Revealed: Trump team hired spy firm for ‘dirty ops’ on Iran arms deal
Israeli agency told to find incriminating material on Obama diplomats who negotiated deal with Tehran
Donald Trump promised the Israeli leader that Iran would never have nuclear weapons. Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
Sat 5 May 2018 21.00 BST
Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal.
People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to “get dirt” on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.
The extraordinary revelations come days before Trump’s 12 May deadline to either scrap or continue to abide by the international deal limiting Iran’s nuclear programme.
Jack Straw, who as foreign secretary was involved in earlier efforts to restrict Iranian weapons, said: “These are extraordinary and appalling allegations but which also illustrate a high level of desperation by Trump and [the Israeli prime minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, not so much to discredit the deal but to undermine those around it.”
One former high-ranking British diplomat with wide experience of negotiating international peace agreements, requesting anonymity, said: “It’s bloody outrageous to do this. The whole point of negotiations is to not play dirty tricks like this.”
Sources said that officials linked to Trump’s team contacted investigators days after Trump visited Tel Aviv a year ago, his first foreign tour as US president. Trump promised Netanyahu that Iran would never have nuclear weapons and suggested that the Iranians thought they could “do what they want” since negotiating the nuclear deal in 2015. A source with details of the “dirty tricks campaign” said: “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it.”
Benjamin Netanyahu on Israeli television, describing how Iran has continued with its plans to make nuclear weapons. Photograph: Jim Hollander/EPA
According to incendiary documents seen by the Observer, investigators contracted by the private intelligence agency were told to dig into the personal lives and political careers of Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and Kahl, a national security adviser to the former vice-president Joe Biden. Among other things they were looking at personal relationships, any involvement with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and if they had benefited personally or politically from the peace deal.
Investigators were also apparently told to contact prominent Iranian Americans as well as pro-deal journalists – from the New York Times, MSNBC television, the Atlantic, Vox website and Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper among others – who had frequent contact with Rhodes and Kahl in an attempt to establish whether they had violated any protocols by sharing sensitive intelligence. They are believed to have looked at comments made by Rhodes in a 2016 New York Times profile in which he admitted relying on inexperienced reporters to create an “echo chamber” that helped sway public opinion to secure the deal. It is also understood that the smear campaign wanted to establish if Rhodes was among those who backed a request by Susan Rice, Obama’s final national security adviser, to unmask the identities of Trump transition officials caught up in the surveillance of foreign targets.
Although sources have confirmed that contact and an initial plan of attack was provided to private investigators by representatives of Trump, it is not clear how much work was actually undertaken, for how long or what became of any material unearthed.
Neither is it known if the black ops constituted only a strand of a wider Trump-Netanyahu collaboration to undermine the deal or if investigators targeted other individuals such as John Kerry, the lead American signatory to the deal. Both Rhodes and Kahl said they had no idea of the campaign against them. Rhodes said: “I was not aware, though sadly am not surprised. I would say that digging up dirt on someone for carrying out their professional responsibilities in their positions as White House officials is a chillingly authoritarian thing to do.”
A spokesman for the White House’s national security council offered “no comment” when approached. However, the revelations are not the first time that claims of “dirty tricks” have been aimed at the Trump camp. Special counsel Robert Mueller is leading an investigation into apparent attempts by Trump’s inner-circle to dig up damaging information on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Missiles are paraded through Tehran on Iran’s annual army day on 18 April. Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images
Of particular interest is a meeting involving the US president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chair Paul Manafort and a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer who had promised damaging information about Clinton.
Trump has repeatedly signalled his intention to scrap the Iran deal, denouncing it as “the worst deal ever.” In a January speech the US president accused his predecessor of having “curried favour with the Iranian regime in order to push through the disastrously flawed Iran nuclear deal.”
Last Monday, Netanyahu, accused Iran of continuing to hide and expand its nuclear weapons know-how after the 2015 deal, presenting what he claimed was “new and conclusive proof” of violations.
However, European powers including Britain responded by saying the Israeli prime minister’s claims reinforced the need to keep the deal.
On Thursday the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres urged Trump not to walk away from the deal, warning that there was a real risk of war if the 2015 agreement was not preserved. The following day details emerged of some unusual shadow diplomacy by Kerry, meeting a top-ranking Iranian official in New York to discuss how to preserve the deal.
It was the second time in around two months that Kerry had met foreign minister Javad Zarif to apparently strategise over rescuing a pact they spent years negotiating during the Obama administration. Straw, who was foreign secretary between 2001 and 2006, said: “The campaign against the JCPOA has been characterised by abuse and misinformation. It is the best chance of ensuring Irannever develops a nuclear weapons programme, and it is insane to suggest abandoning the deal could do anything but endanger international security.”
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My Comments :
1. Finishing off Shiite (Syria, Lebanon, Yemen) Iran was one of the main motives behind the concerted effort from the two infamous Trump Super-Pack financiers, the Jew-zionists Mercer and explicit pro-Eretz-Israel proponent Adelson to have White Supremacist Trump catapulted into the White House.
2. One of tools at their disposal was Cambridge Analytica (in order to brainwash the electorate in key states, into voting for Trump and the GOP) while the Breitbart platform had been used to sow fear by releasing fake news messages on the Trump adversaries.
3. Although Mercer and Adelson tried hard to have all the preferred personnel installed in and ditto policies implemented by the Trump administration - and into the senior WH staff, such as the so-called special ME mediator the settler financier Jared Kushner and his influential wife Ivanka - they did not manage to have all the necessary bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran proponents in to the right places within the first round.
4. So they finally succeeded in removing Bannon, Tillerson and former security adviser McMaster, and replace them for the recognised neo-conservative war-hawks Bolton and Pompeo, who are both renowned for their unconditional love for the ultra-right Netanyahu regime and the Yinon Plan..
5. The infamous Yinon plan (*), written in the 80-ties as a long term future paper, contained the main objective of invading all those - mainly Shiite - countries in the ME that might be considered an obstacle on the route to the complete hegemony and dominance of the ME region by Israel and the USA.
6. Not just invading those countries was the aim, but also to have Western minded rulers installed and to have those countries divided up into small territorial entities along ethnic and religious lines.
7. The Yinon plan - in close combination with the USA PNAC project (**) - formed the backbone of the Bush jr. military agenda for the ME, as has been clearly and convincingly revealed by the former four star NATO general Wesley Clark, who did mention in public in 2007 (***) the existence of a Pentagon memo from 2001, that did imply "regime change in seven countries, within five years".
8. Seven countries, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan and Iran, the latter already having been the victim of brutal Western intervention and regime change during the fifties, when the CIA and MI6 staged a coup d'état against the legally elected Iranian president Mossadeq, who dared to have raised the subject of a fair distribution of the enormous profits from the Iranian oil industry, that until then, almost entirely disappeared into western bank-accounts
9. A Western initiated regime change in the fifties whereby the tyrant Reza had been forcibly put into a leading position by the CIA and MI6 which western intervention by the way, finally led up to the Iranian revolution in 1979, that was a direct Iranian revolt against the Western machinations in the ME.
10. In spite of the fact that Obama in fact did overall continue the neo-colonial Bush doctrine within the ME, the neo-conservatives never ever forgave him the western nuclear deal with Iran, which - from their Yinon / PNAC perspective at least - might prevent the west from realising their colonial ambition of military intervention into Iran, under the ominous pre-text that "Iran might become a nuclear power"
11. In the face of this development, all of a sudden Netanyahu did appear at the world stage with wild accusations that Iran would have been continuing to develop its atomic program and thus "cheating" the west with the "wretched" Iran deal.
12. However, besides the EU (which on this dossier will not reach beyond the borders of diplomacy), it might be Russia and - to a lesser extend - China that may be the powers that might materially oppose the warmongering members of the determined Trump administration.
13. The warmongering factions within the Trump administration are somewhat in a hurry, for one never knows how long it will take, before Trump will be removed from the WH and one never knows what the Congressional elections in November might entertain with the still ongoing GOP-dominated Congress.
14. So it does not exactly come as a big surprise, that Trump would have hired an "Israeli spy firm" to take care of the credibility of the USA Obama negotiating team, in order to definitively clear the road to a military intervention into Iran, be it by USA proxy SA, or in a united effort by a newly to be formed coalition of the willing.
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