American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymore Hersh, reporting in the New
Yorker, says that the Bush administration provided MEK operatives terror training at secret facilities in Nevada starting in 2005.
“We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official told me. “We were deploying them over long distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in communications.”
The Iranian dissident agents received the full panoply of spook training offering by U.S. Special Forces operatives:
They got “the standard training,” he said, “in commo [communications], crypto [cryptography], small-unit tactics, and weaponry—that went on for six months…”
The communications training in Nevada involved more than teaching how to keep in contact during attacks—it also involved communication intercepts. The United States…at one point found a way to penetrate some major Iranian communications systems. At the time…the U.S. provided M.E.K. operatives with the ability to intercept telephone calls and text messages inside Iran—which M.E.K. operatives translated and shared with American signals intelligence experts.
The MEK had been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department in 1997. Hersh writes that though the training ended before Obama took office, the MEK terror activities using U.S. supplied arms and logistical support continue inside Iran to this day.
“Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants.”
This means of course that certainly George Bush, and implicitly Barack Obama were not concerned about the terror designation, which makes it an empty exercise and a laughingstock.
In mid-January, a few days after an assassination by car bomb of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, at a town-hall meeting of soldiers at Fort Bliss, Texas, acknowledged that the U.S. government has “some ideas as to who might be involved, but we don’t know exactly who was involved.” He added, “But I can tell you one thing: the United States was not involved in that kind of effort. That’s not what the United States does.” Prison Planet
