Misguided

CQ Politics: Covert U.S. action to topple Iran’s government through operations inside the country’s borders has become a major hindrance in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner asserts in a new study.

...Support for a handful of proxy groups began in mid-2005, including the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, which the State Department lists as a terrorist organization. But clandestine operations escalated only within the last year or two, and a new presidential finding was signed and partially briefed to appropriate members of Congress, which expanded funding for a wider scope of operations within Iran, according to Gardiner.

“Whether explicitly approved in this latest presidential finding or not, it is now fairly clear that assassinations are being carried out,” Gardiner writes, citing the work of Andrew Cockburn in Counterpunch in May as well as the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, ABC News and numerous other U.S. and Iranian news agencies in support of his claims. “Terms like ‘targeted officials’ and ‘high-value targets’ have clear meaning in the sterile language of covert operations,” but the national security community is uneasy about whether the terms reflect government complicity in the proxy groups’ killing of Iranian leaders in government, the military or the nuclear program.

There are four main groups, which are managed by the CIA and U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, Gardiner writes. They include the MEK, which has been performing intelligence work for the United States for at least a few years; the Free Life Party of Kurdistan, or PJAK, which performs combat operations in Iran and is supplied with Russian weapons; the Jundallah, which operates out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and conducts killings, leaving behind videotapes in some cases; and a new group, the Ahwazi Arabs of southwest Iran.