48 Years Ago Today, Mehdi Ben Barka Disappeared . . .

Mehdi Ben Barka

On October 29, 1965, the exiled Moroccan leftist opposition figure Mehdi Ben Barka headed to the famous Brasserie Lipp on Paris' Boulevard St. Germain for a supposed meeting he expected to be about making a film for an upcoming conference he was organizing in Havana on Third World liberation movements. Unidentified men grabbed him, shoved him into a car, and drove away. He has not been seen since.

In theory, the French consider the case still open (though no one expects a now 93-year-old Ben Barka to turn up suddenly); it's clear that Moroccan agents were involved, but there are a lingering questions about the role of French intelligence, since he was snatched in a very public place in Paris. (And, of course, some versions bring both the CIA and Mossad into the plot. Though the Middle East loves a good conspiracy theory, it's also true that the French, American and Israeli services all had close links with the Moroccan in those days.)

In 2012 I wrote a bit about the case, after a French judge tried to have the British arrest the head of the Moroccan Olympic committee at the London Olympics.

Plaque at Brasserie Lipp

Two French officers were jailed in 1967, but the French court blamed the plot on then-Moroccan Interior Minister Mohammed Oufkir, who was killed in 1972 during an attempt to overthrow the King; various alleged accounts of what happened agree Ben Barka was either killed or died under interrogation, but the accounts don't match (the body was dissolved in acid, or encased in concrete, depending on the version). Wikipedia offers a summary of various accounts and theories.

In two years, it will have been half a century. But this is not the sort of operation likely to be declassified even at this remove.

Did Israeli Agents Support Jundallah by Claiming to be US Agents?

Mark Perry has a sensational (if true) story at Foreign Policy called "False Flag," asserting that according to US intelligence sources, Israeli agents met with Jundallah, the Sunni opposition movement inside Iran that has been accused of bombings and assassinations against Iranian targets, and that the Israelis posed as American agents in a false flag operation. Iran regularly accuses the US of supporting Jundallah; the story, if true, may have leaked because of unhappiness in the US intelligence community over the Israeli operation.

I don't know Perry's source, and stories like this always need to be approached cautiously, but I thought it worth noting.

Did Wikileaks Take Down Al Jazeera's Wadah Khanfar?

Al Jazeera Director General Wadah Khanfar announced yesterday that he was retiring after eight years at the head of the news agency. He said he'd been discussing this with the Chairman of the Board for some time, and that he'd decided to move on to new opportunities, etc. (here's his farewell message to his staff), but given the fact that Khanfar has turned up in the latest Wikileaks cable dump, it's not surprising that a lot of people and commentators, up to and including The New York Times, think this is Wikileaks related. One has to admit the timing doesn't suggest he just wanted to spend more time with his family.

If there is a smoking gun, it appears to be this cable from Embassy Doha, released by Wikileaks.  The Embassy PAO, the Public Affairs Officer, met with Khanfar to discuss a Defense Intelligence Agency report about Al Jazeera. Despite some of the reporting there and abroad, he did not meet with the DIA directly, at least not according to this cable. (The DIA representative is usually the Defense Attache.) Nothing in what I read suggests he agreed to "soften" Al Jazeera coverage, just enforce a greater control over what appears on their website.

Admittedly, in the conspiracy-prone Middle East, any whiff of the CIA or the DIA can be fatal, but it suggests a rather naive view of how reporting works. The other day somebody posted a link on Facebook to some publication trying to paint Juan Cole (Juan Cole!) as a "CIA consultant" because a CIA officer had said they had had meetings with him and other academics to give them alternative views. Believe me, in Washington, both academics and journalists interact with the intelligence community because we share the same space. Sometimes we know who they are; sometimes we don't. (I remember an Indian Embassy official taking me out for a lovely Indian lunch in my defense journalism days and quizzing me about the real range of Pakistani ship-to-ship missiles. I assured him that all I knew was what I read in Jane's, and asked him what his job was. "I'm just a visa officer," he assured me. "This is a hobby with me." As an aside, India's intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing, has the greatest acronym of the English-speaking intel world, RAW.)

If you touch policy in DC, you'll touch the intel community. My old college roommate spent a career in the intel community. I've considered myself a personal friend of Miles Copeland, knew William Colby, and met Richard Helms a few times; I've known at least two former heads of Mossad and one former head of Israeli military intelligence and have met ‘Omar Suleiman of Egypt. I've spoken to the DIA and most of the war colleges but have never worked for our or any other government. Kermit Roosevelt once served as President of the Middle East Institute and a former US Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East serves on my Board of Advisory Editors today. The number of ex-CIA analysts ensconced in Middle East think tanks in DC is considerable, and they are not all on one side of the ideological fence. I won't even start to name them.

If this is what really forced the resignation of Khanfar, it's too damned bad.

Oh: Khanfar's replacement? Sheikh Ahmad bin Jasem Al Thani, head of Qatargas, a member of he Al Jazeera Board, and, as his name should make obvious, a member of Qatar's royal family. He certainly has no questionable political links.

Juan Cole, the Bush White House, and the CIA

The New York Times quoted a former CIA official as saying that the George W. Bush White House asked the CIA to gather information on University of Michigan Professor and Blogger Juan Cole in order to discredit him. If true, this would have echoes of the Watergate era, when the Nixon Whte House tried to use the CIA domestically against  American citizens, a clear violation of the law. Juan's own take on the story is here, and there's little I can add to that. I've read Juan's blog from its early days and have also published his academic work in the Journal, and about all I can do other than repeat what he has said is to join in deploring any use, or even suggestion of using, the CIA against American academics.

A Graphic Novel on Operation Ajax

Having learned to read from comic books, my first grade readers being far more boring and simplistic, and having been introduced to great literature by the Classics Illustrated comics of the 1950s, I have no intellectual disdain for what today are called "graphic novels," though I don't tend to read them. So I thought I'd call your attention to this item about a graphic novel series focusing on Operation Ajax, the CIA/British orchestrated coup against Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. The author is making the first episodes free on the ITunes store for IPad users. Here's the trailer:



The link and the trailer are all I know right now.

As an aside since somebody may bring it up anyway, Kermit ("Kim") Roosevelt, who helped orchestrate the coup and wrote a memoir about it, served as President of the Middle East Institute for a short while may years later.

Gary Sick: "How I Got Dragged Into an Iranian Show Trial"

Gary Sick, Professor at Columbia, an old friend, and a member of the Board of Advisory Editors of The Middle East Journal, was a pioneer of online Middle East discussion with his Gulf 2000 mailing list (which he's asked me not to mention too much as he doesn't want a lot of requests for membership; it's by invitation so please respect that: I mention it here because it's central to the subject matter), and he blogs intermittently. Here's his post on how he got dragged into an Iranian show trial. He's being accused of having worked for the CIA and knowing the defendant. As he notes, he's met several times with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but so far the President hasn't been charged. Here are the key excerpts, but read it all at the link:

Last week, an Iranian-American colleague of mine, Kian Tajbaksh, was sentenced in Tehran to 15 years in prison. The indictment included the charges that (1) he was in contact with me; (2) that he was part of the Gulf/2000 network that I manage; and (3) that I am an agent of the CIA.

Normally, I simply ignore silly accusations such as this. They are nothing new. On one hand, it has been intimated that I must be under the influence of Iranian intelligence (by prominent neoconservatives who believe that my views on Iran’s political development and especially its nuclear program are not sufficiently alarmist). I have also been accused (by such worthies as Hossein Shariatmadari, the ultra-radical editor of Iran’s Kayhan newspaper, who is also a representative of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei) of being a CIA agent. I regard these insinuations as badges of honor, since they merely confirm that I do not subscribe to the ideological extremes of either of these groups. I have always felt that my reputation could speak for itself and required no public defense.

However, this time the accusations are really not about me but about a friend and colleague. Moreover, they are not just newspaper hyperbole by people who have an ax to grind and whose desire to make a political point exceeds their respect for the truth. These assertions are a matter of law—an official indictment by the judicial authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It is often said that it is impossible to prove a negative. How do I prove that I am NOT an agent of the CIA? How do I prove that the Gulf/2000 Internet project is NOT engaged in overthrowing governments? How do I prove that Kian—a friend and a colleague—was NOT trying to lead a “velvet revolution” against the Islamic Republic of Iran?

Let me simply reverse the questions. I spent 24 years in the U.S. Navy—my only connection with the U.S. government. The Navy sponsored my education at the University of Kansas. It took me to the Persian Gulf for my first exposure to the region that has become my professional specialization. It sponsored my graduate work for a Ph.D. degree at Columbia University. And it paid my salary while I was on the National Security Council staff at the time of the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis. I never received a paycheck from any other agency of the U.S. government. Do the prosecutors in Iran have evidence to the contrary? If so, please let me know.

There are a number of commentators on Iran, such as Reuel Gerecht, Graham Fuller, and Bruce Riedel, who indeed worked for the CIA. Although their political views disagree sharply, they always identify themselves as former CIA employees. I do not identify myself that way for the very simple reason that I never worked for the CIA.

The prosecutors charge that Kian was in touch with me. Right. We were both academics in New York, and we saw each other from time to time. However, I have gone back over the past 20 years with that in mind, and I am struck by something quite different. Over that period of time, I have known every Iranian ambassador to the United Nations and many members of the staff of the Iranian U.N. mission. I have spent much more time with them than with Kian.

More important, I have been in meetings with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on four different occasions over the past three years. I have spent at least nine hours with him, much more than I ever spent with Kian. In my last meeting with Mr. Ahmadinejad, I told him that if he were simply a lowly academic, instead of the president of Iran, he would be subject to arrest upon his return to Iran for meeting with the roomful of U.S. academics and think tank representatives that he had assembled at his hotel. He scoffed at the idea. Now one of my colleagues, a lowly Iranian-American professor who was about to take up a position at my university, is being condemned to 15 years in prison because, among other things, he had contact with me.

Iranian security officials are notably lacking in any sense of irony or humor. But I do wonder whether President Ahmadinejad is being considered for indictment because of his extensive contacts with me over the past four years.

This compels me to tell a story. (Doesn't everything? I'm Irish.) Back in 2007 we held a joint conference with the Library of Congress on the 60th Anniversary of The Middle East Journal.

One of the first questions asked was introduced by a statement that many people think we're funded by the CIA. We aren't. I made my usual comment that I wasn't paid nearly enough to be working for the CIA. But then we handed out the latest issue of the Journal, our 60th Anniversary issue (Winter 2007), in which the lead article was by Tom Lippman on a 1947 CIA National Estimate on Palestine. Then veteran MEJ Editor Richard Parker (1980-86, one issue in 1995), handed out a xerox of an early article in the Journal by Kermit Roosevelt (who was, of course, with the Agency). So much for denial. The fact is if you work in DC you cross paths with lots of people. I know at least as many Arab diplomats as I do folks in the intelligence agencies, but no one accuses me of being an Arab ... oh, wait, yes sometimes they do. Having worked as both an academic and a journalist, I would have a bit of a problem with a security clearance. Have I ever associated with anyone on the terrorism list? Well, if interviews count, yeah.

Obviously we all know this guilt-by-association stuff. Gary was career Navy and worked for the National Security Council but he's never been CIA. (How do I know? Well, I guess I don't. How do I know you're not an agent?) (Actually, I hope some of you are. They should be reading me.)

Enough side comments. Gary's concerns are real. An Iranian-American scholar is facing 15 years in prison for — well, something to do with the election protests and knowing Gary Sick, it sounds like. Middle Eastern scholars should be free to meet and talk with Western scholars, even those who've worked for the government.

Do read Gary's post.