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>Press TV
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>@PressTV
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>Iran state-affiliated media
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>Towards the end of his presidency, Donald Trump approved a secret Pentagon campaign to conduct sabotage, propaganda and other psychological operations in Iran, a new report has revealed.
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>https://twitter.com/PressTV/status/1463515471442071552
the report is here …
interesting stuff
https://news.yahoo.com/frustrated-with-cia-trump-administration-turned-to-pentagon-for-shadow-war-with-iran-205152958.html
Former officials described an interagency process on Iran that was rife with dysfunction. The CIA and Defense Department “were not providing good options to the decision makers, to the president,” because they thought Trump was “crazy and if they took [an] idea to him he’d say, ‘Do it,’ and so they felt they had to control him,” said former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, who also served in a number of NSC and Pentagon positions in the Trump administration.
-CIA Director Gina Haspel was working to convince Milley that the agency should be in charge of the U.S.’s secret operations against Iran, according to the former senior defense official.
Haspel “wooed him into believing that CIA was responsible for this, and let CIA take care of this,” said this former official. “Meanwhile, CIA wasn’t doing anything.”
CIA and other officials strongly dispute this characterization. Long-running CIA programs and authorities — focused on countering Iran’s nuclear program, sowing dissent within the regime and delegitimizing it in the eyes of the Iranian public, and combating Iranian influence abroad, among other things — continued under the Trump administration, according to former agency and national security officials.
On counterproliferation-related activities, “they let us run wild, because they just didn’t want to get involved in the disruption part,” said the former senior agency official. In fact, argue some former CIA officials, during the Trump administration, the agency’s Iran center was so focused on covert action that it hurt the agency’s ability to develop Iranian source networks.
In 2018, the Trump administration also approved a new presidential finding permitting the CIA to conduct much more aggressive covert action in cyberspace. The agency subsequently conducted covert hack-and-dump operations against Iran and Russia and cyberattacks on Iranian infrastructure, former officials told Yahoo News. The secret authorization also freed up the agency to conduct these operations with less White House oversight.