C.I.A. Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition
WASHINGTON — A small number of
C.I.A.
officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies
decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive
arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and
Arab intelligence officers.
The weapons, including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades,
ammunition and some antitank weapons, are being funneled mostly across
the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries
including
Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the officials said.
The C.I.A. officers have been in southern Turkey for several weeks, in
part to help keep weapons out of the hands of fighters allied with Al
Qaeda or other terrorist groups, one senior American official said. The
Obama administration has said it is not providing arms to the rebels,
but it has also acknowledged that Syria’s neighbors would do so.
The clandestine intelligence-gathering effort is the most detailed known
instance of the limited American support for the military campaign
against the Syrian government. It is also part of Washington’s attempt
to increase the pressure on President
Bashar al-Assad
of Syria, who has recently escalated his government’s deadly crackdown
on civilians and the militias battling his rule. With Russia blocking
more aggressive steps against the Assad government, the United States
and its allies have instead turned to diplomacy and aiding allied
efforts to arm the rebels to force Mr. Assad from power.
By helping to vet rebel groups, American intelligence operatives in
Turkey hope to learn more about a growing, changing opposition network
inside of Syria and to establish new ties. “C.I.A. officers are there
and they are trying to make new sources and recruit people,” said one
Arab intelligence official who is briefed regularly by American
counterparts.
American officials and retired C.I.A. officials said the administration
was also weighing additional assistance to rebels, like providing
satellite imagery and other detailed intelligence on Syrian troop
locations and movements. The administration is also considering whether
to help the opposition set up a rudimentary intelligence service. But no
decisions have been made on those measures or even more aggressive
steps, like sending C.I.A. officers into Syria itself, they said.
The struggle inside Syria has the potential to intensify significantly
in coming months as powerful new weapons are flowing to both the Syrian
government and opposition fighters. President Obama and his top aides
are seeking to pressure Russia to curb arms shipments like attack
helicopters to Syria, its main ally in the Middle East.
“We’d like to see arms sales to the Assad regime come to an end, because
we believe they’ve demonstrated that they will only use their military
against their own civilian population,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, deputy
national security adviser for strategic communications, said after Mr.
Obama and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, met in Mexico on
Monday.
Spokesmen for the White House, State Department and C.I.A. would not
comment on any intelligence operations supporting the Syrian rebels,
some details of which were reported last week by The Wall Street
Journal.
Until now, the public face of the administration’s Syria policy has largely been diplomacy and humanitarian aid.
The State Department said Wednesday that Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton would meet with her Russian counterpart, Sergey V.
Lavrov, on the sidelines of a meeting of Asia-Pacific foreign ministers
in St. Petersburg, Russia, next Thursday. The private talks are likely
to focus, at least in part, on the crisis in Syria.
The State Department has authorized $15 million in nonlethal aid, like
medical supplies and communications equipment, to civilian opposition
groups in Syria.
The Pentagon continues to fine-tune a range of military options, after a
request from Mr. Obama in early March for such contingency planning.
Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told
senators at that time that the options under review included
humanitarian airlifts, aerial surveillance of the Syrian military, and
the establishment of a no-fly zone.
The military has also drawn up plans for how coalition troops would
secure Syria’s sizable stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons if
an all-out civil war threatened their security.
But senior administration officials have underscored in recent days that
they are not actively considering military options. “Anything at this
point vis-Ã -vis Syria would be hypothetical in the extreme,” General
Dempsey told reporters this month.
What has changed since March is an influx of weapons and ammunition to
the rebels. The increasingly fierce air and artillery assaults by the
government are intended to counter improved coordination, tactics and
weaponry among the opposition forces, according to members of the Syrian
National Council and other activists.
Last month, these activists said, Turkish Army vehicles delivered
antitank weaponry to the border, where it was then smuggled into Syria.
Turkey has repeatedly denied it was extending anything other than
humanitarian aid to the opposition, mostly via refugee camps near the
border. The United States, these activists said, was consulted about
these weapons transfers.
American military analysts offered mixed opinions on whether these arms
have offset the advantages held by the militarily superior Syrian Army.
“The rebels are starting to crack the code on how to take out tanks,”
said Joseph Holliday, a former United States Army intelligence officer
in Afghanistan who is now a researcher tracking the Free Syrian Army for
the Institute for the Study of War in Washington.
But a senior American officer who receives classified intelligence
reports from the region, compared the rebels’ arms to “peashooters”
against the government’s heavy weaponry and attack helicopters.
The Syrian National Council, the main opposition group in exile, has
recently begun trying to organize the scattered, localized units that
all fight under the name of the Free Syrian Army into a more cohesive
force.
About 10 military coordinating councils in provinces across the country
are now sharing tactics and other information. The city of Homs is the
notable exception. It lacks such a council because the three main
military groups in the city do not get along, national council officials
said.
Jeffrey White, a defense analyst at the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy who tracks videos and announcements from self-described
rebel battalions, said there were now about 100 rebel formations, up
from roughly 70 two months ago, ranging in size from a handful of
fighters to a couple of hundred combatants.
“When the regime wants to go someplace and puts the right package of
forces together, it can do it,” Mr. White said. “But the opposition is
raising the cost of those kinds of operations.”
Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon. Souad Mekhennet also contributed reporting.
Syria
Goran Tomasevic/Reuters
Updated: Nov. 28, 2012
Recent Developments
Nov. 28 Syrian state media said that 34 people and possibly many more
had died in twin car bombings in
a suburb populated by minorities only a few miles from the center of
Damascus. One estimate by the government’s opponents put the death toll
at 47.
Nov. 27 Syrian rebels accused the authorities of launching an airstrike outside the northern city of Idlib, killing at least 20 people as they waited to have their olives turned into oil.
Nov. 26 After declaring that they had seized an important military airport and an air defense base outside Damascus, Syrian
rebels said they overran a hydroelectric dam
in the north of the country, adding to a monthlong string of tactical
successes that demonstrate their ability to erode the government’s
dominance in the face of withering aerial attacks.
Nov. 24 Hundreds of thousands of Syrians displaced by the war
now face the onslaught of winter with
inadequate shelter, senior government officials and aid organizations
say. With temperatures already plunging, the humanitarian crisis is
deepening.
Nov. 20 Making diplomatic and military advances, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces
gained official recognition from
Britain
and showed off one of its largest hauls of heavy weapons from a
captured government base inside Syria. The developments came against a
backdrop of steadily increasing violence in Damascus.
Nov. 19 The European Union offered crucial support
for the new Syrian political opposition, the National Coalition of
Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces,
calling the group legitimate representatives for the Syrian people.
The union stopped short of conferring full diplomatic recognition, as
France, Turkey and several Gulf Arab countries have done. Meanwhile,
several extremist Islamist groups fighting in Syria have said they
reject the new opposition coalition.
Nov. 17 Days after recognizing the newly formed Syrian opposition council as the “sole representative” of the Syrian people, President
François Hollande of France met with its leaders in Paris and agreed to install a new Syrian ambassador in France.
Nov. 15 Turkey recognized the newly formed Syrian rebel coalition, known as the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, as the legitimate leader of
Syria. It was a powerful boost to the group’s effort to attract legitimacy in its goal of ending the rule of President
Bashar al-Assad.
Overview
The wave of Arab unrest that began with the Tunisian revolution
reached Syria on March 15, 2011, when residents of a small southern city
took to the streets to protest the torture of students who had put up
anti-government graffiti. The government responded with heavy-handed
force, and demonstrations quickly spread across much of the country.
President Bashar al-Assad, a
British-trained doctor who inherited Syria’s harsh dictatorship from
his father, Hafez al-Assad, had at first wavered between force and hints
of reform. But in April 2011, just days after lifting the country’s
decades-old state of emergency, he set off the first of what became a
series of withering crackdowns, sending tanks into restive cities as
security forces opened fire on demonstrators. In retrospect, the attacks
appeared calculated to turn peaceful protests violent, to justify an
escalation of force.
In the summer of 2011, as the crackdown dragged on, thousands of
soldiers defected and began launching attacks against the government,
bringing the country to what the United Nations in December
called the verge of civil war.
An opposition government in exile was formed, the Syrian National
Council, but the council’s internal divisions kept Western and Arab
governments from recognizing it as such.
The opposition was a fractious collection of political groups, longtime exiles, grass-roots organizers and armed militants, divided along ideological, ethnic or sectarian lines.
Syrian opposition factions
signed an agreement
in November 2012 to create a unified umbrella organization with the
hope of attracting international diplomatic recognition as well as more
financing and improved military aid from foreign capitals. The
coalition, known as the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and
Opposition Forces, was recognized by Britain, France, Turkey and several
Gulf Arab countries. However, several extremist Islamist groups
fighting in Syria said they reject the coalition.
By November 2012, the country was many months into a full-blown civil
war. Nearly 40,000 people, mostly civilians, were thought to have died
and tens of thousands of others had been arrested.
More than 400,000 Syrian refugees had registered in neighboring countries,
with tens of thousands not registered. In addition, about 2.5 million
Syrians needed aid inside the country, with more than 1.2 million
displaced domestically, according to the United Nations.
Control of towns and cities seesawed between rebel forces that were
poorly organized but increasingly well-armed and confident, and a
government that was too weak to stamp out the rebellion but strong
enough to prevent it from holding large chunks of territory.
Tactics have often shifted throughout the conflict,
which is approaching the two-year mark. In the summer of 2012, the
government withdrew to strong points, increasingly relying on air power
and artillery to smash areas that rebels had seized.
The rebels have changed their tactics, too. They have focused on
challenging air power, their deadliest foe, by harassing some air bases,
ransacking others and seizing antiaircraft weapons. Fighters have
overrun a half-dozen bases around Damascus, Syria’s capital; two in the
country’s eastern oil-producing area; and the largest military
installation near the country’s largest city, Aleppo.
Yet the tactical gains appear unlikely to lead to a sudden shift that
collapses the government, analysts say. Rather, they say, a de facto
split of Syria is hardening with the government slowly shrinking the
area it tries to fully control, a swath that runs from Damascus north
along the more-populated western half of the country to Latakia, the
ancestral province of President Assad.
The government is still strong in core areas, analysts say, and even
when it cedes control of the ground to rebels, as in parts of northern
Syria and growing areas of the thinly populated east, it retains the
power to strike from the air. And, analysts warn, even if the army
abandons some areas, that could simply open the way to fighting among
sectarian and political factions.
The conflict is complicated by Syria’s ethnic divisions. The Assads
and much of the nation’s elite, especially the military, belong to the
Alawite sect, a minority in a mostly Sunni country. While the Assad
government has the advantage of crushing firepower and units of loyal,
elite troops, the insurgents should not be underestimated. They are
highly motivated and, over time, demographics should tip in their favor.
Alawites constitute about 12 percent of the 23 million Syrians. Sunni
Muslims, the opposition’s backbone, make up about 75 percent of the
population.
Neither the government’s violence nor Mr. Assad’s offers of political
reform — rejected as shams by protest leaders — have brought an end to
the unrest. Similarly, the protesters have not been able to overcome
direct assault by the military’s armed forces or to seize and hold
significant chunks of territory.
The danger of the fighting setting off regional conflict appeared to
rise every month, with destabilizing effects seen in Lebanon and Iraq.
But it was the possibility of a clash between Syria and its former ally
Turkey that drew the most worry, particularly after Turkey
shelled targets across the border
in October 2012 after a Syrian mortar attack killed five of its
civilians. Since Turkey is a NATO member, the fighting there could
deepen international involvement.
Central Intelligence Agency
Saul Loeb/Getty Images
Updated: Nov. 11, 2012
Petraeus Resigns as Director
On Nov. 9, 2012,
David H. Petraeus resigned director of the Central Intelligence Agency after evidence of an extramarital affair was uncovered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Mr. Petraeus issued a statement acknowledging the affair after
President Obama accepted his resignation and it was announced by the
C.I.A.
“After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor
judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair,” Mr. Petraeus said in
his statement. “Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as
the leader of an organization such as ours.”
The disclosure ended a triumphant re-election week for the president with an unfolding scandal.
Administration and Congressional officials identified the woman with
whom he was having the affair as Paula Broadwell, the author of a
biography of Mr. Petraeus. Her book, “All In: The Education of General
David Petraeus,” was published in 2012.
The
F.B.I. investigation that led to Mr. Petraeus’s sudden resignation
began with a complaint several months ago about
“harassing” e-mails sent by Ms. Broadwell to another woman who knows
both of them, two government officials briefed on the case said on Nov.
10.
When F.B.I. agents following up on the complaint began to examine Ms.
Broadwell’s e-mails, they discovered exchanges between her and Mr.
Petraeus that revealed they were having an affair, said several
officials who spoke of the investigation on the condition of anonymity.
They also discovered that Ms. Broadwell possessed certain classified
information, one official said, but apparently concluded that it was
probably not Mr. Petraeus who had given it to her and that there had
been no major breach of security. No leak charges are expected to be
filed as a result of the investigation.
The identity of the woman who complained about the harassing messages
from Ms. Broadwell has not been disclosed. She was not a family member
or in the government, the officials said, and the nature of her
relationship with Mr. Petraeus was not immediately known. But they said
the two women seemed to be competing for Mr. Petraeus’s loyalty, if not
his affection.
The circumstances surrounding the collapse of Mr. Petraeus’s career
remain murky. It is not clear when Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
or Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I., became aware that
the F.B.I.’s investigation into Ms. Broadwell’s e-mails had brought to
light compromising information about Mr. Petraeus.
The revelation of a secret inquiry into the head of the nation’s
premier spy agency raised urgent questions about Mr. Petraeus’s 14-month
tenure at the C.I.A. and the decision by Mr. Obama to elevate him to
head the agency after leading the country’s war effort in Afghanistan.
On Nov. 12, lawmakers with authority over intelligence and national security
expressed consternation that the F.B.I. investigation
of Mr. Petraeus could have been conducted without the knowledge of
officials in the White House or Congress. They also voiced puzzlement
that it came to a head within hours of President Obama’s re-election.
Overview
The Central Intelligence Agency was created in 1947 to continue the
intelligence work carried out during World War II by the Office of
Strategic Services. For the next 57 years, it was preeminent among the
many intelligence-related services that sprung up and flourished across
the government.
After a string of intelligence failures that included the run-ups to
the Sept. 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, the C.I.A. tracked down
Osama bin Laden,
to a sprawling compound in an affluent Pakistani suburb. The Qaeda
leader was killed there on May 2, 2011, during a raid by Navy Seals. For
an intelligence community that had endured searing criticism,
Bin Laden’s killing brought a measure of redemption.
