How the CIA failed Iranian spies in its secret war with Tehran:
The spy was minutes from leaving Iran when he was nabbed.
Gholamreza Hosseini was at Imam Khomeini Airport in Tehran in late 2010, preparing for a flight to Bangkok. There, the Iranian industrial engineer would meet his Central Intelligence Agency handlers. But before he could pay his exit tax to leave the country, the airport ATM machine rejected his card as invalid. Moments later, a security officer asked to see Hosseini's passport before escorting him away.
Hosseini said he was brought to an empty VIP lounge and told to sit on a couch that had been turned to face a wall. Left alone for a dizzying few moments and not seeing any security cameras, Hosseini thrust his hand into his trouser pocket, fishing out a memory card full of state secrets that could now get him hanged. He shoved the card into his mouth, chewed it to pieces and swallowed.
Not long after, Ministry of Intelligence agents entered the room and the interrogation began, punctuated by beatings, Hosseini recounted. His denials and the destruction of the data were worthless; they seemed to know everything already. But how?
"These are things I never told anyone in the world," Hosseini told Reuters. As his mind raced, Hosseini even wondered whether the CIA itself had sold him out.
Rather than betrayal, Hosseini was the victim of CIA negligence, a year-long Reuters investigation into the agency's handling of its informants found. A faulty CIA covert communications system made it easy for Iranian intelligence to identify and capture him. Jailed for nearly a decade and speaking out for the first time, Hosseini said he never heard from the agency again, even after he was released in 2019.
Hosseini's experience of sloppy handling and abandonment was not unique. In interviews with six Iranian former CIA informants, Reuters found that the agency was careless in other ways amid its intense drive to gather intelligence in Iran, putting in peril those risking their lives to help the United States.
One informant said the CIA instructed him to make his information drops in Turkey at a location the agency knew was under surveillance by Iran. Another man, a former government worker who traveled to Abu Dhabi to seek a U.S. visa, claims a CIA officer there tried unsuccessfully to push him into spying for the United States, leading to his arrest when he returned to Iran.
Such aggressive steps by the CIA sometimes put average Iranians in danger with little prospect of gaining critical intelligence. When these men were caught, the agency provided no assistance to the informants or their families, even years later, the six Iranians said.
James Olson, former chief of CIA counterintelligence, said he was unaware of these specific cases. But he said any unnecessary compromise of sources by the agency would represent both a professional and ethical failure.
"If we're careless, if we're reckless and we've been penetrated, then shame on us," Olson said. "If people paid the price of trusting us enough to share information and they paid a penalty, then we have failed morally."
This is only a short excerpt from the full article-JR
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 30 2022, @01:40PM (3 children)
As the poem goes, many regret the road not taken. I am, however, quite glad I turned down a career in the CIA. Torture and other human rights abuses, and hanging everyone that works with them out to dry.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2022, @03:09PM
It's rich kids playing with toys. Just toss it away when they get bored or it breaks. See also: the economy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2022, @02:17PM (1 child)
Yeah, in my opinion the USA and the world would be better off if the CIA was shutdown and maybe their top leaders imprisoned or even executed.
I haven't seen the CIA contribute much to the US public. A lot of the stuff they do doesn't seem to actually make the world or the USA a safer and better place for normal US citizens.
They're more like a harmful parasite.
Trying to overthrow the Syrian Government ain't gonna help the US people much, especially when you're funding and arming the friends of Al Qaeda in the attempt... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/world/middleeast/cia-syria-rebel-arm-train-trump.html [nytimes.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 02 2022, @05:33PM
That's by design, so I wonder how are you so knowledgeable about what they do?
(Score: 5, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Friday September 30 2022, @02:18PM (2 children)
Are you surprised? We had people in Afghanistan that had worked with us for almost two decades and we left them on the tarmac when we pulled out. The people trying to hold onto the outside of aircraft weren't crazy; They genuinely believed that was a safer option than remaining in their home country.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday October 01 2022, @08:45AM
This has also been going on for decades, since at least the OSS during WWII. Get what you can out of them, then burn them. I have no idea why anyone would want to cooperate with the CIA given their appalling track record of burning people who cooperate with them.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday October 01 2022, @08:26PM
The way the US runs its foreign affairs is terrible. Over and over, high minded ideals are sacrificed in an instant, for expediency. For whatever looks good at the moment, and the devil with how it will look later when more, perhaps all, is known. For the profits of the MIC. For oil. The 1952 toppling of Iran's elected democracy was stunningly stupid. Been paying for that ever since. Wasn't worth it.
Figures that the CIA is no better than the US military.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday September 30 2022, @03:01PM (59 children)
I'll never know.
I mean the dude had a beef with the Khomeini to become a traitor, no doubt. But then Khomeini was a direct result of the CIA's toppling Mosaddegh and reinstating the Shah. Or said another way, without the CIA, there would have been no Khomeini.
So the two questions that spring to mind are:
- Why did the dude want the help the US, that got his country into this mess in the first place?
- Why did he think the CIA would do a better job handling him than they did handling his country?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2022, @03:12PM
At least now - plus with Trump's little cameo at Maralago - people won't be so ideologically motivated to believe in The Good Guys. If there are good people, they're certainly not the ones coming up with Marvel Hero scripts for their spies to deliver on 3000 miles away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2022, @05:42PM (57 children)
Indeed, he was a major asset in keeping the Russians out, much the same way we used terrorists in Afghanistan to drive them out [arizona.edu]
What lies will we uncover about Ukraine in the future? And will it ever matter?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Friday September 30 2022, @06:05PM (26 children)
We'll find that the efforts to get Ukraine into NATO started back in the early 2000's, and that we were a major player in the 2004 and 2014 coups to bring Ukraine's government closer to accepting that idea.
That's Russia's motivation for the war; They don't want NATO tanks and planes staged along the 2,000 km Ukraine/Russia border.
(Score: 2, Troll) by khallow on Friday September 30 2022, @06:43PM (24 children)
What's the evidence? There's evidence that the invasion was timed to weakness in NATO, but given how shoddy Russia's excuses and lies have been to this point, do we have anything that doesn't depend on Russian propaganda to go off of?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Friday September 30 2022, @07:24PM (13 children)
It took 60 years to declassify the broad strokes of the Iran Coup; Ask me again in 2074.
(Score: 3, Touché) by khallow on Saturday October 01 2022, @12:22AM (11 children)
In other words, you don't have evidence.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday October 01 2022, @04:05AM (10 children)
Circumstantial evidence is not the same thing as no evidence. In my opinion it is a reasonable possibility based on the United States' history of tinkering with foreign elections as detailed in the book 'Legacy of Ashes', the WikiLeaks cables, revelations about our attempts to overthrow the government of Syria, and the CIA's conduct in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Subsequent quotes by our current and a prior president hinting at our involvement have solidified my opinion. The thing that drove it home was reading the biography of the finance minister that served in the Ukrainian Cabinet after the 2014 coup, Natalie Jaresko. Her CV would not be out of place in a spy novel. It's odd for a nationalist government to put foreigners in cabinet level positions. In light of the prior points, multiple foreigners born or educated in the United States taking office is a glaring red flag.
Setting all that aside, the root question for me is "How would the United States respond if Canada or Mexico started actively pursuing trade, economic, and military relationships with Russia?" Insert the political euphemism for "shit bricks" here.
Russia should not have invaded Ukraine, period. That said, a large portion of blame lies with whatever foreign or domestic influence pushed Ukraine off its balance point as a neutral buffer state. Not seeing this shitstorm coming is a feat worthy of Mr. Magoo.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 01 2022, @04:30AM
She wasn't a foreigner. Her parents were from Ukraine and she lived there a number of years before that position.
Only if you ignore the value of a US education and that they probably weren't foreigners.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 01 2022, @04:31AM
(Score: 5, Touché) by c0lo on Saturday October 01 2022, @12:30PM (7 children)
Yeah, because, you know? it's quite impossible that the Ukrainians themselves would have wanted to join EU economic space and/or get into NATO.
It's obvious for anyone with half a brain that their life under Russia oligarchy and corruption would have been so much better than under the decadent social-democracy running rampant across the Europe. Seriously, just look at Belarus.
Must've been a CIA plot all along, which culminated when 73% of the Ukrainians voted a buffoon [wikipedia.org] who mocked the sacrosanct institution of Ukraine politics [wikipedia.org] on an anti-corruption agenda. Fer fuck sake, CIA must've used potent drugs to wash his brains squeaky clean, the poor bastard started to believe his role and to harbor the delusion he could make a difference for his people. I mean, really, just look at him today, you can't get him off the TV news everywhere or stop him from speaking with all the chiefs of the states in the US clique.
Clearly, the Russians were in their absolute right to try and teach Ukrainians a painful lesson, otherwise they'd run the risk of other "republics" in their empire starting to get cozy with the CIA and then rebel against those fine breed oligarchs.
---
(fucking shit, is depressing that I needed to answer to such a half-brained comment)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2022, @02:29PM (6 children)
The Ukrainians were idiots for getting rid of their nukes and thinking it would be better for them to be protected by a piece of paper.
Then later they were idiots to think joining the NATO would make them safer. Also stealing more than their fair share of gas from the pipelines wasn't a good move - it's as stupid as publicly stealing from a Mafia boss. Same for a number of other things they did.
The Russians were wrong for invading the Ukrainians but the Ukrainians sure did a number of stupid moves to get in that position. Not quite pull skirt down and spread their butt cheeks to Putin while yelling "I dare you to rape me", but not really far from that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2022, @02:54PM
Oh, enlighten us, what would Ukraine do if only they'd have the Russian nukes today?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Saturday October 01 2022, @03:07PM (4 children)
Righto. Because the only solution for an economic dispute between countries is invasion and war.
Though, that Mafia boss must be outta his mind, there's no way that lost gas could've reached $6.9bn/day [genevasolutions.news]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2022, @06:16PM (3 children)
Apparently so, in Afghanistan/Iraq, Libya, Syria, damn near all of Africa... all wars over money. Gangsterism rules
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 04 2022, @02:52AM (2 children)
You forgot to wave vaguely when you said that.
It's not like you'd know what a war that isn't over money would look like.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2022, @05:39AM (1 child)
No such thing
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 04 2022, @11:51PM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 01 2022, @12:24PM
(Score: -1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 30 2022, @08:52PM (1 child)
You cough up the evidence that lamestream media is reporting accurately and impartially. Lamestream articles do not count as evidence.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Saturday October 01 2022, @12:23AM
Because Russia depends on the accuracy and impartiality of the lamestream media for deciding how much it's going to lie about what it does?
(Score: 2) by SomeRandomGeek on Friday September 30 2022, @10:06PM (7 children)
We have no way of knowing what's going on in Putin's head. However, we do know what he has been consistently saying for the last 20 years: https://www.understandingwar.org/report/how-we-got-here-russia-kremlins-worldview [understandingwar.org]
He's been saying that Russia is a superpower. And as a superpower, it is entitled to a sphere of influence where it can do what it wants and other great powers should not get involved. And when the US or the EU or NATO do get involved, it is a provocation. Compare to the Monroe doctrine in the US.
What seems to have eluded Putin is that more people live in the countries he thinks should be part of his sphere of influence than actually live in Russia. And they have no interest in being Russian.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday October 01 2022, @12:45PM (6 children)
USSR transition to Russia Federation was a transition from communism to a corrupt oligarchy.
Not a very conducive way to the preservation of the superpower status, take the Roman and Ottoman empires as other examples.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Saturday October 01 2022, @04:16PM (5 children)
> USSR transition to Russia Federation was a transition from communism to a corrupt oligarchy.
One might argue that it was a transition from corrupt oligarchy to corrupt oligarchy (with slightly different labelling)
> take the Roman and Ottoman empires as other examples.
Interesting point. *Emperor* Augustus Caesar conquered Britain and Spain. They managed to hold onto power for a few centuries after becoming an empire (existing as Republic for half the civilisation, then Empire for the other half).
Counter example is China which was the oldest continuous civilisation for about 4000 years, right up until it became communist in 1940. One might argue that China was a different thing because they had Confucian philosophy.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Saturday October 01 2022, @09:30PM (4 children)
One might have a point.
In the light of the point above, another one might argue that the great Russian corrupt oligarchy continued uninterrupted ever since Ivan the Terrible [wikipedia.org]
That other one can see a lot of parallels with the current oligarch in chief, including the denazification of Novgorod [wikipedia.org] and the management of the Russian economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Sunday October 02 2022, @07:58AM (3 children)
Insightful
Actually, what I always wonder about is those deep cultural (or maybe environmental?) things that make the "stable fixed point" of some countries sit on democracy - UK, US for example - while some countries fix on feudalism - Russia for example. Maybe it is an illusion and we are all one step away from dictatorship.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 02 2022, @10:50AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Sunday October 02 2022, @11:10AM (1 child)
I guess in UK, feudalism was changed to monarchy by invention of cannons - baron could no longer sit in his castle and stick fingers up at the monarch, which fits with the "infrastructure" concept.
Democracy is softer. In 17th/18th century UK at least, when the UK democracy was properly established, I believe it was fed by religious diversity and freedom of the printing press. But what fed that? Not clear to me. Maybe simply travel time from Rome (the seat of Catholicism)?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 03 2022, @03:21AM
Simply that they don't waste resources on caring about religious differences and have a more knowledgeable public.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Friday September 30 2022, @10:34PM
Russia's motivations are deeper than this.
Listen to George Freidman. He is known as the shadow of the CIA as he was developing math models of conflicts for them for many years and now has a rather famous private consulting company. He spells it all out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeLu_yyz3tc [youtube.com]
BTW, he predicted the end of Ukraine and it's annexation by multiple countries back in 2001. He even had the map of the final results.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Friday September 30 2022, @06:10PM (28 children)
Do the lies we know about at present matter to you? Or do they only matter if they are US lies?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 30 2022, @11:44PM (27 children)
Legont posted the link to this video - you really ought to watch it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeLu_yyz3tc [youtube.com]
Skip the first ~5 or 7 minutes, it's bullshit. Fast forward until the talking heads have finally introduced Friedman. Friedman talks for about 35 minutes, then it's question and answer. That 35 minutes is time well spent. Get back to us when you've absorbed what the man has to say.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 01 2022, @12:33AM (18 children)
If Russia really didn't want that "conquering", then maybe they shouldn't work so hard towards it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2022, @02:10AM (17 children)
Oh please! The war in Ukraine is strictly business, and who do you think is profiting the most?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 01 2022, @02:15AM (16 children)
Doesn't look like it's Putin.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2022, @02:35AM (15 children)
Exactly... So, since wars are for profit, I need to repeat the question apparently, who do you think is profiting the most?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 01 2022, @03:35AM (11 children)
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
How about wars for supremacy or in opposition to ideologies?
Even if we choose to blinker our thinking and only consider war in terms of profit, we have to acknowledge that there's a vast difference between profit and the expectation of profit. Here, the person with by far the highest expectations of profit was Putin. And he started that war too. What a coincidence!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2022, @04:21AM (10 children)
Mere rationalization to sell the war to the ignorant masses. The people who start wars are only in it for the money, you know, market share/dominance. It's gangsta mercantilism... The "Great Pirates" [archive.org] rule the world.
You still haven't answered the question, who is profiting the most?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 01 2022, @04:23AM (4 children)
No different than a generic "profit".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2022, @04:30AM (3 children)
It is advertising, public relations. The singular goal remains the same in all cases. War is strictly business.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 01 2022, @04:33AM (2 children)
And you're the market. So what? I grew out of this point of view a long time ago.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2022, @04:40AM (1 child)
You are only proving that war is business, nothing else. Every bullet puts a penny into the bank's vault. The undertaker does pretty good too
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 01 2022, @12:19PM
Only if you completely ignore what words like "proving" and "business" mean. Words mean things.
Just because someone benefits from a problem, like war, doesn't mean that they run the show. For example, if the war profiteers are so powerful and war so profitable, then why is war actually going down [soylentnews.org]? You have any room in that cliche-ridden brain for some reality?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 01 2022, @04:24AM (4 children)
And I explained why I didn't answer that question. Because it's the wrong question to ask. Fortunately, I found the right question to ask and answered it. You're welcome!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2022, @04:34AM (3 children)
You didn't, and you didn't. You are simply practicing your regular evasion. You will not answer the question only because it will force you into admitting you are wrong
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 01 2022, @12:22PM (2 children)
And I see you say nothing except to ad hominem. I have a different opinion about who evades here and how poorly they do it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2022, @06:07PM (1 child)
Based on official lies and your biased appeal to authority
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 01 2022, @10:53PM
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday October 01 2022, @01:16PM (2 children)
Oh, gosh. And me thinking Putin must've have the welfare of some poor souls [wikipedia.org] at heart, as they no doubt were quite grateful (to the tune of $4.5bn in 2022 [theguardian.com])
How wrong I was, together with more than half of Russians [theatlantic.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2022, @06:04PM (1 child)
None of that even comes close to adding up to the many billions garnered by a completely different party that nobody wants to name for fear of destroying a narrative
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 01 2022, @10:56PM
It's your fear of destroying a narrative that shows in that post above. My take is that if you were to name the "different party", then we could pick apart your argument and find that it's just garbage.
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday October 01 2022, @12:57AM (7 children)
The questions and answers is the most interesting part. At some point he is asked if Islamic terrorism is the biggest danger to the US. He answers that while it needs attention, the biggest danger for the US empire (and to British one before that as I read him since 2000) is a union between Germany and Russia.
So, and this is from me, the bombing of the gas pipelines is the US attack against Germany. Russians know it and Germans, I trust, too.
Hereby I predict the pipe from Norway will be hit too.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2, Redundant) by khallow on Saturday October 01 2022, @03:24AM (6 children)
What US empire? This already reads like alternate history. When will we see the fleets of war zepplins and Stalin's giant robots? Hitler in New York? Roosevelt in Moscow or Berlin?
The thing about real empires is that they expand until they start collapsing. Just look at Russia. They can't field a respectable army any more, but that didn't stop them from invading Ukraine. The logic of empire required that they expand or die.
Similarly, we can see some such examples in business. But the US itself? They stopped expanding in terms of territory back in the early 20th century, after relinquishing the banana republics. What's ignored here is the vast soft power of western democracies - not just the US. Consider the common analogy to the Ukraine War, the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In that case, the US cobbled together a decent sized alliance with modest blowback even when the war causes were found to be bogus.
Russia couldn't do it for Ukraine. They've only been able to get the worst of the world to go along even superficially. They have little soft power and no inkling of how to get more. Protip: you need a lot more than propaganda.
Going back to your narrative, why would it be in the US's benefit to sabotage economic cooperation between democratic German and Russian states? To the contrary, there would be plenty of economic angles. Just look at the economic growth Germany got from fixing up old East Germany. Elevating Russia to developed world status would be a huge business opportunity and US-side businesses would get a big piece of that action. And of course, we're ignoring that it's the actions of Russia that drove the wedge between Germany and Russia in the first place, not the US.
But I've noticed this is the typical stilted argument that apologists for Russia and Putin keep using, treating the US as if it were playing the same game as Russia. All I can say is that Russia has shown a remarkable weakness over the past seven months that damns this would-be Russian empire while the US, showing a similar weakness (such as in the retreat from Afghanistan) that has had little effect on the stability of the country. To call the US a mere empire is to ignore this strength.
(Score: 2) by legont on Sunday October 02 2022, @02:58AM (1 child)
If you are not clear about what he said, ask George Friedman himself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Friedman [wikipedia.org]
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 02 2022, @03:14AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 02 2022, @09:02PM (3 children)
Really.. The US is a gangster, not an empire. Orwell drew an almost [wikimedia.org] perfect map of how the world is divided amongst the
FourFive Families (EU has formed its own)(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 04 2022, @02:49AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2022, @08:43PM (1 child)
The Disputed Territories are an "extended" family. And they have lost a lot of ground. North Africa and the middle east are solidly under Eurasian/Oceania's rule
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 07 2022, @05:16AM
In other words, three not four. Probably ought to read 1984 sometime.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Saturday October 01 2022, @04:04PM
> Some agitated Moslems
Why does their religion matter?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 30 2022, @08:55PM (1 child)
"Intelligence" is a dog-eat-dog world, and that includes your own pack members. Nothing and no one is sacred to a spy. The spy who is foolish enough to trust his fellow spies will soon become dog food, it's really that simple. Everyone is expendable, unless they occupy one of the highest offices in the community. And, even they can become expendable if they manage to offend some hamshite politician.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 01 2022, @01:21AM