From a new Atlantic article about Condoleezza Rice (sub. req.):
Rice and her colleagues in the administration decided to embark on a daring and risky third course: a coordinated campaign, directed with the help of the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates. While the “get tough†crew favored direct military action against Iran, the administration chose a more subtle mix of diplomatic and economic pressure, large-scale military exercises, psychological warfare, and covert operations. The bill for the covert part of this activity, which has involved funding sectarian political movements and paramilitary groups in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories, is said to amount to more than $300 million. It is being paid by Saudi Arabia and other concerned Gulf states…
Sources in the United States and the Middle East familiar with the covert side of the American-led effort to “push back†Iran…pointed to an upsurge in antigovernment guerrilla activity inside Iran, including a bomb in Zahedan, the economic center of the province of Baluchistan, that killed 11 soldiers in the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on February 14; the mysterious death of the Iranian scientist Ardashir Hosseinpour, who worked on uranium enrichment at the Isfahan nuclear facility; and the defection of a high-ranking Iranian general named Ali Asgari…
Hey, let’s ask Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, what he’s doing about these massively illegal actions that could easily lead to war…accidently or on purpose. Jay?
ROCKEFELLER: Don’t you understand the way Intelligence works? Do you think that because I’m Chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say I want it, and they give it to me? They control it. All of it. All of it. All the time. I only get, and my committee only gets, what they want to give me.
Oh! Sorry, I didn’t realize that as a senior U.S. senator with an $82 million personal fortune, you were completely powerless—so much so that you can’t even find out things that someone writing an article for the Atlantic can. Carry on.