politics

Iran, Presidential Power and a Hemorrhaging CIA

As a nuclear-armed Iran looms ever closer, Newsweek dives into the fray with a deeply-reported profile of the country's fiery and fearsome president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
February 7, 2006

All three newsweeklies bring us an examination of one aspect or another of national security this week, and, taken together, it’s grim but important stuff.

With the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran seeming ever closer, Newsweek dives into the fray this week with a deeply-reported profile of the country’s fiery and fearsome president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“Born to a blacksmith, educated as a revolutionary, trained as a killer and derided by rivals as a mystical fanatic, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is easily cast as the personification of everything there is to fear about a nuclear Iran,” Newsweek reports. But in fact Ahmadinejad “may be worse than that” because of what he represents within his country — playing to a war nostalgia among parts of Iran’s leadership and its youth and to “a longing for confrontation” based on the belief that the revolutionary Iran of the early 1980s, while enduring various wartime hardships, was a regime that was “purer, more noble, more popular and ultimately more secure.”

“Unimpeded by inspections and vowing to launch commercial uranium enrichment, Iran could move ahead quickly with a program to build a bomb,” Newsweek says. While U.S. intelligence suggests it might be four to 10 years before Iran has the bomb, “Israeli intelligence suggests a year may be a closer bet, and the Israelis see Iranian nukes as an existential threat to be stopped at all costs.” (In a sidebar, the mag examines the logistical obstacles Israel would face in potential air-strike missions aimed at disabling Iran’s nuclear program, while a chewy thought-piece from Fareed Zakaria on “Islam and Power” rounds out the cover package.) Beyond nukes, Iran can also squeeze the U.S. via its contacts in Iraq, while its strategic importance as an oil producer gives it another powerful calling card.

The broad brushstrokes of the Iranian threat taken care of, Newsweek then delves into Ahmadinejad’s “frightening enough” backstory: “He is less a leader than a symbol, combining ferocious pride, militant piety, an expansive view of Iran and a narrow vision of the world that are all products of the Islamic revolution.” Among the tidbits that stand out: Ahmadinejad’s official history in the late 1980s is “largely blank”; he is a religious mystic who will perhaps “be more discreet about his mystical experiences in the future”; and the “hatred, fear and adulation” Ahmadinejad inspires aside, ultimate power (including permission to drink water) still rests with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It’s a profile that filled a gap in our knowledge of Iran (as the newsweeklies often do best), although there’s one discordant note: we are told that Newsweek reporter Babak Dehghanpisheh met with Ahmadinejad recently, yet there are no quotes from him in the story.

Looking at the extent of another president’s power, Newsweek serves up a short exclusive reporting that Justice Department official Steven Bradbury, in a closed-door Senate intelligence committee meeting last week, “suggested that in certain circumstances, [President Bush] might have the power to order the killing of terrorist suspects inside the United States.” A Justice spokeswoman tells the magazine that “Bradbury’s meeting was an informal, off-the-record briefing about the legal analysis behind the president’s terrorist-surveillance program.”

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Meanwhile, Newsweek‘s competitor Time tells us that concerned “moderate senators on both sides of the aisle are quietly considering a range of options that would attempt at the very least to delineate the president’s authority, if not roll it back. Bush’s claims of wartime license are so great — the White House and Justice Department have argued that the commander in chief’s pursuit of national security cannot be constrained by any laws passed by Congress, even when he is acting against U.S. citizens — that some senators are considering a constitutional amendment to limit his powers.” In the political arena, meantime, Bush finds his policy options much more limited than a year ago — and Joe Klein, while giving a thumbs-down to an “eminently disposable State of the Union speech,” finds himself missing “Bush’s exhilarating, if oft misguided, boldness.”

We move on to what furthers geopolitics behind the scenes — espionage — as U.S. News & World Report dissects the CIA’s recruitment and retention troubles in its impressive cover story, “Seeking Spies.”

“Three top-drawer commissions, ranking members of both parties in Congress, and President Bush all agreed that Washington needed to dramatically improve and expand its human intelligence-gathering abilities — in layman’s terms, putting more spies on the ground,” U.S. News reports. “But more than four years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency, current and former intelligence officials say, is nowhere near to achieving that goal.”

At the heart of the crisis is the agency’s National Clandestine Service, traditionally known as its directorate of operations, which over the years “has been home to some of the CIA’s most respected, courageous, and colorful operatives.” But “a triple hex of plummeting morale, a hemorrhage of field-tested veterans, and the drain of trying to counter a seemingly intractable insurgency in Iraq,” says U.S. News, “has left the D.O. today facing some of the most serious challenges in its history.”

As the magazine describes it, that hemorrhaging is more like a bloodletting, as “virtually the entire top level of the D.O. has turned over” in the past year — amounting “to the loss of hundreds of years of experience in some of the most difficult and dangerous parts of the world — precisely the places Washington needs experienced eyes and ears as it continues to prosecute the war on terrorism.”

Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.