Seymour M. Hersh on US intelligence sharing in the Syrian War
Barack Obama’s 
repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office – and that
there are ‘moderate’ rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him – 
has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, 
among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. 
Their criticism has focused on what they see as the administration’s 
fixation on Assad’s primary ally, Vladimir Putin. In their view, Obama 
is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China, and hasn’t 
adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share 
Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria; 
like Washington, they believe that Islamic State must be stopped. 
The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a 
highly classified assessment, put together by the Defense Intelligence 
Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin 
Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos 
and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi extremists, much as was 
then happening in Libya. A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs 
told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on 
information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a 
dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to 
finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA 
had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi 
Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow 
of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence 
estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria 
policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as
 a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting 
Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an 
across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the
 opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. The so-called 
moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group 
stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was bleak: there was 
no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming 
extremists.












