The CIA
backed a right-wing coup in Syria in 1949, a mere 3 years after Syria became an independent
country.
Clark University History professor Douglas Little notes:
Recently declassified
records… confirm that beginning on November 30, 1948, [CIA operative Stephen]
Meade met secretly with Colonel Zaim at least six times to discuss the
“possibility [of an] army supported dictatorship.” [“Cold War and Covert
Action: The United States and Syria, 1945-1958,” Middle East Journal, Winter 1990, p. 55]
***
As early as 1949, this newly independent Arab republic was an
important staging ground for the CIA’s earliest experiments in covert action.
The CIA secretly encouraged a right-wing military coup in 1949.
The reason the
U.S. initiated the coup? Little explains:
In late 1945, the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO)
announced plans to construct the Trans-Arabian Pipe Line (TAPLINE) from Saudi
Arabia to the Mediterra- nean. With U.S. help, ARAMCO secured rights-of-way
from Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The Syrian right-of-way was stalled in
parliament.
In other words,
Syria was the sole holdout for the lucrative oil pipeline.
(Indeed, the CIA has carried out this type of covert action right from the start.)
In 1957, the American president and British prime minister agreed to launch regime change again in
Syria. Historian Little notes that the coup plot was discovered and stopped:
On August 12, 1957, the Syrian army surrounded the U.S. embassy
in Damascus. Claiming to have aborted a CIA plot to overthrow neutralist
President Shukri Quwatly and install a pro-Western regime, Syrian chief of
counterintelligence Abdul Hamid Sarraj expelled three U.S. diplomats ….
Syrian counterintelligence chief Sarraj reacted swiftly on
August 12, expelling Stone and other CIA agents, arresting their accomplices
and placing the U.S. embassy under surveillance.
***
More importantly, Syria also had control of one of the main oil
arteries of the Middle East, the pipeline which connected pro-western Iraq’s
oilfields to Turkey.
***
The report said that once
the necessary degree of fear had been created, frontier
incidents and border clashes would be staged to provide a pretext for Iraqi and Jordanian military
intervention. Syria had to be “made to appear as the sponsor of plots, sabotage
and violence directed against neighbouring governments,” the report says. “CIA
and SIS should use their capabilities in both the psychological and action
fields to augment tension.”
***
The plan called for funding
of a “Free Syria Committee” [hmmm … sounds vaguely familiar],
and the arming of “political factions with
paramilitary or other actionist capabilities” within Syria. The
CIA and MI6 would instigate internal uprisings,
for instance by the Druze [a Shia Muslim sect] in
the south, help to free political prisoners held in the Mezze prison, and
stir up the Muslim Brotherhood in Damascus.
Newly-declassified CIA documents show
that in 1983, the CIA drew up plans to pressure the Syrian government by using
Iraq, Israel and Turkey as proxies:
Syria at present has a
hammerlock on US interests both in Lebanon and in the Gulf — through closure of
Iraq’s pipeline thereby threatening Iraqi internationalization of the
[Iran-Iraq] war. The US should consider sharply escalating the
pressures against Assad [Sr.] through covertly
orchestrating simultaneous military threats against Syria from
three border states hostile to Syria: Iraq, Israel and Turkey. Iraq, perceived
to be increasingly desperate in the Gulf War, would undertake limited military
(air) operations against Syria with the sole goal of opening the pipeline. Although opening war on a second front
against Syria poses considerable risk to Iraq, Syria would also face a
two-front war since it
is already heavily engaged in the Bekaa, on the Golan and in maintaining
control over a hostile and restive population inside Syria.
Israel would simultaneously
raise tensions along Syria’s Lebanon front
without actually going to war. Turkey, angered by Syrian support to Armenian
terrorism, to Iraqi Kurds on Turkey’s Kurdish border areas and to Turkish
terrorists operating out of northern Syria, has often considered launching unilateral military
operations against terrorist camps in northern Syria. Virtually all Arab states
would have sympathy for Iraq.
Faced with three
belligerent fronts, Assad would probably be forced to abandon his policy of
closure of the pipeline. Such a concession would relieve the economic pressure
on Iraq, and perhaps force Iran to
reconsider bringing the war to an end. It would be a sharp blow to Syria’s prestige
and could effect the equation of forces in Lebanon.
***
If Israel were to increase tensions against Syria simultaneously
with an Iraqi initiative, the pressures on Assad would escalate rapidly. A
Turkish move would psychologically press him further.
Recently-declassified CIA documents show
that in 1986, the CIA drew up plans to overthrow Syria by provoking
sectarian tensions.
Neoconservatives planned regime change in Syria once again in 1991 and again in 2001.
And as Nafeez Ahmed notes:
According to former French
foreign minister Roland Dumas,
Britain had planned covert action in Syria as early as 2009: “I was in England
two years before the violence in Syria on other business,” he told French
television: “I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they
were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain
was preparing gunmen to invade Syria.”
Leaked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, including notes
from a meeting with Pentagon officials, confirmed that as of
2011, US and UK special forces training of Syrian opposition forces was well
underway. The goal was to elicit the “collapse” of Assad’s regime “from
within.”
The best way to help Israel
deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help
the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad.
***
What Israeli military leaders really worry about — but cannot
talk about — is losing their nuclear monopoly.
And high-level
American and Turkish officials say
that Turkey supplied Sarin gas to Syrian rebels in 2013 in order to frame the
Syrian government … to provide an excuse for regime change.
Indeed, the U.S. has carried out regime change in the Middle
East and North Africa for six decades.
