CIA Director Porter Goss Meets Turkish Police Officials in Ankara, Dec. 13.
Istanbul/Berlin: The news item put a major damper on the pre-holiday (Christmas) spirit: Washington is preparing its closest allies for the likelihood of an air assault on Iran. This was reported by DDP (Deutsche Depeschendienst, Germany's second leading news agency after DPA), which put out an article to this effect written by Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor for one of Germany's main dailies Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and an intelligence service expert. However, considerable doubt about this claim is warranted. Ulfkotte's controversial sources are named as "Western security circles," and he never gets more specific. According to him, CIA Director Porter Goss, on a visit to Istanbul, asked Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to support the air strikes against Iranian nuclear and military installations by stepping up the exchange of intelligence. As it stands, the strikes are planned to occur in 2006. Furthermore, DDP reports that during the past few weeks the governments of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman and Pakistan have also been approached regarding the military plans. Air strikes were characterized as "an option" in these discussions, but a time frame was not mentioned. On his Istanbul visit, Goss is alleged to have given Turkish security services three dossiers that prove Iranian cooperation with al-Qaeda. In addition, there was a fourth dossier focusing on the current state of Iran's nuclear weapons program. According to information from German intelligence sources, the CIA director assured the Turkish government that it would be informed several hours ahead of any attack, and also green-lighted almost simultaneous Turkish attacks on camps in Iran run by the PKK, the Kurdish separatist organization. This go-ahead appears rather strange since the PKK runs its camps out of northern Iraq and has no such installations in Iran. The apparent escalation, as DDP reports it, is above all the outcome of the latest anti-Semitic outbursts by Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His verbal attacks on Israel have supposedly convinced the U.S. government that Teheran will not back down in the nuclear stand-off, and that Iran is simply dragging its feet. A high-ranking German military officer, wishing to remain anonymous, is quoted as saying: "It would surprise me enormously if the Americans did not use this pretext supplied by Teheran. The Americans must attack Iran before it develops nuclear weapons. Afterwards, it would be too late."
