While the neocons who have infested the State Department, Central Intelligence Agency, and National Security Council seek to sabotage the Iran nuclear deal, wage war with Russia in Ukraine, topple the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria, and derail peace talks between leftist guerrillas and the Colombian government, a little-known entity within the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) continues to maintain liaisons with governments and groups. Many of these countries and groups are targets of the neocons and the CIA loyalists of its pro-Saudi and pro-Israeli director John Brennan.
DIA provided a 2012 classified report that reflected the DIA’s view that “there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria, and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”
Those “supporting powers” include the United States, Britain, Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.
The DIA report was immediately discounted by neocons like former U.S. Naval War College professor John Schindler. In 2014, Schindler was fired by the Naval War College for texting a photograph of his penis to a female “cyber-acquaintance.” However, he continues to appear on Fox News and other networks pushing various discredited neocon themes. (Note: it was WMR’s editor who first brought the sexting photo to the Naval War College’s attention).
Ironically, during the George W. Bush administration, it was DIA that was poached by administration neocons for individuals to support the disastrous U.S. policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among those brought out of DIA by Pentagon neocons, like Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz, was Larry Franklin, later convicted of passing highly-classified information to two operatives of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). DIA, thanks to its then-director, Lt Gen. Michael T. Flynn, became a relative trustworthy source of un-politicized intelligence. However, that situation is reportedly changing under the new DIA director, Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, DIA’s first African-American director and someone considered not to be a “boat rocker.” The fact that DIA’s deputy director, Douglas Wise, is actually on loan from the CIA and has a dual reporting chain-of-command to both Stewart and Brennan puts DIA’s former “independence” in jeopardy.
That report was approved by Flynn, who, in an interview with Al Jazeera, did not contradict reports that the U.S. was helping coordinate arms transfers to Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Salafists, Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda in Iraq, and other jihadist forces in both Syria and Iraq. Flynn, who retired in 2014, is widely believed to have been forced from his job by neocons in the State Department, CIA, and National Security Council.
Flynn has intimated that DIA’s pragmatic and realistic intelligence reports, which lacked the “neocon” flavor of those produced by the CIA, State Department, and National Security Council, were never allowed to proceed to the desk of President Obama. Those reports urged more cooperation with Russia over the eastern Ukrainian situation, with China over competing maritime claims in the South China Sea, and with Syria over combating ISIL.
While DIA director, Flynn streamlined the activities of the Defense Clandestine Service (DCS), DIA’s version of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service (NCS). Under Brennan, the NCS has resorted to “cooking intelligence” to please the neocons, thus making DIA intelligence reports up until 2014 more useful as primary sources of information.
The DCS, according to WMR’s sources, has continued to maintain discrete liaisons with countries and groups. These liaisons may be under attack by the neocons as General Stewart realigns DIA more closely to the Brennan, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, and the overall neocon agenda. However, the DCS station in Beirut, using the auspices of the American University of Beirut, has maintained contact with officials of Lebanese Hezbollah, especially in relation to Hezbollah’s combat operations against ISIL and other Salafist forces in Syria. Contact with the Syrian government is also maintained via the DCS station in Beirut. Similarly, DCS’s station in Cairo has maintained links with Hamas in Gaza with regard to ISIL guerrilla activity in the Sinai Peninsula.
The DCS stations in Baghdad and Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan maintain contact with Iranian military officials particularly in regard to coordinated U.S.-Iranian operations against ISIL in Iraq. The DCS-Iran liaisons have been helped greatly by the recent P5+1 nuclear framework with Iran. DCS has also maintained contact, through its Erbil stations, with Kurdish groups in Syria and Turkey. It is also believed by informed sources that DCS stations in Moscow and Kiev have maintained low-level liaisons with Russian-speaking separatist governments in Donetsk and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
The new Defense Attaché Office at the U.S. embassy in Havana wasted no time in establishing initial low-level contact with officials of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) who have been holding, for two years, peace talks with the Colombian government in Havana.
However, all of these discrete liaisons are considered “dangerous liaisons” by the neocons, who are likely to be closing them down as General Flynn’s last loyalists are purged from the ranks of the DIA.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2015 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
