{"id":41838,"date":"2016-08-29T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2016-08-29T11:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=41838"},"modified":"2016-08-29T12:27:57","modified_gmt":"2016-08-29T11:27:57","slug":"the-red-line-and-the-rat-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/08\/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line\/","title":{"rendered":"The Red Line and the Rat Line"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Seymour<\/a>Expos\u00e9: <\/i>Obama, Erdo\u011fan and the Syrian Rebels
\n<\/i><\/p>\n

In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. In August 2013<\/em>, 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 \u2018red line\u2019 he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons. [*]<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn\u2019t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army\u2019s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn\u2019t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria\u2019s infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack.<\/p>\n

For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria\u2019s neighbours, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdo\u011fan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. \u2018We knew there were some in the Turkish government,\u2019 a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, \u2018who believed they could get Assad\u2019s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria \u2013 and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.\u2019<\/p>\n

The joint chiefs also knew that the Obama administration\u2019s 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 \u2018talking points\u2019 briefing for the DIA\u2019s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was \u2018the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida\u2019s pre-9\/11 effort\u2019. (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: \u2018Previous IC [intelligence community] focus had been almost entirely on Syrian CW [chemical weapons] stockpiles; now we see ANF attempting to make its own CW \u2026 Al-Nusrah Front\u2019s relative freedom of operation within Syria leads us to assess the group\u2019s CW aspirations will be difficult to disrupt in the future.\u2019 The paper drew on classified intelligence from numerous agencies: \u2018Turkey and Saudi-based chemical facilitators,\u2019 it said, \u2018were attempting to obtain sarin precursors in bulk, tens of kilograms, likely for the anticipated large scale production effort in Syria.\u2019 (Asked about the DIA paper, a spokesperson for the director of national intelligence said: \u2018No such paper was ever requested or produced by intelligence community analysts.\u2019)<\/p>\n

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 Erdo\u011fan administration has been covering up the extent of its involvement with the rebels. In a news conference last summer, Aydin Sezgin, Turkey\u2019s ambassador to Moscow, dismissed the arrests and claimed to reporters that the recovered \u2018sarin\u2019 was merely \u2018anti-freeze\u2019.<\/p>\n

The DIA paper took the arrests as evidence that al-Nusra was expanding its access to chemical weapons. It said Qassab had \u2018self-identified\u2019 as a member of al-Nusra, and that he was directly connected to Abd-al-Ghani, the \u2018ANF emir for military manufacturing\u2019. Qassab and his associate Khalid Ousta worked with Halit Unalkaya, an employee of a Turkish firm called Zirve Export, who provided \u2018price quotes for bulk quantities of sarin precursors\u2019. Abd-al-Ghani\u2019s plan was for two associates to \u2018perfect a process for making sarin, then go to Syria to train others to begin large scale production at an unidentified lab in Syria\u2019. The DIA paper said that one of his operatives had purchased a precursor on the \u2018Baghdad chemical market\u2019, which \u2018has supported at least seven CW efforts since 2004\u2019.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s activities said: \u2018Investigators 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.\u2019<\/p>\n

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. \u2018Something was in there that triggered a shit fit by McDonough,\u2019 the former Defense Department official said. \u2018One day it was a huge deal, and then, after the March and April sarin attacks\u2019 \u2013 he snapped his fingers \u2013 \u2018it\u2019s no longer there.\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

The former intelligence official said that many in the US national security establishment had long been troubled by the president\u2019s red line: \u2018The joint chiefs asked the White House, \u201cWhat does red line mean? How does that translate into military orders? Troops on the ground? Massive strike? Limited strike?\u201d They tasked military intelligence to study how we could carry out the threat. They learned nothing more about the president\u2019s reasoning.\u2019<\/p>\n

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, \u2018the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff as being insufficiently \u201cpainful\u201d to the Assad regime.\u2019 The original targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into \u2018a monster strike\u2019: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles were deployed. \u2018Every day the target list was getting longer,\u2019 the former intelligence official told me. \u2018The Pentagon planners said we can\u2019t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria\u2019s 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\u2019ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.\u2019 The new target list was meant to \u2018completely eradicate any military capabilities Assad had\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n

Britain and France were both to play a part. On 29 August, the day Parliament voted against Cameron\u2019s bid to join the intervention, the Guardian<\/i> 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 \u2013 a crucial player in the 2011 strikes on Libya \u2013 was deeply committed, according to an account in Le Nouvel Observateur<\/i>; Fran\u00e7ois Hollande had ordered several Rafale fighter-bombers to join the American assault. Their targets were reported to be in western Syria.<\/p>\n

By the last days of August the president had given the Joint Chiefs a fixed deadline for the launch. \u2018H hour was to begin no later than Monday morning [2 September], a massive assault to neutralise Assad,\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

At this stage, Obama\u2019s premise \u2013 that only the Syrian army was capable of deploying sarin \u2013 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: \u2018Many of the samples analysed in the UK tested positive for the nerve agent sarin.\u2019 MI6 said that it doesn\u2019t comment on intelligence matters.)<\/p>\n

The former intelligence official said the Russian who delivered the sample to the UK was \u2018a good source \u2013 someone with access, knowledge and a record of being trustworthy\u2019. After the first reported uses of chemical weapons in Syria last year, American and allied intelligence agencies \u2018made an effort to find the answer as to what if anything, was used \u2013 and its source\u2019, the former intelligence official said. \u2018We use data exchanged as part of the Chemical Weapons Convention. The DIA\u2019s baseline consisted of knowing the composition of each batch of Soviet-manufactured chemical weapons. But we didn\u2019t 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.\u2019<\/p>\n

The process hadn\u2019t worked as smoothly in the spring, the former intelligence official said, because the studies done by Western intelligence \u2018were inconclusive as to the type of gas it was. The word \u201csarin\u201d didn\u2019t 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\u2019s red line.\u2019 By 21 August, the former intelligence official went on, \u2018the Syrian opposition clearly had learned from this and announced that \u201csarin\u201d 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, \u201cIt had to be Assad.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n

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: \u2018We\u2019re being set up here.\u2019 (This account made sense of a terse message a senior official in the CIA sent in late August: \u2018It was not the result of the current regime. UK & US know this.\u2019) By then the attack was a few days away and American, British and French planes, ships and submarines were at the ready.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s argument that it had the facts to back up its belief in Assad\u2019s guilt. They pressed the DIA and other agencies for more substantial evidence. \u2018There was no way they thought Syria would use nerve gas at that stage, because Assad was winning the war,\u2019 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 \u2018there\u2019s a risk that this conflict has become stalemated.\u2019<\/p>\n

Dempsey\u2019s initial view after 21 August was that a US strike on Syria \u2013 under the assumption that the Assad government was responsible for the sarin attack \u2013 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 \u2013 the story the press corps told \u2013 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\u2019d 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 \u2018that the Middle East would go up in smoke\u2019 if it was carried out.<\/p>\n

The president\u2019s 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\u2019s gambit in the autumn of 2002 before the invasion of Iraq: \u2018When 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 \u2013 wallop Syria with a massive attack and validate the president\u2019s red line commitment, while also being able to share the blame with Congress if it came out that the Syrian military wasn\u2019t behind the attack.\u2019 The turnabout came as a surprise even to the Democratic leadership in Congress. In September the Wall Street Journal<\/i> reported that three days before his Rose Garden speech Obama had telephoned Nancy Pelosi, leader of the House Democrats, \u2018to talk through the options\u2019. She later told colleagues, according to the Journal<\/i>, that she hadn\u2019t asked the president to put the bombing to a congressional vote.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s move for congressional approval quickly became a dead end. \u2018Congress was not going to let this go by,\u2019 the former intelligence official said. \u2018Congress made it known that, unlike the authorisation for the Iraq war, there would be substantive hearings.\u2019 At this point, there was a sense of desperation in the White House, the former intelligence official said. \u2018And 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.\u2019 At a press conference in London on 9 September, Kerry was still talking about intervention: \u2018The risk of not acting is greater than the risk of acting.\u2019 But when a reporter asked if there was anything Assad could do to stop the bombing, Kerry said: \u2018Sure. He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week \u2026 But he isn\u2019t about to do it, and it can\u2019t be done, obviously.\u2019 As the New York Times<\/i> 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\u2019t change its public assessment of the justification for going to war. \u2018There is zero tolerance at that level for the existence of error,\u2019 the former intelligence official said of the senior officials in the White House. \u2018They could not afford to say: \u201cWe were wrong.\u201d\u2019 (The DNI spokesperson said: \u2018The Assad regime, and only the Assad regime, could have been responsible for the chemical weapons attack that took place on 21 August.\u2019)<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

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 \u2018rat line\u2019, 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: \u2018The idea that the United States was providing weapons from Libya to anyone is false.\u2019)<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 Erdo\u011fan 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\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.)<\/p>\n

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 \u2018finding\u2019, 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

The annex didn\u2019t tell the whole story of what happened in Benghazi before the attack, nor did it explain why the American consulate was attacked. \u2018The consulate\u2019s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms,\u2019 the former intelligence official, who has read the annex, said. \u2018It had no real political role.\u2019<\/p>\n

Washington abruptly ended the CIA\u2019s role in the transfer of arms from Libya after the attack on the consulate, but the rat line kept going. \u2018The United States was no longer in control of what the Turks were relaying to the jihadists,\u2019 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<\/i> reported that the previous day rebels near Aleppo had used what was almost certainly a manpad to shoot down a Syrian transport helicopter. \u2018The Obama administration,\u2019 Warrick wrote, \u2018has 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.\u2019 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\u2019 possession of manpads was likely the unintended consequence of a covert US programme that was no longer under US control.<\/p>\n

By the end of 2012, it was believed throughout the American intelligence community that the rebels were losing the war. \u2018Erdo\u011fan was pissed,\u2019 the former intelligence official said, \u2018and felt he was left hanging on the vine. It was his money and the cut-off was seen as a betrayal.\u2019 In spring 2013 US intelligence learned that the Turkish government \u2013 through elements of the MIT, its national intelligence agency, and the Gendarmerie, a militarised law-enforcement organisation \u2013 was working directly with al-Nusra and its allies to develop a chemical warfare capability. \u2018The MIT was running the political liaison with the rebels, and the Gendarmerie handled military logistics, on-the-scene advice and training \u2013 including training in chemical warfare,\u2019 the former intelligence official said. \u2018Stepping up Turkey\u2019s role in spring 2013 was seen as the key to its problems there. Erdo\u011fan 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 \u2013 the distances involved and the difficulty of moving weapons and supplies. Erdo\u011fan\u2019s hope was to instigate an event that would force the US to cross the red line. But Obama didn\u2019t respond in March and April.\u2019<\/p>\n

There was no public sign of discord when Erdo\u011fan and Obama met on 16 May 2013 at the White House. At a later press conference Obama said that they had agreed that Assad \u2018needs to go\u2019. Asked whether he thought Syria had crossed the red line, Obama acknowledged that there was evidence such weapons had been used, but added, \u2018it is important for us to make sure that we\u2019re able to get more specific information about what exactly is happening there.\u2019 The red line was still intact.<\/p>\n

An American foreign policy expert who speaks regularly with officials in Washington and Ankara told me about a working dinner Obama held for Erdo\u011fan during his May visit. The meal was dominated by the Turks\u2019 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. Erdo\u011fan was joined by Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey\u2019s foreign minister, and Hakan Fidan, the head of the MIT. Fidan is known to be fiercely loyal to Erdo\u011fan, and has been seen as a consistent backer of the radical rebel opposition in Syria.<\/p>\n

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, Erdo\u011fan 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 Erdo\u011fan tried to draw Fidan into the conversation, and Fidan began speaking, Obama cut him off and said: \u2018We know.\u2019 Erdo\u011fan tried to bring Fidan in a second time, and Obama again cut him off and said: \u2018We know.\u2019 At that point, an exasperated Erdo\u011fan said, \u2018But your red line has been crossed!\u2019 and, the expert told me, \u2018Donilon said Erdo\u011fan \u201cfucking waved his finger at the president inside the White House\u201d.\u2019 Obama then pointed at Fidan and said: \u2018We know what you\u2019re doing with the radicals in Syria.\u2019 (Donilon, who joined the Council on Foreign Relations last July, didn\u2019t respond to questions about this story. The Turkish Foreign Ministry didn\u2019t 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, Erdo\u011fan, Fidan and Davutoglu sitting at a table. \u2018Beyond that,\u2019 she said, \u2018I\u2019m not going to read out the details of their discussions.\u2019)<\/p>\n

But Erdo\u011fan 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\u2019s ability to conduct international trade. The US followed with the executive order in July, but left what came to be known as a \u2018golden loophole\u2019: 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.<\/p>\n

The programme quickly became a cash cow for corrupt politicians and traders in Turkey, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. \u2018The middlemen did what they always do,\u2019 the former intelligence official said. \u2018Take 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.\u2019 The illicit skimming flared into a public \u2018gas for gold\u2019 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 Erdo\u011fan 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.<\/p>\n

Late last year Jonathan Schanzer and Mark Dubowitz reported in Foreign Policy<\/i> that the Obama administration closed the golden loophole in January 2013, but \u2018lobbied to make sure the legislation \u2026 did not take effect for six months\u2019. 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 \u2018accrue billions of dollars more in gold, further undermining the sanctions regime\u2019.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The American decision to end CIA support of the weapons shipments into Syria left Erdo\u011fan exposed politically and militarily. \u2018One of the issues at that May summit was the fact that Turkey is the only avenue to supply the rebels in Syria,\u2019 the former intelligence official said. \u2018It can\u2019t come through Jordan because the terrain in the south is wide open and the Syrians are all over it. And it can\u2019t come through the valleys and hills of Lebanon \u2013 you can\u2019t be sure who you\u2019d meet on the other side.\u2019 Without US military support for the rebels, the former intelligence official said, \u2018Erdo\u011fan\u2019s dream of having a client state in Syria is evaporating and he thinks we\u2019re the reason why. When Syria wins the war, he knows the rebels are just as likely to turn on him \u2013 where else can they go? So now he will have thousands of radicals in his backyard.\u2019<\/p>\n

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 \u2018the acute anxiety\u2019 of the Erdo\u011fan administration about the rebels\u2019 dwindling prospects. The analysis warned that the Turkish leadership had expressed \u2018the need to do something that would precipitate a US military response\u2019. 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 \u2018sensed 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.\u2019<\/p>\n

As intercepts and other data related to the 21 August attacks were gathered, the intelligence community saw evidence to support its suspicions. \u2018We now know it was a covert action planned by Erdo\u011fan\u2019s people to push Obama over the red line,\u2019 the former intelligence official said. \u2018They had to escalate to a gas attack in or near Damascus when the UN inspectors\u2019 \u2013 who arrived in Damascus on 18 August to investigate the earlier use of gas \u2013 \u2018were 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 \u2013 that it could only have gotten there with Turkish support. The Turks also provided the training in producing the sarin and handling it.\u2019 Much of the support for that assessment came from the Turks themselves, via intercepted conversations in the immediate aftermath of the attack. \u2018Principal 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.\u2019 Erdo\u011fan\u2019s problems in Syria would soon be over: \u2018Off 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.\u2019<\/p>\n

The post-attack intelligence on Turkey did not make its way to the White House. \u2018Nobody wants to talk about all this,\u2019 the former intelligence official told me. \u2018There 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\u2019t say anything because we have acted so irresponsibly. And since we blamed Assad, we can\u2019t go back and blame Erdo\u011fan.\u2019<\/p>\n

Turkey\u2019s 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 Erdo\u011fan 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 Erdo\u011fan 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\u2019s spoke of creating a provocation: \u2018Now look, my commander [Erdo\u011fan], 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\u2019s not a problem. Justification can be created.\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Barring a major change in policy by Obama, Turkey\u2019s meddling in the Syrian civil war is likely to go on. \u2018I asked my colleagues if there was any way to stop Erdo\u011fan\u2019s continued support for the rebels, especially now that it\u2019s going so wrong,\u2019 the former intelligence official told me. \u2018The answer was: \u201cWe\u2019re screwed.\u201d We could go public if it was somebody other than Erdo\u011fan, but Turkey is a special case. They\u2019re a Nato ally. The Turks don\u2019t trust the West. They can\u2019t live with us if we take any active role against Turkish interests. If we went public with what we know about Erdo\u011fan\u2019s role with the gas, it\u2019d be disastrous. The Turks would say: \u201cWe hate you for telling us what we can and can\u2019t do.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n

NOTE:<\/strong><\/p>\n

[*] Seymour M. Hersh first wrote about the sarin attack in the LRB<\/em> on 8 December 2013<\/a>.<\/p>\n

4 April 2014\u00a0 <\/i><\/p>\n

_________________________________<\/p>\n

Seymour M. Hersh has been a contributor to <\/i>The New Yorker since 1993. He is a regular at <\/i>London Review of Books and is writing an alternative history of the war on terror. His journalism and publishing awards include a Pulitzer Prize, five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and more than a dozen other prizes for investigative reporting. Hersh won a National Magazine Award for Public Interest for his 2003 articles \u201cLunch with the Chairman,\u201d \u201cSelective Intelligence,\u201d and \u201cThe Stovepipe.\u201d In 2004 he exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in a series of pieces; in 2005, he again received a National Magazine Award for Public Interest, an Overseas Press Club award, the National Press Foundation\u2019s Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism award, and his fifth George Polk Award, making him that award\u2019s most honored laureate. He lives in Washington DC.<\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 lrb.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Expos\u00e9: Obama, Erdo\u011fan and the Syrian Rebels<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-syria-in-context"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41838\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}