OPINION:
Last month, the CIA posted instructions on social media sites in Farsi — as well as Korean and Mandarin — on a secure means of contact via the internet for Iranians interested in sharing sensitive information with the U.S. government.
In a public statement, the CIA revealed that “people are trying to reach out to us from around the world, and we are offering them instructions for how to do that safely. Our efforts on this front have been successful in Russia, and we want to make sure individuals from other authoritarian regimes know that we’re open for business.”
A long-standing priority hard target of the U.S. intelligence community, Iran is now a nuclear threshold state that, along with its proxy terrorists, is engaging in a multifront war against Israel.
Iran’s multifaceted threats to U.S. national security are also blinking red.
Speaking at a Cipher Brief security conference earlier this month, CIA Director William Burns said that Iran could take “probably more like a week or a little more to produce one bomb’s worth of weapons-grade material.” Iran has amassed a large stockpile of enriched uranium and an extensive ballistic missile program, which it deployed against Israel earlier this month.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei wants to destroy Israel and reduce or eliminate U.S. influence in the Middle East. He has directed cyberhacking operations on critical infrastructure systems in the United States and against Donald Trump’s campaign. He has also ordered assassination plots against former U.S. officials — last month, the Justice Department charged a Pakistani national with being part of a plot to assassinate the former president.
Iran’s closest allies outside of its regional proxies are Russia, to which Iran supplies drones used to wage the Kremlin’s unprovoked war on Ukraine; China, on which Iran relies as the biggest buyer of its oil exports; and North Korea, which turbo-boosted Iran’s ballistic missile program.
Iran has created strategic depth by funding and arming proxy forces in Iraq, Syria, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Yemen. Iran might have believed that the Oct. 7 terror attack by Hamas on Israel would begin a war of attrition leading in time to Israel’s demise. Israel, however, has upset that calculation by effectively counterattacking both Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
Israel has induced a fog of war by destroying Hezbollah’s communications and decimating the group’s leadership and then began systematically destroying Hezbollah’s rocket launchers in southern Lebanon. Demonstrating that no target — even in Tehran — is off-limits, Israel lethally targeted Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in an official Iranian government guesthouse after he attended the inauguration ceremony for Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, over the summer.
Iran has always been willing to fight to the last Palestinian, Iraqi or Lebanese proxy who is ready to die in the fight against Israel. Now, Israel has demonstrated that Iran is powerless to deter or defend its erstwhile allies in the face of an all-out counterassault.
Iran is also dealing with an economic crisis with a severely devalued currency, as well as the aftermath of September 2022 street protests ignited after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the regime’s notorious religious police for not wearing her hijab correctly in public.
With its new online appeal, the CIA is appealing to a few courageous Iranian security, military and intelligence officials who have lost confidence in their country’s decrepit leadership and want to share protected information because Iran directs such serious threats against U.S. national security.
Iran maintains the capability to conduct offensive cyberoperations against our private and government sectors and seeks to carry out terrorist attacks against Americans and U.S. installations at home and abroad. With its proxies badly beaten but still in the fight, Iran might consider how to reconstitute these terrorist groups, risk a nuclear breakout or launch terrorist attacks on U.S. soft targets overseas or here at home.
The U.S. intelligence community’s most vital mission is to collect and analyze information to preempt threats such as Iran’s assassination plot against Mr. Trump. Good intelligence, it turns out, is also critical to building an effective political strategy.
For now, Israel is benefiting from extraordinary tactical success on the battlefield against Hezbollah and Hamas. But Israel and Iran are trading tit-for-tat escalatory attacks, which risk sparking a full-scale war.
Seeking to restore a measure of deterrence to protect its citizens, Israel is poised to respond militarily to Iran’s recent ballistic missile strike on its territory, the second such salvo this year. With the Middle East at risk of spiraling into a wider war, President Biden and whoever succeeds him will need those CIA sources on Iran’s plans and intentions.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018.
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