Keith Thomson: The CIA's Role in Iranian Regime Change

I would guess that in the past year, there were more regime-change-in-Iran plots floated by members of the intelligence community than there are Iranians. During that time, research for my novel Once A Spy (Doubleday, 2010) brought me into contact with an array of intelligence community personnel ranging from analysts to CIA Director Michael Hayden. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would estimate their overall enthusiasm for a change of regime was a 9. Among Israeli intelligence officers (who didn't exactly cotton to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's dismissal of the Holocaust as a myth or to his frequent mentions of the end of the Zionist regime and Iran's nuclear program in the same breath), the average was 12. Still, the consensus on actively promoting regime change was: "Let's wait and see what happens in the election in June." After all,... [read full story]                    

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