Chapter 20 — “Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us” — Iran, Iraq and the Kurds
A short history of the Kurds
When Iraq and Iran are discussed in relation to zionist intrigue, the Kurds are front and center.
Important: And when I discuss the Kurds, I’m not referring to the Kurds as a people, but their tribal and military leaders.
The vast area known historically as Kurdistan was never defined. Before the 20th century, Kurds lived mostly at the periphery of empires, in semi-autonomous tribal confederations in remote mountain valleys.
The name ‘Kurd’ can be traced to the period following the tribes’ conversion to Islam in the seventh century AD. Even after that, they continued to exist largely in nomadic groups rather than occupying a defined homeland.
Kurdish is a language of the north-western Iranian group.
(The history of the Kurds in Iraq: “the largest people never to have achieved statehood”, BBC History Magazine, June 24, 2021 — note that the BBC tells a romanticized version of Kurdish history, failing to mention the Armenian genocide many of their tribes participated in, but the chronology of events is accurate enough)
Old maps that people use to prove that Kurdistan existed centuries ago show a Kurdistan (spelled differently) east of the Iraqi River Tigris to the northeast of Iraq. Without going in to too much detail, the Kurds are said to be tribes which originally inhabited mountainous regions in northwestern Iran (bordering northeast Iraq). For centuries they were used by the Ottoman Empire to control and sometimes ethnically cleanse Christian/non-Islamic populations.
They were constantly used as a destabilizing influence on the rule of various empires and regimes in the region for centuries. Zionists knew this.
One bloody alliance with the Ottoman Empire would eventually lead to many Kurdish tribes taking part in the Armenian genocide of 1915, spurred on by the promise of an “independent state”, coupled with the land they had stolen from Armenians.
With the defeat of the Ottomans in the First World War, that promise was broken. When the Kurds rebelled, they themselves were ethnically cleansed by the Turks.
[Note: Slightly off-topic, but very relevant, is the fact that zionist intrigue had extended the First World War by another year when they had sabotaged peace talks with the Ottomans in 1917. This was just a year after the same zionist channels were responsible for America’s entry in to the war. Because Palestine was under Ottoman control.]
As early as the 1930s, zionists were already testing the Kurdish waters. Just as they were doing with Lebanese fascists during the same period. And Hitler. And Mussolini. But the outreach to Kurds was for different reasons.
The first contacts between zionism and the Kurds were established by Reuven Shiloah (later, first director of the Mossad) in the early 1930s when he worked as a reporter for the Palestine Bulletin newspaper.
(Tom Segev, 1949, Hayisraelim Harishonim (Jerusalem: Domino, 1984), p. 34.)
Shortly after World War Two, a Soviet-sponsored Kurdish republic briefly came into existence in Mahabad, Iran. Its military commander was Mulla Mustafa Barzani, and the Barzani clan has dominated the Kurdish nationalist movement ever since.
(A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite, Said Aburish, 1997)
The Mahabad republic was defeated by Iran, and Barzani went into exile in the Soviet Union, where he remained until a revolution overthrew the British-installed Iraqi monarchy in July 1958. At that point, Barzani returned from exile to lead the Kurdistan Democratic Party.
The Barzanis would be a crucial zionist connection for the coming decades and up to the present day. The Kurds saw zionism in the same light that they had seen the Ottoman Empire. A means to an end.
Iran
The Iranian Qajar dynasty and British colonialism had plundered the country’s coffers by the turn of the twentieth century.
The Qajars…sold effective power over Iran and its resources to the British. What eventually gave (future elected Prime Minister of Iran) Mohammad Mossadegh his primary goal in life, however, was the 1901 concession to London-based financier William Knox D’Arcy, granting him the “special and exclusive privilege to obtain, exploit, develop…and sell natural gas [and] petroleum…for a term of sixty years.”
The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company which grew out of the D’Arcy concession played a major role in Iranian politics. The AIOC had no Iranian in a leadership position, would not allow the Iranian government to examine its financial records, and continually changed the manner of figuring their profit, to minimize the payment due Tehran.
Mossadegh became one of the Third World’s greatest nationalist leaders. He founded and led the secular National Front in the majlis, where, as chairman of the oil committee, he called for the nationalization of the AIOC. On March 15, 1951, 97 parliamentary deputies arrived for the nationalization vote; it passed unanimously. In April 1951, in a surprising twist of events, Mossadegh was elected prime minister, dashing British hopes of bringing Iran and its oil supply back under their control.
Churchill played the “communist threat” card in that he warned US President Eisenhower that Persian oil could come under the control of Moscow. A joint British-American “regime change” plot named “Operation Ajax” was carried out.
(All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, Stephen Kinzer, 1986)
The nucleus of democracy and secularity in Iran was stomped out at birth.
Richard Helms oversaw the Iran coup of 1953. He and the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, had been best friends and schoolmates together as children at boarding school in Switzerland. It was Helms who was later the CIA coordinator of the very coup that installed the Shah on the throne in 1953. It was a lifelong relationship which culminated with Helms later becoming U.S. Ambassador to Iran.
(Robert Morrow. The Senator Must Die: The Murder of Robert F. Kennedy, pp783–784)
Deputy CIA Director Richard Helms, who later went on to become CIA director under zionist coup president Lyndon Johnson, was Israeli asset and counterintelligence chief James Angleton’s mentor. Helms was Angleton’s “chief patron.”
(Mangold. Cold Warrier — James Jesus Angleton: The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 307.)
The people on the fringes and at the center of Gladio and the future JFK assassination were involved. Zionists were also involved at higher and lower levels.
(See Chapter 13)
This regime change cabal stretched across the globe:
Financial backing for Permindex came from J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation, a firm “that had been closely associated with Allen Dulles” via the latter’s law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell. Dulles eventually became the bank’s General Counsel. Its “founder, Baron Kurt von Schroeder, was associated with the Third Reich, especially Heinrich Himmler.” Apparently, the Swiss were none too happy to learn of all this; as a result, Permindex was forced to leave Switzerland and relocate to Rome.
Sullivan and Cromwell also represented the CIA’s and zionist Samuel Zemurray’s United Fruit. Their offices were also used to sabotage Italy’s elections in 1948 through James Angleton.
“The J. Henry Schröder & Co. Bank and J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation (Schrobanco, the firm of which Allen Dulles had been an officer) had a financial stake in all three of Allen Dulles’ major CIA covert operations.Schröder had financed the creation of Anglo-Persian (later Anglo-Iranian) oil: thus Frank Cyril Tiarks was a partner both in J. Henry Schröder & Co., and also in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (1917–1948). (He was also a member of the Ribbentrop-inspired Anglo-German Fellowship and of the British Union of Fascists.)
Schrobanco had a stake in the International Railways of Central America, a firm developed in conjunction with what became United Fruit in order to ship out United Fruit’s bananas in Guatemala. Both Schröders and Schrobanco were heavily invested in Cuban sugar; and M.E. Rionda, president of Cuba Cane Corporation, was a member of Schrobanco’s board…”
(James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed; The Dulles Brothers, Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss, and the Fate of the Private Pre-War International Banking System, Peter Dale Scott)
Remember that just a year after Mossadegh was overthrown, this same group set their sights on Arbenz of Guatemala. A coup directly called for by zionist oligarch Samuel Zemurray.
(See Chapter 18)
Iraqi Jews
Writing at the end of 1934, Sir Francis Humphreys, Britain’s Ambassador in Baghdad, noted that, while before WW I Iraqi Jews had enjoyed a more favorable position than any other minority in the country, since then Zionism has sown dissension between Jews and Arabs, and a bitterness has grown up between the two peoples which did not previously exist.
(Marion Woolfson (Jewish Middle East Affairs reporter) “Prophets in Babylon: Jews in the Arab World,” p. 129)
In September 1949, Israel sent the spy Mordechai Ben-Porat..to Iraq.
Six months after his arrival, starting in March, 1950 through to June 5, a series of bomb attacks occurred on Jewish institutions and places where Jews gathered socially. Leaflets were simultaneously distributed calling for Jews to leave Iraq. The number of Jews fleeing Iraq surged during this period.
Another attack in January 1951 lead to the deaths of three Jews, one of which was a child.
It was carried out by zionists.
There were also bomb attacks on US buildings.
These actions would result in the flight of 95% of Iraqi Jews.
Tests showed that the type of explosive used in one of the attacks matched traces of explosives found in the suitcase of an Iraqi Jew by the name of Yosef Basri. Basri, a lawyer, together with Shalom Salih, a shoemaker, would be put on trial for the attacks in December 1951 and executed the following month. Both men were members of Hashura, the military arm of the Zionist underground. Salih ultimately confessed that he, Basri and a third man, Yosef Habaza, carried out the attacks.
The pro-British, pro-Zionist puppet Nuri el-Said, Prime Minister of Iraq under the British Mandate, saw to it that all of the Iraqi Jew possessions were frozen, including their cash assets. (There were ways of getting Iraqi dinars out, but when the immigrants went to exchange them in Israel they found that the Israeli government kept 50 percent of the value).
Even those Iraqi Jews who had not registered to emigrate, but who happened to be abroad, faced loss of their nationality if they didn’t return within a specified time. An ancient, cultured, prosperous community had been uprooted and its people transplanted to a land dominated by East European Jews, whose culture was not only foreign but entirely hateful to them.
By the time of the executions in January 1952, all but 6,000 of an estimated 125,000 Iraqi Jews had fled to Israel.
In 1965, the Israeli magazine Haolam Hazeh, published by Uri Avnery, then a Knesset member, accused Ben-Porat of the Baghdad bombings. Ben-Porat, who would become a Knesset member himself, denied the charge, but never sued the magazine for libel. And Iraqi Jews in Israel still call him Morad Abu al-Knabel, Mordechai of the Bombs.
(THE JEWS OF IRAQ, Naeim Giladi)
Ex CIA officer Wilbur Crane Eveland confirmed that bombings of US targets and synagogues and leaflet campaign against Jews in Iraq was the work of zionists based on Iraqi police reports to the US embassy.
In attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the U.S. Information Service library and in synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel. . . . Although the Iraqi police later provided our embassy with evidence to show that the synagogue and library bombings, as well as the anti-Jewish and anti- American leaflet campaigns, had been the work of an underground Zionist organization, most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had “rescued” really just in order to increase Israel’s Jewish population.”
(Ropes of Sand, Wilbur Crane Eveland, former senior CIA officer)
Remember that just three years later, zionists would also bomb US and British targets in Egypt in order to blame Egyptian leader Nasser (See Chapter 7).
After decades of British brinkmanship with the Iraqi puppet leadership, coups and a fake “independence” where the British controlled the Iraqi military, oil, and were allowed to station troops there, Abd al-Karim Qasim took power in a popularly-backed coup in 1958….decriminalizing the Iraqi Communist Party. He also set up a power sharing agreement between Shia, Sunni and Kurd.
He was Iraq’s most popular leader and became another prime target for elimination by the “regime changers”.
In 1959, there was a failed assassination attempt on Qasim. The failed assassin was none other than a young Saddam Hussein… Saddam returned from exile in Egypt in 1963 and took up a key post in the new regime. He was in charge of Iraq’s secret service.
(Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge, Said Aburish)
Assurances by the new military regime that Kurdish rights would be enshrined in a new constitution at first seemed to herald a new beginning for the Kurds. However, negotiations between Barzani and ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim, Iraq’s new prime minister, broke down. Barzani’s demands for autonomy were too far-reaching, and included making oil-rich Kirkuk the ‘capital’ of an autonomous Kurdistan. Eventually, the deadlock descended into all-out war between the government and the Kurds.
Though Qasim’s regime was overthrown in 1963, subsequent military regimes followed a similar pattern: seeking negotiated settlement but eventually engaging in military action against the Kurds.
Increasingly, the Shah of Iran and Israel provided financial and logistic support to the Kurdish rebels, in order to undermine the Iraqi government.
(The history of the Kurds in Iraq: “the largest people never to have achieved statehood”, BBC History Magazine, June 24, 2021 — note that the BBC tells a romanticized version of Kurdish history, failing to mention the Armenian genocide many of their tribes participated in, but the chronology of events is accurate enough)
The Shah and Mossad
The Shah of Iran wanted relations with Israel because of the Jewish influence in the US Congress.
(The Iranian Triangle, Segev, 1981)
The same mentality was to spread among Israeli-supported dictators throughout South and Central America.
During the 1950s, Mossad cooperated with the CIA in establishing the Shah of Iran’s secret police, SAVAK, under Ya’acov Nimrodi, Israel’s military attaché, and the chief government agent for Israel’s arms industry.
Nimrodi was intimate with the Shah and his generals.
“I was in partnership with the Shah,” he told friends…And as the Mossad agent who could properly boast of having “built” SAVAK into an efficient if brutal intelligence service, he was no less intimate with the keepers of the Shah’s secrets.
[Note: With the arrival of the Khomeini regime in 1979, Nimrodi kept open his lines of communication as a private arms dealer who would become central to the Reagan arms-for-hostage talks.]
A 1979 CIA report on Mossad notes that:
“The main purpose of the Israeli relationship with Iran was the development of a pro-Israel and anti-Arab policy on the part of Iranian officials. Mossad has engaged in joint operations with SAVAK over the years since the late 1950s. Mossad aided SAVAK activities and supported the Kurds in Iraq. The Israelis also regularly transmitted to the Iranians intelligence reports on Egypt’s activities in the Arab countries, trends and developments in Iraq, and Communist activities affecting Iran.”
(The Iran Contra Connection, Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era by Johnathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, 1987, p169)
The unification of Egypt and Syria in 1958 seemed to be transforming Arab nationalism into a dynamic political and ideological force. Israel and Iran, both of which greatly feared Arab unity, saw these first tangible steps toward it as a major threat. By the early 1960s, therefore, the Israeli-Iranian relationship had evolved to include trade as well as military intelligence cooperation and coordination. David Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Abba Eban, Yitzhak Rabin, Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin, and many lesser Israeli leaders visited Iran and discussed the common interests between the two countries with the shah.
(Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 1988, Page 4, 5, 6, Khomeini’s Iran: Israel’s Ally, Bahram Alavi)
This was also the period where Israel was plotting with France and Britain to take over the Suez Canal (See Chapter 7). And when they joined forces with French fascists in Algeria during the genocide being carried out there (See Chapter 12).
The “poor little Israel surrounded by enemies” narrative that has been churned out for decades can be seen in it’s true light now, no? They were meddling. Everywhere.
Petroleum was the major Iranian export to Israel, and military equipment the principal Israeli export to Iran. By 1968, according to Edward A. Bayne (Persian Kingship in Transition), “virtually every general officer in the shah’s army had visited Israel, and hundreds of Iranian junior officers had undergone some aspect of Israeli training.” In contrast to the assertion made repeatedly in the popular media, therefore, Israel’s close contacts with the Iranian military did not begin in the early 1980s but were a continuation, with only a brief interruption, of the relationship going back to the early 1960s.
Between 1962 and the shah’s downfall in 1979, Israel’s military intelligence established close contacts with many of the Iranian officers being trained by the Israeli military. Israel also expanded its intelligence network in Iran by using members of Iran’s large Jewish community. William H. Sullivan, the last U.S. ambassador to Iran, noted that “the Israelis enjoyed an information network that was second to none, thanks to the large colony of 80,000 Jews who penetrated into almost every aspect of Iranian life.”
One of the most prominent of these Iranian Jews with special contacts with the Israelis was Albert Hakim, who has subsequently figured so prominently in the Israeli-brokered sales of U.S. arms for American hostages. Hakim’s company, Stanford Technology, dealt in sophisticated electronics and had extensive business dealings with the shah’s military.
Besides its strong links with the Iranian military and the Jewish community in Iran, Israel also enjoyed a very close relationship with the shah’s notorious secret police, Savak. The popular belief in Iran was that Savak agents were trained by the Mossad and the CIA. Richard T. Sale reported in the Washington Post on May 9, 1977, that “Innumerable Iranians, including many in a position to know, told me that the Israelis oversee Savak’s techniques.”
Throughout the shah’s reign, Israel also recruited Savak agents to work with Israel’s external intelligence service, the Mossad. One Savak agent recruited by the Israelis was Manucher Ghorbanifar, who later emerged both as a key player in the Iran-contra secret operations and as the originator of false reports of armed Libyan “hit squads” headed for Washington that had the U.S. national capital tied in knots throughout much of 1981.
(Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 1988, Page 4, 5, 6, Khomeini’s Iran: Israel’s Ally, Bahram Alavi)
The Ba’ath Party and Saddam Hussein
The coup that had brought the Ba’ath Party to power in 1963 was celebrated by the United States.
The CIA had a hand in it. They had funded the Ba’ath Party — of which Saddam Hussein was a young member — when it was in opposition.
US diplomat James Akins served in the Baghdad Embassy at the time. Mr. Akins said, “I knew all the Ba’ath Party leaders and I liked them”.
“The CIA were definitely involved in that coup. We saw the rise of the Ba’athists as a way of replacing a pro-Soviet government with a pro-American one and you don’t get that chance very often.
“Sure, some people were rounded up and shot but these were mostly communists so that didn’t bother us”.
This happy co-existence lasted right through the 1980s.”
When the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran in 1979, America set about turning Saddam Hussein into Our Man in the Gulf Region.
Washington gave Baghdad intelligence support.
President Reagan sent a special presidential envoy to Baghdad to talk to Saddam in person.
The envoy’s name was Donald Rumsfeld.
(Saddam’s parallel universe, BBC, Allan Little, 26 January, 2003)
You’d have to be a complete idiot to believe that the CIA and Mossad were working against each other. They were playing Iran and Iraq off each other. The US was building up Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, while Israel was building up Iran (while bleeding them dry), and would play a major role in a proxy war in Iraq through the Kurds.
“We really had the ts crossed on what was happening,” James Critchfield, then head of the CIA in the Middle East, told us. “We regarded it as a great victory.” Iraqi participants later confirmed American involvement. “We came to power on a CIA train,” admitted Ali Saleh Sa’adi, the Baath Party secretary general who was about to institute an unprecedented reign of terror. CIA assistance reportedly included coordination of the coup plotters from the agency’s station inside the U.S. embassy in Baghdad….and solicitation of advice from around the Middle East on who on the left should be eliminated once the coup was successful.”
(“Out of the Ashes, The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein”, by Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, 2000, p74)
[Note: At the time, Richard Helms was Director for Plans at the CIA. That is the top CIA position responsible for covert actions, like organizing coups. Helms served in that capacity until 1966, when he was made Director. Helms, Israelophile James Angleton’s “mentor”, was in place during the JFK coup. Angleton was the one who oversaw the “investigation”.]
Author Said Aburish reckons that 5,000 were killed after the coup, giving the names of 600 of them — including many doctors, lawyers, teachers and professors who formed Iraq’s educated elite. The massacre was carried out on the basis of death lists provided by the CIA.
“But the CIA’s crimes don’t end when a right-wing coup has succeeded. The CIA then has to keep its repressive despots in power in order to ensure that they can put into place and then maintain a variety of unjust economic systems and structures. This is done with arms sales (and outright gifts of “surplus” weapons), glowing diplomatic support, “intelligence support” (sic) and massive economic investment (i.e., pillaging as much profit as possible by exploiting the natural resources that drew them in there in the first place, and handing out some of the spoils to a loyal local elite).”
(A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite, Said Aburish, 1997)
And this ego rubbing of the “loyal local elite”, no matter how blatant, would be lapped up for decades.
The west and Zionists had a deciding hand in destroying any hope of real democracy in Iran and Iraq. Real democracy.
The zionist tool: the Kurds
Israeli-Kurdish ties officially go back to the 1950s when Israel’s foreign policy strategy of the peripheral alliance was first launched. This strategy maintained that Jerusalem should seek alliances with non-Arab states as well as with minorities in the Middle East in order to address states as well as with minorities in the Middle East in order to address the larger Arab bloc.
(Ofra Bengio, The Turkish-Israeli Relationship: Changing Ties of Middle Eastern Outsiders (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 33–71)
In other words, they struck alliances with fifth columnists for their own purpose. Divide and destroy.
Relations between Israel and the Kurds began developing shortly after the outbreak of the Kurdish rebellion in the autumn of 1961, apparently at Jerusalem’s initiative.
(Israeli officials interviewed by the author Ofra Bengio, a senior research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, Israel, Mar. 13, 1982, July 28, 1985.)
Israel sent Mossad advisers to help Kurdish leader Mulla Mustafa Barzani, and to manage the Kurds’ battles against the Iraqi army.
(Israel said to import $1 billion in oil from Iraqi Kurds, Times of Israel, August 2015)
One of the early Kurdish interlocutors was activist Ismet Sherif Vanly. In his memoirs, Vanly revealed that in 1964, when the Kurdish revolution was in dire straits, he suggested to Kurdish leader Mulla Mustafa Barzani that he contact Jerusalem for help. Upon Barzani’s agreement, Vanly went to Israel (with the help of the head of the Iranian intelligence) where he met Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, as well as Shimon Peres, head of the Labor party. Following that visit, the Israeli government sent a permanent representative to Iraqi Kurdistan.
[Note: Remember that this particular period of Kurdish-zionist alliance against Iraq kicked off just after the US had installed “their boys”. Including Saddam Hussein.]
These ties, kept secret by both sides, reached their peak in the early years of the Baath in 1968–75. Barzani visited Israel secretly twice, in 1968 and 1973, meeting with high Israeli officials including the prime minister. Mustafa’s sons Masoud and Idris also visited Israel. For their part, various Israeli officials frequented the Kurdish region.
Israeli aid… expanded gradually, eventually to include the supply of small arms and ammunition. Later, it encompassed more sophisticated equipment such as antitank and antiaircraft weapons. It also included training Kurds in Israel and Kurdistan.
One reliable source claimed that all training of Kurds was provided by Israel. Rafael Eytan, who visited Kurdistan in 1969 before he became Israel’s chief of staff, stated that almost all of the Israeli trainers were paratroopers. Israelis also served as advisers.
(Sergey Minasian, The Israeli-Kurdish Relations, Noravank Foundation, Yerevan, p. 22.)
In 1966, Iraqi defense minister Abd al-Aziz al-Uqayli blamed the Kurds of Iraq for seeking to establish “a second Israel” in the Middle East. He also claimed that “the West and the East are supporting the rebels to create [khalq] a new Israeli state in the north of the homeland as they had done in 1948 when they created Israel.”
(Surprising Ties between Israel and the Kurds by Ofra Bengio, Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2014)
The first official acknowledgment that Jerusalem had provided aid to the Kurds dates back to Sept. 29, 1980, when Prime Minister Menachem Begin disclosed that Israel had supported the Kurds “during their uprising against the Iraqis in 1965 to 1975” and that the United States was aware of this fact. Begin added that Israel had sent instructors and arms, but not military units.
(Radio Israel, Sept. 29, 1980.)
According to Eliezer Tsafrir, a former senior Mossad official, during 1963–1975 Israel had military advisers at the headquarters of Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani, and trained and supplied Kurdish units with firearms, field artillery, and antiaircraft guns. According to a former director-general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, this was part of a strategy of seeking alliances with other non-Arab nations in the region.
(A former senior Mossad officer looks back on his career, The Jerusalem Post, July 2021)
Kurds actually aided Israel in the 1967 “7 day war” and received arms captured as reward.
They mounted an offensive against the Iraqis to prevent Iraq from offering aid to Arab countries.
They were rewarded with arms captured in the war and $500,000 a month. Their leader Mula Mustafa Barazani visited Israel that same year.
(Begin Airs Secret Israeli Aid to Kurds as Reminder to Iraqis, CSM, Morris, 1980)
Against this background, Iraq broke diplomatic relations with the US in 1967 for its support for Israel during the 1967 land grab. They weren’t (officially) restored until 1984.
(U.S. Restores Full Ties With Iraq But Cites Neutrality in Gulf War, NYT, November 1984)
Another 1968 coup made Saddam the second most powerful man in Iraq (I don’t think it’s any coincidence that this coup happened a year after they confronted Israel and broke relations with the US). And would become president in 1979.
Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, and future zionist stooge in the push for war against Iraq based on lies, claimed that there was CIA cooperation with the second Ba’ath coup in 1968.
(Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge, Said Aburish)
When the Ba‘ath Party seized power in 1968, Saddam Hussein took charge of negotiations and successfully managed to agree a deal with Barzani in March 1970. Although the agreement was the most far-reaching ever signed by any Iraqi government — promising extensive autonomy with Kurdish-language provision, a guarantee of Kurdish officials in Kurdish areas, and a separate legislative body — it soon became clear that it was not enough for the Kurds.
In 1973, President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had the CIA instigate a Kurdish uprising in northern Iraq against Saddam Hussein.
War broke out again in 1974, this time on an unprecedented scale. By now, the Shah, along with the CIA, was providing millions of dollars to the Kurds annually, and extensive logistic support across the border. The Iranians even stationed troops disguised as Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq to help the rebellion.
When the Shah unexpectedly made a deal with Saddam in March 1975, promising to withdraw support for the Kurds in exchange for Iraqi border concessions, Iraqi troops swiftly moved in and crushed the rebellion, forcing as many as 200,000 Kurds to flee to Iran.
The 1975 Algiers agreement between Iraq and Iran, when the two sides suddenly settled long-standing differences and felt free to deal with their “internal problems,” including the Kurds. Algiers came just two years after Massoud went to Washington to meet Richard Helms, the CIA director, and Al Haig, the White House chief of staff a meeting that led to both CIA and Israeli advisers moving into northern Iraq to help the Kurds. Algiers left the Kurds high and dry, ending a generation of Kurdish revolt led by Massoud’s father, Mulla Mustafa.
(A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite, Said Aburish, 1997),
In the aftermath, the Kurds accused the government of pursuing an ‘Arabisation’ policy in the region. It therefore came as no big surprise that, when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, the Kurds eventually sided with the Iranians, even though by then that latter country had become an Islamic republic following the overthrow of the Shah in 1978–79. The Kurds paid a heavy price for their decision, being branded traitors by the Saddam regime and taking the full brunt of a brutal campaign at the end of the war that saw thousands of Kurdish civilians killed as the Iraqi government retook areas captured by Iran and the Kurds.
(The history of the Kurds in Iraq: “the largest people never to have achieved statehood”, BBC History Magazine, June 24, 2021 — note that the BBC tells a romanticized version of Kurdish history, failing to mention the Armenian genocide many of their tribes participated in, but the chronology of events is accurate enough)
[Note: In 1974, Mossad asset and financier (who would buy a pardon from Bill Clinton 30 years later) Marc Rich and his partner, Pincus Green, started their own holding company, eventually known as the Marc Rich Group, and began making oil deals with Iran and Iraq.
(The Pardon of Marc Rich: How Hillary Clinton Served as the “Secret Weapon” for One of the Biggest Tax Cheats in American History, Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch, OCTOBER 3, 2016)
1974? When Mossad and the CIA were training Kurds to fight against Iraq? Rattlesnakes…
Marc Rich bought millions of barrels of oil from Iran during the 1979–81 hostage crisis flouting a ban on “trading with the enemy”. He in turn supplied weapons and spare parts to Iran. His autobiographer stated that he was able to profit from boycotts. He profited from the embargos against Iran and South Africa.
(Marc Rich: controversial commodities trader and former fugitive dies aged 78, The Guardian, June 2013)]
The Iran-Contra Affair
Hussein became President of Iraq in 1979. Within a year, Iran and Iraq would kick off a long, bloody war. By this time, Khomeini had been ushered in as leader of Iran after the 1979 revolution that ousted the Shah.
While the United States and Britain helped arm Saddam in his confrontation with Iran, Israel would (continue to) take the Iranian side.
In the midst of this manouevring, what was known as the Iran-Contra Affair took place.
The damning, yet very sanitized version of what happened during the Iran-Contra Affair:
On December 21, 1982, the first Boland Amendment was passed into law in the US, which barred the use of funds for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua or provoking a war between Nicaragua and Honduras [Note: which Israel was involved in, front and center].
Late 1982–1983, the U.S. is actively engaged in preventing arms sales to Iran, known as Operation Staunch.
In 1983, Saudi Arabian businessman Adnan Khashoggi first meets with National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane while CIA Officer Theodore Shackley meets with Iranians Manucher Hashemi, (Mossad asset) Manucher Ghorbanifar, and Hassan Karoubi.
Between 1983 and 1985, the CIA would (officially) actively take part in bombings in Nicaragua, and request Israeli military aid to train the Nicaraguan Contras.
By 1984, the sale of arms by the US to Iran through Israel and it’s Iranian and Saudi assets would be used to fund the Contras in Nicaragua.
(Understanding the Iran-Contra Affair, Brown Edu, Timeline)
The nitty-gritty that the mainstream media hops, skips and jumps over:
After the fall of the shah, (Mossad asset) Ghorbanifar and other such former Savak agents proved to be extremely useful to Israel because they continued to maintain their contracts with the Israelis while working for the Khomeini regime. Their central role in the Iranian-Israeli (and U.S.) relationship was made possible by Khomeini’s decision to leave the shah’s secret police untouched. Beyond executing three former chiefs of Savak and changing the name of the remaining organization to Savama, the Khomeini regime did little to alter its functions. Many of its agents were called back and assigned the same duties by the Khomeini regime that they had performed for the shah.
(Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 1988, Page 4, 5, 6, Khomeini’s Iran: Israel’s Ally, Bahram Alavi)
Israel lobbied the United States to arm Iran in its war efforts against Saddam Hussein in order to achieve a “broader strategic relationship with Iran”.
(Samuel Segev, The Iranian Triangle: The Untold Story of Israel’s Role in the Iran-Contra Affair, tr. Haim Watzman, New York, 1988. p. 249).
According to Aḥmad Ḥaydari, an Iranian arms dealer, roughly 80 percent of the weaponry bought by Tehran immediately after the onset of the war (1980) originated from Israel.
(Nader Entessar, “Israel and Iran’s National Security,” Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies 27/4, Summer 2004. p. 7).
After twenty five years of trade worth billions between Iran and Israel, coupled with their geo-strategic interests, and despite the revolution that brought “radical Islam” to power there, Israel still intended to maintain this relationship. And the Iran-Iraq war provided this connection.
David Kimche, the former head of the Israeli Foreign Ministry:
“We had very deep relations with Iran, cutting deep into the fabric of the two peoples. It was difficult for people to accept the fact that all of this intimacy was thrown out of the window. So there were a lot of attempts during the first year after the Revolution, to see if we could revive the relations with [Iran]”
(Interview, Tel Aviv, 22 October, 2004; David Menashri, Trita Parsi, “ISRAEL i. RELATIONS WITH IRAN,” Encyclopædia Iranica, XIV/2, pp. 213–223, 2007)
What was really layered beneath for zionism was the opportunity to sell arms to Iran, and the mutual destruction of two superpowers in the area, particularly Iraq.
Though Israel initially supported Iran, it came to appreciate the way the war absorbed Arab resources and prevented the Arabs from focusing on the Palestinian issue. Tel Aviv reasoned that providing military assistance to Iran contributed to Israel’s security by further splitting the Arabs
(Sohrab Sobhani, The Pragmatic Entente: Israeli-Iranian Relations, 1948–1988, New York, 1989, p. 150).
According to David Kimche, “our big hope was that the two sides would weaken each other to such an extent that neither of them would be a threat to us”
(David Menashri, Trita Parsi, “ISRAEL i. RELATIONS WITH IRAN,” Encyclopædia Iranica, XIV/2, pp. 213–223, 2007); Interview, 22 October 2004).
Yeah….”deep relations” with Israel is like having a rattlesnake as a pet.
In 1979 after the Iran market had shriveled. Nimrodi, the Mossad-agent-turned-arms-dealer, recalled that when he reported to the Israeli government on the millions of dollars to be had from arms sales to Khomeini’s Iran, “people’s eyes lit up here. They have been laying people off in the defense industry, and this meant jobs.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser, said the U.S. government had become aware of Israeli shipments of U.S.-made armaments to the Khomeini regime in 1980.
In 1981, Ya’acov Nimrodi, an intimate of leaders across the Israeli political spectrum, had sold the Iranian defense ministry $135,842,000 worth of Hawk anti-aircraft missiles, 155 mm. mortars, ammunition, and other weapons through his Tel Aviv-based company, International Desalination Equipment, Ltd.
In July 1981, one of the three planes carrying arms to Iran crashed on the Turkish-Soviet border. Israeli officials said the three shipments had been authorized by the Reagan administration shortly after the hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran were released on President Reagan’s inauguration day.
US Secretary of State Edmund Muskie demanded that Israel cease its shipments; Prime Minister Begin promised to comply. In fact, however, the supply line stayed open without Washington’s approval, carrying tank parts and ammunition.
Despite assurances from Israel not to sell weapons to Iran, Nimrodi, the Mossad-agent-turned-arms-dealer who helped set up SAVAK set up arms deals with them. They supplied more than half of their weapons over the next 16 months. Including US parts for aircraft.
(Israeli Arms Sales to Iran, Jane Hunter, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 1986, Page 2; The Iran Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era, Johnathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, p169)
But this forked tongue, schizophrenic narrative that the US and Israel played out when dealing with Iran and Iraq went beyond the apparent, permanent zionist “middle finger” to US foreign policy in the form this time of the Iranian arms embargo.
In 1979, the Carter administration provided Israel ability to see American spy satellite photos “for defense purposes only”.
They used these satellite images to target Iraq’s Osirak nuclear research reactor at Tuwaitha on June 7, 1981, using U.S. supplied F-15 and F-16 aircraft to carry out the attack.
They went ahead and attacked this facility even though in July 1980, U.S. Ambassador Sam Lewis had warned Begin that “precipitate action against Iraq’s nuclear installations would be a severe setback to prospects for Middle East peace.” Indeed, the attack had a strongly negative impact on Israel’s image in the Arab world and elsewhere.
The research facility was subject to International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. Israel asserted that Iraq was on the brink of developing a nuclear weapons capability. France said that the reactor’s design features and the precautionary procedures it had implemented insured that the Osirak reactor could never be used in the production of nuclear weapons.
Israel had sabotaged equipment intended for the facility on the verge of delivery by France in 1979, and in 1980 it assassinated a leading scientist working on the program.
(Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer, “Revisiting Osirak: Preventive Attacks and Nuclear Proliferation Risks,” International Security 36 (2011): 101–132.)
They had used satellite imagery supplied by the US “for defence purposes” to attack a nuclear energy facility that couldn’t possibly produce weapons grade uranium. They had attacked the facility using US-supplied aircraft. And they had ignored pleas not to attack!
[Note: The non-stop contradictory narrative played out by the US and Israel with regards to Iran and Iraq can be confusing. What was said publically contrasted with their actions. They wanted the two countries to destroy themselves but not so much that one of them would become a dominant power.]
The IAEA and UN churned out the usual toothless condemnations with no follow up — including calls for “Israel to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and place its own nuclear program under IAEA safeguards”. This coming just a year after Israel and South Africa had detonated a nuclear bomb off the coast of South Africa. Which was covered up by the US. And just six years after Israel had contemplated dropping a nuclear bomb on Cairo during the early stages of the “Yom Kippur” war in 1973 (See Chapter 9).
Israel is the only entity on the planet allowed to have hundreds of unchecked nuclear warheads, but they attack a facility not capable of producing nuclear weapons? Even Henry Kissinger claimed that Israel “was more likely to use them”, before introducing his “ambiguity” approach to their existence, and giving them carte blanche in 1969 (See Chapter 9).
Condemning the attack, the United States suspended the shipment of F-16s to Israel because the strike raised questions whether they had been used for legitimate self-defense purposes as required by law. Nevertheless, the Reagan administration was not about to re-evaluate policy toward Israel and the deliveries resumed in a few months.
(Israeli Attack on Iraq’s Osirak 1981: Setback or Impetus for Nuclear Weapons?, National Security Archives, June, 2021)
Admiral Bobby Ray Inman described how in 1981 when the Israelis had bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor, he (Inman) discovered that the Israelis had been able to carry out their act precisely because they had gained access to high-level Pentagon satellite reconnaissance files.
At that juncture, Inman, then serving as acting CIA director during CIA director William Casey’s absence from the country, gave orders limiting Israeli access to such strategic national intelligence.
In response, according to Inman, “The [Israeli] defense minister, General Sharon, was so furious he came to the U.S. to protest to [Secretary of Defense] Weinberger.”
Then, after CIA Director Casey returned to the United States, William Safire — a longtime friend and a former campaign manager for Casey when Casey made an unsuccessful bid for Congress — complained to Casey who countermanded Inman’s decision.
According to Inman, “from that point on, if you will trace the [media] coverage [of Inman], it’s been hostile.”
(Press Statement by Bobby Ray Inman, January 18, 1994.)
Do as you’re told, eh?
And this schizophrenic narrative continued…
Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon told the Washington Post in May 1982, justifying Israeli arms sales to Tehran, “Iraq is Israel’s enemy and we hope that diplomatic relations between us and Iran will be renewed as in the past.” Four months later he told a Paris press conference, “Israel has a vital interest in the continuing of the war in the Persian Gulf, and in Iran’s victory.” Such views were not Sharon’s alone; Prime Ministers Itzhak Shamir (Likud) and Shimon Peres (Labor) shared them too.
Five months later, the then-Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Moshe Arens, stated that Israeli shipments of arms to Iran were “taking place in coordination with the highest level of the U.S. government.”
And those shipments would continue to be enormous in size, estimated by experts at the Jaffee Institute for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv at $500 million in value from 1980–83. Other arms market experts have put the total value at more than $500 million a year, including aircraft parts, artillery and ammunition.
In March 1982, the New York Times cited documents indicating that Israel had supplied half or more of all arms reaching Tehran in the previous 18 months, amounting to at least $100 million in sales.
Foreign intelligence sources told Aerospace Daily in August 1982 that Israel’s support was “crucial” to keeping Iran’s air force flying against Iraq.
Newsweek also reported that after an Iranian defector landed his F-4 Phantom jet in Saudi Arabia in 1984, intelligence experts determined that many of its parts had originally been sold to Israel, and had then been re-exported to Tehran in violation of U.S. Iaw.
In April 1985, tapes made by the US Customs Service reveal Israeli government involvement in a $2.6 billion conspiracy to sell US-made arms to Iran through third countries.
On September 15, 1985, at least 1,250 TOW missiles were flown from Israel to Iran via Malaga.
At about the same time a ship carrying 25,000 tons of Israeli material sailed directly to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas.
In May, 1986, West German authorities foiled an $81 million ammunition and tank deal to Iran involving Israeli Military Industries.
In June 1986, a Swedish businessman was reported to have acted as intermediary for Israeli sales of explosives to Iran. The shipments went from Israel to Iran via Argentina.
In September, 1986, the Danish Sailor’s Union had logs and records to prove that since May a Danish freighter had taken four 900-ton shipments from the Israeli port of Eilat to Bandar Abbas in Iran. The union was certain the arms were US-made.
(Israeli Arms Sales to Iran, Jane Hunter, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 1986, Page 2; The Iran Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era, Johnathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, p169)
Israel was calling the shots no matter what angle you look at it.
The official line was that Israel had persuaded the US to “get on board” the Iranian arms gravy train to fund the Contras in Nicaragua.
The US allies in NATO were being bullied in to not selling arms to Iran. The US own customs service was apparently unaware. And the arms were to be used against “their man” Saddam Hussein.
Who actually benefited the most?
Michael Ledeen
A Swiss bank account from which contributions to the contras were drawn had been set up by Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and was under the control of Yaacov Nimrodi, the Israeli arms dealer and former military attache in Tehran.
(Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January 1987, pages 4–5, Israeli Arms Sales to Central America: An Overview By Jane Hunter)
Oliver North and Israeli spy Michael Ledeen were involved in setting up the Israeli role in the Iran-Contra Affair. Michael Ledeen was a founder of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and was a major participant in the 1979 and 1984 Jonathan Institute conferences on terrorism. Both institutes have substantial ties to Mossad.
(Covert Action, the Roots of Terrorism, edited by Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap)
As a consultant to the National Security Council in the 1980s, in the early stages of the Iran-Contra affair Michael Ledeen acted as a go-between for the Reagan administration and the Israeli spy David Kimche to gain the release of U.S. hostages in Beirut through aforementioned Iranian arms dealer and Israeli asset, Manucher Ghorbanifar.
According to official investigations into the Iran-contra scandal, Ledeen helped initiate the effort to use Israeli contacts to pursue an arms for hostages deal with Iran.
(“Arms for Hostages — Plain and Simple,” New York Times, November 27, 1988)
Ledeen was a “journalist” who had been instrumental in turning “Billygate” — revelations of Billy Carter’s involvement with Libyan lobbyists — into a major scandal for the Carter administration. Ledeen conveniently went on to serve as the Reagan State Department’s resident expert on terrorism.
“Israel finally succeeded in penetrating Washington’s defenses at a time of crisis for the administration,”
“An Iranian-backed terrorist group seized the CIA’s Beirut station chief, William Buckley in March 1984. […] Desperate for help, the Reagan administration turned to the Israelis in early 1985.
The nature of the approach almost guaranteed the outcome. The key emissary — and a pivotal figure in the entire Iran story — was Michael Ledeen, an NSC [National Security Council] consultant. Ledeen had extremely close ties with Israel. His wife Barbara is an assistant in the Pentagon office of Stephen Bryen, who was investigated by the FBI in the late 1970s after an eyewitness alleged that he passed secrets to Israel. In 1981 Ledeen was a founder of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a Washington group that lobbies for Israeli defense interests. His co-founders included Bryen and Richard Perle, another Pentagon official associated with the Israeli arms industry. And only a few weeks after its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israeli armed forces invited him to tour the conquered territory.
Ledeen planted the notion of exploring an opening to Iran with National Security Advisor [Robert] McFarlane by claiming, supposedly on the basis of discussions with a European intelligence official in April 1985, that the timing was favorable. Then at his own initiative, but with McFarlane’s approval, Ledeen visited Israel in early May 1985 to pursue the idea unofficially. There he met with government officials to discuss means of contacting Iran’s “moderates”. “He was involved in the creation of the idea that we have to have some kind of relations with the Iranians,” said his wife Barbara.
Ledeen says he asked Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres what could be done to further the cause of better U.S.-Iranian relations. Peres did not turn for answers to his intelligence professionals, as he would were his aim merely to exchange information. Instead he convened a tight-knit group of arms dealers including his longtime confidant Al Schwimmer, the American-born founder of Israel Aircraft Industries.
Schwimmer, according to some Israeli news accounts, came up with the arms-for-Buckley formula. He also brought in his lifelong friend and partner in the arms business, Ya’acov Nimrodi. Nimrodi, the Mossad agent and former Israeli military attaché, had acted as a sales agent for Schwimmer in the Shah’s Iran. As we have seen, evidence suggests that Nimrodi was also involved in shipping arms to Khomeini’s Iran.
Fellow career Mossad officer David Kimche, then director-general of the Foreign Ministry, came on board to steer the negotiations. Ledeen’s chief contact in Israel, Kimche proved to be an ardent advocate of reopening relations with Iran’s “moderate” elements. In fact, Kimche appears to have been one of the architects of Israel’s arms sales to Iran ever since 1980.
Leading these Israelis was Shlomo Gazit, former director of military intelligence and president of Ben Gurion University.”
(Marshall, Jonathan, et al. The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era. New York, NY: Black Rose Books, 1987, p. 72; Ibid., pp. 174–175.)
These characters Ledeen, Bryen and Perle will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. They were blatant Israeli assets at the heart of the US “security set up”.
And this guy Schwimmer’s story goes way back. Around the time he was acting as a go-between for the Shah of Iran and Israel, the FBI were aware of his illegal activities on behalf of zionism in the US. And the efforts of other American spies during the 1950s with the same protection as the aforementioned characters within the US, to get the investigation dropped.
In November, 1948, an indictment was returned in Miami, Florida charging nine individuals with conspiracy to violate the Neutrality Act, based on evidence that attempts were made to transport airplanes illegally from the United States to Israel.
Quoting from an FBI memo at the time:
Among those indicted were ADOLF SCHWIMMER and Irving Schindler. An anonymous source of known reliability advised that the Israeli Government was fearful that prosecution of Schwimmer and Schindler would result in publicity unfavorable to Israel and that the Israeli government instructed ELIAHU ELATH, Israel Ambassador to the United States, on April 1, 1949 to “squash it forever.” One of the several courses of action recommended by the Israeli Government was to have Abe (believed to be ABRAHAM FEINBERG) take it up with his friends.
Informants advised that FEINBERG was probably in touch with Bob Hannegan (chairman of the Democratic National Committee) and other high Government officials trying to get them to exert political pressure on Tom Clark, Attorney General, in connection with these cases.
(Source: https://www.israellobby.org/Feinberg/04171952cover.pdf )
Nothing was done to the man, of course. And nothing would ever happen to long term spy Michael Ledeen. Nothing has ever happened to any blatant zionist spies mentioned throughout these chapters.
Ledeen’s role in Iran-a-scam and Contragate begins with his secret missions to Israel. But it is unclear who was urging whom to do what. According to leaked portions of a Senate Intelligence Committee report, the sale of arms to Iran was planned and implemented by the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad. Each time that the United States rejected further participation in the Israeli plan, some Mossad agent was urgently dispatched to the United States to put their plan back on track. Throughout the leaked Senate report, there are references to “the Israeli plan.” And the text of a memo by Lt. Col. Oliver North titled “Covert Action Finding Regarding Iran” reads: “Prime Minister Peres of Israel secretly dispatched his special adviser on terrorism (Amiram Nir) with instructions to propose a plan by which Israel, with limited assistance from the United States, can create conditions…”
But instead of trying to shift the blame to Israel, the White House sought to delete all references to the Israeli role from the Senate report and the media accounts followed suit.
(Covert Action, the Roots of Terrorism edited by Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap, p162)
Think about that. The shit had hit the fan. The US had been fully exposed over its public condemnation of Iran, while privately helping to arm them. But the Reagan administration and the media buried Israeli involvement!
A glimpse of the next chapter:
Ledeen’s immediate supervisor was the Principle Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, Noel Koch.
Early in their work together, Koch noticed with concern Ledeen’s habit of stopping by in his (Koch’s) outer office to read classified materials.
When the two of them took a trip to Italy, Koch learned from the CIA station there that when Ledeen had lived in Rome previously, as correspondent for The New Republic, he’d been carried in Agency files as an agent of influence of a foreign government: Israel.
Some time after their return from the trip, Ledeen approached his boss with a request for his assistance in obtaining two highly classified CIA reports which he said were held by the FBI. He’d hand written on a piece of paper the identifying “alpha numeric designators”.
These identifiers were as highly classified as the reports themselves….which raised in Koch’s mind the question of who had provided them to Ledeen if he hadn’t the clearances to obtain them himself. Koch immediately told his executive assistant that Ledeen was to have no further access to classified materials in the office, and Ledeen just ceased coming to “work”.
In early 1986…Koch learned that Ledeen had joined NSC as a consultant, and..arranged to be interviewed by two FBI agents on the matter…Koch was told that it was only Soviet military intelligence penetration that interested the Bureau. The follow-on interviews that were promised by the agents just never occurred.
Koch thought this strange, coming as it did just months after the arrest of Naval intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard on charges of espionage for Israel.
(Note: Think about this also. In the midst of this multi-layered zionist intrigue, Jonathan Pollard was carrying out the largest theft of US secrets in history for the US’ “biggest ally”, Israel!)
Frustrated, Koch wrote up in detail the entire saga of Ledeen’s DOD consultancy, and sent it to the Office of Senator Charles Grassley, then a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which had oversight responsibility for, inter alia, the FBI.
In June, 1987 during the Iran-Contra hearings, Noel Koch testified that…Ledeen had negotiated for the sale to the Israeli Government of basic TOW missiles for $2,500 each when the lowest previous price to Israel was $6,800 per unit.
(Serving Two Flags, Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Administration, Stephen Green Expert on US-Israeli Relations, February 2004)
And while zionists sucked every benefit they could, the US was playing it’s macabre games.
Playing the two sides
The U.S. knew about, and in at least one case, helped coordinate, Iraq’s chemical weapons attacks against Iran in the 1980’s, according to recently declassified CIA documents.
The detailed timeline, also constructed with the aid of interviews with former foreign intelligence officials, indicates that the U.S. secretly had evidence of Iraqi chemical attacks in 1983. The evidence…is “tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched.”
From 1983 until 1987, the U.S. more or less sat on (and internally discussed) intelligence containing strong evidence of Iraq’s chemical weapons use — early on, that meant mustard gas. Retired Air Force Col. Rick Francona told the magazine that he first learned of Iraq’s chemical weapons use in 1984. All that time, Iran was publicly saying that Iraq had used chemical weapons against them. They just didn’t have any evidence to take to the U.N. Then, Iran concentrated a large number of troops near the Iraqi city of Barash, near a vulnerability in Iraq’s defenses:
In late 1987, the DIA analysts in Francona’s shop in Washington wrote a Top Secret Codeword report partially entitled “At The Gates of Basrah,” warning that the Iranian 1988 spring offensive was going to be bigger than all previous spring offensives, and this offensive stood a very good chance of breaking through the Iraqi lines and capturing Basrah. The report warned that if Basrah fell, the Iraqi military would collapse and Iran would win the war.
President Reagan read the report and, according to Francona, wrote a note in the margin addressed to Secretary of Defense Frank C. Carlucci: “An Iranian victory is unacceptable.”
The U.S. authorized intelligence sharing with Iraq, and gave Iraq the location of those troops. Iraq then conducted a series of devastating sarin gas attacks.
(New Docs Detail U.S. Involvement in Saddam’s Nerve Gas Attacks, The Atlantic, August 2013)
According to the CIA, two-thirds of all chemical weapons ever used by Iraq during its war with Iran were fired or dropped in the last 18 months of the war. When the US (allegedly) began to supply constant intelligence reports and satellite imagery.
(Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran, Foreign Policy, August 2013)
Thousands of people are reported to have been killed and many others injured in a poison gas attack on a Kurdish city in northern Iraq.
Figures for the final total of dead range from 3,200 people to 5,000.
(1988: Thousands die in Halabja gas attack, BBC, On This Day, March 16, 1988)
It was not until 1987, when Iraqi prospects for victory had grown substantially that Tel Aviv concluded that a continuation of the war would be too risky and viewed a stalemate as the best possible outcome.
(Note: and this was the actual outcome in 1988 when a UN backed ceasefire was called). Although Iraq did not win the war, by the time of its conclusion, Baghdad emerged as the most potent military power in the region, save Israel. As a result, Iraq remained Israel’s primary threat, and Iran its preferred partner in balancing Iraq.
(David Menashri, Trita Parsi, “ISRAEL i. RELATIONS WITH IRAN,” Encyclopædia Iranica, XIV/2, pp. 213–223, 2007)
Iran continued to covertly use Israel for its military needs until 1991, when Iraq, crippled with debt from the war with Iran, invaded Kuwait. The ripping apart of the Iraqi army by the subsequent Gulf War made Iran the next “biggest threat to Israel” in the region.
Iran had allowed the US to use its airspace to attack Iraq despite the fact that the US had been responsible for strengthening Iraq during their own war (including the supply of chemical weapons).
Did Iran actually believe that “playing ball” would legitimize them in American eyes?
But 1991 was also the year that the Soviet Union had broken up. Zionism had clung on to the coattails of the US “anticommunism” campaign for decades profiting off the death and misery they sowed in every country where the working class and poor had rebelled. Or where democratically elected leaders were removed or murdered for not bowing to US demands of subjugation.
According to Ephraim Inbar of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, “there was a feeling in Israel that, because of the end of the Cold War, relations with the U.S. were cooling and we needed some new glue for the alliance. And the new glue was radical Islam. And Iran was radical Islam. So Rabin played [the Iranian threat] more than it was deserved in order to sell the peace process”
(David Menashri, Trita Parsi, “ISRAEL i. RELATIONS WITH IRAN,” Encyclopædia Iranica, XIV/2, pp. 213–223, 2007; Interview, Jerusalem, 19 October 2004).
In the words of an Israeli diplomat, the Israeli gambit was to establish a new Middle East order in which Iran would “have no choice but to accept its own isolation and Israel’s leadership”
(David Menashri, Trita Parsi, “ISRAEL i. RELATIONS WITH IRAN,” Encyclopædia Iranica, XIV/2, pp. 213–223, 2007 Interview, Israeli UN diplomat, New York, 31 March, 2004).
Conclusion
This was the beginning of the ensuing 24/7 zionist narrative that blamed all acts of terrorism on Iran, warning of the “nuclear threat”, and “taking unilateral action” against them. Just a few years earlier Yitzhak Rabin had said that “Iran is Israel’s best friend and we do not intend to change our position in relation to Tehran” (Agence France-presse, 28 October 1987).
Saddam Hussein was allowed to stay in power to “balance out” Iran. This was coupled with the US intending to make a new Middle East “order” post-Saddam, with Israel at the center, and the exclusion of Iran. It was at this point that Iran began to proactively oppose Israel through Hezbollah and Palestinian groups.
What is so difficult about narrating the “history of zionism” is being able to convey the many, many layers of intrigue. What goes over people’s heads is that while the US and Israel were molding dystopian nightmares in Iran and Iraq, they were busy doing the same across the globe.
The following quote sums up zionist tactics at this time:
Argentine planes would also be caught transporting Israeli arms to Guatemala. And Iran.
(Israel and Latin America: The Military Connection, Bishara Bahbah, p133)
Argentina was carrying out a purge of the opposition to the dictatorial junta in power. A disproportionate percentage of the “disappeared” were Jewish. 1000 of them. Guatemala was involved in a genocidal campaign against the indigenous Mayans. Israel was up to its neck in the flow of blood in both countries. As it was across Latin America. And the “Islamic threat” in Iran they’ve been warning of for decades was receiving their aid up to the point where they outlived their usefulness financially. But were seamlessly slotted in to the void left by the fall of the Soviet Union and “anticommunism”.
Whether it’s far right nazis or far right fundamentalists, they don’t care!
The closest analogy I can come up with in regards to how Iran and Iraq were played is the image of two owners in a dog fight with electric cattle prods keeping the dogs at each other’s throats, but not letting them near the fence that surrounds them. And stopping the fight at intervals to make sure both survive to continue fighting. Having said that, I’d also add that these two dogs voluntarily walked in to this sadist arena. For ego and temporary riches.
The CIA snuffed out any democratic, secular solution in both Iran and Iraq just as the shackles of colonialism were being removed. Zionists took full advantage of this in Iran for decades. The US sucked the marrow of Iraq’s resources and put “one of their own” in charge. And the Kurds were financed and armed as a fifth column during this time. Then abandoned to the wolves at critical moments…but they still kept trusting the sociopaths.
The war between Iran and Iraq saw the US (and some European countries) supply chemical weapons and military hardware to Hussein coupled with satellite imagery on Iranian positions. Israel consistently supplied Iran with millions of dollars worth of arms despite a (supposed) US ban on trade with them. The end result? Mutual destruction.
The Iran-Iraq war of the eighties was the same timeframe that the regurgitated Oded Yinon plan came to light:
“Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi’ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north. It is possible that the present Iranian-Iraqi confrontation will deepen this polarization.”
(Oded Yinon’s “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties”)
Your enemy’s enemy can also be your enemy!
It’s not that the “Oded Yinon plan” is so Machiavellian or brilliant. It’s the fact that the states they targeted are and were so predictable, and zionist intrigue so unscrupulous, that is the problem. Hundreds of thousands dead? So what?
With Hussein still in power but now under the cosh, coupled with Iran’s portrait as the new post-communism global enemy, Israel went about picking at the bones of the two dogs in the pen.
And of the other dog owner.
