Word: coverting
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...digs will allow the Senate investigators to review the hundreds of electronic intercepts, CIA files and covert-operation reports that may bear on the widening arms-for-hostages scandal. But one committee member wryly suggests that the extensive security precautions may be the best guarantee that information will get out. If Washington runs on leaks, says Alabama Democrat Howell Heflin, secrecy fuels the process. "You have to build all these top-secret, eyes-only bubbles in order that there can be leakin'," Heflin insists. "That's what it comes down...
Cave's negative view of Ghorbanifar failed to prevent the Iranian from becoming the linchpin of the covert operation. By November 1985 the Israelis, who had checked out Ghorbanifar at the request of Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian businessman who deems himself a peacemaker, had convinced the NSC staff that Ghorbanifar was too well connected in Iran to be ignored. The NSC undertook the Iran initiative, with the now obviously disastrous results...
...mainly the operatives at the Iran desk who transformed the idea of an arms-hostage exchange, originally ^ conceived as a test of mutual goodwill, into a principal objective of the dialogue with Tehran. This mistake eventually left the initiative mired in Iranscam. Says a recently retired senior CIA official: "Covert operatives despise grand strategy. They prefer tangible results that make them look good." The arms swap was sharply opposed by both Clarridge and Allen...
...France the scandal specialty for years has been covert mayhem committed by barbouzes, shadowy secret government agents with false beards or other disguises. The gem of these was surely the Greenpeace affair of 1985, in which two teams of French secret service frogmen blew up a trawler belonging to the environmental organization Greenpeace in Auckland harbor. The resulting international uproar shook Francois Mitterrand's Socialist government and forced the sacking of its intelligence chief and the resignation of its Defense Minister. Unlike Iranscam, however, that was the extent of it. Parliament never pursued it further. Indeed, the two French agents...
While Hashemi, former chief of the Tehran bureau responsible for exporting Islamic-style revolution, is an expendable power broker, the case against him has wider political significance. The Iranscam affair became public knowledge after radical supporters of Hashemi reportedly leaked the story of Iran's covert diplomatic and military dealings with the U.S. to ash-Shiraa, the Lebanese magazine that Ronald Reagan subsequently described as "that rag in Beirut." Moreover, Khomeini's public support for punishing Hashemi has been interpreted by some observers as evidence that the radicals in the Iranian leadership are losing ground to the pragmatists...