Seymour
M. Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels
In
2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without
consulting the US Congress. Last August, 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 ‘red line’ he had set
in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons. 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’s 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.
Obama’s
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’t match the
batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The
message that the case against Syria wouldn’t 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’s 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.
For
months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the
intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbours,
especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the
al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other
Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a
former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence,
told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a
sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line
threat.’
The
joint chiefs also knew that the Obama administration’s 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
‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which
stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the
paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11
effort’. (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: ‘Previous IC
[intelligence community] focus had been almost entirely on Syrian CW [chemical
weapons] stockpiles; now we see ANF attempting to make its own CW … Al-Nusrah
Front’s relative freedom of operation within Syria leads us to assess the
group’s CW aspirations will be difficult to disrupt in the future.’ The paper
drew on classified intelligence from numerous agencies: ‘Turkey and Saudi-based
chemical facilitators,’ it said, ‘were attempting to obtain sarin precursors in
bulk, tens of kilograms, likely for the anticipated large scale production
effort in Syria.’ (Asked about the DIA paper, a spokesperson for the director
of national intelligence said: ‘No such paper was ever requested or produced by
intelligence community analysts.’)
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 Erdoğan administration has been covering up
the extent of its involvement with the rebels. In a news conference last
summer, Aydin Sezgin, Turkey’s ambassador to Moscow, dismissed the arrests and
claimed to reporters that the recovered ‘sarin’ was merely ‘anti-freeze’.
The
DIA paper took the arrests as evidence that al-Nusra was expanding its access
to chemical weapons. It said Qassab had ‘self-identified’ as a member of
al-Nusra, and that he was directly connected to Abd-al-Ghani, the ‘ANF emir for
military manufacturing’. Qassab and his associate Khalid Ousta worked with
Halit Unalkaya, an employee of a Turkish firm called Zirve Export, who provided
‘price quotes for bulk quantities of sarin precursors’. Abd-al-Ghani’s plan was
for two associates to ‘perfect a process for making sarin, then go to Syria to
train others to begin large scale production at an unidentified lab in Syria’.
The DIA paper said that one of his operatives had purchased a precursor on the
‘Baghdad chemical market’, which ‘has supported at least seven CW efforts since
2004’.
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’s 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’s activities said: ‘Investigators
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.’
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. ‘Something was in there that
triggered a shit fit by McDonough,’ the former Defense Department official
said. ‘One day it was a huge deal, and then, after the March and April sarin
attacks’ – he snapped his fingers – ‘it’s no longer there.’ 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.
The
former intelligence official said that many in the US national security
establishment had long been troubled by the president’s red line: ‘The joint
chiefs asked the White House, “What does red line mean? How does that translate
into military orders? Troops on the ground? Massive strike? Limited strike?”
They tasked military intelligence to study how we could carry out the threat.
They learned nothing more about the president’s reasoning.’
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, ‘the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of
staff as being insufficiently “painful” to the Assad regime.’ The original
targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian
infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a
monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to
Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles were
deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting longer,’ the former
intelligence official told me. ‘The Pentagon planners said we can’t use only
Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s 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’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams
to recover downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ The
new target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities
Assad had’, 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.
Britain
and France were both to play a part. On 29 August, the day Parliament voted
against Cameron’s bid to join the intervention, the Guardian 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 – a crucial player in the 2011 strikes on Libya – was deeply
committed, according to an account in Le Nouvel Observateur; François Hollande
had ordered several Rafale fighter-bombers to join the American assault. Their
targets were reported to be in western Syria.
By
the last days of August the president had given the Joint Chiefs a fixed
deadline for the launch. ‘H hour was to begin no later than Monday morning [2
September], a massive assault to neutralise Assad,’ 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.
At
this stage, Obama’s premise – that only the Syrian army was capable of
deploying sarin – 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: ‘Many of
the samples analysed in the UK tested positive for the nerve agent sarin.’ MI6
said that it doesn’t comment on intelligence matters.)
The
former intelligence official said the Russian who delivered the sample to the
UK was ‘a good source – someone with access, knowledge and a record of being
trustworthy’. After the first reported uses of chemical weapons in Syria last
year, American and allied intelligence agencies ‘made an effort to find the
answer as to what if anything, was used – and its source’, the former
intelligence official said. ‘We use data exchanged as part of the Chemical
Weapons Convention. The DIA’s baseline consisted of knowing the composition of
each batch of Soviet-manufactured chemical weapons. But we didn’t 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.’
The
process hadn’t worked as smoothly in the spring, the former intelligence official
said, because the studies done by Western intelligence ‘were inconclusive as to
the type of gas it was. The word “sarin” didn’t 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’s red line.’ By 21 August,
the former intelligence official went on, ‘the Syrian opposition clearly had
learned from this and announced that “sarin” 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, “It had to be Assad.”’
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: ‘We’re
being set up here.’ (This account made sense of a terse message a senior
official in the CIA sent in late August: ‘It was not the result of the current
regime. UK & US know this.’) By then the attack was a few days away and
American, British and French planes, ships and submarines were at the ready.
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’s argument that it had the facts to back up its
belief in Assad’s guilt. They pressed the DIA and other agencies for more
substantial evidence. ‘There was no way they thought Syria would use nerve gas
at that stage, because Assad was winning the war,’ 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
‘there’s a risk that this conflict has become stalemated.’
Dempsey’s
initial view after 21 August was that a US strike on Syria – under the
assumption that the Assad government was responsible for the sarin attack –
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 – the story the press corps
told – 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’d 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 ‘that the Middle
East would go up in smoke’ if it was carried out.
The
president’s 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’s gambit in the autumn of 2002 before the invasion of Iraq: ‘When 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 – wallop Syria with a massive
attack and validate the president’s red line commitment, while also being able
to share the blame with Congress if it came out that the Syrian military wasn’t
behind the attack.’ The turnabout came as a surprise even to the Democratic
leadership in Congress. In September the Wall Street Journal reported that
three days before his Rose Garden speech Obama had telephoned Nancy Pelosi,
leader of the House Democrats, ‘to talk through the options’. She later told
colleagues, according to the Journal, that she hadn’t asked the president to
put the bombing to a congressional vote.
Obama’s
move for congressional approval quickly became a dead end. ‘Congress was not
going to let this go by,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Congress made
it known that, unlike the authorisation for the Iraq war, there would be
substantive hearings.’ At this point, there was a sense of desperation in the
White House, the former intelligence official said. ‘And 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.’ At a press conference in London on 9 September, Kerry
was still talking about intervention: ‘The risk of not acting is greater than
the risk of acting.’ But when a reporter asked if there was anything Assad
could do to stop the bombing, Kerry said: ‘Sure. He could turn over every
single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next
week … But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.’ As the
New York Times 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’t change
its public assessment of the justification for going to war. ‘There is zero
tolerance at that level for the existence of error,’ the former intelligence
official said of the senior officials in the White House. ‘They could not
afford to say: “We were wrong.”’ (The DNI spokesperson said: ‘The Assad regime,
and only the Assad regime, could have been responsible for the chemical weapons
attack that took place on 21 August.’)
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 ‘rat line’, 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: ‘The idea that the United
States was providing weapons from Libya to anyone is false.’)
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’s 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
Erdoğan 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’s
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’t
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.)
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 ‘finding’, 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 – 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.
The
annex didn’t tell the whole story of what happened in Benghazi before the
attack, nor did it explain why the American consulate was attacked. ‘The
consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms,’ the
former intelligence official, who has read the annex, said. ‘It had no real
political role.’
Washington
abruptly ended the CIA’s role in the transfer of arms from Libya after the
attack on the consulate, but the rat line kept going. ‘The United States was no
longer in control of what the Turks were relaying to the jihadists,’ 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
reported that the previous day rebels near Aleppo had used what was almost
certainly a manpad to shoot down a Syrian transport helicopter. ‘The Obama
administration,’ Warrick wrote, ‘has 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.’ 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’ possession of manpads was likely the unintended
consequence of a covert US programme that was no longer under US control.
By
the end of 2012, it was believed throughout the American intelligence community
that the rebels were losing the war. ‘Erdoğan was pissed,’ the former
intelligence official said, ‘and felt he was left hanging on the vine. It was
his money and the cut-off was seen as a betrayal.’ In spring 2013 US
intelligence learned that the Turkish government – through elements of the MIT,
its national intelligence agency, and the Gendarmerie, a militarised
law-enforcement organisation – was working directly with al-Nusra and its
allies to develop a chemical warfare capability. ‘The MIT was running the
political liaison with the rebels, and the Gendarmerie handled military
logistics, on-the-scene advice and training – including training in chemical
warfare,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Stepping up Turkey’s role in
spring 2013 was seen as the key to its problems there. Erdoğan 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 – the distances involved and the
difficulty of moving weapons and supplies. Erdoğan’s hope was to instigate an
event that would force the US to cross the red line. But Obama didn’t respond
in March and April.’
There
was no public sign of discord when Erdoğan and Obama met on 16 May 2013 at the
White House. At a later press conference Obama said that they had agreed that
Assad ‘needs to go’. Asked whether he thought Syria had crossed the red line,
Obama acknowledged that there was evidence such weapons had been used, but
added, ‘it is important for us to make sure that we’re able to get more
specific information about what exactly is happening there.’ The red line was
still intact.
An
American foreign policy expert who speaks regularly with officials in Washington
and Ankara told me about a working dinner Obama held for Erdoğan during his May
visit. The meal was dominated by the Turks’ 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. Erdoğan was joined by Ahmet Davutoğlu,
Turkey’s foreign minister, and Hakan Fidan, the head of the MIT. Fidan is known
to be fiercely loyal to Erdoğan, and has been seen as a consistent backer of
the radical rebel opposition in Syria.
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, Erdoğan 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 Erdoğan tried to draw Fidan into
the conversation, and Fidan began speaking, Obama cut him off and said: ‘We
know.’ Erdoğan tried to bring Fidan in a second time, and Obama again cut him
off and said: ‘We know.’ At that point, an exasperated Erdoğan said, ‘But your
red line has been crossed!’ and, the expert told me, ‘Donilon said Erdoğan
“fucking waved his finger at the president inside the White House”.’ Obama then
pointed at Fidan and said: ‘We know what you’re doing with the radicals in
Syria.’ (Donilon, who joined the Council on Foreign Relations last July, didn’t
respond to questions about this story. The Turkish Foreign Ministry didn’t
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, Erdoğan, Fidan and Davutoğlu sitting at a table. ‘Beyond
that,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to read out the details of their discussions.’)
But
Erdoğan 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’s
ability to conduct international trade. The US followed with the executive
order in July, but left what came to be known as a ‘golden loophole’: 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.
The
programme quickly became a cash cow for corrupt politicians and traders in
Turkey, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. ‘The middlemen did what they always
do,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Take 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.’ The illicit skimming flared into a
public ‘gas for gold’ 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 Erdoğan 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.
Late
last year Jonathan Schanzer and Mark Dubowitz reported in Foreign Policy that
the Obama administration closed the golden loophole in January 2013, but
‘lobbied to make sure the legislation … did not take effect for six months’.
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 ‘accrue
billions of dollars more in gold, further undermining the sanctions regime’.
The
American decision to end CIA support of the weapons shipments into Syria left
Erdoğan exposed politically and militarily. ‘One of the issues at that May
summit was the fact that Turkey is the only avenue to supply the rebels in
Syria,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘It can’t come through Jordan
because the terrain in the south is wide open and the Syrians are all over it.
And it can’t come through the valleys and hills of Lebanon – you can’t be sure
who you’d meet on the other side.’ Without US military support for the rebels,
the former intelligence official said, ‘Erdoğan’s dream of having a client
state in Syria is evaporating and he thinks we’re the reason why. When Syria
wins the war, he knows the rebels are just as likely to turn on him – where
else can they go? So now he will have thousands of radicals in his backyard.’
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 ‘the acute anxiety’ of the Erdoğan administration
about the rebels’ dwindling prospects. The analysis warned that the Turkish
leadership had expressed ‘the need to do something that would precipitate a US
military response’. 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
‘sensed 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.’
As
intercepts and other data related to the 21 August attacks were gathered, the
intelligence community saw evidence to support its suspicions. ‘We now know it
was a covert action planned by Erdoğan’s people to push Obama over the red
line,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘They had to escalate to a gas
attack in or near Damascus when the UN inspectors’ – who arrived in Damascus on
18 August to investigate the earlier use of gas – ‘were 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 –
that it could only have gotten there with Turkish support. The Turks also
provided the training in producing the sarin and handling it.’ Much of the
support for that assessment came from the Turks themselves, via intercepted
conversations in the immediate aftermath of the attack. ‘Principal 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.’ Erdoğan’s
problems in Syria would soon be over: ‘Off 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.’
The
post-attack intelligence on Turkey did not make its way to the White House.
‘Nobody wants to talk about all this,’ the former intelligence official told
me. ‘There 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’t say anything because we have acted so irresponsibly.
And since we blamed Assad, we can’t go back and blame Erdoğan.’
Turkey’s
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 a government national security meeting, 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 Erdoğan 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’s spoke of
creating a provocation: ‘Now look, my commander, 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’s not a problem. Justification can be created.’ 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.
Barring
a major change in policy by Obama, Turkey’s meddling in the Syrian civil war is
likely to go on. ‘I asked my colleagues if there was any way to stop Erdoğan’s
continued support for the rebels, especially now that it’s going so wrong,’ the
former intelligence official told me. ‘The answer was: “We’re screwed.” We
could go public if it was somebody other than Erdoğan, but Turkey is a special
case. They’re a Nato ally. The Turks don’t trust the West. They can’t live with
us if we take any active role against Turkish interests. If we went public with
what we know about Erdoğan’s role with the gas, it’d be disastrous. The Turks
would say: “We hate you for telling us what we can and can’t do.”’
