CIA Spies Caught in Pizza Hut, Fear Execution in Middle East
In what reads like a very badly written spy thriller, a story is being released through the mainstrem media that claims over a dozen ’CIA spies’ (who are not actually spies) have been discovered in the Middle East and are probably slated for execution.
"In a significant failure for the United States in the Mideast, more than a dozen spies working for the CIA in Iran and Lebanon have been caught and the U.S. government fears they will be or have been executed, according to four current and former U.S. officials with connections to the intelligence community."
These spies, who were actually paid informants recruited by the CIA, were to allegedly target Iran and Hezbollah in Beirut.
The U.S. government labels Hezbollah as a terrorist group, and accuses Iran of developing a nuclear weapon and sponsoring attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. They are both major targets for U.S. spy agencies and the White House.
While many of the allegations in this affair are supplied by ’unnamed U.S. officials’, Robert Baer, a former senior CIA official who worked against Hezbollah in Beirut in the 1980’s, speculated, "If they were genuine spies, spying against Hezbollah, I don’t think we’ll ever see them again," he said. "These guys are very, very vicious and unforgiving."
Baer’s suggestion that these informants will assuredly be executed in barbaric fashion is followed by an unnamed ’official’ lamenting, "Many risks lead to wins, but some result in occasional setbacks."
Undoubtedly having over a dozen assets strategically embedded in hostile territory all captured and executed and the entire debacle paraded around global mainstream media is a considerable setback.
However, no time is wasted in invoking 9/11 or reminding how Israel works into this equation.
Other current and former officials said the discovery of the two U.S. spy rings occurred separately, but amounted to a setback of significant proportions in efforts to track the activities of the Iranian nuclear program and the intentions of Hezbollah against Israel.
"Remember, this group was responsible for killing more Americans than any other terrorist group before 9/11," said a U.S. official. Attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 killed more than 300 people, including almost 260 Americans.
The U.S. official, speaking for the record but without attribution, gave grudging credit to the efforts of Iran and Hezbollah to detect and expose U.S. and Israeli espionage.
"Collecting sensitive information on adversaries who are aggressively trying to uncover spies in their midst will always be fraught with risk," said the U.S. official briefed on the spy ring bust.
But others inside the American intelligence community say sloppy "tradecraft" -- the method of covert operations -- by the CIA is also to blame for the disruption of the vital spy networks.
How was this crack squad of savvy spies snared?
Allegedly, it was sloppy lunchdates.
In Beirut, two Hezbollah double agents pretended to go to work for the CIA. Hezbollah then learned of the restaurant where multiple CIA officers were meeting with several agents, according to the four current and former officials briefed on the case. The CIA used the codeword "PIZZA" when discussing where to meet with the agents, according to U.S. officials.
Two former officials describe the location as a Beirut Pizza Hut. A current US official denied that CIA officers met their agents at Pizza Hut.
From there, Hezbollah’s internal security arm identified at least a dozen informants, and the identities of several CIA case officers.
Hezbollah then began to "roll up" much of the CIA’s network against the terror group, the officials said.
One former senior intelligence official told ABC News that CIA officers ignored warnings that the operation could be compromised by using the same location for meetings with multiple assets.
"We were lazy and the CIA is now flying blind against Hezbollah," the former official said.
A link to Iran is formed, coming almost as an afterthought, and with the same vein of unsupportable evidence as was touted in the "Iranian Terror Plot to Kill The Saudi Embassador" narrative.
CIA Spies Caught in Iran
At about the same time that Hezbollah was identifying the CIA network in Lebanon, Iranian intelligence agents discovered a secret internet communication method used by CIA-paid assets in Iran.
The CIA has yet to determine precisely how many of its assets were compromised in Iran, but the number could be in the dozens, according to one current and one former U.S. intelligence official.
The exposure of the two spy networks was first announced in widely ignored televised statements by Iranian and Hezbollah leaders. U.S. officials tell ABC News that much of what was broadcast was, in fact, true.
Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, announced in June of this year that two high-ranking members of Hezbollah had been exposed as CIA spies, leading U.S. officials to conclude that the entire network inside Hezbollah had been compromised.
In Iran, intelligence minister Heidar Moslehi announced in May that more than 30 U.S. and Israeli spies had been discovered and an Iranian television program, which acts as a front for Iran’s government, showed images of internet sites used by the U.S. for secret communication with the spies.
U.S. officials said the Iranian television program showed pictures of people who were not U.S. assets, but the program’s video of the websites used by the CIA was accurate.
An unnamed U.S. official reminds the world to fear:
"Hezbollah is an extremely complicated enemy. It’s a determined terrorist group, a powerful political player, a mighty military and an accomplished intelligence operation, formidable and ruthless. No one underestimates its capabilities."
So the message readers take away from this narrative is that:
-While ’sloppy tradecraft’ was responsible for the downfall of the PizzaHut Spy Ring, Hezbollah is a masterful player in global machinations,
-Iran and Lebanon are dangerous, heinous nations that for some reason take issue with extensive rings of foreign spies infiltrating their respective countries,
-The CIA releases the intricate details of both victories and grave mistakes to the global media for the good of the public,
-Now that these informants have probably been eliminated (if they even existed), the CIA is "flying blind" when it comes to Middle East intelligence gathering. The CIA has no further resources or spies, and never has the western world been at more risk due to unforeseen threats,
-Iran must be dealt with sooner rather than later and they must be fought in PizzaHut over there so we don’t have to fight them in PizzaHut over here,
-None of this story is propaganda, disinformation, or untrue.
~E
GoodMorningAmerica source article : gma.yahoo.com
Written by Matthew Cole and Brian Ross.
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