Iran's Feared SAVAK: Norman Schwarzkopf’s Father Had Greater Impact On Middle East Affairs

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BY Palash R. Ghosh | December 28 2012

Retired general Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., who commanded U.S. and coalition troops against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War in 1990-1991, has died at the age of 78.

Widely praised for driving Saddam out of Kuwait’s rich oilfields, Schwarzkopf became an American hero and the most celebrated figure of the successful Operation Desert Shield/Storm.

However, perhaps forgotten after so many decades, the general’s father, also named Norman Schwarzkopf, had a more profound impact on another troubled spot in the Middle East -- an impact that has reverberated to the present day more than fifty years after his death.

Major-General Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf, a New Jersey state policeman who became famous for his involvement in the Lindbergh kidnapping case, later rose to the rank of brigadier general in the U.S. army. After World War II, he served as provost marshal for U.S. forces in occupied Germany.

But Schwarzkopf Sr.’s greatest (some would say, most infamous) accomplishment would come a few years later 2,000 miles away from central Europe -- in Iran.

In August 1953, through the auspices of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and British intelligence, in cooperation with forces loyal to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, the popularly-elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was forcibly removed from power.

Mossadegh's “crime” had been to support the nationalization of Iran's key oil industry -- a grave affront to British oil companies. The 1953 coup not only ended Iran's attempt to control its own hugely lucrative petroleum sector, but likely also killed any chances for Iran developing into a democratic society.

Schwarzkopf Sr. played a major role in this forcible “regime change.”

Under a CIA operation called “Operation Ajax,” Schwarzkopf Sr. had been sent to Iran to encourage the Shah to return to power and, most crucially, helped him in the quest by forming and training security forces that would be loyal to the Shah. These security agents would eventually metamorphose into the dreaded and feared SAVAK secret police, one of the most brutal foundations of the Shah’s power.

Israel’s Mossad spy agency also assisted in training SAVAK agents in the arts of interrogation, surveillance and torture.

SAVAK basically served as an intelligence agency with unlimited police powers -- and a very effective deterrent to any opposition to the Shah. Officers of the organization could spy on or arrest almost anybody at will and frequently used torture to gain information or to simply intimidate the populace.

“This organization was the first modern, effective intelligence service to operate in [Iran],” wrote the Encyclopædia Iranica. “Its main achievement occurred in September 1954, when it discovered and destroyed a large Communist Tudeh Party network that had been established in the [Iranian] armed forces.”

SAVAK’s presence deepened in the 1960s and 1970s, when it arrested, tortured and killed untold thousands of Iranians – anyone who was perceived to be a threat to the Shah’s one-party rule.

In the eyes of the Iranian public (and especially to those who engineered the 1979 revolution that finally toppled the Shah from the throne), SAVAK was viewed as inseparable from Western interference in Iran’s affairs and the Tehran government’s repressive control.

According to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), details on SAVAK’s membership and the extent of its activities remain blurry. However, documents produced after the 1979 Iranian revolution suggest that the intelligence agency employed more than 15,000 full-time agents and thousands of other informants. SAVAK also sent operatives overseas to spy on Iranian students and business in foreign countries, particularly in the U.S., France and Britain.

Schwarzkopf Sr.’s complete role in the development of what would become SAVAK largely remains classified and subject to conjecture, but there is no doubt that without his involvement, the Shah’s brutal regime might not have maintained its dominant power for decades.

Schwarzkopf Sr. died in 1958 at the age of 63.

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Stars&Stripes: CIA’s Global Response Staff emerging from shadows

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By Greg Miller and Julie Tate

The Washington Post

Published: December 27, 2012

 

Marines with the remains of one of the four Americans killed in Benghazi, Libya, during a ceremony Sept. 14, 2012, at Andrews Air Force Base, Md. Two of the Americans killed in Benghazi were members of the CIA’s Global Response Staff.

Carolyn Kaster/AP

 

The rapid collapse of a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya exposed the vulnerabilities of State Department facilities overseas. But the CIA’s ability to fend off a second attack that same night provided a glimpse of a key element in the agency’s defensive arsenal: a secret security force created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Two of the Americans killed in Benghazi were members of the CIA’s Global Response Staff, an innocuously named organization that has recruited hundreds of former U.S. Special Forces operatives to serve as armed guards for the agency’s spies.

The GRS, as it is known, is designed to stay in the shadows, training teams to work undercover and provide an unobtrusive layer of security for CIA officers in high-risk outposts.

But a series of deadly scrapes over the past four years has illuminated the GRS’s expanding role, as well as its emerging status as one of the CIA’s most dangerous assignments.

Of the 14 CIA employees killed since 2009, five worked for the GRS, all as contractors. They include two killed at Benghazi, as well as three others who were within the blast radius on Dec. 31, 2009, when a Jordanian double agent detonated a suicide bomb at a CIA compound in Khost, Afghanistan.

GRS contractors have also been involved in shootouts in which only foreign nationals were killed, including one that triggered a diplomatic crisis. While working for the CIA, Raymond Davis was jailed for weeks in Pakistan last year after killing two men in what he said was an armed robbery attempt in Lahore.

The increasingly conspicuous role of the GRS is part of a broader expansion of the CIA’s paramilitary capabilities over the past 10 years. Beyond hiring former U.S. military commandos, the agency has collaborated with U.S. Special Operations teams on missions including the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and has killed thousands of Islamist militants and civilians with its fleet of armed drones.
CIA veterans said that GRS teams have become a critical component of conventional espionage, providing protection for case officers whose counterterrorism assignments carry a level of risk that rarely accompanied the cloak-and-dagger encounters of the Cold War.

Spywork used to require slipping solo through cities in Eastern Europe. Now, “clandestine human intelligence involves showing up in a Land Cruiser with some [former] Deltas or SEALs, picking up an asset and then dumping him back there when you are through,” said a former CIA officer who worked closely with the security group overseas.

Bodyguard details have become so essential to espionage that the CIA has overhauled its training program at the Farm — its case officer academy in southern Virginia — to teach spies the basics of working with GRS teams.

The security apparatus relies heavily on contractors who are drawn by relatively high pay and flexible schedules that give them several months off each year. In turn, they agree to high-risk assignments in places such as Benghazi and are largely left on their own to take basic precautions, such as finding health and life insurance.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said the GRS has about 125 employees working abroad at any given time, with at least that many rotating through cycles of training and off-time in the United States.

At least half are contractors, who often earn $140,000 or more a year and typically serve 90- or 120-day assignments abroad. Full-time GRS staff officers — those who are permanent CIA employees — earn slightly less but collect benefits and are typically put in supervisory roles.

The work is lucrative enough that recruiting is done largely by word of mouth, said one former U.S. intelligence official. Candidates tend to be members of U.S. Special Forces units who have recently retired, or veterans of police department SWAT teams.

Most GRS recruits arrive with skills in handling the weapons they will carry, including Glock handguns and M4 rifles. But they undergo additional training so they do not call attention to the presence or movements of the CIA officers they are in position to protect.

Although the agency created the GRS to protect officers in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan, it has been expanded to protect secret drone bases as well as CIA facilities and officers in locations including Yemen, Lebanon and Djibouti.

In some cases, elite GRS units provide security for personnel from other agencies, including National Security Agency teams deploying sensors or eavesdropping equipment in conflict zones, a former special operator said. The most skilled security operators are informally known as “scorpions.”

“They don’t learn languages, they’re not meeting foreign nationals and they’re not writing up intelligence reports,” a former U.S. intelligence official said. Their main tasks are to map escape routes from meeting places, pat down informants and provide an “envelope” of security, the former official said, all while knowing that “if push comes to shove, you’re going to have to shoot.”

The consequences in such cases can be severe. Former CIA officials who worked with the GRS still wince at the fallout from Davis’s inability to avoid capture as well as his decision to open fire in the middle of a busy street in Pakistan. The former security contractor, who did not respond to requests for comment, said he was doing basic “area familiarization” work, meaning learning his surroundings and possibly mapping routes of escape, when he was confronted by two Pakistanis traveling by motorcycle.

Davis became trapped at the scene, and his arrest provoked a diplomatic standoff between two tense allies in the fight against terrorism.

The CIA took heavy criticism for the clumsiness of the Davis episode, temporarily suspending the drone campaign in Pakistan before U.S. payments to the families of the men Davis had killed helped secure his release.

By contrast, the CIA and its security units were praised — albeit indirectly — in a report released last week that was otherwise sharply critical of the State Department security failures that contributed to the deaths of four Americans in Libya three months ago.

In Benghazi, a GRS team rushed to a burning State Department compound in an attempt to rescue U.S. diplomats, then evacuated survivors to a nearby CIA site that also came under attack. Two GRS contractors who had taken positions on the roof of the site were killed by mortar strikes.

Among those killed was Glen Doherty, a GRS contractor on his second CIA assignment in Libya who had served in about 10 other places, including Mexico City, according to his sister, Kathleen Quigley.

“Was he aware of the risks? Absolutely,” Quigley said in an interview, although she noted that “he wasn’t there to protect an embassy. He was there to recover RPGs,” meaning he was providing security for CIA teams tracking Libyan stockpiles of rocket-propelled grenades.

Doherty took the CIA job for the pay and abundant time off, as well as the chance to continue serving the U.S. government abroad, Quigley said.

When Doherty died, he left debts that included loans on two houses in California, Quigley said. He had no life insurance. CIA officials told Doherty’s family that they had recommended companies willing to underwrite such policies, but that agency coverage was not available for contractors.

Quigley did not criticize the agency, but added: “It’s so sad for a guy like that to go out and have nothing to show for it, except, frankly, a lot of debt.”

The CIA declined to comment.

Quigley said her family has started a foundation in Doherty’s name to help other families of current and former U.S. Special Operations troops who have been killed. A separate organization performs a similar function for families of slain CIA officers.
The CIA Memorial Foundation pays college costs for children of CIA officers who were killed and recently began providing payments of about $5,000 to families to help pay for funeral-related costs.

The organization is paying tuition and other costs for 28 dependents of slain agency employees, and an additional 77 will be eligible when they reach college age, said Jerry Komisar, a CIA veteran who is president of the foundation.

The organization’s obligations have grown in recent months, a stretch that ranks as among the deadliest for the CIA since the attack on Khost. After Doherty and Tyrone Woods were killed in Benghazi, three other CIA officers — all staff employees — were killed in Afghanistan.

The foundation covers contractors who work for the GRS. “I often wonder why people take those kinds of risks,” Komisar said. “It’s got to be an opportunity for them to bring in more cash. But the downside is, you put yourself at great risk. My heart goes out to them.”

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KIMERY REPORT - Counterterrorism Officials: Fears Escalate Over Potential for Al Qaeda Seizing Syrian WMDs

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December 21, 2012

By: Anthony Kimery

Since Homeland Security Today first reported Dec. 13 that senior US counterterrorism (CT) officials were becoming increasingly concerned that Al Qaeda in Syria could acquire Syrian WMDs, and that the Pentagon had drawn up military contingencies in the event that they do, these same officials said they're more alarmed now than they were "just a few weeks ago" because of the significant strides jihadist forces dominating “front line fighting” in Syria have made. "That could put them in position … to overtake important [Syrian] chemical weapons sites, even manufacturing facilities," as one of the officials emphasized.

In a Dec. 16 report, the Washington Post confirmed that “US officials are increasingly worried that Syria’s WMDs could fall into the hands of Islamist extremists, rogue generals or other uncontrollable factions.”

The Post further confirmed that “defense officials … have been updating their contingency plans in recent weeks” for dealing with terrorists acquiring Syrian WMDs.

Meanwhile, Syria's ambassador to the UN, Bashar Al Jafair, warned in a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that rebel forces could indeed get control of chemical weapons.

But at a Dec. 18 press briefing, US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland called the claims “garbage.” The Syrian government, she said, has “a responsibility not only not to use them, but to keep them safe and secure. As you know, for more than a decade, we’ve been trying to convince Syria to eradicate these weapons, to get rid of them altogether. They have not done that. They bear responsibility for keeping them safe and secure.”

“So any effort to abrogate that responsibility,” Nuland continued, “any effort to shift it onto others is just further to the kind of garbage that we’ve seen from the regime.”

Nuland said the US and other countries have been “extremely vigilant” in keeping an eye on Syrian WMD locations, adding, “I’m obviously not going to get into the details of our discussions with partners, but I think we have said for some weeks here that we are working very closely with a number of allies and partners in the international community to ensure that we are able to do what’s necessary should the regime make the wrong choice, should the regime lose control, et cetera.”

Despite Nuland’s assurances, Russian, Israeli and other officials have continued to express alarm that Al Qaeda or aligned jihadist forces battling the Assad regime could get their hands on WMD weapons or the materials to manufacture them. Al Qaeda-linked insurgents battling Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s regime have already overrun several sites where chemical -- and perhaps other WMDs -- are believed to be located.

Earlier this month, the Syrian-Saudi Chemicals Company (SYSACCO) factory near Safira that manufactures chlorine and other toxic chemicals was taken over by the Al Qaeda franchise, Al Nusra Front, that reportedly is responsible for “the heaviest frontline fighting” in Syria.

Al Qaeda-tied rebels overran the Sheik Suleiman military base near Aleppo where research on chemical weapons had been conducted, and opposition Islamist forces have made inroads on a Syrian military base near Aleppo where chemical weapons are believed to have been produced.

According to the Post’s report, “A former Syrian general who once led the army’s chemical weapons training program said that the main storage sites for mustard gas and nerve agents are supposed to be guarded by thousands of Syrian troops, but that they would be easily overrun.”

Retired Syrian Maj. Gen. Adnan Silou, who defected to opposition forces in June, said “Probably anyone from the Free Syrian Army or any Islamic extremist group could take them over,” the Post reported.

Because of the deteriorating situation on the ground in Syria, “Al Qaeda understands it has a unique opportunity” to take advantage of the chaos to try to get hold of Syrian WMDs,” one of the senior US counterterrorism officials told Homeland Security Today for its Dec. 13 report, ominously adding, “in fact, Al Qaeda may be as close as it’s ever been to getting hold of chemical weapons.”

The Post later reported that “As the Syrian opposition steadily makes territorial gains, US officials and analysts said the odds are increasing that insurgents will seize control of a chemical weapons site or that Syrian troops guarding the installations will simply abandon their posts.”

"It's almost inevitable -- It may have already happened, for what we know,” retired Army officer Michael Eisenstadt told the Post. Eisenstadt served for 26 years as an officer in the US Army Reserve and is a senior fellow and director of The Washington Institute's Military and Security Studies Program where he is a specialist in Persian Gulf and Arab-Israeli security affairs. He has extensive experience in the Middle East.

Perhaps easier to capture though are some of the more than dozen mobile chemical weapons labs that a Syrian military defector reportedly told US counterterrorism intelligence and WMD officials have been fielded by the Syrian military. The truck-mounted labs allegedly are capable of mixing “binary” chemicals to produce lethal weapons.

The situation in Syria "may be the first time the international community faces the possibility of a civil war in a state with a known stockpile of chemical weapons,” warned a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report delivered to lawmakers earlier this month.

Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said “The greatest danger is that parts of Syria continue to fall under the control of the opposition where extremists, terrorists and Al Qaeda have strong positions.” And “That could have very serious consequences,” RIA Novosti reported.

“Everyone is afraid of that, including our American partners,” Bogdanov was quoted as saying, noting that rebel factions have already gained control of some Syrian military arsenals. And that could also happen to chemical weapon stockpiles, Bogdanov said, pointing out that “This has already happened in Aleppo with the seizure of a plant manufacturing chemical components that can be used for terrorist purposes.”

“The opposition’s victory, regrettably, cannot be ruled out,” Bogdanov told a Kremlin advisory body, according to Interfax. “We need to face the truth. A current tendency is that the regime and the government keep losing control over an ever-growing territory.”

"I think the regime in Damascus is approaching collapse. I think now it's only a question of time," NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in Brussels, Belgium, during a news conference with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

On Nov. 14, the day after Homeland Security Today first reported that the Defense Department had hurried contingency plans to deal with terrorists acquiring Syrian WMDs, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta acknowledged that defense officials had developed preparations for responding to Assad’s regime losing control of WMD stockpiles. However, he declined to discuss specifics about the Pentagon’s plans.

President Barak Obama had asserted during an Aug. 20 press conference that "We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people,” adding it would be "a red line for us, and ... there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front …”

In recent weeks, the US, Israel and United Kingdom have deployed covert intelligence assets and special operations forces to monitor Syrian WMD sites in preparation for potential intervention should it appear imminent that a site will be overrun by jihadist or Al Qaeda forces who are on the front lines of the battle against Assad’s military.

Thomas Pierret, Lecturer in Contemporary Islam and an Islamic and Middle Eastern studies specialist at the University of Edinburgh, has said "Radical Islamists are very visible [in Syria], and that “They always fight on the front line because they're seeking martyrdom. For that reason, other groups often ask them to spearhead attacks.”

Counterterrorism officials said there is ample intelligence to indicate that Al Qaeda and "like-minded" jihadists are indeed at the front lines in Syria.

Consequently, these CT officials told Homeland Security Today, Al Qaeda and aligned Islamist jihadist forces on the front lines of the effort to topple Assad’s regime “are well situated to be the first to overtake [Syrian] WMD sites,” as one said.

On Wednesday, Israeli Air Force chief, Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel, was quoted by Ynetnews.com saying, "We are prepared to deal with” Syria’s WMDs coming under the control of Islamist extremists. “This is an issue for the country's decision makers. We are providing the relevant capabilities, so that if it is decided to use them, we will know how to.”

Earlier this month, Arutz Sheva reported that Israeli Lt. Col. (Res.) Mordechai Kedar, a 25-year military intelligence veteran, had said the Israeli military is actively taking measures to be able to respond to any threat posed by Syria's WMDs.

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