I don't as a rule trust Seymour Hersh's stories on the US Military, but I have seen hints here and there supporting his story about American Special Forces teams hunting for nuclear sites in Iran. While American military strategic reconnaissance is a necessary preparatory step for an invasion of Iran, this report does not necessarily mean we are going to invade. The intelligence gathered could be used for any of a number of things short of invasion ranging from diplomacy through Special Forces "Direct Action" missions, to one off precision air-strikes to a full blown air campaigns.
The key fact here isn't the "sexy angle" of American Special Forces being used to avoid Congressional Intelligence Committee oversight, or that Hersh is shilling for his sources on the CIA bureaucracy and the Congressional Intelligence Committee staffs. It is that Pakistan has turned "States Evidence" on the Iranian nuclear program.
"The former intelligence official told Hersh that an American commando task force in South Asia is working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists who had dealt with their Iranian counterparts.
The New Yorker reports that this task force, aided by information from Pakistan, has been penetrating into eastern Iran in a hunt for underground nuclear-weapons installations.
In exchange for this cooperation, the official told Hersh, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has received assurances that his government will not have to turn over Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, to face questioning about his role in selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea (news - web sites). "
This is the sort of deal a responsible American government trying to prevent an ISO container nuke from going off in an American city must accept. If this report is to be trusted, I suspect these Special Force’s missions are as much to determine the reliability of the Pakistani nuclear data, as it is to pave the way for an American invasion of Iran.
Seymour Hersh's article in the New Yorker is now online at:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050124fa_fact
This is OK, I just wonder whether I really believe that covert US intelligence operations in Iran will produce better intelligence than non-covert IAEA inspections. How much of this story is a message directed at the Iranians?