Just Out: a piece in National Journal, "Keeping Iran Off Balance":

Late last month, ABC News reported that the administration had notified congressional intelligence committees of a covert action authorized by President Bush against Iran. "The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert 'black' operation to destabilize the Iranian government," ABC reported. "The sources ... say President Bush has signed a 'nonlethal presidential finding' that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation, and manipulation of Iran's currency and international financial transactions."

The report sent ripples through Persian Gulf policy circles, suggesting that in the long running battle between hawks in the administration who favor "regime change" in Tehran and doves who favor "behavior change," the regime-changers were gaining the upper hand. And it came just as the United States was about to sit down to talks in Iraq with Iranian representatives -- one of the few times that diplomats from the two countries have met since relations were sundered after the Iranian hostage crisis 27 years ago.

There's just one problem. Interviews with numerous current and former Iran hands in the U.S. government indicate that the Bush administration has not decided to try to foment regime change in Iran. On the contrary, the policy is moving in the other direction, away from confrontation and toward expanded diplomacy, multiple sources and signs suggest. The reported covert action, these sources say, should be understood as part of an effort by Washington, now hobbled by the war in Iraq, to gain leverage vis-a-vis Iran as it moves deeper along a diplomatic track.

Among the continuing signs that it is actually State Department pragmatists who are gaining the upper hand over regime-change hard-liners, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns informed a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in writing in May of the closing down of a shadowy U.S. interagency group, the Iran-Syria Policy Operations Group, that had been meeting weekly over the past year to find ways to poke at the Iranian regime. Sources at the State Department and on Capitol Hill say that Burns had wanted the group closed for months, believing it was leading to confusion -- and turf battles -- over the thrust of U.S. policy toward Iran. "The policy of the U.S. government is behavior change," sighed one U.S. official involved with Iran policy, who asked not to be further identified. "We're on the record [saying that], a million times." ...

Bruce Riedel, a former senior CIA and National Security Council official who dealt with Iran, said that the behavior-changers in the Bush administration clearly are winning. "I think that there certainly is a group within the administration which would love to pursue regime change, and they are centered in the vice president's office," Riedel said. "But I think overall they appear to have lost the battle on this. And the biggest reason they lost the battle is that the military option, which is essential to regime change, has just got so many downsides that it's become obvious even to hard-liners opposed to the clerical regime that there is no military option available to us as long as we have 150,000 soldiers in Iraq."

Riedel, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, added, "The most important line in the ABC report, which people have not focused on, is that this is a nonlethal finding.... You can't provide arms in a nonlethal finding -- arms are by definition lethal."

He continued, "The one part of the covert action that is probably worth looking at the most is the business of going at Iranian financial transfers," especially those involving the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Revolutionary Guard is believed to be behind Iranian operations to destabilize Iraq and Lebanon. United Nations sanctions, imposed against Iran for its nuclear program, call for cutting off financial transactions to the corps or its members.

The Treasury Department has been doing a lot of work in the past five or six years to make these financial sanctions more successful, Riedel said, and that requires good intelligence. The problem has been getting the intelligence agencies to surrender information to their financial counterparts. Late last year, The Washington Post reported that State Department officials had been forced to resort to Google searches to identify Iranian officials in the nuclear program who could face financial sanctions and travel bans. Riedel said that the covert authorization may give financial authorities greater access to intelligence. ...

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Posted by Laura at June 8, 2007 03:42 PM