Rob: Welcome to the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show WMJC 1360AM, out of Washington Township reaching Metro Philly and South Jersey sponsored by Opednews.com. My guest for this part of the show is Mark Perry. He's an author, historian and intelligence analyst living in Arlington, Virginia. His book, Talking To Terrorists published by Basic Books in 2010. His Twitter account is @markperrydc. Welcome to the show Mark.
Mark: It's good to be here Rob.
Rob: I got in touch with you because you have a new article that came out a week or two ago called False Flag . The description is a series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad agents use American spies to recruit members of the Jundallah terrorist organizations to fight their covert war against Iran. It blew my mind when I heard that. It's not surprising I guess but that the Mossads would actually pretend to be Americans?
Mark: Well it shocked me too, oddly how these things happen if you're a reporter this was an aside in a cup of coffee with a person I barely knew about 18 months ago and we went on with the discussion and I said to the person, "Can we go back about 10 minutes, what is this Israel and Jundallah" and this is a very senior intelligence analyst and they went back through the story and it took me 18 months to really develop it and confirm it and the day it appeared which was on the Friday before Martin Luther King day I finally was able to be comfortable enough with it to publish it. It is shocking, but it's very clear that Israeli intelligence agencies, posing as CIA officers, attempted to recruit for their own purposes in Iran, an organization that's on the foreign terrorist organization list.
Rob: And that's Jundallah?
Mark: Jundallah. There's not much known about it among the general public but it's a notorious terrorist group in Balochistan which is in Southeastern Iran, the separatist group and it's very violent, very reminiscent of what Al-Qaeda does, decapitation, suicide bombings, targeting the innocent civilians in Iran and it's a group the United States really doesn't want to have anything to do with despite the fact that it's working against Iran, which as we all know is working to gain some nuclear weapons or at least that's the thinking.
Rob: Now your article reports that the Israeli's connected with them in London, so this is stuff going on all over the world.
Mark: Yes, that's right. London is fairly notorious for this. As we know the British Empire a hundred years ago, had a lot of contacts obviously, in their colonial empire in the Arab world and Iran and Pakistan. So a lot of these groups have offices in London, work out of London, the British intelligence agency eyes them and watches them very closely. The Israeli's recruited them-- attempted the recruitment in London and my information is also in Casablanca, Morocco, and in two cities in Pakistan.
Rob: Wow. So your article reports that Bush went ballistic when he found out about this. This happened under Bush's watch initially.
Mark: Yes, this happened in, my information was in late 2007. This was reported from the London station and my guess is probably from the London CIA and my guess is probably from other places around the world and it's reported up the intelligence the CIA chain of command to the head of directorate of operation and then put in a report to the White House. When Bush heard about it he was very angry and I think it's easy to see why. If you have a foreign intelligence agency, especiallyone that's recruiting terrorists, it puts Americans at danger and it was Bush's calculation to my information that this would put Americans in danger in Pakistan where Jundallah operates along the border with Iran and possibly in Iran itself. So it is a very dangerous operation and frankly it's not the first time this has happened. Israel has conducted other false flag operations disguised as Americans and I think that's really why Bush was angry is that Israel had been warned not to do this stuff and had continued to do it.
Rob: I don't think you wrote in your article about Israel engaging in other false flag operations, operating as Americans, did you?
Mark: No I didn't. In my original draft I had talked about CIA officers information speculating on other operations and two or three others that they were able to confirm but it didn't' seem to fit. But this was really the most notorious and a colleague of mine here in Washington just died who was an intelligence reporter and a very fine one talked about Mossad officers here in the United recruiting Arab Americans. This has happened, the article appeared back in 2010 and I found it by way of doing my own research on Jundallah. So it is, I guess I wouldn't characterize this as a common practice but it's certainly not unheard of.
Rob: So do you know anything more about the other false flag operations?
Mark: Well a little bit and these are antidotal of one apparently occurred in the Sudan many years ago where a CIA officer was able to hustle out some Mossad officers posing as CIA officers who are being tracked by Sudanese intelligence and were in danger. Of course the operation here in the United States to recruit in the Arab community, those two seem to be the most prominent. Strangely enough, I didn't get information, perhaps it's not strange, but I didn't get information on American false flag operations or whether we conduct them. But the Israeli's seem to be known for this kind of thing. It's very strangely, I was talking to Senior military officials about this, General Johor, former Commander of CENTCOM shrugged his solders and waved and said, "Ah, I've heard this stuff a dozen times," I was very surprised by that, perhaps I'm naive but I don't think so. But this is really the first substantive one I've come across in 30 years.
Rob: So is it reasonable to assume that not just going falsified operations as CIA and US but also other nations operations as well?
Mark: I think it's reasonable to assume that but I don't have evidence of it. I know that in the CIA one of the training mechanisms they use to discover false flag operations, one thing they tell their field officers is that when you come across somebody claiming to be Canadian intelligence you know it's a false flag operation because Canadian intelligence is not that deeply rooted, does not have that broad a reach. When you come across someone saying that they work for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or they're an intelligence officer for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization you can assume that's a false flag operation because the North Atlantic Treaty Organization doesn't have an intelligence unit. And I note in my article, in one instance, in Casablanca, the Mossad officers posed as intelligence officers for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The operatives from Jundallah thought this was very suspicious so they assumed they were being recruited by the Americans or the Israeli's and they were being recruited by the Israeli's.
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