Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Enigma Iran

#_Robert Baer e` stato agente US in MO per ventun'anni; presente in Libano e 
Iraq fino a quando lascio`la CIA. Pochi come lui conoscono la difficolta`di 
decifrare cio`che succedel'Iran.
G.
http://www.truthout.org/062609T
For US Intelligence, Few Clues to Iran Turmoil
Thursday 25 June 2009
by: Mary Louise Kelly  |  Visit article original @ NPR
Generations of Western spies have tried, and mostly failed, to decipher 
events in Iran.
Martin Indyk was among them. Working for Australian intelligence 30 years 
ago, Indyk, who has since served as a U.S. diplomat, regaled a recent 
gathering at the Brookings Institution with his efforts to crack Iran in 
1979.
"I was the Iran assessments officer during the revolution and produced an 
assessment which said the shah was finished," he said. "And my bosses, under 
the heavy influence of the CIA, changed the assessment to say that the shah 
was likely to face a few problems, but that, quote, 'The sun would never set 
on the peacock throne.'"
Of course, the sun did set that very year on the throne of the Persian 
emperor, and since then, Western intelligence on Iran has, if anything, 
become worse.
Little Known About Iran
The CIA was forced to close its station when the U.S. Embassy in Tehran shut 
down. For a while, the agency ran a hub out of Frankfurt, from which CIA 
officers could travel to meet contacts and try to steal secrets about Iran. 
More recently, it based a collection office in Los Angeles to take advantage 
of the Iranian expatriate community there.
None of it, however, is a substitute for having CIA staff actually on the 
ground, says former CIA official Bob Baer.
"We know virtually nothing about Iran. It's very easy to get misled when you 
collect intelligence through occasional sources, who travel out rarely, that 
are almost impossible to vet," Baer says. "Your intelligence by force is 
bad."
Another former CIA official says the agency does have sources inside the 
country: Iranians who have agreed to pass on to U.S. intelligence what they 
see and hear.
Internet Provides Few Clues
Recent years have seen the advent of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and 
allowed anyone with an Internet connection to watch the crackdown this week 
by Iranian security forces against pro-reform demonstrators. But such tools 
are next to useless for providing insights into the current political 
crisis.
What the CIA would like to know, for example, is more about the power 
struggle under way among Iran's leading mullahs, or for that matter, says 
Baer, Iran's nuclear program.
"God knows we've tried every way in the world. But the fact is Iran is still 
a police state," he says. "And it's very difficult to collect on a police 
state, especially a police state that puts out so much propaganda and 
disinformation."
Disinformation
Baer says disinformation is a major obstacle to working with another 
possible source of information: Iranian expatriates and dissidents.
Paul Pillar, the CIA's former top analyst for the Middle East, agrees. He 
says the CIA always tries to milk exiles for intelligence.
"You do so with a couple of very big grains of salt that you have to keep in 
mind. One is how dated these people's information often is. And the other 
big thing is what kind of ax they have to grind," he says. "We've just had a 
big set of experiences with Iraqi exiles, and we know how that went."
�

 Penso
_Esagerata!