Seymour M. Hersh
In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military
intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August,
after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to
launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government
for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of
chemical weapons. Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he
announced that he would seek congressional approval for the
intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for
hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer
to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did
Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing
into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the
administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and
military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and
potentially disastrous.
For
months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and
the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s
neighbours, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to
be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel
opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were
some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence
official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed
they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack
inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’
The
joint chiefs also knew that the Obama administration’s public claims
that only the Syrian army had access to sarin were wrong. The American
and British intelligence communities had been aware since the spring of
2013 that some rebel units in Syria were developing chemical weapons. On
20 June analysts for the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a highly
classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy
director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin
production cell: its programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced
sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’. (According to a Defense
Department consultant, US intelligence has long known that al-Qaida
experimented with chemical weapons, and has a video of one of its gas
experiments with dogs.) The DIA paper went on: ‘Previous IC
[intelligence community] focus had been almost entirely on Syrian CW
[chemical weapons] stockpiles; now we see ANF attempting to make its own
CW … Al-Nusrah Front’s relative freedom of operation within Syria leads
us to assess the group’s CW aspirations will be difficult to disrupt in
the future.’ The paper drew on classified intelligence from numerous
agencies: ‘Turkey and Saudi-based chemical facilitators,’ it said, ‘were
attempting to obtain sarin precursors in bulk, tens of kilograms,
likely for the anticipated large scale production effort in Syria.’
(Asked about the DIA paper, a spokesperson for the director of national
intelligence said: ‘No such paper was ever requested or produced by
intelligence community analysts.’)
Last May, more than ten members of the al-Nusra Front were
arrested in southern Turkey with what local police told the press were
two kilograms of sarin. In a 130-page indictment the group was accused
of attempting to purchase fuses, piping for the construction of mortars,
and chemical precursors for sarin. Five of those arrested were freed
after a brief detention. The others, including the ringleader, Haytham
Qassab, for whom the prosecutor requested a prison sentence of 25 years,
were released pending trial. In the meantime the Turkish press has been
rife with speculation that the Erdoğan administration has been covering
up the extent of its involvement with the rebels. In a news conference
last summer, Aydin Sezgin, Turkey’s ambassador to Moscow, dismissed the
arrests and claimed to reporters that the recovered ‘sarin’ was merely
‘anti-freeze’.
The DIA paper took the arrests as evidence that
al-Nusra was expanding its access to chemical weapons. It said Qassab
had ‘self-identified’ as a member of al-Nusra, and that he was directly
connected to Abd-al-Ghani, the ‘ANF emir for military manufacturing’.
Qassab and his associate Khalid Ousta worked with Halit Unalkaya, an
employee of a Turkish firm called Zirve Export, who provided ‘price
quotes for bulk quantities of sarin precursors’. Abd-al-Ghani’s plan was
for two associates to ‘perfect a process for making sarin, then go to
Syria to train others to begin large scale production at an unidentified
lab in Syria’. The DIA paper said that one of his operatives had
purchased a precursor on the ‘Baghdad chemical market’, which ‘has
supported at least seven CW efforts since 2004’.
A series of
chemical weapon attacks in March and April 2013 was investigated over
the next few months by a special UN mission to Syria. A person with
close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria told me that there was
evidence linking the Syrian opposition to the first gas attack, on 19
March in Khan Al-Assal, a village near Aleppo. In its final report in
December, the mission said that at least 19 civilians and one Syrian
soldier were among the fatalities, along with scores of injured. It had
no mandate to assign responsibility for the attack, but the person with
knowledge of the UN’s activities said: ‘Investigators interviewed the
people who were there, including the doctors who treated the victims. It
was clear that the rebels used the gas. It did not come out in public
because no one wanted to know.’
In the months before the attacks
began, a former senior Defense Department official told me, the DIA was
circulating a daily classified report known as SYRUP on all intelligence
related to the Syrian conflict, including material on chemical weapons.
But in the spring, distribution of the part of the report concerning
chemical weapons was severely curtailed on the orders of Denis
McDonough, the White House chief of staff. ‘Something was in there that
triggered a shit fit by McDonough,’ the former Defense Department
official said. ‘One day it was a huge deal, and then, after the March
and April sarin attacks’ – he snapped his fingers – ‘it’s no longer
there.’ The decision to restrict distribution was made as the joint
chiefs ordered intensive contingency planning for a possible ground
invasion of Syria whose primary objective would be the elimination of
chemical weapons.
The former intelligence official said that many
in the US national security establishment had long been troubled by the
president’s red line: ‘The joint chiefs asked the White House, “What
does red line mean? How does that translate into military orders? Troops
on the ground? Massive strike? Limited strike?” They tasked military
intelligence to study how we could carry out the threat. They learned
nothing more about the president’s reasoning.’
In the aftermath of
the 21 August attack Obama ordered the Pentagon to draw up targets for
bombing. Early in the process, the former intelligence official said,
‘the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of
staff as being insufficiently “painful” to the Assad regime.’ The
original targets included only military sites and nothing by way of
civilian infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan
evolved into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted
to airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with
Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting
longer,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The Pentagon
planners said we can’t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s missile
sites because their warheads are buried too far below ground, so the two
B-52 air wings with two-thousand pound bombs were assigned to the
mission. Then we’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover
downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ The new
target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities
Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets
included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic
and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all
known military and intelligence buildings.
Britain and France were both to play a part. On 29 August, the
day Parliament voted against Cameron’s bid to join the intervention, the
Guardian reported that he had already ordered six RAF Typhoon
fighter jets to be deployed to Cyprus, and had volunteered a submarine
capable of launching Tomahawk missiles. The French air force – a crucial
player in the 2011 strikes on Libya – was deeply committed, according
to an account in Le Nouvel Observateur; François Hollande had
ordered several Rafale fighter-bombers to join the American assault.
Their targets were reported to be in western Syria.
By the last
days of August the president had given the Joint Chiefs a fixed deadline
for the launch. ‘H hour was to begin no later than Monday morning [2
September], a massive assault to neutralise Assad,’ the former
intelligence official said. So it was a surprise to many when during a
speech in the White House Rose Garden on 31 August Obama said that the
attack would be put on hold, and he would turn to Congress and put it to
a vote.
At this stage, Obama’s premise – that only the Syrian
army was capable of deploying sarin – was unravelling. Within a few days
of the 21 August attack, the former intelligence official told me,
Russian military intelligence operatives had recovered samples of the
chemical agent from Ghouta. They analysed it and passed it on to British
military intelligence; this was the material sent to Porton Down. (A
spokesperson for Porton Down said: ‘Many of the samples analysed in the
UK tested positive for the nerve agent sarin.’ MI6 said that it doesn’t
comment on intelligence matters.)
The former intelligence official
said the Russian who delivered the sample to the UK was ‘a good source –
someone with access, knowledge and a record of being trustworthy’.
After the first reported uses of chemical weapons in Syria last year,
American and allied intelligence agencies ‘made an effort to find the
answer as to what if anything, was used – and its source’, the former
intelligence official said. ‘We use data exchanged as part of the
Chemical Weapons Convention. The DIA’s baseline consisted of knowing the
composition of each batch of Soviet-manufactured chemical weapons. But
we didn’t know which batches the Assad government currently had in its
arsenal. Within days of the Damascus incident we asked a source in the
Syrian government to give us a list of the batches the government
currently had. This is why we could confirm the difference so quickly.’
The
process hadn’t worked as smoothly in the spring, the former
intelligence official said, because the studies done by Western
intelligence ‘were inconclusive as to the type of gas it was. The word
“sarin” didn’t come up. There was a great deal of discussion about this,
but since no one could conclude what gas it was, you could not say that
Assad had crossed the president’s red line.’ By 21 August, the former
intelligence official went on, ‘the Syrian opposition clearly had
learned from this and announced that “sarin” from the Syrian army had
been used, before any analysis could be made, and the press and White
House jumped at it. Since it now was sarin, “It had to be Assad.”’
The
UK defence staff who relayed the Porton Down findings to the joint
chiefs were sending the Americans a message, the former intelligence
official said: ‘We’re being set up here.’ (This account made sense of a
terse message a senior official in the CIA sent in late August: ‘It was
not the result of the current regime. UK & US know this.’) By then
the attack was a few days away and American, British and French planes,
ships and submarines were at the ready.
The officer ultimately
responsible for the planning and execution of the attack was General
Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs. From the beginning of the
crisis, the former intelligence official said, the joint chiefs had been
sceptical of the administration’s argument that it had the facts to
back up its belief in Assad’s guilt. They pressed the DIA and other
agencies for more substantial evidence. ‘There was no way they thought
Syria would use nerve gas at that stage, because Assad was winning the
war,’ the former intelligence official said. Dempsey had irritated many
in the Obama administration by repeatedly warning Congress over the
summer of the danger of American military involvement in Syria. Last
April, after an optimistic assessment of rebel progress by the secretary
of state, John Kerry, in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee,
Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee that ‘there’s a risk
that this conflict has become stalemated.’
Dempsey’s initial view
after 21 August was that a US strike on Syria – under the assumption
that the Assad government was responsible for the sarin attack – would
be a military blunder, the former intelligence official said. The Porton
Down report caused the joint chiefs to go to the president with a more
serious worry: that the attack sought by the White House would be an
unjustified act of aggression. It was the joint chiefs who led Obama to
change course. The official White House explanation for the turnabout –
the story the press corps told – was that the president, during a walk
in the Rose Garden with Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, suddenly
decided to seek approval for the strike from a bitterly divided Congress
with which he’d been in conflict for years. The former Defense
Department official told me that the White House provided a different
explanation to members of the civilian leadership of the Pentagon: the
bombing had been called off because there was intelligence ‘that the
Middle East would go up in smoke’ if it was carried out.
The president’s decision to go to Congress was initially seen
by senior aides in the White House, the former intelligence official
said, as a replay of George W. Bush’s gambit in the autumn of 2002
before the invasion of Iraq: ‘When it became clear that there were no
WMD in Iraq, Congress, which had endorsed the Iraqi war, and the White
House both shared the blame and repeatedly cited faulty intelligence. If
the current Congress were to vote to endorse the strike, the White
House could again have it both ways – wallop Syria with a massive attack
and validate the president’s red line commitment, while also being able
to share the blame with Congress if it came out that the Syrian
military wasn’t behind the attack.’ The turnabout came as a surprise
even to the Democratic leadership in Congress. In September the Wall Street Journal
reported that three days before his Rose Garden speech Obama had
telephoned Nancy Pelosi, leader of the House Democrats, ‘to talk through
the options’. She later told colleagues, according to the Journal, that she hadn’t asked the president to put the bombing to a congressional vote.
Obama’s
move for congressional approval quickly became a dead end. ‘Congress
was not going to let this go by,’ the former intelligence official said.
‘Congress made it known that, unlike the authorisation for the Iraq
war, there would be substantive hearings.’ At this point, there was a
sense of desperation in the White House, the former intelligence
official said. ‘And so out comes Plan B. Call off the bombing strike and
Assad would agree to unilaterally sign the chemical warfare treaty and
agree to the destruction of all of chemical weapons under UN
supervision.’ At a press conference in London on 9 September, Kerry was
still talking about intervention: ‘The risk of not acting is greater
than the risk of acting.’ But when a reporter asked if there was
anything Assad could do to stop the bombing, Kerry said: ‘Sure. He could
turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international
community in the next week … But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t
be done, obviously.’ As the New York Times reported the next
day, the Russian-brokered deal that emerged shortly afterwards had first
been discussed by Obama and Putin in the summer of 2012. Although the
strike plans were shelved, the administration didn’t change its public
assessment of the justification for going to war. ‘There is zero
tolerance at that level for the existence of error,’ the former
intelligence official said of the senior officials in the White House.
‘They could not afford to say: “We were wrong.”’ (The DNI spokesperson
said: ‘The Assad regime, and only the Assad regime, could have been
responsible for the chemical weapons attack that took place on 21
August.’)
*
The full extent
of US co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in assisting the
rebel opposition in Syria has yet to come to light. The Obama
administration has never publicly admitted to its role in creating what
the CIA calls a ‘rat line’, a back channel highway into Syria. The rat
line, authorised in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and
ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border
to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the
weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida. (The DNI
spokesperson said: ‘The idea that the United States was providing
weapons from Libya to anyone is false.’)
In January, the Senate
Intelligence Committee released a report on the assault by a local
militia in September 2012 on the American consulate and a nearby
undercover CIA facility in Benghazi, which resulted in the death of the
US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three others. The report’s
criticism of the State Department for not providing adequate security at
the consulate, and of the intelligence community for not alerting the
US military to the presence of a CIA outpost in the area, received
front-page coverage and revived animosities in Washington, with
Republicans accusing Obama and Hillary Clinton of a cover-up. A highly
classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret
agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan
administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the
agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar;
the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from
Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria. A number of front companies were set up
in Libya, some under the cover of Australian entities. Retired American
soldiers, who didn’t always know who was really employing them, were
hired to manage procurement and shipping. The operation was run by David
Petraeus, the CIA director who would soon resign when it became known
he was having an affair with his biographer. (A spokesperson for
Petraeus denied the operation ever took place.)
The operation had
not been disclosed at the time it was set up to the congressional
intelligence committees and the congressional leadership, as required by
law since the 1970s. The involvement of MI6 enabled the CIA to evade
the law by classifying the mission as a liaison operation. The former
intelligence official explained that for years there has been a
recognised exception in the law that permits the CIA not to report
liaison activity to Congress, which would otherwise be owed a finding.
(All proposed CIA covert operations must be described in a written
document, known as a ‘finding’, submitted to the senior leadership of
Congress for approval.) Distribution of the annex was limited to the
staff aides who wrote the report and to the eight ranking members of
Congress – the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and
Senate, and the Democratic and Republicans leaders on the House and
Senate intelligence committees. This hardly constituted a genuine
attempt at oversight: the eight leaders are not known to gather together
to raise questions or discuss the secret information they receive.
The
annex didn’t tell the whole story of what happened in Benghazi before
the attack, nor did it explain why the American consulate was attacked.
‘The consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of
arms,’ the former intelligence official, who has read the annex, said.
‘It had no real political role.’
Washington abruptly ended the
CIA’s role in the transfer of arms from Libya after the attack on the
consulate, but the rat line kept going. ‘The United States was no longer
in control of what the Turks were relaying to the jihadists,’ the
former intelligence official said. Within weeks, as many as forty
portable surface-to-air missile launchers, commonly known as manpads,
were in the hands of Syrian rebels. On 28 November 2012, Joby Warrick of
the Washington Post reported that the previous day rebels near
Aleppo had used what was almost certainly a manpad to shoot down a
Syrian transport helicopter. ‘The Obama administration,’ Warrick wrote,
‘has steadfastly opposed arming Syrian opposition forces with such
missiles, warning that the weapons could fall into the hands of
terrorists and be used to shoot down commercial aircraft.’ Two Middle
Eastern intelligence officials fingered Qatar as the source, and a
former US intelligence analyst speculated that the manpads could have
been obtained from Syrian military outposts overrun by the rebels. There
was no indication that the rebels’ possession of manpads was likely the
unintended consequence of a covert US programme that was no longer
under US control.
By the end of 2012, it was believed throughout
the American intelligence community that the rebels were losing the war.
‘Erdoğan was pissed,’ the former intelligence official said, ‘and felt
he was left hanging on the vine. It was his money and the cut-off was
seen as a betrayal.’ In spring 2013 US intelligence learned that the
Turkish government – through elements of the MIT, its national
intelligence agency, and the Gendarmerie, a militarised law-enforcement
organisation – was working directly with al-Nusra and its allies to
develop a chemical warfare capability. ‘The MIT was running the
political liaison with the rebels, and the Gendarmerie handled military
logistics, on-the-scene advice and training – including training in
chemical warfare,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Stepping up
Turkey’s role in spring 2013 was seen as the key to its problems there.
Erdoğan knew that if he stopped his support of the jihadists it would be
all over. The Saudis could not support the war because of logistics –
the distances involved and the difficulty of moving weapons and
supplies. Erdoğan’s hope was to instigate an event that would force the
US to cross the red line. But Obama didn’t respond in March and April.’
There
was no public sign of discord when Erdoğan and Obama met on 16 May 2013
at the White House. At a later press conference Obama said that they
had agreed that Assad ‘needs to go’. Asked whether he thought Syria had
crossed the red line, Obama acknowledged that there was evidence such
weapons had been used, but added, ‘it is important for us to make sure
that we’re able to get more specific information about what exactly is
happening there.’ The red line was still intact.
An American
foreign policy expert who speaks regularly with officials in Washington
and Ankara told me about a working dinner Obama held for Erdoğan during
his May visit. The meal was dominated by the Turks’ insistence that
Syria had crossed the red line and their complaints that Obama was
reluctant to do anything about it. Obama was accompanied by John Kerry
and Tom Donilon, the national security adviser who would soon leave the
job. Erdoğan was joined by Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister,
and Hakan Fidan, the head of the MIT. Fidan is known to be fiercely
loyal to Erdoğan, and has been seen as a consistent backer of the
radical rebel opposition in Syria.
The foreign policy expert told
me that the account he heard originated with Donilon. (It was later
corroborated by a former US official, who learned of it from a senior
Turkish diplomat.) According to the expert, Erdoğan had sought the
meeting to demonstrate to Obama that the red line had been crossed, and
had brought Fidan along to state the case. When Erdoğan tried to draw
Fidan into the conversation, and Fidan began speaking, Obama cut him off
and said: ‘We know.’ Erdoğan tried to bring Fidan in a second time, and
Obama again cut him off and said: ‘We know.’ At that point, an
exasperated Erdoğan said, ‘But your red line has been crossed!’ and, the
expert told me, ‘Donilon said Erdoğan “fucking waved his finger at the
president inside the White House”.’ Obama then pointed at Fidan and
said: ‘We know what you’re doing with the radicals in Syria.’ (Donilon,
who joined the Council on Foreign Relations last July, didn’t respond to
questions about this story. The Turkish Foreign Ministry didn’t respond
to questions about the dinner. A spokesperson for the National Security
Council confirmed that the dinner took place and provided a photograph
showing Obama, Kerry, Donilon, Erdoğan, Fidan and Davutoglu sitting at a
table. ‘Beyond that,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to read out the details
of their discussions.’)
But Erdoğan did not leave empty handed.
Obama was still permitting Turkey to continue to exploit a loophole in a
presidential executive order prohibiting the export of gold to Iran,
part of the US sanctions regime against the country. In March 2012,
responding to sanctions of Iranian banks by the EU, the SWIFT electronic
payment system, which facilitates cross-border payments, expelled
dozens of Iranian financial institutions, severely restricting the
country’s ability to conduct international trade. The US followed with
the executive order in July, but left what came to be known as a ‘golden
loophole’: gold shipments to private Iranian entities could continue.
Turkey is a major purchaser of Iranian oil and gas, and it took
advantage of the loophole by depositing its energy payments in Turkish
lira in an Iranian account in Turkey; these funds were then used to
purchase Turkish gold for export to confederates in Iran. Gold to the
value of $13 billion reportedly entered Iran in this way between March
2012 and July 2013.
The programme quickly became a cash cow for
corrupt politicians and traders in Turkey, Iran and the United Arab
Emirates. ‘The middlemen did what they always do,’ the former
intelligence official said. ‘Take 15 per cent. The CIA had estimated
that there was as much as two billion dollars in skim. Gold and Turkish
lira were sticking to fingers.’ The illicit skimming flared into a
public ‘gas for gold’ scandal in Turkey in December, and resulted in
charges against two dozen people, including prominent businessmen and
relatives of government officials, as well as the resignations of three
ministers, one of whom called for Erdoğan to resign. The chief executive
of a Turkish state-controlled bank that was in the middle of the
scandal insisted that more than $4.5 million in cash found by police in
shoeboxes during a search of his home was for charitable donations.
Late last year Jonathan Schanzer and Mark Dubowitz reported in Foreign Policy
that the Obama administration closed the golden loophole in January
2013, but ‘lobbied to make sure the legislation … did not take effect
for six months’. They speculated that the administration wanted to use
the delay as an incentive to bring Iran to the bargaining table over its
nuclear programme, or to placate its Turkish ally in the Syrian civil
war. The delay permitted Iran to ‘accrue billions of dollars more in
gold, further undermining the sanctions regime’.
*
The
American decision to end CIA support of the weapons shipments into
Syria left Erdoğan exposed politically and militarily. ‘One of the
issues at that May summit was the fact that Turkey is the only avenue to
supply the rebels in Syria,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘It
can’t come through Jordan because the terrain in the south is wide open
and the Syrians are all over it. And it can’t come through the valleys
and hills of Lebanon – you can’t be sure who you’d meet on the other
side.’ Without US military support for the rebels, the former
intelligence official said, ‘Erdoğan’s dream of having a client state in
Syria is evaporating and he thinks we’re the reason why. When Syria
wins the war, he knows the rebels are just as likely to turn on him –
where else can they go? So now he will have thousands of radicals in his
backyard.’
A US intelligence consultant told me that a few weeks
before 21 August he saw a highly classified briefing prepared for
Dempsey and the defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, which described ‘the
acute anxiety’ of the Erdoğan administration about the rebels’ dwindling
prospects. The analysis warned that the Turkish leadership had
expressed ‘the need to do something that would precipitate a US military
response’. By late summer, the Syrian army still had the advantage over
the rebels, the former intelligence official said, and only American
air power could turn the tide. In the autumn, the former intelligence
official went on, the US intelligence analysts who kept working on the
events of 21 August ‘sensed that Syria had not done the gas attack. But
the 500 pound gorilla was, how did it happen? The immediate suspect was
the Turks, because they had all the pieces to make it happen.’
As
intercepts and other data related to the 21 August attacks were
gathered, the intelligence community saw evidence to support its
suspicions. ‘We now know it was a covert action planned by Erdoğan’s
people to push Obama over the red line,’ the former intelligence
official said. ‘They had to escalate to a gas attack in or near Damascus
when the UN inspectors’ – who arrived in Damascus on 18 August to
investigate the earlier use of gas – ‘were there. The deal was to do
something spectacular. Our senior military officers have been told by
the DIA and other intelligence assets that the sarin was supplied
through Turkey – that it could only have gotten there with Turkish
support. The Turks also provided the training in producing the sarin and
handling it.’ Much of the support for that assessment came from the
Turks themselves, via intercepted conversations in the immediate
aftermath of the attack. ‘Principal evidence came from the Turkish
post-attack joy and back-slapping in numerous intercepts. Operations are
always so super-secret in the planning but that all flies out the
window when it comes to crowing afterwards. There is no greater
vulnerability than in the perpetrators claiming credit for success.’
Erdoğan’s problems in Syria would soon be over: ‘Off goes the gas and
Obama will say red line and America is going to attack Syria, or at
least that was the idea. But it did not work out that way.’
The
post-attack intelligence on Turkey did not make its way to the White
House. ‘Nobody wants to talk about all this,’ the former intelligence
official told me. ‘There is great reluctance to contradict the
president, although no all-source intelligence community analysis
supported his leap to convict. There has not been one single piece of
additional evidence of Syrian involvement in the sarin attack produced
by the White House since the bombing raid was called off. My government
can’t say anything because we have acted so irresponsibly. And since we
blamed Assad, we can’t go back and blame Erdoğan.’
Turkey’s
willingness to manipulate events in Syria to its own purposes seemed to
be demonstrated late last month, a few days before a round of local
elections, when a recording, allegedly of Erdoğan and his associates,
was posted to YouTube. It included discussion of a false-flag operation
that would justify an incursion by the Turkish military in Syria. The
operation centred on the tomb of Suleyman Shah, the grandfather of the
revered Osman I, founder of the Ottoman Empire, which is near Aleppo and
was ceded to Turkey in 1921, when Syria was under French rule. One of
the Islamist rebel factions was threatening to destroy the tomb as a
site of idolatry, and the Erdoğan administration was publicly
threatening retaliation if harm came to it. According to a Reuters
report of the leaked conversation, a voice alleged to be Fidan’s spoke
of creating a provocation: ‘Now look, my commander [Erdoğan], if there
is to be justification, the justification is I send four men to the
other side. I get them to fire eight missiles into empty land [in the
vicinity of the tomb]. That’s not a problem. Justification can be
created.’ The Turkish government acknowledged that there had been a
national security meeting about threats emanating from Syria, but said
the recording had been manipulated. The government subsequently blocked
public access to YouTube.
Barring a major change in policy by
Obama, Turkey’s meddling in the Syrian civil war is likely to go on. ‘I
asked my colleagues if there was any way to stop Erdoğan’s continued
support for the rebels, especially now that it’s going so wrong,’ the
former intelligence official told me. ‘The answer was: “We’re screwed.”
We could go public if it was somebody other than Erdoğan, but Turkey is a
special case. They’re a Nato ally. The Turks don’t trust the West. They
can’t live with us if we take any active role against Turkish
interests. If we went public with what we know about Erdoğan’s role with
the gas, it’d be disastrous. The Turks would say: “We hate you for
telling us what we can and can’t do.”’
"London Review of Books," April 6, 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment