Free Iran: So long as this regime has access to Iran’s oil income, all other sanctions, although may be necessary, are band-aid solutions at best – if not just feel good measures.  America needs to focus on the source of the regime’s strength, its oil income, and not waste so much time and effort on cutting of each individual tentacle.

President Obama’s quiet nomination of S. Leslie Ireland, a top former CIA, Defense Department and DNI specialist on Iran, to be the Treasury Department’s top intelligence official seems to signal that he’s putting the final pieces in place for tougher sanctions on the Tehran regime.

Ireland has been serving Obama recently as an intelligence briefer. But prior to that, she spent 25 years in intelligence, much of it concentrating on Iran. Go to Washington Post.

Reza Kahlili (an alias) recently wrote the book, A Time To Betray, a portrayal of his double life as a Revolutionary Guard member and CIA Agent. Go to original article.

Iran remains a difficult target for US spies

…”It’s really impossible to say how much of a window this kind of a defector could provide without knowing how much he was reading into aspects of the entire program, as opposed to chipping away at one part of the program,” CIA veteran Paul Pillar said.

“One ought to be very cautious about how much a difference any one individual might make,” said Pillar, now at Georgetown University.

Some media reports suggested the scientist may have helped inform the Americans about a secret enrichment site near Qom, which caused international outrage when it was revealed in September.

Amiri’s disappearance appeared to confirm reports in recent years that US intelligence agencies have tried to lure away key civilian and military figures to undercut Iran’s nuclear drive in an operation dubbed “Brain Drain.”

The fate of a former Iranian deputy defense minister who disappeared in Istanbul in 2007, General Ali Reza Asgari, remains unresolved, amid speculation he defected as well and offered his knowledge of the Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The suspected defections offer a glimpse into a secret struggle between Western intelligence agencies and Iran, with the United States and its allies working to delay Tehran’s nuclear project by clandestine means even as they seek international support for tougher sanctions.

“The one thing that we have done, and this has come out in the open press… is to feed faulty components into the supply chain for Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” said Clare Lopez, who worked for the CIA during and after the Cold War.

Working through a family of Swiss engineers, the CIA reportedly managed to provide Libya and Iran with flawed parts for several years, according to The New York Times and other media.

In 2006, a sabotaged power supply failed at the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz, reportedly causing 50 centrifuges to explode and setting back Tehran’s nuclear fuel work.

Former intelligence officers said defections are a delicate, risky business, and it remained uncertain whether Amiri had cooperated with the Americans over a long period of time.

“By and large defections like this are what you call walk-ins, that is they come to you,” said Bruce Riedel, a retired CIA officer and fellow at The Brookings Institution think-tank.

“Typically, a response for a walk-in is, ‘Hey wait, we rather you stay in place and provide an ongoing stream of intelligence.’”

Go to Middle East Online.

The shah wasn’t supposed to fall; Iraq’s WMD were supposed to be a ’slam dunk.’

When we hear the sound of hoofbeats, should we think horses or zebras? The question is a classic problem of intelligence analysis. Too often in recent years the CIA, FBI and Department of Homeland Security have got it wrong—most recently with the Christmas Day underwear bomber, who was able to board a U.S.-bound flight despite plenty of early warning signs. Political scientist Robert Jervis wants to know the reason for such error.

In “Why Intelligence Fails,” Mr. Jervis examines two important U.S. intelligence lapses and tries to account for what went awry. After both, the CIA hired Mr. Jervis—a longtime student of international affairs—to help the agency sort out its mistakes. He thus brings an invaluable perspective as a smart outsider with sufficient inside access to appraise the agency’s blind spots.

The first of his two cases is the CIA’s failure to grasp the weakness of the Iranian monarchy on the cusp of the Iranian revolution in 1979. “An island of stability” is what President Jimmy Carter called Iran just before the Islamic volcano erupted. No doubt the CIA estimates that Mr. Carter saw were not quite so ludicrously sanguine, but they were still dangerously inaccurate.

Mr. Jervis draws a striking portrait of an intelligence agency in disarray. He is particularly surprised by the “paucity of resources” dedicated to Iran in the late 1970s. The CIA had assigned just two analysts to assess Iranian politics and two more to study its economy, supplemented by a small, unproductive station in Tehran.

Making matters worse, the members of this tiny group were caught in a loop of circular reasoning. They were convinced that Iran’s burgeoning opposition was not a threat to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s government because he had not cracked down on it. But as Mr. Jervis notes, the analysts’ key indicator of trouble—a crackdown—would occur only “if the crisis became very severe.” In the event, the crisis did become very severe—and the shah still did not crack down. The analysts relied on what turned out to be a worthless metric.

Even if the CIA’s analysts had not fallen into a logic-trap of their own devising, the agency would have faced a larger challenge. “Predicting revolutions is very hard,” Mr. Jervis aptly notes. Neither revolutionaries nor those in power know where their struggle is going. Why should outsiders have a better sense of what lies ahead? Foreign intelligence services are at a particular disadvantage: The “CIA and its counterparts are in the business of stealing secrets, but secrets are rarely at the heart of revolutions.” Go to WSJ.

The CIA stepped in to prevent the United States from closing a consulate in the Persian Gulf city-state of Dubai, arguing that it was a gold mine of human intelligence from Iran.  That’s according a new book, “City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism,” by former Associated Press correspondent Jim Krane.  The State Department tried “more than once” to shut down its consular services office in Dubai for budget reasons.  But it ran up against the resistance of senior intelligence officials.  For decades, they’d been gleaning precious information about Iran by grilling hundreds of Iranian visa applicants, according to the book.

…From Dubai, Washington monitors Iran’s business relations, trade and cash flows in an intelligence operation that has been ongoing since the 1980s.  Over the years the tiny consulate, dwarfed by the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates capital of Abu Dhabi, grew from a half-dozen American staff members to take over at least three floors in the Dubai World Trade Center, with spying its main priority, said Krane, who is now pursuing a doctorate at Cambridge University in Britain.  In 2006, the State Department opened a new Dubai department called the Iran Regional Presence office, the first U.S. mission aimed at Iran since Washington and Tehran severed ties following the 1979 Iranian revolution. Go to LA Times.

IND:  We don’t know about other parts of the world but to get Iran right, America doesn’t need to spend billions and billions of dollars.  Just minimize the threat of hostilities, don’t lend legitimacy to the regime in a futile effort to engage it and support the Iranian people’s democratic aspiration in creative ways.  Stop thinking so conventionally.

Intelligence activities across the U.S. government and military cost a total of $75 billion a year, the nation’s top intelligence official said on Tuesday, disclosing an overall number long shrouded in secrecy.  Dennis Blair, the U.S. director of national intelligence, cited the figure as part of a four-year strategic blueprint for the sprawling, 200,000-person intelligence community.  In an unclassified version of the blueprint released by Blair’s office, intelligence agencies singled out as threats Iran’s nuclear program, North Korea’s “erratic behavior,” and insurgencies fueled by militant groups, though Blair cited gains against al Qaeda…Officials said the $75 billion total figure cited by Blair incorporated spending by the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies, as well as the amounts spent by the Pentagon on military intelligence activities. Go to Reuters.

About ten days after the start of Iran’s insurrection, I asked a senior administration official what, if anything, the White House knew about the people behind the demonstrations. His reply: “I think it is fair to say senior administration officials are busily trying to understand how the opposition is generated and where it came from.” In other words, there’s a lot about the protesters we still don’t know. Go to New Republic.