The FBI has reopened an investigation into Australian journalist Julian Assange, according to front-page reporting from the Sydney Morning Herald. 

The news that the FBI is taking fresh investigative steps came as a surprise to Assange’s legal team, given that the U.S. filed charges against the WikiLeaks founder more than three years ago and is involved in an ongoing extradition process from a maximum security prison in the United Kingdom so that he can stand trial in the United States. 

Biden is now picking a fight with Australia (after offending them by cancelling a trip there over the debt ceiling) by re-opening a case against Australian journalist Julian Assange even as the country calls for his repatriation pic.twitter.com/P2tDMe7uRk

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) June 1, 2023

Assange is charged under the Espionage Act with obtaining, possessing, and publishing classified information that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, crimes that themselves have gone unpunished. 

The Morning Herald reporting also comes amid heightened hopes in Australia that a resolution to the case, which has raised serious press freedom issues in the U.S. and abroad, was near at hand. The country’s ruling party has spoken in defense of Assange, as has the nation’s opposition party leader. In early May, a cross-party delegation of influential Australian lawmakers met with the U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, urging that a deal be struck to return Assange to Australia before U.S.-Australian relations were harmed further by the prosecution. 

The U.S. has otherwise complicated its relationship with Australia in recent weeks even as it seeks closer ties in order to compete with China in the region. Australia spent weeks preparing for Joe Biden to make a major visit to the nation in May, only to see him cancel the trip at the last minute to fly back from Japan to continue with debt ceiling negotiations. And this week, the U.S. also warned Australia that some of its military units may be ineligible to cooperate with U.S. forces due to their own alleged war crimes in Australia. It is not lost on the Australian public that Assange is being prosecuted for uncovering and publishing evidence of U.S. war crimes. 

In May, the Morning Herald reported, the FBI requested an interview with Andrew O’Hagan, who was brought on more than 10 years ago to work as a ghostwriter on Assange’s autobiography. The FBI may have thought he would be cooperative because O’Hagan’s relationship with Assange soured; O’Hagan publicly criticized Assange as narcissistic and difficult to work with and published an unauthorized version in the London Review of Books instead. But O’Hagan told the Morning Herald he was not willing to participate in his prosecution. “I might have differences with Julian, but I utterly oppose all efforts to silence him,” he said.

In 2010 and 2011, in conjunction with major papers around the world, WikiLeaks published leaked documents and videos related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, evidence of war crimes, and other documents that exposed corruption on a grand scale. The disclosures helped trigger the Arab Spring, popular revolts against dictators across the Middle East and North Africa. 

The Obama administration considered prosecuting Assange but decided they couldn’t overcome “the New York Times problem”: They couldn’t figure out, in other words, how to prosecute him but not the Times. 

The case is now under the zealous guidance of Gordon Kromberg, a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia, though the reopening of the investigation suggests the government has doubts that its case will hold up in court. 

A coalition of major newspapers around the world has urged the Biden administration to drop charges against Assange. Yahoo News reported that the Trump administration considered ways to kidnap or assassinate the journalist. 

The U.S. State Department was not immediately able to comment.

Update: June 1, 2023, 12:25 p.m.
The original headline of this story said the FBI has reopened a case “against Assange,” though the precise target of the FBI’s new investigation is not publicly known. The FBI relayed to O’Hagan that it wanted to interview him about his participation in Assange’s autobiography.

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The war in Yemen looks like it’s coming to an end. U.S. media reported on Thursday that a cease-fire extending through 2023 had been agreed to, but those reports also included Houthi denials. On Friday, Al Mayadeen, a generally pro-Houthi Lebanese news outlet, reported optimism from the Houthi side that the deal is real and the war is winding down. Reuters later on Friday matched Al Mayadeen’s reporting, confirming that Saudi envoys will be traveling to Sana’a to discuss the terms of a “permanent ceasefire.”

What’s startling here is the apparent role of China — and complete absence of the U.S. and President Joe Biden — in the deal-making.

“Biden promised to end the war in Yemen. Two years into his presidency, China may have delivered on that promise,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “Decades of militarized American foreign policy in the Middle East have enabled China to play the role of peacemaker while Washington is stuck and unable to offer much more than arms deals and increasingly unconvincing security assurances.”

“Biden promised to end the war in Yemen. Two years into his presidency, China may have delivered on that promise.”

The U.S. always backed Saudi Arabia to the hilt and vociferously opposed the Houthis, who are backed by Iran. Now China has extracted concessions from the Saudis that made the cease-fire talks possible. The Saudis seem like they are fully capitulating to the Houthi demands, which include opening the major port to allow critical supplies into the country, allowing flights into Sana’a, and allowing the government to have access to its currency to pay its workers and stabilize the economy. Reasonable stuff.

“The Saudi concessions — including a potential lifting of the blockade and exit from the war — demonstrate that their priority is to protect Saudi territory from attack and focus on economic development at home,” said Erik Sperling, executive director of Just Foreign Policy, which has been working for an end to the war in Yemen for years. “This diverges from the approach preferred by many Washington foreign policy elites who continued to hope that the Saudi war and blockade could force the Houthis to make concessions and cede more power to the U.S.-backed Yemeni ‘government.’”

The Yemen deal is undergirded by another China-brokered deal for rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. On Thursday, the Iranian and Saudi foreign ministers met in Beijing to finalize an agreement that reinstates direct flights between Riyadh and Tehran, reopens embassies, and expands commercial cooperation.

“The full scope of this appears to have been unlikely without the Saudi-Iranian normalization brokered by China,” Parsi said. “Whether China played a crucial role in the Yemeni dimension is unclear. Beijing will, however, get some credit for it because of its role in bringing Riyadh and Tehran together.”

U.S. policy toward the Yemen conflict has been so hostile to peace it managed to do the impossible: make Saudi Arabia appear reasonable in comparison. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the U.S. is deeply frustrated at how reasonably various parties are behaving:

In an unannounced visit to Saudi Arabia earlier this week, CIA Director William Burns expressed frustration with the Saudis, according to people familiar with the matter. He told Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that the U.S. has felt blindsided by Riyadh’s rapprochement with Iran and Syria—countries that remain heavily sanctioned by the West—under the auspices of Washington’s global rivals.

This is all part of a larger program of Chinese diplomacy — as opposed to U.S. saber-rattling — in the Middle East. The Iranian minister of foreign affairs said publicly that he also held an expansive, two-hour meeting with his French counterpart while she was also in China. The meetings come ahead of a planned regional summit that will be organized by China and include both Saudi Arabia and Iran.

With the Saudis no longer backing militants in the Yemen war, those rump factions won’t have much capacity left to fight, though there will still probably be some clashes before a final peace is reached. Some observers said the U.S. could still aid efforts to bring the war to its ultimate close.

“Now is the time for the United States to do everything it can to support these negotiations to finally end the war and support robust humanitarian funding to address the suffering of the Yemeni people,” said Hassan El-Tayyab, the legislative director for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation. “If Washington rejects regional power-sharing and obstructs a world in which other nations have a vested interest in peace, it risks jeopardizing America’s own economic and security interests and its international reputation. Now is the time to prioritize and reap the benefits of diplomacy, not reject those who advocate for it.”

The way the war is ending also underscores just how illegitimate the U.S.-backed “government” of Yemen has been the last several years. In reality, it’s a group of exiles living in hotels in Riyadh, fully propped up by and under the thumb of Saudi Arabia. For a while, Saudi Arabia was referring to it in official documents as “the Legitimate Government of Yemen,” though it did no actual governing and had no legitimacy outside its hotel.

The exiled “government” is now led by the “Presidential Leadership Council,” and look at how the news was delivered to the “Legitimate Government of Yemen,” according to Al Mayadeen: “The sources stated that Riyadh informed the Presidential Leadership Council of its decision to end the war and conclude the Yemeni file permanently.” Such was the ignoble end of the U.S.-recognized government of Yemen.

“The Saudis are smart to cut their losses, end their complicity in this human rights nightmare, and refocus their attention to their own economic development.”

“While the Houthis are a deeply flawed movement, it is both immoral and ineffective to try to counter them by pushing tens of millions of Yemenis to the brink of starvation,” said Sperling. “The Saudis are smart to cut their losses, end their complicity in this human rights nightmare, and refocus their attention to their own economic development.”

The Chinese may find, however, that running a constellation of satellites is harder than it looks and that brokering peace may be more difficult than keeping it. This week, Iran-allied groups in Lebanon launched airstrikes on Israel in response to a raid on Jerusalem’s holy Al Aqsa Mosque by Israeli police. Israel, which has moved increasingly closer to Saudi Arabia, responded to the rockets by attacking both Gaza and Lebanon. President Xi Jinping will have no shortage of disputes to work out at his upcoming summit.

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The Russian government has accused Germany, Denmark, and Sweden of a cover-up in their investigations into the sabotage attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines last September. Moscow, with the support of China, plans to introduce a resolution before the United Nations Security Council on Monday calling for an independent international investigation.

The White House declined to answer questions from The Intercept about whether the U.S. has ordered its own investigation, saying only that it is supporting its allies in their individual probes. Germany, along with Denmark and Sweden, are each conducting separate investigations but say they are cooperating with one another.

In a series of letters to European governments and the United States in February, made public by Moscow earlier this month, Russian officials complained that they have been barred from examining evidence gathered from the sites where the blasts occurred. Despite Russia’s majority ownership of the pipelines, Russian officials said, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden have rejected Russia’s repeated requests for a joint investigation — confirming their “suspicions that these countries are trying to conceal evidence, or to cover up the sponsors and perpetrators of these acts of sabotages.”

Russia has been doing its own investigation into the sabotage, including underwater surveys. It has not, to date, released any forensic evidence to support its assertion that “Anglo-Saxon” powers or the U.S. were behind the explosions. At a U.N. Security Council meeting in February, Russia’s representative Vassily Nebenzia cited investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s report accusing the U.S. of carrying out the attack. “This journalist is telling the truth,” he said. “This is more than just a smoking gun that detectives love in Hollywood blockbusters. It’s a basic principle of justice; everything is in your hands, and we can resolve this today.”

Denmark and Sweden have cited procedural matters and national regulations as to why they aren’t collaborating with Russia. But it’s pretty obvious that they have also adopted the position that Russia should be viewed as a suspect in the sabotage and wouldn’t want to invite it into the probe, particularly given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It should be noted that Sweden also refused an official joint investigation with its own allies from the onset, opting for a less formal cooperative arrangement. German officials have publicly confirmed their investigation into a “pro-Ukrainian” group and its possible connection to the attack on the pipeline, but have also cautioned that it could be a “false flag” intended to conceal the sponsor.

Russia’s recent maneuvers signal that it is becoming more aggressive in its rhetoric toward the two Scandinavian nations and Germany and is breaking some diplomatic protocols by making public its private communications with various nations. It is effectively arguing that the three national probes, which are backed by the U.S., are part of the Nord Stream bombing plot, and it wants to pull the U.N. in, where Russia would find a more neutral audience than NATO or the European Union. The backdrop to all of this, of course, is the public display of Russia-China unity that’s unfolded over the past year, culminating with President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Moscow. China, which is officially co-sponsoring the Russian resolution, has said it believes the attack was carried out by a state actor and that a U.N. investigation is needed to “uncover the truth and identify those responsible.”

Underwater Evidence?

Almost immediately after the pipeline explosion on September 26, 2022, the Russian government asked the governments of Sweden, Germany, and Denmark to participate in their national investigations into “deliberate acts of sabotage” against “one of the most important investment projects of the Russian Federation.” All three governments rejected Russia’s requests, and Moscow has said that they are not sharing any meaningful information with Russian authorities.

That position is hardly surprising given the war in Ukraine and the massive NATO and European weapons shipments aimed at defeating Moscow. Russia’s ambassador to Denmark, Vladimir Barbin, has been outspoken in his criticisms of the Danish government’s refusal to cooperate with Russia. He has rejected speculation Russia was behind the attacks, saying that its ships did not have access to the waters where the explosives were placed. “The preparation of such attacks requires time and direct presence in the area of sabotage, which was carried out in the exclusive economic zones of Denmark and Sweden,” Barbin said. “The Russian side, unlike the others, did not have permission for any underwater work or research in this area before the gas pipelines were blown up.”

Russia is effectively arguing that the three national probes, which are backed by the U.S., are part of the Nord Stream bombing plot.

The sabotage of the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines occurred in the Baltic Sea waters stretching around the Danish island of Bornholm and extending to the southeast of the Swedish coast. The Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, nestled between Lithuania and Poland, is to the east of the area. The Nord Stream pipelines are majority-owned by Russia’s state-run energy firm Gazprom.

In contrast to Barbin’s contentions, a new report published by the German outlet T-Online, asserts that Russian vessels, possibly including a mini-submarine, were operating in the waters near the blast sites days before the sabotage. The article cites open-source satellite data and relied on information provided by an anonymous “intelligence source.”

On February 17, the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry fired off letters not only to Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, but also to the U.S. and Norway, charging an apparent cover-up. On March 1, Russia submitted its correspondence with those nations to the U.N. Security Council as part of Moscow’s push for the U.N. to initiate its own independent probe of the Nord Stream attack.

The U.S., which opposes the resolution, has portrayed Russia’s efforts to litigate the pipeline bombing at the security council as a “blatant attempt to distract” from its yearlong war in Ukraine. In a joint letter submitted to the council in late February, Germany, Sweden and Denmark claimed, “Russian authorities have been informed regarding the ongoing investigations,” adding that the three nations “have been in dialogue regarding the investigation of the gas leaks, and the dialogue will continue to the relevant extent.”

On February 21, a Gazprom-contracted ship doing a survey discovered an antenna-like device that Russia alleged might be a component of the materials used in the sabotage of the pipeline or part of a triggering mechanism for an unexploded bomb on an underwater pipe. “Specialists believe it might be an antenna to receive a signal to detonate an explosive device that could have been — I’m not certain, but it’s possible — planted under the pipeline system,” said Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in an interview with Russian television on March 14. “It appears that several explosive devices were planted,” Putin said, adding, “Some of them went off, and some didn’t. The reasons are unclear.”

He also alleged that the device was discovered attached to an undersea pipe junction on the only string of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline where no explosion was registered last September. “We would like to receive permission from the Danish government [to] conduct the necessary examination either on our own, or jointly with them,” Putin said. “Better yet, establish an international group of experts and bomb engineers that could work at a depth like that. And if need be, to defuse the explosive device, of course, if there is one down there.” Putin said his government had made discreet inquiries to the Danish authorities proposing a joint effort. “Their response was ambiguous,” he said. “To put it bluntly, there was really no answer at all. They said that [we] need to wait.”

Denmark’s government ultimately confirmed that there was an object in the area identified by the Russians and that it was investigating. There was a flurry of activity in late March — with Danish military vessels and diving ships congregating in the waters around the site identified by the personnel aboard the Glomar Worker, the ship that reportedly found the suspicious object. On March 21, the Danish newspaper Berlingske reported that Russia believes the “antenna” was “part of a device from an explosive charge on the last of the four Nord Stream gas pipelines.” Only three of the lines were successfully damaged in the sabotage, and it has confounded researchers why one was left intact. “It is a cylindrical object about 30 centimeters high and 10-15 centimeters in diameter and was located approximately 28 kilometers from the explosion site,” Barbin said in a statement to Berlingske. “It was installed at a welding joint on the B line.”

On March 23, the Danish Energy Agency released a photograph of an object roughly fitting the dimensions offered by Russia. The object appeared to have been submerged for a long time and was covered by a layer of algae or other foliage. “It is possible that the object is a maritime smoke buoy,” asserted the Danish statement. Such devices are commonly used to mark an area where someone has gone overboard or to alert other ships to a problem. The government agency said it had invited the owners of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, effectively Russia, to participate in the salvage. The Kremlin labeled the Danish invitation “positive news.”

It’s possible that the Danish government is essentially trolling the Russians by posting the photo and making a public offering to allow Russia to participate in the retrieval of what Denmark alleges is a harmless civilian device but that Moscow implied was potentially an unexploded bomb.

In its initial news report on the Danish invitation to Russia to participate in retrieving the object, the Russian state-owned TASS news agency did not mention the possibility it was a “smoke buoy,” instead doubling down on Russian theories it may be a component of an unexploded device. “It is critically important to determine what kind of object it is, whether it is related to this terrorist act — apparently it is — and to continue this investigation,” said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on March 24. “And this investigation must be transparent.” Denmark has said “the object does not pose an immediate safety risk.”

In a recent op-ed in the Danish newspaper Altinget, Barbin, the Russian ambassador, accused Denmark of engaging in speculative analysis since the explosion last September with an aim to assign blame for the attack. In Danish media, some prominent military analysts have spent considerable time discussing potential Russian culpability for blowing up its own pipeline. Barbin asserted that this “intellectual exercise, without presenting facts that should be verifiable, leads to a dead end and benefits only those who are afraid of the truth.” He said Denmark should provide an update to a variety of questions: “Which naval vessels — including military ships — were present in the sabotage area? Are there any witnesses who have been questioned and what is their testimony? Were fragments of broken gas pipelines raised and what are the results of their research? Which companies — especially foreign ones — were allowed to work in Denmark’s and Sweden’s exclusive economic zone, and were their activities audited?”

These are all fair questions, which may well be answered once the governments complete their probes. Denmark and Sweden have both remained tightlipped, and scant details have leaked from either government. While there are likely multiple layers contributing to the hyper-secrecy, the stakes are obviously high, particularly if evidence leads to a nation-state actor, such as the U.S., Russia, or Ukraine, as the perpetrator.

False Flag vs. “False Concoctions”

In the public discourse, Seymour Hersh’s report in February that the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up in a covert operation authorized by President Joe Biden has become something of a Rorschach test in the broader context of the war in Ukraine and the hostilities between the U.S., NATO, and Russia.

Hersh himself is entirely unfazed by the mounting attacks on his credibility. This, he asserts, is what powerful forces do: They seek to destroy the messenger to distract from the crime. When pressed on some of the criticism of his reporting, including apparent inconsistencies raised by open-source data on ship and aircraft movements during the alleged operation, Hersh has cut his questioners short and asserted that he hasn’t even published 20 percent of what he knows or what his sources have told him. He has all but said that he used additional sources and is playing his own game of cat and mouse to protect them. Moreover, he has argued, these OSINT warriors are naive to believe that the CIA and other U.S. agencies would not have taken extensive steps to cloak the operation.

At 85 years old, Hersh is staking his storied and well-earned reputation as one of the premiere muckrakers in modern U.S. history on the veracity of this one story. It may appear to be a crazy gamble, particularly if it is based on a single source, but it also serves as a powerful symbol of how right Hersh believes he is. In essence, Hersh is forcing the question: Do we really believe Sy Hersh would do this if it wasn’t true?

This same dynamic has played out with several of Hersh’s stories over the past decade since he left the New Yorker. It was true of his 2015 story for the London Review of Books alleging that President Barack Obama and his administration lied about almost every detail of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. And it was also the case with both his 2013 LRB article and his 2017 story for the German newspaper Welt asserting that the U.S. was falsely accusing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian army of using chemical weapons. Hersh’s detractors say he is not the journalist he once was and is peddling false theories based on dubious or fictional assertions from anonymous sources. Hersh maintains he got these stories right and that he continues to use the same quality of fact-checker, editor, and lawyer he had reviewing his work at the New Yorker.

In his most recent post on Substack, Hersh criticizes reports in the New York Times and multiple German media outlets that among the perpetrators of the sabotage was a “pro-Ukrainian group” that rented a private boat using false passports. Hersh alleged that the entire story, based on anonymous U.S. intelligence and German law enforcement sources, was a false-flag operation and that the assertions published by the Times and Die Zeit “originated with a group of CIA experts in deception and propaganda whose mission was to feed the newspaper a cover story—and to protect a president who made an unwise decision and is now lying about it.” Hersh writes:

“It was a total fabrication by American intelligence that was passed along to the Germans, and aimed at discrediting your story,” I was told by a source within the American intelligence community. The disinformation professionals inside the CIA understand that a propaganda gambit can only work if those on receiving are desperate for a story that can diminish or displace an unwanted truth. And the truth in question is that President Joe Biden authorized the destruction of the pipelines and will have a difficult time explaining away his action as Germany and its Western European neighbors suffer as businesses are shuttered amid high day-to-day energy costs.

Hersh also asserted that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit to the White House in early March was, in part, aimed at preparing the rollout of the cover story developed by the CIA and its German counterparts. “I was told by someone with access to diplomatic intelligence that there was a discussion of the pipeline exposé and, as a result, certain elements in the Central Intelligence Agency were asked to prepare a cover story in collaboration with German intelligence that would provide the American and German press with an alternative version for the destruction of Nord Stream 2,” Hersh writes. “In the words of the intelligence community, the agency was ‘to pulse the system’ in an effort to discount the claim that Biden had ordered the pipelines’ destruction.”

Hersh is staking his storied and well-earned reputation as one of the premiere muckrakers in modern U.S. history on the veracity of this one story.

For people who have already concluded that Hersh is either fabricating this story or relying on bad sources, his latest story is evidence that he is trapped in a hall of mirrors and seeing conspiracies in every direction he looks. Holger Stark, the lead reporter on the German story Hersh claims was the product of a CIA deception campaign, addressed Hersh in a tweet: “Sy, old colleague, I admire your historical work and it hurts tremendously to say it: But this is, at least in respect to our work at Die Zeit, complete BS. And if you write about me: call next time before you publish. You would avoid a lot of mistakes.” Stark has collaborated with The Intercept on an investigation into the U.S. drone program and Germany’s role and was one of the main German journalists reporting on Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency documents for Der Spiegel.

For those who believe that Hersh has correctly identified the perpetrator of the Nord Stream bombing — the U.S. government — it is plausible that the information fed to the Times and German news outlets about the “pro-Ukrainian group” is suspicious and part of a deception operation. Last June — two months before the Nord Stream explosions — the CIA reportedly offered German intelligence and other European governments a “strategic warning” of a potential plot to blow up the pipeline. According to the Wall Street Journal, “The warning included information about three Ukrainian nationals who were trying to rent out ships in countries bordering the Baltic Sea, including Sweden.”

It could well be that the U.S. was simply sharing its intel with allies with a direct stake in such an action. It could also be that this is where a potential deception operation involving a “pro-Ukrainian group” began. What does not seem likely is that the cover story was created in response to Hersh. More plausible, if this is indeed a cover story, was that it was planned long before Hersh wrote his story and was designed to deceive or misdirect U.S. allies and the world about who was responsible. Stark, the German journalist who heads Die Zeit’s investigative unit, said he had been working on his story, based on the German criminal probe, for months and rushed to publish only after he learned the New York Times was going to post its “pro-Ukraine group” story, which was based on the claims of anonymous U.S. intelligence operatives. Hersh later updated his piece to reflect this.

In his latest story, Hersh lambasted the U.S. press corps for refusing to ask the White House about his assertions the U.S. blew up the pipeline. “There is no evidence that any reporter assigned there has yet to ask the White House press secretary whether Biden had done what any serious leader would do: formally ‘task’ the American intelligence community to conduct a deep investigation, with all of its assets, and find out just who had done the deed in the Baltic Sea. According to a source within the intelligence community, the president has not done so, nor will he. Why not? Because he knows the answer.”

I asked the White House Hersh’s specific question and also for comment on Hersh’s assertions about the private meeting between Biden and Scholz and the CIA manufacturing a cover story. In a statement, National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson did not directly address any of my questions. “These stories are totally false concoctions,” Watson said. “We can say categorically that the United States was not involved in the Nord Stream explosions in any way. We continue to support efforts with our allies and partners to get to the bottom of what happened.”

During Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s appearance before the House Committee on Appropriations on March 23, Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, asked Blinken: “You’re now in a formal setting. Can you assure the world that no agency of the U.S. government blew up those pipelines or facilitated that action?”

“Yes, I can,” Blinken replied.

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Ever since it pushed aside colonial Britain and France, the United States has prided itself on being the dominant outside power in the Middle East. That lofty image was shaken this past week by the surprise announcement that Saudi Arabia, a close U.S. partner, and Iran, a longtime enemy, had negotiated a normalization agreement on their own to restore diplomatic ties. The final meeting to conclude the agreement took place in the Chinese capital of Beijing.

The symbolism of the signatures being put on paper with the support of the preeminent U.S. adversary China without an American presence starkly underlined the failures of an approach to the Middle East that prioritized belligerence and confrontation over cooperation and impartiality. Few can deny that U.S. policy has ended up playing a destabilizing role in regional geopolitics.

For years, hawks have argued that U.S. military and political drawdowns from the Middle East risk generating a chaotic vacuum. What unfolded in Beijing appears to be the inverse. Rather than dissuading conflict, the American role as an enforcer for certain powers against others has incentivized them to pursue policies like military aggression and even apartheid out of a sense of assurance that an outside superpower will always have their back.

The scene of two Middle Eastern rivals negotiating peace on their own also strengthens the arguments of noninterventionist foreign policy advocates. These figures have long argued that the U.S.’s presence itself has been an accelerant for regional conflicts. In the end, an increasing reluctance on the part of the U.S. to get more directly involved in the region, rather than fomenting chaos, incentivized local powers to sort things out on their own — exactly what are now seeing with the Iran-Saudi deal.

For all the challenges that a post-American world may entail, U.S. hegemony in the Middle East has been an undeniably disastrous project both for Americans and especially the people of the region. By engaging in direct violence, as well as enabling its aggressive client states, the U.S. helped turn the Middle East into a nightmare of instability. Yet as U.S. influence recedes and other countries adapt to its absence, a more sustainable status quo may be ready to emerge.

Saudi Arabia is a signal example. In years past, the erratic Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, seemed eager for war with Iran, publicly vowing to take the proxy conflict between the powers directly into Iranian territory and comparing Iran’s supreme leader to Hitler. These provocative statements were undergirded by an implicit assumption that the U.S. would be doing the heavy lifting in a future war and ensure Saudi Arabia’s defense.

Yet, in 2019, after years of the Saudi government’s feting of President Donald Trump, following an Iranian attack on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil facilities, many Saudis were shocked to find that the U.S. government did not retaliate on their behalf.

The realization after the Abqaiq incident that Saudi Arabia was on its own and would never enjoy Israel-like security guarantees in Washington, painful as it may have been, ultimately helped spur years of peace talks between Iranian and Saudi officials in Iraq and Oman that have now reached their conclusion in Beijing.

The Saudis may have preferred to see a destructive U.S. war against Iran so long as they were provided their own American security umbrella to shield them from the blowback — a classic moral hazard. With that prospect off the table, peace gradually became the more attractive option.

“When Trump didn’t retaliate for the Abqaiq attack, that sent shockwaves throughout the region. If the U.S. had continued to show a willingness to fight for Saudi Arabia and uphold Saudi security, MBS never would’ve gone down path of diplomacy in first place,” said Trita Parsi, president of the D.C.-based realist foreign policy think tank the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “This shows how U.S. military power has actually become an obstacle to security and stability in the region. As long as MBS felt that he could hide behind U.S. military power, that was more attractive to him than going down the difficult road of diplomacy with Iran.”

“This shows how U.S. military power has actually become an obstacle to security and stability in the region.”

Saudi Arabia and Iran still have serious obstacles to overcome to achieve a lasting détente. The normalization deal has a two-month implementation period before the return of ambassadors to their respective capitals, allowing time for outside parties, including Israel, which has objected loudly to the agreement, to act as spoilers. The two countries remain on opposite sides of the conflict in Yemen, which is still unresolved and poses a serious security threat to Saudi Arabia, while Iran is facing domestic unrest that has humiliated its government and thrown its economy into turmoil.

The deal includes a mutual agreement by the parties to stay out of each other’s domestic affairs — a clause that will also require some major course corrections. Saudi Arabia, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, has indicated it will modify the coverage of Iran International, a Saudi-funded Persian-language television station that has become a favored outlet for anti-regime Iranian political activists, as well as, allegedly, Israeli intelligence.

Despite these challenges, if the agreement between them holds, it would put Saudi Arabia outside of the firing line of a possible U.S.-Israeli campaign to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities. Following the U.S. decision to violate the Iran nuclear deal — or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, known as the JCPOA — the likelihood of armed conflict is looking higher than ever.

Saudi Arabia’s agreement with Iran appears to be an attempt to stay out of the fray in case a war comes to pass. Yet it also signals the U.S.’s own relative isolation in the region, outside of its lockstep relationship with Israel, as it presses forward with a campaign to isolate Iran that even its own partners have begun to balk at.

“The Saudi-Iran agreement comes at a time when there is widespread acceptance that the JCPOA is not going to be revived and is effectively dead,” said Kristian Ulrichsen, the Middle East fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “The Biden administration is running of patience with Iran and its statements are becoming increasingly hawkish. But China moving in now and successfully engaging with the main regional antagonists suggests that the rest of the region does not share any U.S. or Israeli desire for escalation.”

U.S. officials have said time and again that they will not be turning attention away from the Middle East. Yet the country’s track record in the region has not been a good one.

Americans have suffered military casualties and terrorist blowback because of elite-driven interventions. The civilian population of the region has suffered more gravely — with millions killed, maimed, or displaced by American wars, immiserated under U.S. sanctions regimes, or repressed by U.S.-backed dictatorships and military occupations.

Now it seems like the U.S. may have exhausted its runway for pursuing similarly disastrous adventures in the future.

“The U.S. foreign policy establishment is not good at learning — it takes a lot of suffering, and sometimes killing and dying, for them to learn a lesson,” said Justin Logan, an expert at the Cato Institute. “If you look at the people involved in making U.S. policy for the region, many of them are still maximalists. But things have still improved, and we are not going to see a repeat of the Iraq War anytime soon.”

Although it cuts against the interests of a small yet vocal minority of D.C.-based hawks, a pivot from the region would be a welcome sign for many in the wake of years of military and diplomatic failures.

Recent farcical U.S. diplomatic agreements like the Abraham Accords did not entail any actual cessation of active hostilities and were largely based on U.S. concessions rather than any made by the involved parties. Unlike those deals, the Chinese-brokered rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran represents a genuine diplomatic accomplishment in which two rival powers were convinced to make compromises in the name of peace.

The U.S.’s extreme stances on various issues have not done it any favors. On the Israel-Palestine conflict, for instance, the U.S. makes no secret of its slanted position. And on issues like the Iran nuclear deal, the U.S. stance was erratic, violating the agreement shortly after it was signed. Outside powers like China have proven able to exploit the low bar of U.S. diplomatic performance in the region and position themselves as preferred mediators.

“In order to be able to serve as an effective mediator, you need to have a reputation of being fair. The U.S. has been clear that it does not want to be fair — it has not been impartial between Israelis and Palestinians, and it wouldn’t be impartial between Saudi Arabia and Iran,” said Parsi of the Quincy Institute. “This stance has disabled its ability to be an effective broker and peacemaker in the region. Now that other states are stepping into the vacuum to play that role, we are really going to start to see the costs of pursuing a policy that is explicitly perceived as biased.”

The Middle East is sufficiently far away from the U.S. that fomenting continued chaos through military interventions and abysmal diplomatic endeavors there may actually be politically acceptable in Washington. With rising powers taking a role in the region and the U.S. grappling with other challenges, a healthier status quo may be given space to emerge.

As Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud acknowledged after the announcement of the normalization deal with Iran, “The countries of the region share one fate.”

The post Saudi-Iran Deal’s Key Factor: No U.S. Involvement appeared first on The Intercept.

In the month since veteran journalist Seymour Hersh published his bombshell report alleging that President Joe Biden personally authorized a covert action to bomb the Nord Stream pipelines, we’ve seen a frenzy of speculation, detailed dissection of Hersh’s specific assertions, and the emergence of competing narratives both supporting and denouncing the report.

The question of whether Hersh’s story is accurate — either in whole or in part — is of monumental significance, and there are some issues related to this story that have not received as much attention as they deserve. Among these are questions surrounding the legal and constitutional framework the Biden administration would have used if, as Hersh’s source alleges, Biden directly ordered the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines. There is also an emerging counternarrative to Hersh’s reporting from U.S. intelligence that warrants scrutiny, both on its merits and for how it might relate to Hersh’s story.

“A Pro-Ukrainian Group”

On March 7, the New York Times and the German newspaper Die Zeit both published stories that thicken the plot. The Times story was based on a narrative clearly being pushed by U.S. intelligence sources that “a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack.” The Times asserted that a “review of newly collected intelligence suggests they were opponents of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, but does not specify the members of the group, or who directed or paid for the operation.” The report was spartan in its specifics, used no named sources, and seemed reminiscent of other efforts by anonymous U.S. intelligence sources to launder a narrative under the guise of a news scoop. “U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains,” the report said. “They have said that there are no firm conclusions about it, leaving open the possibility that the operation might have been conducted off the books by a proxy force with connections to the Ukrainian government or its security services.”

The Times report was almost immediately contested by reporting in CNN and the Washington Post, downplaying the certainty of U.S. officials that the intelligence was accurate. An unnamed senior administration official told the Washington Post, “My understanding is that we don’t find this conclusive.” The Ukrainian government has denied any connection to the operation, saying it “absolutely did not participate in the attack on Nord Stream 2.”

Die Zeit’s investigation, conducted with public broadcasters ARD and SWR, was based on a German criminal probe led by the federal police. Die Zeit reports that its journalists identified the boat that was allegedly used in the operation. “It is said to be a yacht rented from a company based in Poland, apparently owned by two Ukrainians. According to the investigation, the secret operation at sea was carried out by a team of six people. It is said to have been five men and one woman,” according to the report. “The group consisted of a captain, two divers, two diving assistants and a doctor, who are said to have transported the explosives to the crime scenes and placed them there. The nationality of the perpetrators is apparently unclear.” They allegedly “used professionally forged passports, which are said to have been used, among other things, to rent the boat.”

In response to the story, Germany’s defense minister Boris Pistorius said, “We need to clearly differentiate whether it was a Ukrainian group that acted on the orders of Ukraine or … without the government’s knowledge.”

These new reports offer no concrete evidence or credible explanation for how this alleged group may have conducted the sabotage operation.

Die Zeit’s story appears to challenge Hersh’s central narrative, which offered a mass of detailed information about how exactly the U.S. allegedly carried out its attack on the pipeline, including details about the specific forces and ships involved in the operation and a technical description of how they planted and detonated the explosives. But these new reports do not actually contradict Hersh’s story, because they offer no concrete evidence or credible explanation for how this alleged group may have conducted the sabotage operation.

The German report, written by Holger Stark, made no allegation of any nation-state involvement in the attack but noted that “it is not excluded that this is also a false flag operation,” which “means that traces could also have been deliberately laid that point to Ukraine as the culprit. However, the investigators have apparently found no evidence that confirms such a scenario.” In an interview with a German radio station, Pistorius said he cannot rule out a “false flag” operation “to blame pro-Ukrainian groups and make it look that way.” That probability, he asserted, was “equally high.”

Researchers specializing in open-source intelligence, or OSINT, have loudly concluded that Hersh’s reporting does not add up and is easily debunked by tracking publicly available data on the movements of ships, aircraft, and other vessels at the time of the alleged operation. Hersh has summarily dismissed these critics, asserting that U.S. intelligence understands quite well the need to circumvent such OSINT vulnerabilities and had taken measures — including, perhaps, the disabling of location transponders — to ensure the integrity of the operation. “If you’re in the intelligence community, you’ve been running covert ops for years,” Hersh said, “certainly, the first thing you look at is how to take care of open-source people, make them think what happened isn’t happening.”

Some of the doubts and criticism aimed at Hersh’s piece, especially the fact that it appears to rely on a single source, are valid, but Hersh has a long track record of breaking major stories about covert operations and U.S. war crimes. And he has frequently proved his critics wrong. Hersh’s narrative also has the benefit of abundant public circumstantial evidence in the form of statements by the president and his advisers appearing to threaten to take out the pipeline and then gloating once it was destroyed. The U.S. had the motive and the means to carry out the operation.

When Hersh contacted the Biden administration for comment on his story, a White House spokesperson said, “This is false and complete fiction,” while the CIA told him, “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

The New York Times has not published serious reporting — or any reporting — on the substance of Hersh’s allegations or the denials from the White House and other government agencies. But in its piece on the “pro-Ukrainian group” the Times mentions Hersh’s report in the 23rd graph of the story. “Last month, the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article on the newsletter platform Substack concluding that the United States carried out the operation at the direction of Mr. Biden. In making his case, Mr. Hersh cited the president’s preinvasion threat to ‘bring an end’ to Nord Stream 2, and similar statements by other senior U.S. officials,” the report said. “U.S. officials say Mr. Biden and his top aides did not authorize a mission to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines, and they say there was no U.S. involvement.”

In an interview on “The Daily,” a New York Times podcast, one of the reporters on the story, Julian Barnes, was asked if he knows who did the bombing. “Yeah, we think we do know,” he replied. But later in the nearly 30-minute discussion, he said, “I should be very clear that we know really very little, right? This group remains mysterious and it remains mysterious, not just to us, but also to the U.S. government officials that we have spoken to. They know that the people involved were either Ukrainian or Russian or a mix. They know that they are not affiliated with the Ukrainian government, but they know they’re also anti-Putin and pro-Ukraine.”

Barnes described the evolution of the pro-Ukraine story as beginning with the Times reporters speaking to U.S. intelligence officials. He said that initially the Times had been focusing its probe into the bombing on the Russian and Ukrainian governments, but that it was “just hitting dead end after dead end,” so the reporters “started asking a different question: ‘Could this have been done by nonstate actors? Could this have been done by a group of individuals who were not working for a government?’” Barnes added, “The more we talked to officials who had access to intelligence, the more we saw this theory gaining traction.” Barnes did not mention Hersh’s story on the podcast.

Despite the claim that this story emerged from a speculative hunch on the part of the Times reporters, it certainly appears to be an effort by some forces within U.S. intelligence to rework and spin the previous narrative that sought to imply that Russia itself had blown up the pipeline. Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and other nations have spent months investigating the explosion. The Times story could be an indication that after doing forensic and other investigations, Washington’s allies do not believe that Russia was behind the attack. Several European media outlets, including the Times of London, reported that European investigators zeroed in on the alleged pro-Ukrainian group very soon after the explosion, despite the fact that it only hit the news media in the past week. It may turn out that this is precisely what happened, and that the U.S. had nothing to do with the operation. But it would be unwise — and would require a complete disregard of U.S. history — to assume without evidence that the inferences of anonymous U.S. officials are genuine.

“I don’t know what happened here but it would be naive and irresponsible for journalists to take U.S. intel agencies’ claims at face value,” said Jameel Jaffer, a former lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who spent years battling the Bush and Obama administrations over issues of secrecy and national security.

Floating Narratives

If the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines was, as Hersh alleges, directed by the U.S., then the leaked suggestion that the culprits were a “pro-Ukrainian group” could indicate a nascent effort at floating a cover story. There is also the possibility that some elements within the U.S. government ran a covert operation using deniable assets, such as Ukrainian “partisans” operating with fake passports. Further, “pro-Ukrainian group” is so vague that it could apply to an infinite number of actors, including former U.S. military or intelligence personnel or those of an allied nation. Die Zeit reported that the alleged perpetrators rented a yacht from a Polish company owned by two Ukrainians. According to the report, the group failed to clean the yacht they allegedly used in the operation, leading investigators to discover residue from explosives on a table in the cabin. This is either unbelievably sloppy tradecraft, evidence of total amateurism, or an intentional “clue” left with the intent to deceive. The U.S. or another nation could have used such a team as a patsy operation to mislead investigators and cover the tracks of the actual perpetrators.

There are recent precedents for foreign actors taking credit for U.S. operations to conceal Washington’s involvement.

No one has claimed responsibility for this attack, but there are recent precedents for foreign actors taking credit for U.S. operations to conceal Washington’s involvement. This was the case when President Barack Obama authorized a cruise missile attack in Yemen in December 2009, which killed more than three dozen people, most of them women and children. The Yemeni government announced it had conducted the strikes, a claim later proven false when a journalist photographed the remnants of U.S. cluster munitions. In fact, this practice of cloaking the U.S. role in drone and other airstrikes in Yemen was common during the Obama administration.

European news outlets have been aggressively pursuing the story of the private boat that U.S. and German intelligence have suggested was used by the “pro-Ukrainian group.” Some of the open-source researchers who criticized Hersh’s version of events have also identified inconsistencies and problems with the initial reporting on this new theory. Among these are questions of how such a small vessel could have transported the quantity of explosives allegedly used in the attack on the Nord Stream, the extreme difficulty such a small team on a yacht would face in pulling off the operation, and the perplexing narrative about the alleged land route they used to deliver the explosives to the ship. Some analysts have also raised doubt that a small team of divers would have the technical capacity to have pulled off such a complicated and deep dive or why they would choose a difficult access point to place the explosives.

I am not saying I believe any specific theory about the Nord Stream explosion at present, including Hersh’s. But I am not about to denounce Hersh’s reporting. He has repeatedly been accused of being wrong, only later to be proven right. That was true of My Lai, it was true of the CIA’s domestic spying in the 1970s, and it was true of the secret plans to manufacture a “weapons of mass destruction” threat in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, and countless other stories throughout his career. I am confident that if Hersh publishes a story, he believes that it is true and that he has a source or sources he has deemed reliable who are providing information. That does not mean that he or his sources are always right about every detail. In that sense, the ultimate question of credibility for Hersh’s story rests exclusively on his source’s level of direct access to the planning and their personal firsthand knowledge about the execution of the operation.

Like many reasonable observers who understand the history of U.S. covert actions, I am following the developments closely, with an open mind. It is possible for a journalist to get many details correct while also being fed some unreliable information by sources who are passing off speculation as fact. This is one of the major risks of single-sourced reporting, no matter how reliable the source is. Very few people in government are privy to every single detail of a covert operation, and I know from experience that sometimes sources know a lot about some aspects of a program or operation but are trying to fill in the blanks about the aspects they do not know directly. This is not done out of malice or with an intent to deceive, but because that’s how many people operate. Sometimes it is difficult to parse fact from speculation with sensitive sources who are reluctant to talk, especially if the source does not make clear what they know to be true and what they suspect to be true.

It is also possible that sources themselves have been fed bad or incomplete information and pass it along sincerely believing it to be true. There are many instances too where assertions confirmed by more than one source and published by major publications with substantial resources turn out to be false. Despite getting some details wrong, it is still possible for a reporter to get the overarching conclusion right.

It remains conceivable that Hersh correctly identified the sponsor of the Nord Stream attack, even if some of the details provided by his source were speculative, inaccurate, or based on outdated operational plans.

Oversight and Authority

There is another important set of questions to consider: If the U.S. did carry out the strike on the Nord Stream with Biden’s direct authorization, under what authority would the operation have been conducted? Under what legal basis would Biden and his administration have to keep even senior congressional leadership out of the loop and then blatantly lie about it to the public?

It’s worth nothing that as a young senator, Biden played a role in creating the permanent congressional intelligence committees and in crafting laws regulating the oversight of the CIA and covert actions in the aftermath of the Nixon-era lawlessness.

First, let’s review what Hersh reported about the authorities at play in the alleged operation. “The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. ‘This is not kiddie stuff,’ the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, ‘It’s an act of war.’”

According to Hersh, things changed after remarks Biden made on February 7, 2022, as he stood next to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the East Room at the White House. “If Russia invades … there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it,” said Biden. “We will — I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.” Hersh’s source said the framework for the operation shifted to a military umbrella because senior CIA officers determined that destroying the pipeline could “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.” Hersh writes, “The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, ‘There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it — but it still had to be secret.’”

“There is supposed to be at least some congressional notification of any covert action.”

I consulted several constitutional law scholars and experts on U.S. covert actions to explore the legal framework within which the Biden administration would have needed to operate to carry out such an operation. All of the sources I spoke with said it would be a serious violation of law if such a covert action were not briefed to at least some senior U.S. lawmakers. At a minimum, the operation would need to be reported to the so-called Gang of Eight — the House speaker and minority leader, the Senate majority and minority leaders, the chair and ranking members of both intelligence committees — either beforehand or, if necessary for the integrity of the operation, shortly thereafter. In that case, the president would be required to provide an explanation as to why Congress was not briefed ahead of time. In rare cases, presidents have chosen to brief only four members of Congress, though the practice has no basis in U.S. statute. “There is supposed to be at least some congressional notification of any covert action,” said Steven Aftergood, who served as director of the Government Secrecy Project at the Federation of American Scientists from 1991-2021. “If notification is not provided in advance, it must still be given in ‘a timely fashion.’ Failure to do so would be a violation of law.”

Within the U.S. laws governing military and intelligence operations, there are gray areas. Title 50 of the U.S. code sets out the rules and structures for intelligence operations, while Title 10 covers military actions. The code under which a particular operation is performed has serious implications for oversight and accountability. A covert action requires the drafting of a presidential “finding,” or memorandum of notification, and the White House must brief the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on its contents. This briefing must occur before the covert action unless there are “extraordinary circumstances.” The requirements for congressional involvement were established to prevent scandals such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and other dubious CIA operations.

Military doctrine defines another class of activities, “clandestine operations,” in which the point of secrecy is to protect the integrity of the mission, not to conceal its sponsor, the U.S. government. The military may conduct operations that are both covert and clandestine, but these are rare. Unlike covert actions, clandestine operations do not require a presidential finding if “future hostilities” are “anticipated” in the country where they are taking place. Nor is the administration required to report the operation to Congress. Such operations are defined as “traditional military activities,” or TMAs, and offer the intelligence committees no real-time oversight rights. Under U.S. law, the military is not required to disclose the specific actions of an operation, but the U.S. role in the “overall operation” should be “apparent” or eventually “acknowledged.”

Hersh’s source said the “covert action” was officially changed to a U.S. military operation after Biden’s public threat and that it used regular U.S. Navy divers instead of those from U.S. Special Operations Command “whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance,” thus eliminating the reporting requirement to the intelligence committees. “What qualifies as TMA has long been a subject of push and pull between Congress and the executive,” said University of Houston constitutional law scholar Emily Berman. “So the bottom line is that what rules apply would depend on which authority the President relied on to carry out the mission, which will often not be evident.”

“To the extent that ‘traditional military activities’ can look a lot like covert actions, congressional notification is only required under Title 50 (covert action) operations, not Title 10 (military) ones,” explained Melinda Haas, an assistant professor of international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, in an email. “It isn’t possible to know up front, however, whether a certain behavior is considered a ‘covert action.’”

The military, while not subject to the select committees on intelligence, does have its own reporting requirements to the Senate and House Armed Services committees. While there is a debate about what sort of congressional oversight would be required if the action was done under a military umbrella, it would be brazen for Biden’s administration and the Pentagon leadership to refuse to do so. Even the notoriously secretive and anti-oversight George W. Bush administration briefed four members of Congress, including Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., in January 2003 about the existence of CIA torture videos. It is also true that the CIA subsequently spied illegally on Senate torture investigators.

Robert Litt, the former general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under President Barack Obama, told me that he thought it was unlikely that the U.S. carried out the operation, but that if it did so, regardless of which U.S. forces performed such an operation, it would still “fall within a well-established statutory framework for covert action.” Litt said, “If a ‘highly classified intelligence operation’ is intended to affect conditions abroad and not to be acknowledged, it is a covert action under the law, and has to be treated as such. I don’t think this would be considered to fall within the traditional military activity exemption even though that may be what [Hersh’s] source is imprecisely referring to.”

If, as Hersh’s source alleges, no members of Congress were read into this operation, it would mean that Biden essentially adopted an Iran-Contra-style strategy of boxing out legislative oversight entirely, potentially setting himself up for a public scandal of epic proportions. There is, however, precedent for this. A 1986 memo prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel during the Reagan administration argued that the president was “within his authority in maintaining the secrecy” of a covert operation “from Congress until such time as he believed that disclosure to Congress would not interfere with the success of the operation.”

While this is not unfathomable in light of U.S. history, that likelihood seems low when you look at the vast number of agencies and people within the U.S. government — including an interagency working group with people from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury departments — who were allegedly working on the plans. Not to mention a foreign government and a cover story of a highly publicized NATO training exercise. This would mean mid-level U.S. government bureaucrats and foreign officials were read into the operation, but not senior members of Congress with statutory oversight authorities and sworn secrecy oaths.

“I believe that if this activity had been done by the U.S., it is almost certain that at least the Gang of Eight was informed, and by now probably the full committees as well,” said Litt. “Given the requirement of congressional briefing, the likelihood of leaks, and the political situation in Washington, I would doubt that the president would take the risk of actually lying had this been a U.S. operation.” Litt added: “My bottom line is that I think it is highly unlikely that if the U.S. did this Congress was not briefed.”

Beyond the issue of whether Congress was informed of the alleged operation, it’s hard to imagine a scenario, if Hersh’s source is accurate, in which no one involved eventually confirms at least parts of Hersh’s reporting, or intentionally or unwittingly leaks details and backs up the claims. According to Hersh’s source, there were dissenters within the CIA and State Department who said, “Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.”

Hersh has been confronted with this exact question before, including after his 2015 story challenging the official narrative of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound was published. “How many people do you think in the American government in the years 2001, 2002, 2003 leading up to the late March attack on Iraq knew that the government was misrepresenting the intelligence on the WMD?” Hersh asked in an interview with NPR’s On the Media, adding that potentially thousands of government employees and contractors also knew that the National Security Agency was engaged in warrantless collection of the communications of American citizens prior to Edward Snowden’s revelations, but kept silent. “We’ve demonstrated that you can cow the bureaucracy, you can cow people to an extraordinary length in this society to the length where nobody’s going to go public on it,” Hersh added.

If the U.S. did blow up the pipeline, it could be that the administration did in fact inform some congressional leaders and they are assisting in concealing the operation. “I don’t know of any rule that would prevent the President from denying involvement in an operation that was designed to remain unacknowledged, as covert actions are,” said Berman.

“As for lying to the public, I’m not aware of any law that would prevent the President from doing that (there is certainly plenty of recent precedent for presidential prevarication), although more typically the approach is when asked about a covert action is not to comment,” Litt wrote in an email. He added that “the military’s position is that they will not affirmatively lie about military action.”

Regardless of the U.S. military’s official position on lying about its activities, it is undeniable that military officials have lied or misled the public at various points throughout U.S. history, including the recent case of an August 2021 drone strike in Afghanistan that killed 10 members of an Afghan family, including seven children. Whether it is lying or misdirecting the public in the Nord Stream case obviously depends on the veracity of the information provided by Hersh’s source. When the intent is to deceive an “enemy” nation or hostile force, rather than the U.S. public or Congress, the military has extensive guidelines for doing so.

Aftergood points out that there is no U.S. law or rule prohibiting the government from promoting a false alternative explanation to conceal an operation. “This is an established practice in military operations and intelligence activities where it is often known as ‘cover and deception,’” he said. “Sometimes, in order to maintain the operational security of X, you have to declare that it is actually Y.”

The post Conflicting Reports Thicken Nord Stream Bombing Plot appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

For nearly a decade in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the newly founded Islamic Republic of Iran waged a merciless war against each other. The fighting saw the return of World War I-style human-wave offensives, trench warfare, and chemical weapons attacks.

Though it dragged on for years, the Iran-Iraq war benefited neither side. In the end, the conflict claimed the lives of over a million people, since, despite the carnage and wishes of ordinary people on both sides to end it, no diplomatic solution proved possible over eight years of fighting.

There is good reason to worry that this ugly history is repeating itself today in Eastern Europe.

Like the Iran-Iraq war, the war in Ukraine was triggered by an expansionist dictator hoping to make quick work of a neighbor whom he had wrongly predicted would prove incapable of defending itself. Now, over a year into the fighting, the conflict, which has already claimed hundreds of thousands of casualties by some estimates, has ground to a bloody stalemate that has transformed once-anonymous Ukrainian towns like Bakhmut and Marinka into killing fields.

A peace treaty that puts a stop to this chaos is attractive for many obvious reasons, and foreign powers like China and India have recently indicated that they would like to encourage one. Yet observers say that all signs point to the war dragging on for years to come, with both sides — like Iranians and Iraqis in the past — committed to the belief that victory is within their grasp and that pressing the war forward is worthwhile.

“I don’t see any prospect of diplomacy. What both sides would accept as an equitable settlement to the war is very far apart,” said Rajan Menon, the author of “Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order” and a research fellow at Columbia University. Menon pointed to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s declaration that the four Russian-controlled Ukrainian provinces had already been annexed — a position he is extremely unlikely to back away from.

“I don’t see any prospect of diplomacy. What both sides would accept as an equitable settlement to the war is very far apart.”

“On the Ukrainian side,” Menon said, “because their country has been invaded and has witnessed immense destruction and atrocities, there is a coming together of Ukrainian sentiment to fight against Russia. They have no illusions about a quick victory and have already priced in that they will have to endure this for a long time.”

Menon argues that the war is thus likely to continue for many years to come, a prediction that is echoed by many other observers. Some have argued that the conflict will become a permanent part of the international system, only concluding if either Ukraine or Russia collapses, or both cease to exist as states. Even if a negotiated settlement emerges sometime in the future, the amount of destruction that will have likely taken place by that time will be staggering.

The war has already taken a devastating toll on the Ukrainian population, which has suffered civilian massacres and systematic destruction of infrastructure. Yet it has also proved damaging to Russia. In addition to suffering Western sanctions, which are likely to escalate in the years to come, huge numbers of young Russian men have been killed, wounded, or simply fled the country to escape military enlistment. According to The Economist, this exodus and killing off of young Russians means that there are now 10 million more Russian women than men in the country — a situation that portends a demographic nightmare for an already rapidly aging population.

In a sense, the U.S. has played a role in prolonging the conflict by heavily arming the Ukrainians to resist Russia’s aggression. The position has drawn scrutiny from some sectors of the U.S. political establishment. Noninterventionist foreign policy observers from the realist, right-wing, and left-wing camps have characterized the conflict as overly costly in financial terms, blamed the U.S. for provoking Russia with the prospect of NATO expansion, or suggested that it would be the lesser evil to cease arms shipments to the Ukrainians and let the conflict conclude swiftly, accepting a likely Russian victory.

What these positions fail to account for are the actions of Ukrainians, who, over a year of grueling fighting, have proven themselves very committed to preserving their own nationhood and territorial integrity.

“If you are calling to stop the war right now, and you’re a person on the left, you’re effectively telling Ukrainians to accept the partition of their country, which is the same position as the MAGA right,” Menon said. “Ukraine would have to cease existing as a coherent state and be truncated. But through his actions, Putin has kind of remade Ukrainian nationalism, and they have a commitment to win.”

Despite the unlikelihood of a negotiated outcome to the war coming any time soon, there are signs of longer-term planning for an endgame by the United States.

While U.S. leaders were glad to egg on the Iran-Iraq war for years — including arming both sides and helping facilitate chemical weapons attacks against Iran by Saddam — there seems to be less appetite for the risk of an indefinite conflict involving a nuclear power like Russia.

A recent report by the RAND Corporation laid out the consequences for the U.S. of a very long war in Ukraine, including the small but persistent possibility of nuclear escalation. The report acknowledged that Ukrainian and American interests may well diverge in the future, with Americans coming to prioritize ending the conflict over helping Ukraine regain full control of its occupied territory — a goal ultimately more important to Ukrainians than Americans.

“The U.S. is currently engaged in [a] protracted attempt to punish Russia because they have offended our moral sensibilities. I don’t think that is inherently wrong, but it’s different from saying that it’s a critical national security interest,” said Benjamin Friedman, policy director at the realist foreign policy think tank Defense Priorities and a lecturer at George Washington University. “We have already underlined that invading other countries in this day and age is very costly. Russia has been punished heavily for violating Ukrainian sovereignty, and I don’t think that anyone would look at them after today and say that they are an example to emulate.”

For now, the fighting will continue and may even increase. Ukraine is likely to pursue a counteroffensive against Russia this spring, even as soldiers on both sides continue to die in the grueling battle for the town of Bakhmut.

The U.S., for its part, is reportedly looking at upping its own support by providing F-16s to the Ukrainian military, with pilots now being brought stateside for training. Unlike in the Iran-Iraq war, where the U.S. armed both countries at various times in order to keep the conflict going and kill as many people on both sides as possible, in the Ukraine war, it has clearly picked one side to support to the hilt.

“The war has a low probability of a serious escalation, but the longer you continue to roll those dice, even if the odds are low, the more likely you are to hit on a future disaster.”

Faced with the Russian invasion, heavily arming Ukraine may indeed be the least bad option. Yet despite paying dividends in slain Russian troops, this policy, likely to keep the war going for a long time to come, will keep the risk of far more dangerous escalation alive down the road. Just as the horror of the Iran-Iraq war had unintended long-term consequences for U.S. politics in the Middle East, an endless conflict in Ukraine will likely give shape to an Eastern Europe that is more radicalized and dangerous for Americans in the future.

“A lot of people basically have the view that it’s great that we’re killing Russians and weakening Russia for the future. It will prevent them from invading other countries, and, so long as it’s Ukrainians who are signed up on the front lines, there’s no real issue for the United States,” said Friedman. “But the war going on and on is bad for the United States. The war has a low probability of a serious escalation, but the longer you continue to roll those dice, even if the odds are low, the more likely you are to hit on a future disaster.”

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The U.S. military allocated spending for secret contingency operations pertaining to an Iran war plan, according to a classified Pentagon budget manual listing emergency and special programs reviewed by The Intercept.

The contingency plan, code-named “Support Sentry,” was funded in 2018 and 2019, according to the manual, which was produced for the 2019 fiscal year. It classifies Support Sentry as an Iran “CONPLAN,” or concept plan, a broad contingency plan for war which the Pentagon develops in anticipation of a potential crisis.

The existence of Support Sentry has not been previously reported. It is not clear from the document how much the Pentagon spent on the plan in those years. When asked about the program and whether it is still in place, Maj. John Moore, a spokesperson for U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, said, “As a matter of policy, we do not comment on numbered plans. Iran remains the leading source of instability in the region and is a threat to the United States and our partners. We are constantly monitoring threat streams in coordination with our regional partners and will not hesitate to defend U.S. national interests in the region.”

Support Sentry is one example of the U.S. military’s growing comfort with – and support for — Israel’s aggressive stance toward Iran. As U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides’ bluntly put it earlier this month, “Israel can and should do whatever they need to deal with [Iran] and we’ve got their back.”

As major U.S. attempts at diplomacy with Iran collapsed under Trump, the Pentagon quietly moved Israel into its Central Command area of responsibility, officially grouping it with the mainly Arab countries of the Middle East. The reshuffling, which occurred in the final days of the Trump administration and has remained under Presidnt Joe Biden, is the military corollary to the financial and diplomatic alliances laid out by the Abraham Accords, a normalization agreement negotiated by Trump’s son-in-law and Middle East envoy, Jared Kushner, between Arab Gulf states and Israel. The accords were touted as a peace deal, but in fact served to align these countries against a common enemy: Iran.

The U.S. and Israel have also collaborated on a growing number of military exercises in recent months that Israeli leaders say are designed to test potential attack plans with Iran.

Contingency plans such as Support Sentry provide “the general outline—the overarching ‘concept’—of a plan to take some major action against an enemy,” Dakota Wood, a senior research fellow for defense programs at the Heritage Foundation and retired U.S. military planner who served as a strategist for the Marine Corps’ Special Operations Command, told The Intercept in an email.

For instance, in June 1994, the Pentagon requested a CONPLAN for military operations in Haiti; by July, U.S. forces invaded and deposed Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The manual also notes that Support Sentry is a “COW,” or cost of war item.

Though conventional wisdom might be that the military has contingency plans for everything, CONPLANs are, in fact, quite limited since preparing them is time consuming, Wood explained. “Since staff, time, and resources are always limited, no military command at any level would develop CONPLANs … for every conceivable contingency.”

The existence of Support Sentry, then, suggests that the U.S. military takes the possibility seriously enough to prepare a strategic framework for it. CONPLANs also lead to consequences short of war, like military exercises.

“CONPLANs serve as the intellectual framework or context when developing military exercises because it makes sense for units that are honing their skills to have that work be relevant to likely tasks,” Wood said.

By 2018, President Donald Trump had vocally withdrawn the U.S. from the Iran deal. In January 2019, he tweeted a picture of a poster displayed at a cabinet meeting and directed at Iran that read “sanctions are coming” — a reference to the “Game of Thrones” TV series.

Under Biden, U.S. policy toward the region remains much the same.

On January 16, 2021, just four days before Biden’s inauguration, Trump ordered the military to reassign Israel to CENTCOM, its Middle East combatant command. Historically, the U.S. military has rather counterintuitively kept Israel under its European Command, or EUCOM, in order to avoid tensions with Gulf Arab allies like Saudi Arabia. This was one of a volley of last-minute decisions by Trump designed to force the Biden administration to abandon diplomacy and adopt the framework of his “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran. “For decades, DOD placed Israel in the European Command (EUCOM) AOR due to significant tensions between Israel and its neighbors in the Middle East,” a Congressional Research Service report about the move observed, noting that “improved Israeli ties with some Arab states may allow more open coordination to counter Iran.”

Trump’s order followed a December 2020 bill introduced by several Republican senators, including Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., to study the transfer of Israel to CENTCOM.

“Tasking CENTCOM to serve as the primary U.S. defense coordinator with Israel instead of EUCOM would acknowledge the new political reality of the Middle East under the Abraham Accords,” Cotton said in a press release. “Our bill requires a study of the potential transition, which could increase U.S.-Israel military cooperation with regional partners and help better secure the Middle East against threats like Iran.”

Under Biden, U.S.-Israel military cooperation rapidly expanded to encompass unprecedented joint naval exercises. By March 2021, the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet conducted its first-ever fuel replenishment of an Israeli naval ship. In April 2021, the U.S. fired warning shots at Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf — the first time this had happened in nearly four years. Then, in August 2021, the U.S. 5th Fleet and Israeli naval forces conducted an expansive four-day naval exercise.

Also in August, for the first time ever, the U.S., Iraq, and Kuwait participated in a joint naval patrol of the Persian Gulf.

“Any one of these steps may feel small, but in the aggregate, it’s a serious escalation,” Trita Parsi, the former president of the National Iranian American Council and now president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told The Intercept in a phone interview.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin also remarked that “those exercises would have been unimaginable, unthinkable, just a few years ago.”

In January, the U.S. and Israel conducted their largest joint military exercise in history, called Juniper Oak. Six-thousand four hundred American and 1,500 Israeli troops participated in the training exercise, involving more than 140 aircraft, an aircraft carrier, and live fire exercises with over 180,000 pounds of live munitions.

Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder insisted that “it’s not intended to be focused on any one single adversary or threat; it’s all about working together,” but Israeli officials made clear that the exercise was constructed to simulate a war with Iran.

“The U.S. very much wants to signal to Iran that even if Washington doesn’t have an appetite for war, we’re willing to support Israel, which does.”

Notably, Juniper Oak involved exercises in which American aircraft provided mid-air refueling services to Israeli fighter aircraft — a key capability Israel lacks and without which its aircraft cannot reach Iranian targets — and drills involving American B-52 bombers dropping bunker-buster bombs on targets designed to resemble Iranian nuclear sites. Iran responded to these plans with its own military exercise, which Iranian military commander Maj. Gen. Gholam Ali Rashid said the country considers a “half war” and even a “war before war.”

“The U.S. very much wants to signal to Iran that even if Washington doesn’t have an appetite for war, we’re willing to support Israel, which does,” Parsi said.

While Americans oppose a nuclear Iran, voters strongly prefer a diplomatic solution over war, as illustrated in recent polling.

“Many in Washington may not feel alarmed by this because of their own conviction that Biden is loath to start a war over this issue,” said Parsi. “That may very well be true, but a very dangerous scenario is being created whose buffer against escalation is a president that may not be president in two years time.”

The reluctance by top defense officials to discuss the significance of Israel’s move to CENTCOM gives an idea of how politically fraught the matter is. “I’m not excited about getting into the subject you mentioned,” a retired four-star general who worked with Israel while at EUCOM, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject, told The Intercept. “It is now water under the bridge.”

The Israeli government is more candid than the U.S. about Iran being the focus of these exercises. “In recent months, we have achieved several important goals — the world has joined the fight against Iran,” said then-Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz in a Hebrew-language press release from June. “For this reason, over the past year, I have been promoting a broad plan with my colleagues from the Pentagon and the presidential administration to strengthen cooperation between Israel and the countries of the region under the auspices of the United States and CENTCOM.”

In June, the Israel Defense Forces announced the conclusion of a three-day strategic-operational meeting between CENTCOM and senior IDF officials.

“During the discussions, it was agreed that we are at a critical point in time that requires the acceleration of operational plans and cooperation against Iran and its terrorist proxies in the region,” IDF chief of general staff Lt. Gen. Aviv Kohavi said.

As for actual armed conflict between the U.S. and Iran, that has crescendoed as well. “U.S. armed forces have reportedly struck Iran-related targets in Iraq (June 2021) and Syria (February 2021, June 2021, January 2022, and August 2022) in response to attacks by Iran-backed entities on U.S. forces,” a report by the Congressional Research Service states. “U.S. naval forces have interdicted or supported the interdiction of weapons shipments originating from Iran, including in December 2021 and February 2022.”

The White House, on the other hand, has declined to go into specifics. “Having Israel a part of CENTCOM has just really been, I think, a force multiplier for us, and allowing us to better integrate, organize, share information across the board here in the region has really been — I’ve seen it with my own eyes,” a senior administration official said in a background briefing. “But I won’t speak to any particular CENTCOM assessments or anything like that.”

The White House also hinted at the military option in its most recent National Security Strategy, the high-level planning document detailing nuclear threats and how to respond to them, which administrations release periodically: “We will pursue diplomacy to ensure that Iran can never acquire a nuclear weapon, while remaining postured and prepared to use other means should diplomacy fail.”

While the current administration still pays lip service to the Iran deal — which Biden promised to reinstate — it appears to be all but over. During a press briefing last month, State Department spokesperson Ned Price was asked if Juniper Oak meant that diplomacy with Iran was off the table. “No, it means that our security commitment to Israel is ironclad,” Price responded.

The president appeared to reveal the U.S.’s actual position in November, when asked by an attendee about the Iran deal while on the sidelines of a midterm election rally in Oceanside, California. “It is dead, but we are not gonna announce it,” Biden replied. “Long story.”

The attendee then told Biden that the Iranian regime doesn’t represent the people. “I know they don’t represent you,” Biden replied, “but they will have a nuclear weapon that they’ll represent.”

There is no evidence that the Iranian government is pursuing a nuclear weapon. “Iran does not today possess a nuclear weapon and we currently believe it is not pursuing one,” states the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, the Pentagon’s authoritative report on nuclear policy based on the best intelligence available to the U.S. government.

Should Iran acquire a nuclear weapon, it would certainly be seen as a provocation in the region, touching off a dangerous arms race. Saudi Arabia engaged in quiet negotiations with the Trump administration to develop what it insisted would be a peaceful civilian nuclear program, before Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman let it slip that the country would “follow suit as soon as possible” with an atomic bomb should Iran acquire one. By 2020, the United Arab Emirates became the first Arab nation to build a nuclear power plant, a key step toward building a weapon should it wish to do so.

From its brutal repression of protesters to the decision to provide Russia with drones for use in its illegal invasion of Ukraine, Iran’s policies likely played a role in the Biden administration’s political calculus around abandoning the deal. Biden’s Iran envoy, Robert Malley, cited both as reasons that the Iran deal had been dropped. (Israel, too, has a friendly relationship with Moscow and has vexed Washington by rejecting its request to aid Ukraine with anti-tank missiles.)

Malley, who had previously overseen diplomacy with Iran, last week led a delegation to Riyadh to discuss with Arab Gulf allies counterterrorism, maritime security, and, of course, Iran.

“Without the Iran deal, we’re back to deterrence; we want to show the Iranians that we have a credible military threat and that we’re willing to use it, thinking that this will deter the Iranians from the program,” Parsi said. “It can have that effect, but it can also have the effect of telling the Iranians that the U.S. wants conflict and make them think they need their own deterrence. The truth is that this type of deterrence absent diplomacy can be extremely unstable. It may actually cause the scenario that this strategy is designed to prevent.”

Three days after Juniper Oak concluded, on January 29 — just as Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived for an official visit in Israel — an Israeli drone bombed a military facility in Iran. U.S. officials scrambled to distance the U.S. from the attack, with the New York Times immediately publishing an article citing U.S. intelligence officials blaming the attack on Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad.

But with Israel now under CENTCOM, it’s increasingly likely that Iran won’t distinguish between the two parties, as the Jerusalem Post warned might happen when Trump first ordered the move.

“The plausible deniability for Israel’s alleged strikes … in the past has worked in CENTCOM’s favor,” the report observed.

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April Corley was an elite athlete, a national champion roller skater who appeared in movies, television shows, and commercials. She worked with celebrities like Katy Perry and Madonna. Her life, she said, “was about glitter and rhinestones.”

Then, while vacationing with her boyfriend in 2015, Corley and the rest of her tour group stopped for lunch on a roadside in the Egyptian desert. A U.S.-supplied Boeing AH-64 Apache helicopter appeared overhead, and, moments later, rockets began to rain down. As tourists ran for their lives, the Apache opened up with its 30 mm cannon.

Corley was burned and peppered with shrapnel. She suffered numerous broken and fractured bones in her shoulder, arm, and ribs; a lung contusion; and permanent nerve damage in her extremities, among other injuries detailed in a report by her lawyer. To survive, she played dead, hiding beneath the bodies of her boyfriend, Rafael Bejarano, and 11 others who were killed.

Following the September 2015 attack by the Egyptian military — which claimed the massacre was a “mistake” but never compensated Corley — then-Sen. Patrick Leahy repeatedly blocked Egypt from buying or refurbishing Apache helicopters and buying their armaments, like hellfire missiles. “The Senator felt it was untenable to continue business as usual given what had happened to April Corley, and the long history of reports of indiscriminate attacks by U.S.-made Apaches in the Sinai Peninsula against civilian targets,” said Tim Rieser, a senior staffer for the Senate Appropriations Committee and longtime foreign policy adviser to Leahy, who was chair of the committee until he retired last month.

“The bullets and explosives pierced, lacerated and shredded my body. Even after eight surgeries so far and hundreds of medical appointments, I will never recover,” Corley wrote in a 2019 Washington Post op-ed, as part of a media campaign to press the Trump administration to hold Egypt accountable and impose stricter conditions on military aid. While Trump treated Egypt with kid gloves, waiving provisions to restrict some aid on human rights grounds, the Biden administration pledged to take a harder line.

“President Biden has committed to putting human rights back at the center of American foreign policy, and that’s a commitment that I and the entire Department of State take very seriously,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced in March 2021. But just months later, the Biden administration circumvented Leahy’s hold on Apaches as Blinken quietly announced that Egypt would pay for the attack helicopters with its own money as opposed to an often-used financing program by which the U.S. subsidizes foreign nations’ weapons and equipment purchases through grants and loans. For years, Congress, which can exercise control over the U.S.-subsidized program, had effectively prevented the Egyptians from acquiring the helicopters. “But when the Biden administration negotiated the sale of the Apache helicopters,” Seth Binder of the Project on Middle East Democracy, or POMED, noted, “it provided a workaround.”

To Rieser, the $1 billion Apache deal, which received almost no media attention, was a betrayal of Biden’s pledge. “It is disappointing for an administration that claims human rights are at the center of its foreign policy,” Rieser told The Intercept. “The sale of Apache helicopters to a military that is abusive and unaccountable should be of great concern. There is not enough transparency about our military-to-military relations with foreign countries and the ways in which we support undemocratic governments that fail to respect human rights and the rule of law.”

The Arms Sales Accountability Project — launched Thursday by a consortium of 10 nongovernmental organizations, led by the Center for Civilians in Conflict, or CIVIC — seeks to change this and prevent future tragedies like the 2015 Egyptian attack by pressing the U.S. government to fundamentally alter its arms sales and security assistance policies. Through research, advocacy, and public engagement, ASAP aims to educate Americans and encourage them to press their congressional representatives to better police arms sales and transfers and prevent weaponry from ending up in the hands of abusive militaries, criminals, and terror groups; fueling conflicts around the world; and wounding and killing civilians from El Salvador to Yemen.

“The impetus behind the campaign was a real frustration with a lack of systemic reform to the very broken arms trade,” wrote Ari Tolany, the U.S. program manager at CIVIC. “Despite very clear recommendations, including from within government, that more publicly accessible information is critical, we’ve seen a weakening of congressional oversight and a collapse in transparency measures. When you have decades of evidence of regimes using U.S. weapons to silence dissent and protest or when you watch the government keep selling weapons to forces who use U.S. bombs to strike schools and hospitals, it’s clear that piecemeal reforms aren’t enough. That’s the purpose of the campaign—to push for stronger oversight, transparency, and accountability for what weapons we sell where, and who uses U.S. weapons and how.”

The Intercept was given exclusive access to ASAP’s website, materials, and experts prior to the campaign’s launch.

The world is awash in weaponry. Last year, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that worldwide military spending hit an all-time high of $2.1 trillion in 2021. It was the seventh consecutive year that spending increased. The United States accounted for $801 billion of that total and was responsible for 39 percent of all weapons sales. Between 2017 and 2021, the U.S. sold more arms than the next three nations — Russia, China, and France — combined.

America’s weapons consistently stoke conflicts around the world. A 2018 report by CIVIC and the Washington-based Stimson Center, another ASAP partner, found that the U.S. had delivered arms to 27 of 34 countries at war in 2016. A 2022 analysis by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, also an ASAP member, found that roughly two-thirds of current conflicts — 34 out of 46 — involve one or more parties armed by the U.S. Of those U.S.-supplied nations at war, 15 received $50 million or more worth of U.S. arms between 2017 and 2021. In recent years, there has also been a clear association between U.S.-made weapons and human rights abuses in Cameroon and Nigeria; the spread of arms to terrorist groups like the Islamic State and criminal gangs in Central America; and the deaths of children in Yemen.

Biden made the latter country a foreign policy priority even before he won the White House. After President Donald Trump vetoed a 2019 bipartisan congressional resolution to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war there, the Biden-Harris campaign pledged their administration would “not check its values at the door to sell arms.” Indeed, Biden’s first foreign policy speech included a promise to halt assistance for Saudi-led “offensive operations” in Yemen. Since then, though, the U.S. has continued to sell weapons to the Saudis and their partners; when Sen. Bernie Sanders sought late last year to introduce a war powers resolution aimed at blocking U.S. support for that war, the White House pushed back, threatening that Biden’s aides would recommend a veto, and Sanders quickly withdrew his resolution.

“The administration has continued to maintain that no ‘offensive weapons’ have been transferred to Saudi Arabia, justifying sales on this offensive/defensive distinction,” said CIVIC’s Tolany. “There’s no consistent definition or policy application of what constitutes a ‘defensive weapon,’ so it’s a distinction without a difference.” As a result, the United States remains an integral party to a conflict that has killed, directly and indirectly, an estimated 377,000 people since 2015, left almost 25 million Yemenis in need of aid, and created what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Sales to Saudi Arabia and Egypt are not, however, anomalies. Tolany explained that the quantity and recipients of U.S. foreign military sales in 2022 and 2023 show little substantive difference between Biden and his predecessors.

“U.S. law recognizes that security assistance, including arms sales, may be beneficial in advancing U.S. national security interests,” wrote Binder of POMED, another ASAP partner organization. “But it also directs the government to provide assistance so that it ‘will promote and advance human rights and avoid identification of the United States… with governments which deny to their people internationally recognized human rights and fundamental freedoms.’” It has, however, become increasingly difficult to track U.S. arms transfers and security assistance — and therefore almost impossible to guarantee that the U.S. is living up to its legal requirements to restrict weapons sales to bad actors.

With many arcane programs, a confusing lexicon, and almost impenetrable processes, it’s never been easy for the public to understand the intricacies of U.S. arms sales and transfers. Today, even experts complain they’re unable to find basic information about, let alone assess, the Pentagon and State Department’s many programs. “Through the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, there has been a diminishing level of access to the necessary information,” said Elias Yousif, a research analyst with the Stimson Center’s Conventional Defense Program, noting that previously accessible reports are now, by default, often classified or otherwise unavailable.

Yousif drew specific attention to so-called 655 reports, which summarize the direct commercial sales of military weapons and equipment. Prior to 2010, these reports included detailed information about the type of defense articles exported to a specific country, but they now contain little more than the value and quantity of transferred items without explaining what they actually are. “It’s so aggregated as to be useless,” Yousif told The Intercept. “And this is a trend across all security cooperation reporting.”

The Defense Department’s 2022 “Justification for Security Cooperation Program and Activity Funding” request included, for example, a summary table that provided combined budgetary data for several capacity building authorities, including the Indo-Pacific Maritime Security Initiative, making it impossible to disentangle even how many dollars are allocated to each program, let alone each country. “If you’re telling me that this funding is going to the ‘Africa Region,’ I have no idea what that means. It makes a big difference if it’s going to Egypt or Mali or if it’s going to someplace else,” Yousif said. “This is especially true for researchers trying to understand the impacts of security assistance.”

The State Department also regularly approves arms transfers that fall below thresholds that trigger a notification to Congress under the Arms Export Control Act. Experts say that these sales can be considerable but are almost completely unknown. A 2020 inspector general’s report provided a rare glimpse of the scale of transfers to just two countries, mentioning “4,221 below-threshold arms transfers involving Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with an estimated total value of $11.2 billion since January 2017.”

The war in Ukraine has proven that transparency is possible when it comes to foreign arms transfers, with the White House making regular announcements about military aid packages and providing detailed breakdowns of the exact weapons, ammunition, and equipment provided. “The reporting by the administration of arms transfers to Ukraine has been imperfect but it’s still a really good example of what’s possible if you are trying to be transparent,” Yousif said. “If you can provide that level of information for a country that’s in an active war against a great power then you should be able to provide similar levels of transparency for Egypt or anywhere else. There’s been a lively public debate about arming Ukraine, but it’s impossible to do for other countries because transfers frequently occur below the radar.”

“There’s been a lively public debate about arming Ukraine, but it’s impossible to do for other countries because transfers frequently occur below the radar.”

The Arms Sales Accountability Project wants to make that level of transparency the norm. Most Americans want more oversight too. A 2022 nationwide poll by the University of Maryland found bipartisan support — 68 percent of Democrats, 61 percent of independents, and 56 percent of Republicans — for requiring all U.S. weapons sales over $14 million to be approved by a congressional majority. Comparable levels of support are found in both deep blue and deep red congressional districts.

The White House did not respond to questions about the attack that wounded April Corley, its 2021 agreement with the Egyptian government for refurbishing Apache helicopters, or how that deal squares with Biden’s professed foreign policy goals. The administration also failed to say if it would agree to levels of transparency for other countries that are akin to those employed in arms transfers to Ukraine.

On Thursday, the Biden administration is expected to unveil a long-delayed overhaul of its arms export policy. In early briefings to experts, U.S. officials indicated that the Conventional Arms Transfer, or CAT, policy would place a greater emphasis on human rights, but the White House did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about whether future arms transfers to Saudi Arabia and Egypt would be affected.

The Egyptian Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not reply to multiple queries by The Intercept. Since 1978, the United States has provided Egypt with over $50 billion in military and $30 billion in economic assistance. In May 2022, the State Department approved a possible foreign military sale of TOW “heavy assault” missiles and related equipment to Egypt for $691 million. And just last month, the U.S. Army awarded Boeing a $426 million contract to produce 12 new CH-47F Chinook helicopters for the Egyptian Air Force.

The State Department declined to comment for this article.

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