Why has CIA’s man in Iran gone quiet?

IT TOOK me quite a while before a trusted friend was able to pinpoint why I found Iran’s latest miniature street revolution so weird. And so familiar. And so chilling.

Let’s run through the sequence of events. A large number of young, disenfranchised and poor/unemployed young people take to the streets of a Middle East nation to complain about their poverty, the corruption of the regime, their own lack of freedom – and quickly, they turn against their own leaders.

Perfectly justified. But within days, guns are being used against opponents of the government which both claims the people’s right to freedom of speech but warns that those who use violence will pay the price. At least 21 – two of them members of the security forces – are killed as protesters respond to the shoot-to-kill tactics of the governments’ armed supporters.

The most powerful leader – supported by state militias – complains that the unrest is fomented by foreigners, traitors, spies. The most senior leader in the state puts it all down to “money, weapons, politics and intelligence services”. America, Britain and Saudi Arabia are named as the principal suspects. And then vast pro-government crowds – dwarfing in numbers (if not in enthusiasm) the demonstrators, march in their hundreds of thousands to condemn the street protests, holding pictures of their beloved leaders. The regime calls the protests “finished”.

The parallels are not exact – the similarities much more so – but isn’t this pretty much, word for word, what happened in Syria in 2011? Isn’t this the same scenario? A mass of impoverished rural poor – crushed by the madcap agricultural policies of their government – began to demonstrate against the Assad administration, then against its corruption and then – quickly – demanded its overthrow, just as demonstrators in Iran were seen burning posters of Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, and President Hassan Rouhani. The security forces began to shoot down protesters. And – much earlier than we believed at the time – armed opponents of the regime in the spring of 2011 began to attack the Syrian military, along the northern Lebanese border near Homs and in Dera’a.

Bashar al-Assad’s regime immediately claimed that a “foreign hand” was at work behind the ‘terrorists’ – a word not used (yet) by the Iranian government about their armed opponents – and named America and Saudi Arabia as conspiring to bring civil war to Syria.

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians loyal to the regime paraded through Damascus each week waving posters of Assad. Repeatedly, the Syrian government referred to the crisis as “finished”.

It was not. But, despite the efforts of America and Saudi Arabia (and Britain’s support for “regime change”), Assad clung on with the same tenacity as the Iranian regime crushed the 2009 protests after the very dodgy presidential election “victory” of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (a man who had a lot in common with Donald Trump).

The Israeli war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 was an attempt to destroy Syria’s closest ally in Lebanon and Iran’s protégé. It failed. The Hezbollah claimed they won. They did not, but the Israelis lost. The next target became Syria in 2011. The West – and Israel – lost again. Assad survived. He has won – with the help of the Russians, Hezbollah and Iran.

And so now, is it Iran’s turn? The same screenplay. Saudi Arabia watches with delight. Britain hums and haws about human rights but the Americans are gung-ho on the side of the protesters.

But what puzzles me is that while Iran makes its usual claims of US conspiracies, the American media – and Britain’s – have not in this context once mentioned the name of a US intelligence official who was getting star billing only six months ago as the man appointed by Trump to run the CIA’s Iran operations.

How very odd. For the New York Times, back in June, was profiling the new role of the “Dark Prince” – or “Ayatollah Mike” as he was also apparently dubbed – as one of “a number of moves inside the spy agency that signal a more muscular approach to covert operations” under the leadership of Mike Pompeo. “Iran has been one of the hardest targets for the CIA …” quoth the paper that publishes “all the news that’s fit to print”. “The challenge to start carrying out President Trump’s views falls to Mr D’Andrea, a chain-smoking convert to Islam ... Perhaps no single CIA official is more responsible for weakening al-Qaeda ... Mr Trump has appointed to the National Security Council hawks eager to contain [sic] Iran and push regime change, the groundwork for which would most likely be laid through CIA covert action.”