iWar

by Bill Gertz

  7

  IRAN

  I Went to the Store and They Still Don’t Have Whiskey. What Kind of Nuclear Deal Is This?

  Iran employs the concept of “soft war,” using the Internet and other technical platforms to combat perceived enemies.

  —INTERNAL STATE DEPARTMENT SECURITY REPORT, MAY 8, 2015

  The Islamic Republic of Iran remains the world’s deadliest state sponsor of international terrorism, a regime responsible for the killing of thousands of Americans. And within a few years, as a result of the nuclear agreement orchestrated by President Barack Obama, the extremist regime in Tehran will be capable of firing missiles armed with nuclear warheads against American cities, threatening the lives of millions of Americans. In developing these weapons of mass destruction, the hard-line Islamic rulers of Iran remain steadfast in their goal of making “Death to America” a reality. In the process, the Iranians have conducted a highly effective information warfare program to deceive the United States into lifting crippling economic sanctions and paying billions of dollars in ransom, in exchange for the false promise of improved relations between the United States and Iran. In pursuing this objective, Obama utterly failed to understand the true nature of the danger posed by Iran. And in an unprecedented move by an American president, Obama carried out his own information warfare operation against the American people to conclude the nuclear agreement, which guarantees the ruling mullahs in Tehran will be permitted under an international treaty to produce nuclear weapons in ten years or less. The mishandling of the nuclear danger posed by Iran was blatant appeasement of a kind not seen since British prime minister Neville Chamberlain declared “peace for our time” after caving in to Nazi Germany in 1938—less than a year before German forces invaded Poland, marking the start of World War II.

  • • •

  On July 14, 2015, in Vienna, Austria, representatives of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the United States, China, France, Germany, the European Union, Russia, and the United Kingdom gathered to sign an agreement that had been twenty months in the making. And according to its preamble, the agreement would “ensure that Iran’s nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful, and mark a fundamental shift in their approach to this issue.” In reality, the agreement will go down in history as among the worst diplomatic failures in American history. It legitimized an illegal nuclear program for Iran and permits the hard-line Islamist state to take all the technological steps needed to produce nuclear weapons within a decade.

  It was the deal of the century. Iran was a rogue Islamist state that at the time of the signing remained one of the most active state sponsors of international terrorism, backing such groups as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Palestinian terror group Hamas. Iran also had harbored several key al Qaeda leaders throughout the 2000s. Iran is a state that since its Islamic revolution in 1979 has been linked to the killing of thousands of Americans, including at least 1,100 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq as a direct result of Tehran’s supplying deadly armor-piercing bombs to Iraqi militias and terrorists.

  The nuclear deal triggered deadpan humor on Iran’s vibrant social media, one of the few areas of society where Iranians opposed to the violent theocratic regime express themselves. “I went to the store now and they still don’t have whiskey! What kind of a deal is this?” went one wry text message circulating on WhatsApp and Viber.

  The appeasement of Iran was a deliberate policy of President Barack Obama and his administration to seek normal relations with Iran, at the same time pretending the nuclear agreement would mitigate perhaps the most serious danger of Iran developing nuclear weapons and thus emerging as a nuclear weapons state. By participating in what became known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Tehran received through negotiations what it had been seeking for years—relief from crippling international sanctions imposed for its illegal nuclear program, sanctions that had prevented the purchase of foreign military weapons and equipment. The kicker, however, came when the U.S. government agreed as part of the deal to allow Iran to recover at least $100 billion in cash that had been frozen in various banks around the world under U.S. sanctions.

  The Iran deal was a clear case of a successful information warfare campaign waged against the United States and the world; it involved infiltrating key pro-Iranian influence agents within the Obama administration. For President Obama, the Iran nuclear deal was cast as the crowning achievement of his second term in office, a foreign policy gambit he and his aides regarded as the equivalent of his controversial national health care program of the first term.

  Obama ignored a strategic opportunity to support democratic reform in Iran during the mass demonstrations that broke out in Iran following rigged elections in 2009. As Iranians took to the streets by the thousands to protest the fraud, Obama remained silent. The protesters were supporting official Iranian government reformers who, while not advocating democratic changes or opposing the theocratic regime, could nonetheless have been utilized in an information warfare program to advance the emergence of a democratic regime in Iran if given covert American intelligence support or financing. The president instead regarded any covert intervention to back the protesters as harking back to what he viewed as unwelcome American imperialism. The CIA successfully had worked behind the scenes in Iran in 1953 to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and install the shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

  Hillary Clinton, as Obama’s secretary of state, wrote in her book Hard Choices that Obama rejected arguments from his advisers to help the protesters, who would end up being brutally suppressed and attacked by Iranian security forces. Clinton wrote that “the president grudgingly decided that we would better serve the aspirations of the Iranian people by not putting the United States in the middle of the crisis. It was a difficult, clear-eyed tactical call.” An inveterate dissembler, Clinton also falsely stated that the failure to back the Iranian protests was not based on Obama’s desire to engage the Islamist regime. She then stated that “in retrospect, I’m not sure our restraint was the right choice.”

  In reality, Iran’s Green Revolution, as it was called, was a golden opportunity for the United States to change the power structure in the Middle East by forcing democratic reform on the terrorist-backing regime in Tehran. Had the United States government and intelligence community had a highly developed information warfare capability at the time, the peaceful regime change could have been carried out without firing a shot. But the president and his team squandered the chance to not only improve the lives of millions of Iranians, but to serve U.S. interests as well. Instead of doing the right thing, Obama pressed ahead with a secret program of engaging Iran, sending at least four secret letters to Iran’s dictator, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The letters naïvely offered American cooperation with the hard-line regime. In 2014, Obama asked Khamenei to work with the United States in countering terrorism, apparently oblivious to Iran’s role as a leading state sponsor of Islamist terror itself.

  As noted earlier, Ben Rhodes operated as the president’s chief liberal left communications strategist, waging a kind of information warfare against the American public in mustering support for the Iranian nuclear deal. As a thirty-year-old White House official working for Obama, Rhodes was dubbed the Boy Wonder. Under the grandiose title Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, it was Rhodes who served as the puppet master, pulling the strings of the entire Obama foreign and international security apparatus. The neophyte aide peeled back the veil of secrecy surrounding his operations in a revealing New York Times Magazine profile published in early 2016. The article exposed how Rhodes had boasted of manipulating Congress and the news media into supporting the Iran nuclear deal, whose skeptics included both Republicans and Democrats alike.

  Rhodes’s Iran nuclear deal operation was central to Obama’s gigantic disinformation program, especially against Congress, which gave up its constitutional prerogative to approve treaties in exchange for a promise from the White House to submit the final accord to a
much easier up-or-down Senate vote. By contrast, formal treaty ratification would have required the nearly impossible to obtain two-thirds majority of the divided one hundred senators. Along with CIA detailee to the White House Ned Price, who served as Rhodes’s sidekick and spokesman at the National Security Council, Rhodes ran a propaganda and deception campaign that rivaled the propaganda efforts of Nazi Joseph Goebbels. As writer David Samuels explained in his Times Magazine piece:

  Price turns to his computer and begins tapping away at the administration’s well-cultivated network of officials, talking heads, columnists and newspaper reporters, web jockeys and outside advocates who can tweet at critics and tweak their stories backed up by quotations from “senior White House officials” and “spokespeople.” I watch the message bounce from Rhodes’s brain to Price’s keyboard to the three big briefing podiums—the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon—and across the Twitterverse, where it springs to life in dozens of insta-stories, which over the next five hours don formal dress for mainstream outlets. It’s a tutorial in the making of a digital news microclimate—a storm that is easy to mistake these days for a fact of nature, but whose author is sitting next to me right now.

  To manipulate the press into reporting stories Obama wanted, Rhodes and his team worked to spin reporters through tightly controlled and coordinated official press briefings held daily or several times a week at the State Department, Pentagon, and White House. Rhodes then amplified the propaganda themes through “force multipliers”—propaganda agents within the Washington media milieu who could be counted on to spout administration talking points, especially against critics of the administration. “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know, I wouldn’t want to name them,” Price told Samuels.

  The White House–backed reporters could be counted on to tweet and otherwise propagate digital propaganda directly in line with administration themes. With the decline of newspapers and traditional news outlets over the past decade—the wire services, the major newspapers, and the major broadcast outlets—Rhodes and his information warfare team successfully fooled millions of Americans about the Iran deal. Samuels wrote that it likely will be the model for future presidents’ efforts.

  In the case of the Iran deal, Rhodes presented the lie that the deal directly resulted from the emergence in 2013 of alleged Iranian “moderates” within the regime, led by Hassan Rouhani, and who Rhodes asserted had provided a strategic opening for U.S. engagement with the longtime enemy. According to Samuels, this meme was largely manufactured for the purpose of selling the deal. Rhodes described Obama’s Iranian efforts as beginning in 2012 and as the apogee of an arc of his entire second term. As Rhodes put it:

  We don’t have to kind of be in cycles of conflict if we can find other ways to resolve these issues. We can do things that challenge the conventional thinking that, you know, “AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] doesn’t like this,” or “the Israeli government doesn’t like this,” or “the gulf countries don’t like it.” It’s the possibility of improved relations with adversaries. It’s nonproliferation. So all these threads that the president’s been spinning—and I mean that not in the press sense—for almost a decade, they kind of all converged around Iran.

  The president’s claim that 2013 marked the key starting point for the Iran deal was false, since the negotiations had begun in mid-2012 and informal talks stretched as far back as 2011—months before Rouhani came to power. The notion that Rouhani was a moderate was also disinformation, since all Iranian candidates for elective office are picked by the supreme leader—dictator Khamenei. The idea of a leadership split was a deception ploy used by Obama and Rhodes to make it appear to Americans that a nuclear deal was a real chance to influence the Islamist state.

  To help sell the deal, Rhodes used a false straw-man argument that there were only two choices related to the nuclear deal—reject the agreement and bring about war, or support it and bring about peace. Key media influencers were Jeffrey Goldberg, the staff writer at the Atlantic who wrote the flattering article on the Obama foreign policy doctrine, and Laura Rozen, a liberal pro-Iran advocate who wrote for the online Al-Monitor and who according to the Times Magazine article was counted on by the White House to reliably promote their propaganda.

  Rhodes boasted of creating the echo chamber for the press and pro-Iran activist supporters. It included groups like the liberal Ploughshares Fund, an arms control advocacy group that promoted the utopian antinuclear program Global Zero, which found favor with Obama but was resoundingly rejected by senior defense and military leaders worried about the nuclear modernization under way in China, Russia, and, soon, Iran. Also co-opted to propagandize the Iran deal was a group called the Iran Project, which billed itself as “independent” and “nonpartisan” yet worked covertly with the Rhodes information warfare machine to push the Iran nuclear agreement on an unsuspecting public and Congress. Rhodes seemed unconcerned that Iran could cheat on the agreement without any real penalty, or by the fact that it ultimately will be permitted to develop all the infrastructure for arming itself with nuclear weapons. For Rhodes, as for Obama, the urgent mission was to strive for the utopian notion of a reoriented, pro-Iran foreign policy in the Middle East.

  Leon Panetta, who held significant posts within the Obama administration as CIA director and secretary of defense, would turn against Obama by disclosing his disagreement with the fiction that the fortunes of moderate Iranians would be boosted by concluding the Iran nuclear deal. Hard-liners remained firmly in power and Panetta viewed Obama’s shift in sucking up to Iran as reflecting the president’s liberal left antiwar policies of seeking to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan regardless of the security situation on the ground. Obama also falsely believed that continuing to impose U.S. and international sanctions on Iran would lead to war. In Panetta’s telling, the pacifist, liberal Obama could not be convinced otherwise. The president thought that “if you ratchet up sanctions, it could cause a war. If you start opposing their interest in Syria, well, that could start a war, too,” Panetta said.

  In other words, Obama’s policy was based on rank appeasement.

  A day after the New York Times Magazine article appeared, Rhodes moderated an interagency government videoconference with a large group of Obama administration officials. The thirty-eight-year-old propaganda wizard opened the meeting by joking about the article. “You’re my echo chamber,” he quipped, according to a person in the meeting. “It was disgusting,” the official told me. “He was making fun of how he deceived the American people.”

  • • •

  The Iran deal came on the heels of an unsuccessful U.S. information warfare operation against Iran’s nuclear program. It began in 2010, when Obama authorized a clandestine cyberattack on Iran’s program of enriching uranium through thousands of centrifuges—precision machines linked together in groups called cascades that spin a uranium gas into highly enriched uranium that can be used in nuclear weapons. The clandestine program, code-named Olympic Games, secretly planted sophisticated malicious software, later called Stuxnet, into the centrifuge control system. The computer virus caused around one thousand of the five thousand centrifuges located at the nuclear complex in Natanz to spin out of control and self-destruct. As fallout from the secret operation, the Stuxnet computer worm had managed to escape the Natanz industrial control system network and began appearing on the Internet by the summer of 2010. It was quickly identified by security researchers as a nation-state-developed malware with capabilities beyond those of the average or even advanced nonstate hacker. The disclosure of Stuxnet caused the president to consider shutting down the secret operation, part of a program developed by the CIA and National Security Agency during the administration of President George W. Bush around 2006. “Should we shut this thing down?” Obama asked, according to the first account of the secret program disclosed by New York Times reporter David Sanger. Obama would stay the course and keep the operation
going for a few more years with some new variants of the cyber weapon. But the program was not producing the urgently needed result: complete destruction of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

  The Stuxnet program employed a device called a beacon, which was planted inside Iran’s Siemens industrial controller and sent back technical details of the system to cyber spies at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Through Stuxnet, a detailed map of the entire Natanz centrifuge network was obtained. Israel’s military cyberwarfare group, called Unit 8200, also played a key role in the operation. But the cyber covert action program was never understood by its operators as a total solution to the Iran nuclear problem. A very high-ranking U.S. intelligence official disclosed to me that Olympic Games was assessed by both intelligence officials and policy makers as unable to eliminate the threat posed by the growing Iran nuclear program.

  However, for a while the clandestine program helped convince the Israelis that the United States was supporting its Middle East ally in working to block Iran from developing nuclear weapons. That goal was critically important because Israel correctly views Iran and its nuclear ambitions as posing an existential threat to the Jewish state that must be countered, preferably through nonmilitary means, but ultimately through the use of force if needed.

  In the end, Obama abandoned the cyber covert action program in favor of his naïve approach of seeking engagement diplomacy with Iran. The reality is that the president was guilty of appeasing one of the world’s most dangerous regimes, which will become more dangerous through the use of a nuclear agreement that by any objective measure provided the regime with both cash and arms in the near term, and the technology, equipment, and international backing for producing nuclear weapons in the longer one.