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It looks like the protests in Iran are part of just another CIA linked project of destabilization

By on January 12, 2020 in Featured, General

By Theodore Shoebat

Things are getting politically unstable in Iran as thousands upon thousands of people are protesting and screaming chants like “death to the dictator!” One protest even tore down a giant portrait of Soleimani:

https://twitter.com/mohmd_mozafari/status/1216480396101156864?s=20

A lot of this anger has been further intensified by the fact that Iran admitted to accidentally downing a Ukrainian plan, as we read in a report from CNN:

Apologies from Iranian leaders over the downing of an airliner last week have done little to quell mass anti-government protests spreading across the country.

Thousands of demonstrators hit the streets this weekend condemning Iranian authorities for shooting down a Ukrainian passenger plane and killing all 176 people on board.
The airliner disaster came hours after Iran fired missiles at Iraqi military bases housing US troops. That was retaliation for a drone strike at Baghdad airport that killed Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.

Crowds are also screaming: “Islamic Republic, we don’t want!”

Looking at these protests, is it possible that they are being capitalized by the US and American-backed operatives to spark some sort of revolution. In 2006 the Asia Times published an article (which they removed) which documented a US-organized program in Dubai which was essentially a workshop on how to conduct a revolution in Iran. Iranian exiles based in Los Angeles, Serbian activist trainers from Otpor (which helped in the overthrow of Milosevic in 2000) and American operatives were leading the rebel courses. According to the article from the Asia Times, one Iranian activist who went through the course recounted how:

organizers were a mixture of Los Angeles-based exiled Iranians, Americans who appeared to supervise the course and whose affiliation remained unclear throughout, and three Serbs who said they belonged to the Otpor democratic movement that overthrew the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

The highly secretive nature of the workshops meant that they were misleadingly advertised in the lobby of the hotel as a conference by the “Griffin Hospital”. The organizers, instructors and students identified themselves through aliases and were instructed to communicate with one another after the course was over through Hushmail accounts, an encrypted e-mail service that claims to be hack-proof.

In class, the Serbian instructors organized role-playing games in which the participants would assume the personas of characters such an Iranian woman or a Shi’ite cleric. Throughout these exercises in empathy and psychology, stress was laid on the importance of ridiculing the political elite as an effective tool of demythologizing them in the eyes of the people.

“They taught us what methods they used in Serbia to bring down Milosevic,” Nilofar said. “They taught us some of them so we could choose the best one to bring down the regime, but they didn’t mention directly bringing down the regime – they just taught us what they had done in their own country.”

Cyrus Safdari, an independent Iranian analyst, observed:

“As I gather, the idea was to fund and train activists to be agents provocateurs along the lines of the Otpor movement in Serbia. Their job was to utilize various techniques, such as anti-government graffiti etc, to embolden the student movement and provoke a general government crackdown, which could then be used as a pretext to ‘spark’ a mass uprising in Iran that appeared to be spontaneous and indigenous.”

Safdari also recounted how he met Iranians in social functions who would show off their CIA connections: “I guess the whole program had developed some serious leaks … since I heard about it repeatedly from various guests at various Iranian social functions who wanted to show off about how well connected to the CIA they had become.” Safdari also believed that the funding for the rebel academy came “only indirectly from the US government … I’m not sure if that meant the project belonged to some ‘political entrepreneurs’ acting independently of the US government, or if these are just standard measures intended to create plausible deniability”.

During the Bush administration, State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli made public that a newly created Office of Iranian Affairs within the department would put in efforts on introducing democracy in Iran. The top officials who were behind the new policy were said to be Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, Elizabeth Cheney (Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter), Scott Carpenter and David Denehy, in addition to the secretary of state herself, Condoleezza Rice.

This department of “introducing democracy” to Iran consisted of 15 Farsi-speaking officers who were positioned in areas adjacent to Iran or in major European cities, such as Frankfurt, with large Iranian communities.  “We need to develop a cadre of foreign-service officers who speak Farsi, who understand the region – not just Iran, but the region where Iran has influence and reach – and understand Iran,” Ereli said. He went on to explain the long term strategy:

“The logic of putting people out in the field [is] to use the language, to develop the on-the-ground expertise so that 10, 15, 20 years from now, we’ve got – just like we have Arab experts … we used to have Soviet experts – we’ve got a cadre of Iran experts.”

These activists were then commissioned to work with other operatives in Dubai, or in the words of Henry Precht, a former US diplomat who presided over the Iran desk during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, the State Department intended “to beef up the training of officers in the history, language and culture of the country and put them in touch in Dubai with oppositionists”. This plot was being done to compliment the work of CIA officers who specialized in Iran and who were based off of neighboring countries, such as the UAE, Turkey and Azerbaijan. One of these operatives was the sinister Reuel Marc Gerecht, who worked in the CIA in the 1980s under diplomatic cover in the US Consulate in Istanbul. His job was to get information from poor and suffering Iranians who would beg him for help, an experience that excited Gerecht who would later describe it as a “chance to play God”. He recounted:

“I’d let hundreds of desperate Iranians languish in Turkey. People who’d given me insights never found in books. I’d watched mothers with children drop to their knees and beg for my help … They didn’t want money, just a little kindness, a visa out of their personal hell … [they met] a sympathetic man waiting in a warm room full of food, coffee, tea, alcohol and cigarettes. A US official who’d politely strip them of all their memories and every corpuscle of information and then reopen the street-side door.”

Gerecht was present in a 2011 conference organized by the Washington Forum, entitled,  Ideology, Power, and Alliances in a Changing Middle East. The meeting was all in support for military intervention and regime change in Syria. Basically, the continuation of the very CIA policy of destabilization in the Middle East. This conference took place in 2011, the year that the Syrian revolution began. So its very interesting to read about this conference in context of the greater agenda to commence chaos in the Middle East. In the conference, Gerecht shared a platform with Soner Cagaptay, a Turkish-American think tank analyst of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Turkish research program. In their talk both of these men expressed their full support for the United States to back Turkey as the top nation of the Muslim world:

“Turkey plays an increasingly important role in the new Middle East, said Soner Cagaptay, who directs The Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Turkish research program.

“The view from Ankara is that Turkey is the region’s leader.” “Turkey’s role in the Arab Spring can be boiled down to Turkey’s role in Syria,” Cagaptay said, noting that Syria—unlike the other Arab Spring countries of Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya—shares a border with Turkey, bears an Ottoman imprint, and has economic, social, and historical connections to Turkey. As the first country in the region—outside of the Gulf States—to have a successful, middleclass Muslim society, Turkey can serve as an economic model for the Mideast.  Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at FDD and former CIA Iran operative, agreed. Turkey represents the “possibility you can be devoutly faithful and you can be rich,” said Gerecht. “The best thing for Turkey is to have it become a democratic inspiration and to actually trumpet its own economic success.”        

So we know that Gerecht was an operative against Iran and today he supports the United States bolstering Turkey in the Near East. This is not coincidence and this mentality and reflects the Trump administration’s foreign policy operation of backing Turkey’s expansion into northwestern Syria while at the same time intensifying sanctions on Iran.

In 2017, it was reported by the Wall Street Journal that the CIA was intensely operating within Iran:

“The Central Intelligence Agency has established an organization focused exclusively on gathering and analyzing intelligence about Iran, reflecting the Trump administration’s decision to make that country a higher priority target for American spies”

According to the Jordan Times, various CIA linked activists have been arrested by Iranian authorities:

Iran has arrested eight people it accused of CIA links and sending abroad information on recent urban unrest, days after the United States said it had received thousands of messages on a protest crackdown in the Islamic republic.

New York-based Human Rights Watch has accused Tehran of “deliberately covering up” more than 140 deaths that it said came when security forces suppressed demonstrations against a sharp fuel price hike.

Iran said that among the more than 500 people arrested were eight who were “linked to the CIA”, state news agency IRNA said late on Wednesday, citing the head of the intelligence ministry’s counterespionage department.

“Some elements who tried to collect information about the recent riots and send them out of the country… were identified and arrested,” the director general was quoted as saying.

Six of them were alleged to have been at “the riots and carrying out orders”, IRNA reported, without naming the official.

Two others were arrested before they could leave the country, the news agency said, and all had been “trained in different countries on how to collect information… as citizen-journalists”.

So we know that there are CIA-linked activists involved in the Iran protest, which is not far fetched at all, given the current circumstances of US-Iranian tensions.

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