WarSclerotic

Saudi Arabia has long been a backroom player in the Middle East’s nuclear game of thrones, apparently content to bankroll the ambitions of Pakistan and Iraq (under Saddam Hussein) to counter the rise of its mortal enemy, Iran. 

But as the West and Iran have moved closer to a nuclear accommodation, signs are emerging that the monarchy is ready to give the world a peek at a new missile strike force of its own – which has been upgraded with Washington’s careful connivance.

According to a well-placed intelligence source, Saudi Arabia bought ballistic missiles from China in 2007 in a hitherto unreported deal that won Washington’s quiet approval on the condition that CIA technical experts could verify they were not designed to carry nuclear warheads.

The solid-fueled, medium-range DF-21 East Wind missiles are an improvement over the DF-3s the Saudis clandestinely acquired from China in 1988, experts say, although they differ on how much of an upgrade they were.

The newer missiles, known as CSS-5s in NATO parlance, have a shorter range but greater accuracy, making them more useful against “high-value targets in Tehran, like presidential palaces or supreme-leader palaces,” Jeffrey Lewis, director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, tells Newsweek. They can also be fired much more quickly.

The poor accuracy of the old DF-3s rendered them impotent during the first Gulf War as a counterstrike to Saddam Hussein’s Scuds, according to Desert Warrior, a 1996 memoir by Saudi Prince Khaled bin Sultan, then-commander of the Riyadh’s Air Defense Forces. King Fahd declined to fling them at Iraq because the likely result would have been mass civilian casualties, and “the coalition’s air campaign being waged against Iraq was sufficient retaliation,” Khaled wrote.

When that war ended, the Saudis went looking for something better. In China, they likely found it. But unlike in 1988, when they royally annoyed Washington with their secret acquisition of DF-3s, this time they decided to play nice. And the CIA was their assigned playmate.

CIA and Saudi air force officers hammered out the ways and means for acquiring the new Chinese missiles during a series of secretive meetings at the spy agency’s Langley, Va., headquarters and over dinners at restaurants in northern Virginia during the spring and summer of 2007, a well-informed source tells Newsweek. The arrangements were so sensitive that then-deputy CIA director Stephen Kappes ordered the CIA’s logistical costs, estimated at $600,000 to $700,000 buried under a vague “ops support” heading in internal budget documents – prompting loud complaints from the head of the agency’s support staff.

Aside from technical personnel, among the few CIA officials let in on the deal were the agency’s then-number three, Associate Deputy Director Michael Morrell, a longtime Asia hand; John Kringen, then-head of the agency’s intelligence directorate; and the CIA’s Riyadh station chief, who Newsweek is not identifying because he remains undercover. Two analysts subsequently traveled to Saudi Arabia, inspected the crates and returned satisfied that the missiles were not designed to carry nukes, says the source, who asked for anonymity in exchange for discussing the still-secret deal.

The CIA declined to comment, as did current and former White House officials. The Chinese and Saudi embassies in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

Reports that the Saudis have upgraded their missile fleet, however, are not new. Former CIA analyst Jonathan Scherck, for example, who managed intelligence reports on Saudi Arabia as a contractor from 2005 to 2007, claimed in Patriot Lost, an unauthorized 2010 book, that China began supplying a “turnkey nuclear ballistic missile system” to the kingdom with the covert approval of the George W. Bush administration, “no later than December 2003.”

Lewis discounts Scherck’s “nuclear” claim, which Scherck says he based on reports he saw from CIA spies and technical collection systems.

Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA and White House National Security Council expert on the Middle East, also dismisses Scherck’s nuclear scenario, as well as recent claims by the BBC and Time magazine – citing a former head of Israeli military intelligence – that the Saudis had placed Pakistani nuclear warheads “on order.”

“Nonsense and disinformation,” he told Newsweek.

But Lewis says that other small but important details in Patriot Lost checked out. “One can raise a number of questions about the logic in Scherck’s book – particularly when he starts imagining Pakistani warheads on those Chinese missiles or accusing Bush administration officials of various crimes,” Lewis explains, “but when Scherck sticks to the details about monitoring foreign missile shipments and deployments, he’s believable.”

An engineer on a U.S. Navy guided missile cruiser before joining the CIA, Scherck was fired in 2008 for pursuing details out of channels at the National Geospatial Agency, the satellite imagery service helmed by James Clapper when he began to dig into the missile mystery. Clapper is now director of National Intelligence. Then the Justice Department pounced on Scherck, seizing the modest revenues from his self-published book and prohibiting him from writing or talking further about the matter. Now 39, Scherck works as a night manager of a hotel in Southern California while he works on a screenplay.

Meanwhile, the Saudis have been acting like they want people to take notice of their previously furtive missile program.

“Over the past few years, Saudi Arabia has started talking a lot about its Strategic Missile Force,” Lewis writes in the draft of an upcoming piece for Foreign Policy that he showed Newsweek. “And, in the course of doing so, Riyadh seems to be hinting that it has bought at least two new types of ballistic missiles.”

“For example,” Lewis writes, “in 2010, Khaled – by then deputy defense minister – cut the ribbon on a new headquarters building in Riyadh for the Strategic Missile Force. They released a number of images of the building, both inside and out. Moreover, since about 2007, the Saudi press has covered graduation ceremonies from the Strategic Missile Force school in Wadi ad-Dawasir – especially if the commencement speaker is a person of importance.

“The process of recruiting Saudis has also resulted in fair amount of information appearing in print, right down to the pay schedule,” he added. “For a while, the Strategic Missile Force even had a website, although it is no longer active.”

The most intriguing photo to appear so far, showed “Khaled’s replacement – the recently removed deputy minister of defense Prince Fahd – visiting the Strategic Missile Force headquarters in Riyadh,” Lewis writes. Instead of gifting him with the usual “solid-gold falcon in a glass case… the stuff dreams are made of,” Lewis cracks, officials are shown posing with a glass-enclosed case of three missile models.

“The missile on the far left is, obviously, a DF-3 of the sort that Saudi Arabia purchased from China in the late 1980s,” Lewis writes. “But the other two? They could any one of Chinese or Pakistani missiles. All the missiles Lewis mentions are nuclear-capable.

Again, the unprecedented missiles-and-pony show could be a deception. In any case, the Saudis are banging the drums around their missile bases – without any apparent notice here, Lewis says, probably because it’s all in Arabic.

The local Saudi press has been covering blood drives and disaster relief efforts by personnel at known missile bases, Lewis tells Newsweek. And while officials have been secretive about another missile base, he’s discovered that “people on Arabic bulletin boards have big mouths.

“Turns out, if you’re a Saudi assigned to a launch unit,” he says, “the most natural thing in the world is to announce on a bulletin board, ‘Hi, I work for the Saudi missile force, and I’ve been assigned to this place, and where can I get an apartment?’ And people openly talk about their deployments in a way that Saudi officials would freak if they realized it.”

Maybe. But you can’t scare people if nobody knows what you got. Maybe the Saudis are suddenly trying to get attention. They’ve faced the deterrence dilemma before.

In late 1988, Khaled recalled in his memoir, he worried that nobody had detected the deployment of the secretly acquired Chinese DF-3s. What good was having them if nobody was afraid of them? He suggested leaking their existence, “as the object of acquiring the weapon would not have been achieved” unless the world (read: Iranians and Israelis) knew about it. “As it happened,” he wrote in Desert Warrior, “we had no need to do so, because the Americans broke the news first.” And they were in a king’s rage about it.

But what about the 2007 Chinese missile deal Newsweek was told about? No one seems to have noticed that, either.

But they may now.

Important note: Those DF-21s – or whatever they are – don’t dramatically tilt the Middle East map in the Saudis’ favor.

“Even if it is the case that Saudi Arabia received DF-21 missiles, unless they also received nuclear warheads for the missiles, it has little meaning for the regional military balance,” Pollack told Newsweek.

“Saudi Arabia has had Chinese ballistic missiles since the 1980s, and the DF-21 has a shorter range than the CSS-2s they originally bought. A conventional warhead on the DF-21 would be too small to cause the kind of damage that would have a strategic impact. Even if the Chinese had sold Saudis the mod-4 warhead for the DF-21 – which theoretically can cripple an aircraft carrier – the Saudis lack the sensor technology to find an aircraft carrier, except when one is docked at Port Jebel Ali in the UAE, Saudi Arabia’s close ally.”

Lewis agrees – with caveats. When you’re talking nukes and missiles, you always have to factor in the weird stuff, like Kissinger whispering to Hanoi that Nixon was bonkers over Vietnam and would slap the armageddon button if pushed too far – the so-called “madman theory.”

“It has its advantages, it definitely has its advantages,” Lewis says of the new Saudi missiles deal, if only because some of those missiles could have been modified to carry nuclear warheads after CIA technicians left. “But I don’t know if I were an Iranian I would feel fundamentally different about the DF 21s than I did about the DF-3…. “

He adds, “Maybe there’s a whole gut, or visceral, thing, where they” – the Iranians – “say, ‘Hey, these guys spent a lot of money, they’re serious.’ So maybe it just conveys the Saudis’ will in a way that is unsettling, in a way that the fine old missile system wasn’t.

“It’s a weird thing. It has its own, strange logic. So yeah, it makes a difference. But it’s not a difference-maker.”

Newsweek Contributing Editor Jeff Stein writes the SpyTalk column from Washington.

BY: Washington Free Beacon Staff
January 30, 2014 12:14 pm

An analysis of statements made by top Iranian officials shows that Iran does not take Secretary of State John Kerry’s threat of military force seriously.

Kerry warned in an interview with the Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya channel that if Iran were to restart its uranium enrichment program that the United States military option is “ready and prepared.”

“If they decided they’re going to throw this agreement away and go start enrichment again, sure, they can turn around,” said Kerry. “But guess what? If they do that, then the military option that is available to the United States is ready and prepared to do what it would have to do.”

An analysis by the Middle East Media Research Institute of comments made by top Iranian officials in reaction to Kerry’s statement shows that Iran thinks Kerry is bluffing.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said earlier this month that the United States doesn’t have the ability to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program.

“If the Americans are not acting in a [particular] issue, the reason for this is lack of capability, not lack of hostility,” said Khamenei. “They [the Americans] have said, ‘If we could, we would dismantle Iran’s nuclear industry’–but they cannot … The recent talks showed both America’s hostility and its impotence.”

“What kind of action–or mistake–could they possibly take against Iran?” said Khamenei on Sunday.

Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Mohammad Ali Ja’fari, said that Iran has no fear of the United States’ “miniscule and shabby” military threat.

“Mr Kerry, in the eyes of the true fighters, the U.S., with all its military force, is miniscule and shabby,” said Ja’fari. “Your military option will remain only on the table.”

“Iran has no fear of this threat, and it and its revolutionary allies worldwide will unite to respond,” Ja’fari said.

On Tuesday, Iranian Army Chief of Staff Hassan Firouzabadi said that the “military option that is today on the table in the U.S. has become a joke among the nations.”

Top adviser to Khamenei, Ali Akbar Velayati, said that Kerry’s declarations are a bluff.

“These declarations are more of a bluff,” said Velayati. “Obviously the Americans do not have this capability, because if they did, they would not have been expelled, completely weakened, from Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi expressed disbelief that Kerry was anointed U.S. Secretary of State.

“People are wondering how a man who does not know how to speak was appointed Secretary of State,” said Shirazi.

WASHINGTON – The US strongly condemned Syria for its failure to prepare and package the bulk of its chemical weapons arsenal for removal from the country, six days before a UN deadline requires its government to have shipped its entire stockpile to the port at Latakia.

In September, Syria agreed to forfeit its massive chemical weapons stockpile to be destroyed at sea under strict time constraints, under threat of military force from Washington.

“We all know that the Syrian regime has the capability to move these weapons, since they have been moved multiple times in the conflict,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Thursday, adding that the US was “deeply concerned” about the delay. “This isn’t rocket science here. They’re dragging their feet.”

Psaki said US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry never removed the prospect of military action from the table after threatening Syria’s Bashar Assad with assault in August. But they are focused on enforcing the deal that resulted from that standoff, she said.

“We’ve never taken the option, as it relates to Syria, off the table. But obviously what we’re pursuing now is the diplomatic path,” Psaki said. “There is still the possibility, and still the option here… that the Syrian regime can deliver on the promise that they will deliver the weapons to the port.”

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel also condemned the Syrian government for the delay.

“I do not know what the Syrian government’s motives are – if this is incompetence – or why they are behind in delivering these materials,” Hagel told reporters in Warsaw on Thursday. “The Syrian government has to take responsibility to respect the commitment that had been made.”

Delays pose a difficult challenge for Obama, who has faced criticism at home and abroad for failing to do more to quell Syria’s nearly three-year-old civil war.

The president cited the chemical weapons deal in his annual State of the Union address on Tuesday, saying that “American diplomacy, backed by the threat of force, is why Syria’s chemical weapons are being eliminated.”

Underscoring the administration’s anxiety, Hagel said he discussed the issue in a call on Wednesday with his Russian counterpart, Defense Minister Sergei Shogun, and asked him to “do what he could to influence the Syrian government to comply with the agreement that has been made” for destroying the chemical weapons.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a frequent Republican critic of Obama’s Syria policy, said: “Having the Russians disarm Assad is sort of like Mussolini disarming Hitler; I’m not so sure it’s going to work.”

According to US representative to the OPCW Robert Mikulak, “Syria has said that its delay in transporting these chemicals has been caused by ‘security concerns,’ and insisted on additional equipment – armored jackets for shipping containers, electronic countermeasures, and detectors for improvised explosive devices.”

But “these demands are without merit, and display a ‘bargaining mentality’ rather than a security mentality,” he said in a statement to the OPCW’s executive council.

The administration stopped short of threatening action if Syria failed to comply.

After threatening and then backing away from military action last year, there seems to be little support in Congress or among the war-weary American public for a new US military entanglement in the Middle East.

Failure to eliminate its chemical weapons could expose Syria to sanctions, although these would have to be supported in the UN Security Council by Russia and China, which have so far refused to back such measures against Assad.

“The question will be whether the Russians will tolerate Assad making them look bad,” said Dennis Ross, Obama’s former Middle East adviser. “I suspect he is dragging his feet to see what he can get away with.”

 Since Tuesday, senior level Palestinian Authority official Jibril Rajoub is in Iran, on behalf of Palestinian Authority chairman Abu Mazen, where he will meet with a series of senior level Iranian officials.  By the means of Rajoub, Abu Mazen delivered a personal letter to Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, which surveyed the internal Palestinian arena in regards to the negotiations existing with Israel under American auspices.

 Palestinian sources stated this morning in the Al Quds Al Arabi newspaper that Iran is even expected to invite Abu Mazen for an official visit in Tehran, as the strengthened relations between Tehran and the Palestinian Authority develop.  This visit is the result of intensive contacts arranged recently between the two sides in the framework of Iranian attempts to become involved with pressing regional issues.

Iran severed relations with Hamas

 Another thing that brought about the warming of relations between Iran and the Palestinian Authority is Hamas distancing itself from the Hamas movement in Gaza, because of its support for the rebel movement in Syria.  Unlike Hamas, the Islamic Republic supports the Assad regime and is interested in him maintaining power.  Therefore, Iran stopped financially supporting Hamas and cut off all contact with the Sunni Islamist terrorist organization.  Therefore, representatives of Fatah and Iran were quick to establish new lines of communication between them.

 Sources in Tehran stated that Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who was the first to meet with Rajoub, stressed Iran’s readiness to support the Palestinian Authority and the Fatah movement.  Fatah and Iran announced the opening of a “new page,” to the great alarm of the State of Israel.  

The supply of weapons will include a wide variety of firearms such as American-made assault rifles and even more powerful weapons such as shoulder-fired anti-tank weaponry. The arms shipments will not include however, anti-aircraft missiles out of fear that these weapons will fall into the wrong hands.

The decision to provide weapons to rebel factions in Syria was authorized by a U.S. Congressional hearing held behind closed doors. For a long time, the U.S. Congress has refused to authorize the supply of weapons to rebels in Syria primarily out of concern that weapons will end up in the hands of factions who oppose the US and Western influence.