Are We Supposed to Believe that Ahmadinejad is a CIA Agent?

On Thursday Iran blamed the CIA for the recent protests roiling the country. Yesterday Caitlin Johnstone wrote "Reminder: The Lying, Coup-Staging CIA Recently Escalated Operations In Iran":

The CIA recently escalated its involvement in Iran, and they ain’t there for the baba ghanoush.

Back in June the Wall Street Journal published a report saying that America’s Central Intelligence Agency had set up a new organization whose sole task would be to focus on Iran under the direction of “Ayatollah Mike” D’andrea, an aggressive Iran hawk.

“The Iran Mission Center will bring together analysts, operations personnel and specialists from across the CIA to bring to bear the range of the agency’s capabilities, including covert action,” says the report.

This alone is reason enough to be intensely skeptical of every single thing you hear about Iran. The CIA has been a consistent utilizer and developer of the science of psyops — psychological operations in which large groups of people are deceived and manipulated into thinking and feeling a certain way to advance a prefered agenda during war and during peacetime. Relatedly, the CIA also has an extensive and well-documented history of staging regime change coups to topple rival governments all around the world, including Iran. These are not conspiracy theories. These are conspiracy facts.

I agree with Johnstone. We have to be skeptical. At the same time we can't look at every uprising as a CIA maneuver. The U.S. spook machine will definitely start spinning once protests spread, attempting to maximize mayhem for official enemies. But we should not confuse this with an army of agents on the ground manning the barricades and leading the protests.

The staple for the CIA is a capital-based coup, what has been dubbed a "color revolution." The protests in Iran are the opposite of the CoRev model; they're not centered in a capital but are taking place in the hinterlands where it is hard for Western journalists to report what is actually going on. As Thomas Erdbrink noted on Wednesday (see "As Iran Erupts in Protest, Tehran Is Notably Quiet"):

The protests that broke out a week ago in other parts of Iran — but never gained traction in the capital — have shown some signs of abating, though demonstrators are still taking to the streets after dark in many outlying provinces. Elite forces with the Revolutionary Guards Corps were deployed to three of them on Wednesday — Hamadan, Isfahan and Lorestan — to help quell uprisings there.

Rural Iranian provinces are more conservative than the cosmopolitan urban centers. (The same is true of the United States of course. Trump won because of a tsunami of rural support.) The rural areas have been bedrock for the Islamic Republic of Iran. For the CIA to stage a coup built out of this bedrock would be the same as toppling Viktor Yanukovich in 2014 with Russian-speaking patriots from Donetsk instead of the neo-Nazis from Lviv who showed up in Kiev with guns. In other words, nonsense.

We have to grant agency to ordinary people; to do otherwise would be to subscribe to a type of Gnosticism where various intelligence agencies stand in for the demiurge.

My sense is that the mainstream reporting is generally correct. This is about rural vs. urban inequality, about Ahmadinejad vs. Rouhani, about domestic politics, a perspective bolstered by reports of former president Ahmadinejad's arrest.

Intelligence agencies are good at disinformation, sowing discord and dissension, co-opting already existing movements; creating campaigns from whole cloth . . . well, look at Timber Sycamore, an epic failure that might eventually be blamed for the dissolution of the European Union.