CIA Activities in Iran - 2008

2008

In response to an inquiry from the Washington Post regarding a story by Seymour Hersh appearing in the July 7, 2008 issue of The New Yorker, which claims that the Bush administration undertook a greatly expanded program of covert actions inside Iran beginning the previous year, agency spokesman George Little said, "The CIA does not, as a rule, comment on allegations regarding covert operations." Hersh detailed US covert action plans against Iran involving CIA, DIA and Special Forces. According to Hersh, the United States is materially supporting the following groups which are performing acts of violence inside Iran:

• Baluchi dissidents. Hersh writes:

The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. "The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda," Baer told me

• Jundallah, a Sunni and Baluchi group. Hersh quotes Vali Nasr on Jundallah as stating that

"They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture."

• These two separate claims are the same. The Jundullah is a Baloch militant group from Sistan - Baluchistan. Baloch people are Sunni.

• The leader of Jundallah was executed at Evin prison in Iran in 2010 after being taken off a flight from Dubai to Kyrgyzstan, where he claimed in an interview on Iranian TV he had a meeting with a "high ranking US official" at the Manas Air base (the US Military base in Kyrgyzstan).

• Expatriate nationalist group People's Mujahedin of Iran
• Kurdish separatist group PJAK

Journalist David Ignatius of the Washington Post asserts that U.S. covert action "appears to focus on political action and the collection of intelligence rather than on lethal operations". Iranian commentator Ali Eftagh wrote in the Washington Post that the covert actions that Hersh is reporting are being made public by the Bush administration as a form of psychological warfare.