Hersh: Congress Agreed to Bush Request to Fund Major Escalation in Secret Operations Against Iran

Congressional leaders agreed to a request from President Bush last year to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran aimed at destabilizing Iran’s leadership. This according to a new article by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker magazine.

The operations were set out in a highly classified Presidential Finding signed by Bush which, by law, must be made known to Democratic and Republican House and Senate leaders and ranking members of the intelligence committees. The plan allowed up to $400 million in covert spending for activities ranging from supporting dissident groups to spying on Iran’s nuclear program.

According to Hersh, US Special Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq since last year. These have included seizing members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of so-called “high-value targets” who may be captured or killed.

While covert operations against Iran are not new, Hersh writes that the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command, have now been significantly expanded.

AMY GOODMAN: We are on the road, Denver, Colorado. We turn now to our first segment. Congressional leaders agreed to a request from President Bush last year to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, aimed at destabilizing Iran’s leadership. This according to a new article by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in The New Yorkermagazine. The operations were set out in a highly classified presidential finding signed by Bush, which by law, must be made known to Democratic and Republican House and Senate leaders and ranking members of the intelligence committees. The plan allowed up to $400 million dollars in covert spending for activities ranging from supporting dissident groups to spying on Iran’s nuclear program. According to Hersh, U.S. special forces of been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq since last year. These have included seizing members of the Iranian revolutionary guard and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, in the pursuit of so-called “high value targets” who may be captured or killed. All covert operations against Iran are not new; Hersh writes the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the C.I.A. and the joint special operations command, have now been significantly expanded. He is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist. He joins me now on the telephone from Washington, D.C. Welcome to Democracy Now!

SEYMOUR HERSH: And a very good early morning to you.

AMY GOODMAN: Start off by talking about how you learned this information.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, that stops me for a second, Amy. Here’s the problem with that question: this is all very classified. Let’s just say that in general, there are a lot of people who are very loyal to the U.S.—military people, people in special operations, people elsewhere in the Congress obviously, people in the Executive—who are increasingly being made anxious,—and I think “frightened” is a fairly good word, too—about what this President and the Vice President may do in Iran. And so it was from that quarter I was able to learn that…. the problem with the finding, and the problem with the whole story, the complication is that, almost the last people, it seems to me, that know exactly what our special forces are doing—particularly the joint special operations command, which is a very elite unit, whose mission essentially is, this is a separate unit of the special operations command called JSOT… Their unit to go find and kill and capture, if possible, high-value targets anywhere in the world. The whole world is a free fire zone for them. When they get into a place like Iran, where they are, the Congress isn’t told. So Congress did approve—and the words were very careful—“up to”—because the president wanted as much as that; we just don’t know how much he’s taken at this point… $400 million dollars for operations. And then they discovered the operations they approved may go way beyond what they think they were approving. So it’s sort of like the end of democracy, in a way. We don’t know what the government is doing. People inside the government don’t know what the government is doing. So it was from this sort of collective angst that people began to talk to me about the operations.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the Democratic controlled Congress, and what exactly it approved late last year?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Late last year, at the time of the—as many in the audience will remember—at the time of the National Intelligence Estimate was made public in late November or early December. And that was a document that—I do not know why it has been totally devalued by everybody, including by all the candidates. The two Democratic candidates during the primary and McCain kept on talking about Iran as if it was on the edge of being nuclear. What the N.I.E. said—and it was a really carefully done document—was since 2003, the evidence is clear that Iran has not pushed a weapons program. There’s no evidence they are actually seeking weapons, as they have been saying. That’s what the N.I.E. said. At the same time, as we all know this President and the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Adviser and the Secretary of State—they’ve all disavowed it. It’s as if it didn’t exist. At that time, Bush went to Congress with the finding that said “I need this huge chunk of money to continue operations.” He has the right as President to ask that only a few members of Congress – it’s known in the law informally as the Gang of Eight – and that would be the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi; her counterpart, the leading Republican in the House; the Majority Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid of Nevada and his counterpart; and all the Democratic and Republican chairmans of the House and Senate Intelligence Committee—in the case of the Democrats, it’s Rockefeller in the Senate and Reyes from Texas in the House. Those four Democrats got a chop at this. The finding was given to them, particularly in the intelligence committees; lawyers looked at it—and did nothing. The money was eventually appropriated by both the House and Senate Defense Appropriation Subcommittees, just as a line item. The rest of the Congress knows nothing about these kind of operations. When it gets to highly classified operations, the money is promulgated through a highly classified defense appropriations subcommittee. The rest of the people in the business—on the floor, in various committees—it could be on the other side of the moon as far as they’re concerned. But those eight people, the four Democrats—Reid, Pelosi, Rockefeller and Reyes—did nothing. It’s complicated because I can’t tell you officially, the answer everybody gives is “we can’t talk about this kind of stuff.” It’s amazing, it’s sort of the catch-22. I did learn—

AMY GOODMAN: But again, a key point here is that the N.I.E. of the 16 spy agencies, had come out saying Iran did not have nuclear weapons, they had abandoned the program years ago.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes. I wouldn’t say the word “abandoned,” but they said there was no evidence they had done anything since 2003. It might have been “on pause,” whatever you want to say. The N.I.E. was very clear, very devastating for an administration that was trying to rally public support. So what you have is at the same time, within the same few weeks, and of course the White House knew about the N.I.E. since August or probably earlier, that it was going to be hurtful in terms of their campaign against Iran. And so at the same time, these Democrats approved the money, and the best guess I can tell you—what I heard from one, two aides actually, who knew the process—is that the Democratic position was very sort of cynical. Which is that “We’re going to do well next year in the election. We’re gonna certainly increase our plurality in the House and Senate, and we’re probably gonna win the presidency. Let’s not give Bush an issue, right now. Let him have his money so he cannot accuse us”—you know, the old traditional fear of the Democrats of being soft on national security. I did hear that from a couple of people as the reason. But none of the members can speak about it, because if they do, they are violating the law. And so that’s what I meant by catch- 22. For a democracy, is a very strange situation.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and what he had to say about the situation, about the Bush administration attacking Iran?

SEYMOUR HERSH: The leadership of the caucus, the Democratic Caucus in the Senate, has off-the-record lunches. Not every week, but on Thursdays usually. They’re pretty sacrosanct in the sense when you go in they’re pretty secure, and in this case, Gates went to one of the lunches. He knew many of the senators for many years, he’s been around Washington forever. During the colloquy, [he] said very flatly, that if we bomb Iran, our grandchildren will be fighting jihadists. The senator with whom I talked about this said the other senators are stunned, a million questions about it. He eventually said he was speaking for himself. But you know, Amy, let me say something. I write in the article also that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, [Admiral Mike] Mullen, is known to be pushing back on the idea of bombing, and also that these ten combatant commanders—you know, these are the guys who run the commanders in chief in the Far East, or the CENTCOM [Central Command], or what you will. And members of some of the junior members of the joint chiefs have all signed or gotten together collectively—at least 10 of them—to say “no bombing.” But here’s the problem with that kind of thinking: We’re ready to go. This has been an issue for this president for three years. As you know, I have been writing in The New Yorker constantly about this stuff, and it doesn’t go away. After three years, our submarines are there, they have the targets, our cruise missiles, our destroyers are there, the cruise missiles are loaded on them, and all targeted. Our air force and navy—not so much the marine—will have a big role in particular in it. They have their target selection, they’ve gone through the practice. We have ground troops. One of the problems with hitting Iran is if you hit ‘em big, is a lot of their anti-aircraft and anti-missile batteries are dug-in underground so marines and other units have to go in and basically blast them out. So before you bomb Iran, you have to take out their radar and their defensive systems. You can’t do it in any other way than a big package, unless you want a lot of your planes shot down. This has been practiced, it’s been exercised, they’ve done it, they’re ready to go. I can tell you that no matter what Gates thinks and no matter what Mullen thinks, if the president says “go,” on January the 13th, 2009, a week before the inauguration, they will go. Because that’s just the way the system is. He’s got the—–