CIA Director Mike Pompeo Warns of Growing Iranian Presence in Syria, Iraq
John Hayward
The discussion ranged from defeating ISIS and countering Iran’s
growing influence in the Middle East to Russian interference in the 2016
presidential election.
The University of Western Australia
Stephens began by asking Pompeo to identify the United States’
enemies in Syria, a question for which Pompeo said there was no singular
answer. Obviously, the defeat of the Islamic State is America’s top
priority at the moment, but the second name offered by the CIA director
was
Iran.
“
Today you have Iran extending its boundary, extending its reach, now making an effort to cross the borders and link up from Iraq,”
said Pompeo. “It’s a very dangerous threat to the United States. Just
yesterday, one more time we learned that Iran is the world’s largest
state sponsor of terror, and
they now have a significant foothold in Syria.”
Pompeo segued from Iran to Russia, saying he hoped the U.S. could
find ways to work alongside the Russians in Syria, but “we really don’t
have the same set of interests there.”
“When the decision was made to allow the Russians to enter into
Syria, now coming on four years ago, it fundamentally changed the
landscape, and it’s certainly been worse for the Syrian people,” he
said.
Pompeo restated that point more forcefully later, during his
question-and-answer session with the audience, recalling an editorial he
co-wrote in 2013 saying that
President Barack Obama should have acted in Syria, but instead he invited the Russians to step in and address the chemical weapons issue.
“The previous president instead chose to invite the Russians in, and
that was a major turning point. That’s not a political statement, it’s a
factual observation. It was a major turning point in the capacity of
America to influence events in Syria. And so today we find ourselves in
the position where we’re working to develop partners and those who are
willing to work alongside us to get an outcome that’s in the best
interests of America,” he said.
Pompeo said America’s objective in Syria, beyond defeating ISIS,
should be enhancing the stability of the Middle East, an objective
shared by America’s partners in the region as well as European allies.
Interestingly, he was somewhat ambivalent about whether the Kurds can
be counted as an American friend in Syria, arguing that it is not
accurate to speak of them as a unified individual element because of
their complex internal politics. “Suffice to say there are places where
we are definitely working alongside them and which they’re going to help
us achieve the outcome that America wants,” he said.
On the biggest Syrian question, Pompeo deferred questions about
whether America will push for the end of Bashar Assad’s dictatorship to
the State Department. He quoted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s
assessment that Assad is “not a stabilizing influence” and agreed it is
“difficult to imagine a stable Syria that still has Assad in power.”
“
He is a puppet of the
Iranians. Therefore, it seems an unlikely situation where Assad will be
sitting on the throne and America’s interests will be well-served,” Pompeo said.
He expressed concerns about Iran’s use of proxy forces like Hezbollah and Shiite militia groups in Syria, citing
the threat posed by these forces to Israel and the Gulf states. He
noted other Iranian proxy forces have gained a disturbing foothold in
Iraq as well.
“This administration is going to have the task of unwinding what we
found when we came in,” he said. “We’re working diligently to get the
right place there. I will tell you that some of the actions we have
taken have let folks know that we are at least back working this problem
in a way that wasn’t the case six months ago.”
As for Russia’s interests in Syria, Pompeo pithily summed them up as:
“They love a warm-water naval port, and they love to stick it to
America.”
Asked if there was any evidence Russia has pursued a serious strategy
against the Islamic State, instead of concentrating its fire on the
more “moderate” opponents of the Assad regime, Pompeo bluntly answered,
“No.”
However, he said he hoped there were other areas where
counterterrorism cooperation with the Russians could be productive and
explained it was his duty to work with them if they could provide
valuable information about terrorist threats to Americans at home and
abroad.
“We live in a world where the Russians have a massive nuclear
stockpile and are firmly entrenched in Syria,” he pointed out. “They’ve
retaken Crimea. They have a foothold in southeast Ukraine. Those are
facts on the ground. America has an obligation to push back against
that, not to allow that continued expansionism that has taken place, and
to be serious in the way that we deal with them.”
“If we can do that by me working with someone who doesn’t share my
value set, but works for the SVR, I’ll do it,” Pompeo said. (The SVR is
Russia’s external intelligence agency, analogous to the CIA.)
Turning back to ISIS, Pompeo warned there are signs the terrorist
organization is already mutating and spreading into other parts of the
world to survive its inevitable defeat in Raqqa, naming Libya, the Sinai
peninsula, and the hinterlands of Iraq and Syria as particular
concerns.
“We broke the back of al-Qaeda. We crushed them. We didn’t do it just
by taking out a handful of folks. We took down their entire network.
That’s what we’re going to do again,” he promised.
He stressed that the Islamic State remains dangerous even without its
“caliphate” territory, but America is “infinitely better off” with that
territory liberated because holding cities in Iraq and Syria helped the
Islamic State build the infrastructure it uses for recruiting and
terrorist attacks around the world.
Pompeo said that, although the State Department has certified
continued Iranian compliance with the JCPOA (i.e. the Iran nuclear
deal), the Trump administration remains committed to pushing back
against Iran in many areas. A longtime skeptic of the nuclear deal, he
humorously compared Iran’s technical compliance with the behavior of a
poor tenant who complies with the rules just enough to avoid eviction.
“Grudging, minimalist, temporary, with no intention really of what
the agreement is designed to do,” he said. “It was designed to foster
stability and have Iran become a re-entrant to the Western world, and
the agreement simply hasn’t achieved that.”
Pompeo said it was not easy to articulate what would achieve those
goals but stressed that “continued appeasement, continued failure to
acknowledge when they do things wrong” will never be the right strategy.
He expressed confidence that the Trump administration could engineer a
fundamental shift in the Iranian situation.
Stephens turned to North Korea, suggesting that the competence of its
nuclear and missile programs has improved to an alarming degree over
the past few years. Pompeo said this was a result of “willing partners —
suppliers, engineers, talented physicists who were able to come provide
them with ways to get up the learning curve faster.”
He revealed that President Trump “rarely lets me escape the Oval
Office without a question about North Korea. It is at the front of his
mind.”
By contrast, he said previous administrations have “whistled past the
graveyard” of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, but it is too close to
realizing those goals for the Trump administration to take the same
approach.
“It would be a great thing to denuclearize the peninsula, to get
those weapons off of that, but the thing that is most dangerous about it
is the character who holds the control over them today,” Pompeo said.
“From the administration’s perspective, the most important thing we can
do is separate those two — separate capacity and someone who might well
have intent, and break those two apart.”
Pompeo said it was still possible to interrupt North Korea’s march to
a nuclear arsenal without resorting to military intervention, noting
that there is a great difference between building a few nuclear missiles
and development a large, reliable missile force along the lines of the
American or Russian inventories. He suggested focusing on reducing North
Korea’s access to the supplies and expertise it would need to develop
anything beyond its first crude ICBMs. He also suggested the North
Korean people might have some appetite for overthrowing their brutal
dictatorship.
Asked if Russia attempted to intervene in the 2016 U.S. presidential
election, Pompeo said yes, adding they tried to interfere with many
previous elections as well. “They’ve been at this a long time, and I
don’t think they have any intention of backing off,” he noted.
Pompeo explained that the cost of effective political interference in other nations has been greatly reduced by the Internet.
“It used to be it was expensive to run an ad on a television station.
Now you simply go online and propagate your message,” he said. “They
have found an effective tool, an easy way to reach into our systems and
into our culture to achieve the outcomes they are looking for.” Later,
in response to a question from the audience, he said the CIA is working
with German intelligence agencies to investigate possible Russian
interference in German elections, although he could not comment on the
status of that investigation.
Stephens proposed that one of those tools is WikiLeaks and asked if
Pompeo sees that website and its founder Julian Assange as witting or
unwitting agents of Moscow.
“WikiLeaks will take down America any way they can and find any
willing partner to achieve that end,” Pompeo declared. “If they can work
with the Chinese, they’re happy to do it. If they can work with the
Iranians, they’ll be part and parcel. If they can work with young
American students in our colleges and on our campuses, they’re happy to
work for them. You only need to go to WikiLeaks’ Twitter account to see
that every month, they remind people that you can be an intern at the
CIA and become a really dynamite whistleblower.”
“This is the nature of these non-state hostile intelligence services,” he said:
I think our intelligence community has a lot of work to figure out
how to respond to them. We have spent decades figuring out how to
respond to nation-state intelligence services that come after us. We
have authorities, and rules, and processes that are focused on countries
and regions. We now need to make sure that we understand that some of
the intelligence threat, some of the threat to America is coming from
these folks who don’t have constituents, people who live in their
country but rather are free-range chickens, running around the world
with resources to spare, and who don’t intend well for the United States
of America, and are happy to use cyber or other means to achieve their
ends.
Pompeo noted that the First Amendment makes it difficult to combat
the spread of information obtained by organizations like WikiLeaks, so
it is imperative for the intelligence community and other government
agencies to maintain information security and keep that information from
being released into the wild. He expressed hope that potential leakers
would consider their responsibilities to America and make the right
decision about jeopardizing national security.
“We have a publication – you work for it, Bret – that published the
name of an undercover officer at the Central Intelligence Agency. I find
that unconscionable,” Pompeo said, and then stared at Stephens for a
few tense moments while the Aspen Security Forum audience applauded.
Stephens retorted that President Trump was known to declare, “I love
WikiLeaks!” on the 2016 campaign trail after it began releasing
documents from the Democratic National Committee.
“I don’t love WikiLeaks,” Pompeo said flatly.
Pompeo agreed with Stephens that a pattern of recent incidents
suggest the U.S. intelligence and defense communities have an “insider
threat” problem, although he stressed that excessive
compartmentalization can result in a catastrophic failure of agencies to
share vital information, as in the case of the run-up to 9/11. “We’re
working inside my organization to make sure we have that balance
correct,” he said.
“I come home every night, my wife says, ‘How was your day? What did
you do?’ I can’t tell her what I did, but I can tell her that my day was
great because America is awesome, and the people who work at the CIA
are doing amazing things. I just can’t always share them with you,” said
Pompeo, bringing a round of applause from the audience. He stressed
that some of those “amazing things” are very much directed against
Russian cyber-espionage.
Later, when pressed by an audience question from former 9/11
Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste about President Trump’s dismissal
of the investigation into Russian election interference as a “witch
hunt,” Pompeo argued that it was not out of bounds for the many high
officials served by the intelligence community to challenge its work.
“It is not always the case that our answers are binary,” he said,
pointing out that some of the findings in the intelligence community’s
analysis of the 2016 election were expressed with more confidence than
others. However, he repeated with some exasperation that he personally
does not doubt the findings that efforts were made by Russia to meddle
in the election.
“I think if you watch this administration’s actions with respect to
Russia, it is no comparison in respect to how this administration has
dealt with Russia and the previous one,” Pompeo said.
Turning to the war against terrorism, Pompeo provocatively stated
that he does not believe in the “lone wolf” designation for many of the
terrorists who have struck across the Western world in the past decade.
“I’ve never seen a wolf alone,” he noted. “They always know how to
find the pack and where to find them. Someone is always helping each of
these folks, so networks still exist.”
However, Pompeo added that terrorism has changed “to the extent it is
less centralized, more diffuse, just like effective corporations in
America today that have decentralized.” To combat that threat, he said
he is working to “decentralize the Central Intelligence Agency, so we
can be as nimble as our adversary.”
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