Retired colonel claims U.S. military operations are already 'underway' in Iran Ron Brynaert
Published: Saturday April 15, 2006 Print This | Email This During an interview on CNN Friday night, retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner claimed that U.S. military operations are already 'underway' inside Iran, RAW STORY has found. "I would say -- and this may shock some -- I think the decision has been made and military operations are under way," Col. Gardiner told CNN International anchor Jim Clancy (as noted by Digby at the blog Hullabaloo). (Crooks and Liars has a video clip of the interview) Gardiner, who designed a war game in November of 2004 for Atlantic Magazine ("Will Iran be next?") which simulated "preparations for a U.S. assault on Iran," also claimed that Aliasghar Soltaniyeh, the Iranian ambassador to the United Nation's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told him a few weeks ago that units who had attacked the Revolutionary Guard had been captured and confessed to working with Americans. "The secretary point is, the Iranians have been saying American military troops are in there, have been saying it for almost a year," Gardiner said. "I was in Berlin two weeks ago, sat next to the ambassador, the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA. And I said, 'Hey, I hear you're accusing Americans of being in there operating with some of the units that have shot up revolution guard units.'" "He said, quite frankly, 'Yes, we know they are. We've captured some of the units, and they've confessed to working with the Americans,'" said the retired Air Force colonel. Last Thursday, Raw Story's Larisa Alexandrovna reported (On Cheney, Rumsfeld order, US outsourcing special ops, intelligence to Iraq terror group, intelligence officials say) that, according to former and current intelligence officials, the Pentagon has been using a right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) as an operational asset "to create strife in Iran in preparation for any possible attack." "[I]nstead of securing a known terrorist organization, which has been responsible for acts of terror against Iranian targets and individuals all over the world  including US civilian and military casualties  Rumsfeld under instructions from Cheney, began using the group on special ops missions into Iran to pave the way for a potential Iran strike," Larisa reported. "They are doing whatever they want, no oversight at all, an intelligence source told Larisa. Larisa reported that the MEK soldiers were told to "quit" their organization and were "renamed" in accordance with a plan conceived by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld so that they could be "converted" into a military special ops team. According to a UN official close to the Security Council whom Larisa interviewed, the "newly renamed MEK soldiers" were being employed in the place of U.S. military advance teams to commit "acts of violence in hopes of staging an insurgency of the Iranian Sunni population." We are already at war, the UN official told RAW STORY .
Map of Iran
On Thursday, the Internet news publication Raw Story corroborated claims that the U.S. is involved in acts of violence committed in Iran. It claims that these are being carried out by retrained ex-members of the People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK) rather than by traditional US soldiers.

A previous claim was made by former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter in June 2005 that United States security forces have been sending members of the MEK into Iranian territory. Ritter claimed that the CIA had used the MEK "to carry out remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush administration condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq".

Early this month, Seymour Hersh made a similar statement in New Yorker Magazine about the entry of US troops themselves into Iranian territory, but without supporting the claim that they carried out acts of violence. Hersh claimed that US combat troops are "now operating in Iran" and that according to a "government consultant with close ties to civilians in the Pentagon, the  units were also working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the north, the Baluchis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the northeast ." According to Hersh, the government consultant also said that the US troops "are studying the terrain, and giving away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds."

In Thursday's report, Raw Story supported the previous claims about the US committing acts of violence in Iran, with the difference that it claimed that the acts are being carried out by proxy retrained ex-MEK members rather than by traditional US soldiers, and that the incursions have been occurring for about a year.


Raw Story cited an unnamed United Nations source "close to" the UN Security Council who stated that former MEK members have been used as a proxy by the US for "roughly a year" inside of Iranian territory. An intelligence source quoted by Raw Story said that the former MEK members were made to "swear an oath to Democracy and resign from the MEK" before being incorporated into US military units and retrained for their operations in Iran. The MEK is an Iranian opposition group listed by the U.S. State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization but describes itself as "secular" and "patriotic, Muslim and democratic".

Raw Story cited the UN official saying that "We are already at war". Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner made similar remarks on CNN on Friday saying "I would say -- and this may shock some -- I think the decision has been made and military operations are under way."

Raw Story said that the MEK has been used in the Iranian provinces of Baluchistan and Khuzestan and quoted a senior British intelligence official saying that British intelligence believes that the MEK is responsible for the violent attacks in the southern Iran, and that people from a "US Special mission unit" are present on Iranian territory, but was unsure as to the links between US military and the MEK.

According to the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which is alleged by the FBI to be "an integral part of the MEK", Professor Raymond Tanter of Georgetown University and a former White House aide argued on Al-Jazeera television that the only way to confront Iran's threats is to support the MEK and its removal from the U.S. State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations and from its classification as a terrorist organization by the Council of the European Union.

Raw Story reports that the office of the Undersecretary of Defense Intelligence did not return calls for comment.