BENGHAZI GUN RUNNING IS THE REAL SCANDAL – THE RED LINE AND THE RAT LINE
OBAMA,
TURKEY’S FELLOW MUSLIM LEADER ERDOGAN, AND THEIR CONNECTION WITH THE
SYRIAN REBELS. OBAMA HAS BEEN HELPING ISLAMIC JIHADIST BEHIND CONGRESS’
BACK SINCE HE’S BEEN IN OFFICE. This author is a Pulitzer
Prize winner and uncovered scandals in Vietnam and Abu Ghraib. Some
people brush him off as a conspiracy theorist and the New Yorker and the
Washington Post wouldn’t run this story but I am having trouble
understanding why FoxNews wouldn’t run with it. I believe this gets to
the heart of Benghazi
rather than the nonsense about the talking points. The talking points
are a sideshow. This is what the cover up is about! Gun running to Syria
and I have been saying it from the start!
Seymour M. Hersh 5-4-14 In
2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without
consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the
Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike,
this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the
‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons.＊
Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he
announced that he would seek congressional approval for the
intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for
hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer
to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did
Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing
into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the
administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and
military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and
potentially disastrous.
Obama’s change of mind had
its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British
intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August
attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the
batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal.
The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly
relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened
doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to
warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on
Syria’s infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a
consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to
the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling
the attack.
For months there had been
acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence
community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbours, especially
Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the
al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well
as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish
government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to
current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s
nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and
forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’
The joint chiefs also knew
that the Obama administration’s public claims that only the Syrian army
had access to sarin were wrong. The American and British intelligence
communities had been aware since the spring of 2013 that some rebel
units in Syria were developing chemical weapons. On 20 June analysts for
the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page
‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd,
which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its
programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since
al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’. (According to a Defense Department
consultant, US intelligence has long known that al-Qaida experimented
with chemical weapons, and has a video of one of its gas experiments
with dogs.) The DIA paper went on: ‘Previous IC [intelligence community]
focus had been almost entirely on Syrian CW [chemical weapons]
stockpiles; now we see ANF attempting to make its own CW … Al-Nusrah
Front’s relative freedom of operation within Syria leads us to assess
the group’s CW aspirations will be difficult to disrupt in the future.’
The paper drew on classified intelligence from numerous agencies:
‘Turkey and Saudi-based chemical facilitators,’ it said, ‘were
attempting to obtain sarin precursors in bulk, tens of kilograms, likely
for the anticipated large scale production effort in Syria.’ (Asked
about the DIA paper, a spokesperson for the director of national
intelligence said: ‘No such paper was ever requested or produced by
intelligence community analysts.’)
Last May, more than ten
members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested in southern Turkey with what
local police told the press were two kilograms of sarin. In a 130-page
indictment the group was accused of attempting to purchase fuses, piping
for the construction of mortars, and chemical precursors for sarin.
Five of those arrested were freed after a brief detention. The others,
including the ringleader, Haytham Qassab, for whom the prosecutor
requested a prison sentence of 25 years, were released pending trial. In
the meantime the Turkish press has been rife with speculation that the
Erdoğan administration has been covering up the extent of its
involvement with the rebels. In a news conference last summer, Aydin
Sezgin, Turkey’s ambassador to Moscow, dismissed the arrests and claimed
to reporters that the recovered ‘sarin’ was merely ‘anti-freeze’.
The DIA paper took the
arrests as evidence that al-Nusra was expanding its access to chemical
weapons. It said Qassab had ‘self-identified’ as a member of al-Nusra,
and that he was directly connected to Abd-al-Ghani, the ‘ANF emir for
military manufacturing’. Qassab and his associate Khalid Ousta worked
with Halit Unalkaya, an employee of a Turkish firm called Zirve Export,
who provided ‘price quotes for bulk quantities of sarin precursors’.
Abd-al-Ghani’s plan was for two associates to ‘perfect a process for
making sarin, then go to Syria to train others to begin large scale
production at an unidentified lab in Syria’. The DIA paper said that one
of his operatives had purchased a precursor on the ‘Baghdad chemical
market’, which ‘has supported at least seven CW efforts since 2004’.
A series of chemical weapon
attacks in March and April 2013 was investigated over the next few
months by a special UN mission to Syria. A person with close knowledge
of the UN’s activity in Syria told me that there was evidence linking
the Syrian opposition to the first gas attack, on 19 March in Khan
Al-Assal, a village near Aleppo. In its final report in December, the
mission said that at least 19 civilians and one Syrian soldier were
among the fatalities, along with scores of injured. It had no mandate to
assign responsibility for the attack, but the person with knowledge of
the UN’s activities said: ‘Investigators interviewed the people who were
there, including the doctors who treated the victims. It was clear that
the rebels used the gas. It did not come out in public because no one
wanted to know.’
In the months before the
attacks began, a former senior Defense Department official told me, the
DIA was circulating a daily classified report known as SYRUP on all
intelligence related to the Syrian conflict, including material on
chemical weapons. But in the spring, distribution of the part of the
report concerning chemical weapons was severely curtailed on the orders
of Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff. ‘Something was in
there that triggered a shit fit by McDonough,’ the former Defense
Department official said. ‘One day it was a huge deal, and then, after
the March and April sarin attacks’ – he snapped his fingers – ‘it’s no
longer there.’ The decision to restrict distribution was made as the
joint chiefs ordered intensive contingency planning for a possible
ground invasion of Syria whose primary objective would be the
elimination of chemical weapons.
The former intelligence
official said that many in the US national security establishment had
long been troubled by the president’s red line: ‘The joint chiefs asked
the White House, “What does red line mean? How does that translate into
military orders? Troops on the ground? Massive strike? Limited strike?”
They tasked military intelligence to study how we could carry out the
threat. They learned nothing more about the president’s reasoning.’
In the aftermath of the 21
August attack Obama ordered the Pentagon to draw up targets for bombing.
Early in the process, the former intelligence official said, ‘the White
House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff as
being insufficiently “painful” to the Assad regime.’ The original
targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian
infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved
into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to
airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with
Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting
longer,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The Pentagon
planners said we can’t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s missile
sites because their warheads are buried too far below ground, so the two
B-52 air wings with two-thousand pound bombs were assigned to the
mission. Then we’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover
downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ The new
target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities
Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets
included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic
and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all
known military and intelligence buildings.
Britain and France were both
to play a part. On 29 August, the day Parliament voted against
Cameron’s bid to join the intervention, the Guardian reported
that he had already ordered six RAF Typhoon fighter jets to be deployed
to Cyprus, and had volunteered a submarine capable of launching Tomahawk
missiles. The French air force – a crucial player in the 2011 strikes
on Libya – was deeply committed, according to an account in Le Nouvel Observateur;
François Hollande had ordered several Rafale fighter-bombers to join
the American assault. Their targets were reported to be in western
Syria.
By the last days of August
the president had given the Joint Chiefs a fixed deadline for the
launch. ‘H hour was to begin no later than Monday morning [2 September],
a massive assault to neutralise Assad,’ the former intelligence
official said. So it was a surprise to many when during a speech in the
White House Rose Garden on 31 August Obama said that the attack would be
put on hold, and he would turn to Congress and put it to a vote.
At this stage, Obama’s
premise – that only the Syrian army was capable of deploying sarin – was
unravelling. Within a few days of the 21 August attack, the former
intelligence official told me, Russian military intelligence operatives
had recovered samples of the chemical agent from Ghouta. They analysed
it and passed it on to British military intelligence; this was the
material sent to Porton Down. (A spokesperson for Porton Down said:
‘Many of the samples analysed in the UK tested positive for the nerve
agent sarin.’ MI6 said that it doesn’t comment on intelligence matters.)
The former intelligence
official said the Russian who delivered the sample to the UK was ‘a good
source – someone with access, knowledge and a record of being
trustworthy’. After the first reported uses of chemical weapons in Syria
last year, American and allied intelligence agencies ‘made an effort to
find the answer as to what if anything, was used – and its source’, the
former intelligence official said. ‘We use data exchanged as part of
the Chemical Weapons Convention. The DIA’s baseline consisted of knowing
the composition of each batch of Soviet-manufactured chemical weapons.
But we didn’t know which batches the Assad government currently had in
its arsenal. Within days of the Damascus incident we asked a source in
the Syrian government to give us a list of the batches the government
currently had. This is why we could confirm the difference so quickly.’
The process hadn’t worked as
smoothly in the spring, the former intelligence official said, because
the studies done by Western intelligence ‘were inconclusive as to the
type of gas it was. The word “sarin” didn’t come up. There was a great
deal of discussion about this, but since no one could conclude what gas
it was, you could not say that Assad had crossed the president’s red
line.’ By 21 August, the former intelligence official went on, ‘the
Syrian opposition clearly had learned from this and announced that
“sarin” from the Syrian army had been used, before any analysis could be
made, and the press and White House jumped at it. Since it now was
sarin, “It had to be Assad.”’
The UK defence staff who
relayed the Porton Down findings to the joint chiefs were sending the
Americans a message, the former intelligence official said: ‘We’re being
set up here.’ (This account made sense of a terse message a senior
official in the CIA sent in late August: ‘It was not the result of the
current regime. UK & US know this.’) By then the attack was a few
days away and American, British and French planes, ships and submarines
were at the ready.
The officer ultimately
responsible for the planning and execution of the attack was General
Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs. From the beginning of the
crisis, the former intelligence official said, the joint chiefs had been
sceptical of the administration’s argument that it had the facts to
back up its belief in Assad’s guilt. They pressed the DIA and other
agencies for more substantial evidence. ‘There was no way they thought
Syria would use nerve gas at that stage, because Assad was winning the
war,’ the former intelligence official said. Dempsey had irritated many
in the Obama administration by repeatedly warning Congress over the
summer of the danger of American military involvement in Syria. Last
April, after an optimistic assessment of rebel progress by the secretary
of state, John Kerry, in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee,
Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee that ‘there’s a risk
that this conflict has become stalemated.’
Dempsey’s initial view after
21 August was that a US strike on Syria – under the assumption that the
Assad government was responsible for the sarin attack – would be a
military blunder, the former intelligence official said. The Porton Down
report caused the joint chiefs to go to the president with a more
serious worry: that the attack sought by the White House would be an
unjustified act of aggression. It was the joint chiefs who led Obama to
change course. The official White House explanation for the turnabout –
the story the press corps told – was that the president, during a walk
in the Rose Garden with Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, suddenly
decided to seek approval for the strike from a bitterly divided Congress
with which he’d been in conflict for years. The former Defense
Department official told me that the White House provided a different
explanation to members of the civilian leadership of the Pentagon: the
bombing had been called off because there was intelligence ‘that the
Middle East would go up in smoke’ if it was carried out.
The president’s decision to
go to Congress was initially seen by senior aides in the White House,
the former intelligence official said, as a replay of George W. Bush’s
gambit in the autumn of 2002 before the invasion of Iraq: ‘When it
became clear that there were no WMD in Iraq, Congress, which had
endorsed the Iraqi war, and the White House both shared the blame and
repeatedly cited faulty intelligence. If the current Congress were to
vote to endorse the strike, the White House could again have it both
ways – wallop Syria with a massive attack and validate the president’s
red line commitment, while also being able to share the blame with
Congress if it came out that the Syrian military wasn’t behind the
attack.’ The turnabout came as a surprise even to the Democratic
leadership in Congress. In September the Wall Street Journal
reported that three days before his Rose Garden speech Obama had
telephoned Nancy Pelosi, leader of the House Democrats, ‘to talk through
the options’. She later told colleagues, according to the Journal, that she hadn’t asked the president to put the bombing to a congressional vote.
Obama’s move for
congressional approval quickly became a dead end. ‘Congress was not
going to let this go by,’ the former intelligence official said.
‘Congress made it known that, unlike the authorisation for the Iraq war,
there would be substantive hearings.’ At this point, there was a sense
of desperation in the White House, the former intelligence official
said. ‘And so out comes Plan B. Call off the bombing strike and Assad
would agree to unilaterally sign the chemical warfare treaty and agree
to the destruction of all of chemical weapons under UN supervision.’ At a
press conference in London on 9 September, Kerry was still talking
about intervention: ‘The risk of not acting is greater than the risk of
acting.’ But when a reporter asked if there was anything Assad could do
to stop the bombing, Kerry said: ‘Sure. He could turn over every single
bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next
week … But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.’ As
the New York Times reported the next day, the Russian-brokered
deal that emerged shortly afterwards had first been discussed by Obama
and Putin in the summer of 2012. Although the strike plans were shelved,
the administration didn’t change its public assessment of the
justification for going to war. ‘There is zero tolerance at that level
for the existence of error,’ the former intelligence official said of
the senior officials in the White House. ‘They could not afford to say:
“We were wrong.”’ (The DNI spokesperson said: ‘The Assad regime, and
only the Assad regime, could have been responsible for the chemical
weapons attack that took place on 21 August.’)
*
The full extent of US
co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in assisting the rebel
opposition in Syria has yet to come to light. The Obama administration
has never publicly admitted to its role in creating what the CIA calls a
‘rat line’, a back channel highway into Syria. The rat line, authorised
in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via
southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of
those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some
of them affiliated with al-Qaida. (The DNI spokesperson said: ‘The idea
that the United States was providing weapons from Libya to anyone is
false.’)
In January, the Senate
Intelligence Committee released a report on the assault by a local
militia in September 2012 on the American consulate and a nearby
undercover CIA facility in Benghazi, which resulted in the death of the
US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three others. The report’s
criticism of the State Department for not providing adequate security at
the consulate, and of the intelligence community for not alerting the
US military to the presence of a CIA outpost in the area, received
front-page coverage and revived animosities in Washington, with
Republicans accusing Obama and Hillary Clinton of a cover-up. A highly
classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret
agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan
administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the
agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar;
the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from
Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria. A number of front companies were set up
in Libya, some under the cover of Australian entities. Retired American
soldiers, who didn’t always know who was really employing them, were
hired to manage procurement and shipping. The operation was run by David
Petraeus, the CIA director who would soon resign when it became known
he was having an affair with his biographer. (A spokesperson for
Petraeus denied the operation ever took place.)
The operation had not been
disclosed at the time it was set up to the congressional intelligence
committees and the congressional leadership, as required by law since
the 1970s. The involvement of MI6 enabled the CIA to evade the law by
classifying the mission as a liaison operation. The former intelligence
official explained that for years there has been a recognised exception
in the law that permits the CIA not to report liaison activity to
Congress, which would otherwise be owed a finding. (All proposed CIA
covert operations must be described in a written document, known as a
‘finding’, submitted to the senior leadership of Congress for approval.)
Distribution of the annex was limited to the staff aides who wrote the
report and to the eight ranking members of Congress – the Democratic and
Republican leaders of the House and Senate, and the Democratic and
Republicans leaders on the House and Senate intelligence committees.
This hardly constituted a genuine attempt at oversight: the eight
leaders are not known to gather together to raise questions or discuss
the secret information they receive.
The annex didn’t tell the
whole story of what happened in Benghazi before the attack, nor did it
explain why the American consulate was attacked. ‘The consulate’s only
mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms,’ the former
intelligence official, who has read the annex, said. ‘It had no real
political role.’
Washington abruptly ended
the CIA’s role in the transfer of arms from Libya after the attack on
the consulate, but the rat line kept going. ‘The United States was no
longer in control of what the Turks were relaying to the jihadists,’ the
former intelligence official said. Within weeks, as many as forty
portable surface-to-air missile launchers, commonly known as manpads,
were in the hands of Syrian rebels. On 28 November 2012, Joby Warrick of
the Washington Post reported that the previous day rebels near
Aleppo had used what was almost certainly a manpad to shoot down a
Syrian transport helicopter. ‘The Obama administration,’ Warrick wrote,
‘has steadfastly opposed arming Syrian opposition forces with such
missiles, warning that the weapons could fall into the hands of
terrorists and be used to shoot down commercial aircraft.’ Two Middle
Eastern intelligence officials fingered Qatar as the source, and a
former US intelligence analyst speculated that the manpads could have
been obtained from Syrian military outposts overrun by the rebels. There
was no indication that the rebels’ possession of manpads was likely the
unintended consequence of a covert US programme that was no longer
under US control.
By the end of 2012, it was
believed throughout the American intelligence community that the rebels
were losing the war. ‘Erdoğan was pissed,’ the former intelligence
official said, ‘and felt he was left hanging on the vine. It was his
money and the cut-off was seen as a betrayal.’ In spring 2013 US
intelligence learned that the Turkish government – through elements of
the MIT, its national intelligence agency, and the Gendarmerie, a
militarised law-enforcement organisation – was working directly with
al-Nusra and its allies to develop a chemical warfare capability. ‘The
MIT was running the political liaison with the rebels, and the
Gendarmerie handled military logistics, on-the-scene advice and training
– including training in chemical warfare,’ the former intelligence
official said. ‘Stepping up Turkey’s role in spring 2013 was seen as the
key to its problems there. Erdoğan knew that if he stopped his support
of the jihadists it would be all over. The Saudis could not support the
war because of logistics – the distances involved and the difficulty of
moving weapons and supplies. Erdoğan’s hope was to instigate an event
that would force the US to cross the red line. But Obama didn’t respond
in March and April.’
There was no public sign of
discord when Erdoğan and Obama met on 16 May 2013 at the White House. At
a later press conference Obama said that they had agreed that Assad
‘needs to go’. Asked whether he thought Syria had crossed the red line,
Obama acknowledged that there was evidence such weapons had been used,
but added, ‘it is important for us to make sure that we’re able to get
more specific information about what exactly is happening there.’ The
red line was still intact.
An American foreign policy
expert who speaks regularly with officials in Washington and Ankara told
me about a working dinner Obama held for Erdoğan during his May visit.
The meal was dominated by the Turks’ insistence that Syria had crossed
the red line and their complaints that Obama was reluctant to do
anything about it. Obama was accompanied by John Kerry and Tom Donilon,
the national security adviser who would soon leave the job. Erdoğan was
joined by Ahmet Davutoğlu, Turkey’s foreign minister, and Hakan Fidan,
the head of the MIT. Fidan is known to be fiercely loyal to Erdoğan, and
has been seen as a consistent backer of the radical rebel opposition in
Syria.
The foreign policy expert
told me that the account he heard originated with Donilon. (It was later
corroborated by a former US official, who learned of it from a senior
Turkish diplomat.) According to the expert, Erdoğan had sought the
meeting to demonstrate to Obama that the red line had been crossed, and
had brought Fidan along to state the case. When Erdoğan tried to draw
Fidan into the conversation, and Fidan began speaking, Obama cut him off
and said: ‘We know.’ Erdoğan tried to bring Fidan in a second time, and
Obama again cut him off and said: ‘We know.’ At that point, an
exasperated Erdoğan said, ‘But your red line has been crossed!’ and, the
expert told me, ‘Donilon said Erdoğan “fucking waved his finger at the
president inside the White House”.’ Obama then pointed at Fidan and
said: ‘We know what you’re doing with the radicals in Syria.’ (Donilon,
who joined the Council on Foreign Relations last July, didn’t respond to
questions about this story. The Turkish Foreign Ministry didn’t respond
to questions about the dinner. A spokesperson for the National Security
Council confirmed that the dinner took place and provided a photograph
showing Obama, Kerry, Donilon, Erdoğan, Fidan and Davutoğlu sitting at a
table. ‘Beyond that,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to read out the details
of their discussions.’)
But Erdoğan did not leave
empty handed. Obama was still permitting Turkey to continue to exploit a
loophole in a presidential executive order prohibiting the export of
gold to Iran, part of the US sanctions regime against the country. In
March 2012, responding to sanctions of Iranian banks by the EU, the
SWIFT electronic payment system, which facilitates cross-border
payments, expelled dozens of Iranian financial institutions, severely
restricting the country’s ability to conduct international trade. The US
followed with the executive order in July, but left what came to be
known as a ‘golden loophole’: gold shipments to private Iranian entities
could continue. Turkey is a major purchaser of Iranian oil and gas, and
it took advantage of the loophole by depositing its energy payments in
Turkish lira in an Iranian account in Turkey; these funds were then used
to purchase Turkish gold for export to confederates in Iran. Gold to
the value of $13 billion reportedly entered Iran in this way between
March 2012 and July 2013.
The programme quickly became
a cash cow for corrupt politicians and traders in Turkey, Iran and the
United Arab Emirates. ‘The middlemen did what they always do,’ the
former intelligence official said. ‘Take 15 per cent. The CIA had
estimated that there was as much as two billion dollars in skim. Gold
and Turkish lira were sticking to fingers.’ The illicit skimming flared
into a public ‘gas for gold’ scandal in Turkey in December, and resulted
in charges against two dozen people, including prominent businessmen
and relatives of government officials, as well as the resignations of
three ministers, one of whom called for Erdoğan to resign. The chief
executive of a Turkish state-controlled bank that was in the middle of
the scandal insisted that more than $4.5 million in cash found by police
in shoeboxes during a search of his home was for charitable donations.
Late last year Jonathan Schanzer and Mark Dubowitz reported in Foreign Policy
that the Obama administration closed the golden loophole in January
2013, but ‘lobbied to make sure the legislation … did not take effect
for six months’. They speculated that the administration wanted to use
the delay as an incentive to bring Iran to the bargaining table over its
nuclear programme, or to placate its Turkish ally in the Syrian civil
war. The delay permitted Iran to ‘accrue billions of dollars more in
gold, further undermining the sanctions regime’.
*
The American decision to end
CIA support of the weapons shipments into Syria left Erdoğan exposed
politically and militarily. ‘One of the issues at that May summit was
the fact that Turkey is the only avenue to supply the rebels in Syria,’
the former intelligence official said. ‘It can’t come through Jordan
because the terrain in the south is wide open and the Syrians are all
over it. And it can’t come through the valleys and hills of Lebanon –
you can’t be sure who you’d meet on the other side.’ Without US military
support for the rebels, the former intelligence official said,
‘Erdoğan’s dream of having a client state in Syria is evaporating and he
thinks we’re the reason why. When Syria wins the war, he knows the
rebels are just as likely to turn on him – where else can they go? So
now he will have thousands of radicals in his backyard.’
A US intelligence consultant
told me that a few weeks before 21 August he saw a highly classified
briefing prepared for Dempsey and the defense secretary, Chuck Hagel,
which described ‘the acute anxiety’ of the Erdoğan administration about
the rebels’ dwindling prospects. The analysis warned that the Turkish
leadership had expressed ‘the need to do something that would
precipitate a US military response’. By late summer, the Syrian army
still had the advantage over the rebels, the former intelligence
official said, and only American air power could turn the tide. In the
autumn, the former intelligence official went on, the US intelligence
analysts who kept working on the events of 21 August ‘sensed that Syria
had not done the gas attack. But the 500 pound gorilla was, how did it
happen? The immediate suspect was the Turks, because they had all the
pieces to make it happen.’
As intercepts and other data
related to the 21 August attacks were gathered, the intelligence
community saw evidence to support its suspicions. ‘We now know it was a
covert action planned by Erdoğan’s people to push Obama over the red
line,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘They had to escalate to a
gas attack in or near Damascus when the UN inspectors’ – who arrived in
Damascus on 18 August to investigate the earlier use of gas – ‘were
there. The deal was to do something spectacular. Our senior military
officers have been told by the DIA and other intelligence assets that
the sarin was supplied through Turkey – that it could only have gotten
there with Turkish support. The Turks also provided the training in
producing the sarin and handling it.’ Much of the support for that
assessment came from the Turks themselves, via intercepted conversations
in the immediate aftermath of the attack. ‘Principal evidence came from
the Turkish post-attack joy and back-slapping in numerous intercepts.
Operations are always so super-secret in the planning but that all flies
out the window when it comes to crowing afterwards. There is no greater
vulnerability than in the perpetrators claiming credit for success.’
Erdoğan’s problems in Syria would soon be over: ‘Off goes the gas and
Obama will say red line and America is going to attack Syria, or at
least that was the idea. But it did not work out that way.’
The post-attack intelligence
on Turkey did not make its way to the White House. ‘Nobody wants to
talk about all this,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘There
is great reluctance to contradict the president, although no all-source
intelligence community analysis supported his leap to convict. There has
not been one single piece of additional evidence of Syrian involvement
in the sarin attack produced by the White House since the bombing raid
was called off. My government can’t say anything because we have acted
so irresponsibly. And since we blamed Assad, we can’t go back and blame
Erdoğan.’
Turkey’s willingness to
manipulate events in Syria to its own purposes seemed to be demonstrated
late last month, a few days before a round of local elections, when a
recording, allegedly of a government national security meeting, was
posted to YouTube. It included discussion of a false-flag operation that
would justify an incursion by the Turkish military in Syria. The
operation centred on the tomb of Suleyman Shah, the grandfather of the
revered Osman I, founder of the Ottoman Empire, which is near Aleppo and
was ceded to Turkey in 1921, when Syria was under French rule. One of
the Islamist rebel factions was threatening to destroy the tomb as a
site of idolatry, and the Erdoğan administration was publicly
threatening retaliation if harm came to it. According to a Reuters
report of the leaked conversation, a voice alleged to be Fidan’s spoke
of creating a provocation: ‘Now look, my commander, if there is to be
justification, the justification is I send four men to the other side. I
get them to fire eight missiles into empty land [in the vicinity of the
tomb]. That’s not a problem. Justification can be created.’ The Turkish
government acknowledged that there had been a national security meeting
about threats emanating from Syria, but said the recording had been
manipulated. The government subsequently blocked public access to
YouTube.
Barring a major change in
policy by Obama, Turkey’s meddling in the Syrian civil war is likely to
go on. ‘I asked my colleagues if there was any way to stop Erdoğan’s
continued support for the rebels, especially now that it’s going so
wrong,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The answer was:
“We’re screwed.” We could go public if it was somebody other than
Erdoğan, but Turkey is a special case. They’re a Nato ally. The Turks
don’t trust the West. They can’t live with us if we take any active role
against Turkish interests. If we went public with what we know about
Erdoğan’s role with the gas, it’d be disastrous. The Turks would say:
“We hate you for telling us what we can and can’t do.”’
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