Robert Dreyfuss

Robert Dreyfuss       (investigative journalist)
Nationality	US
Member of	Association of Former Intelligence Officers, WhoWhatWhy
American investigative journalist, worked for the Executive Intelligence Review

Robert "Bob" Dreyfuss is an American investigative journalist In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dreyfuss was Middle East Intelligence director of the Executive Intelligence Review, the flagship journal of the Lyndon LaRouche movement. His 2005 book The Devil's Game addresses how West used Islamic radicalism to suppress Communist movements in the Middle East.

Career

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dreyfuss was Middle East Intelligence director of the Executive Intelligence Review, the flagship journal of the Lyndon LaRouche movement. In the 1990s Dreyfuss wrote on intelligence issues and foreign affairs, and profiled a number of organizations and public figures, including then governor of Texas, George W. Bush, and senators Trent Lott and John McCain. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, he has written about the War on Terrorism and the Iraq War.

Later he has been contributing editor for The Nation magazine. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Diplomat, Mother Jones, The American Prospect, TomPaine.com, and other progressive publications.

Hostage to Khomeini

His 1981 book, Hostage to Khomeini, was commissioned by Lyndon LaRouche. In the book Robert Dreyfuss provides a detailed explanation of why the Carter administration was fooled into supporting the Khomeini revolutionaries but Khomeini backstabbed the US after the Shah was brought to the US for treatment. The book discusses how various officials in the Carter administration believed that an Islamic Iran could export the Islamic revolution to the Soviet Muslims and cause a break-up of the Soviet Union. Dreyfuss accused Cyrus Hashemi of being a CIA and Mossad agent. Cyrus Hashemi subsequently sued Dreyfuss and Lyndon Larouche.

The Devil's Game

The Devil's Game, published in 2005, addresses a number of different Middle Eastern interventions made by the West, as outlined below.

Islamic Radicalism as a tool against Pro-Soviet Pan-Arabism

The book discusses how Western governments supported the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood in order to sabotage the efforts of Pro-Soviet Arab Nationalist leaders such as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. The goals of Nasser were to end Western domination and control in the Middle East. This was a great threat to Western interests, who used the Muslim Brotherhood to destabilize the Nasser government.

Support of Islamic Radicalism as an Anti-Communist strategy

"[T]he United States spent many years trying to construct a barrier against the Soviet Union along its southern flank. The fact that all of the nations between Greece and China were Muslim gave rise to the notion that Islam itself might reinforce that Maginot Line-style strategy. Gradually the idea of a green belt along the "arc of Islam" took form. The idea was not just defensive. Adventurous policymakers imagined that restive Muslims inside the Soviet Union's own Central Asian republics might be the undoing of the USSR itself, and they took steps to encourage them." (Introduction of Devil's Game)

Dreyfuss also discusses how the West used Islamic radicalism to suppress Communist movements in the Middle East and the rest of the Islamic world. He provides a comprehensive review of the support of Western governments for the Mujahadeen and Jihadi Islamic fighters, who were trained and sent into Afghanistan. With the close support and advice of CIA paramilitaries, these Islamic jihadists helped defeat Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The book also describes the work of Bernard Lewis and his model of Islamic Balkanization, where the CIA secretly supported Islamic movements within the Soviet Union to utilize them as Anti-Communist insurgents in the event of war. The consequence of this CIA program is the present-day Islamic Chechen separatist conflict that the Russians are fighting.

Islamic Radicalism as a divisive tactic

The author also discusses how the Israeli government supported the growth of Hamas as a tool to fight the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO was always viewed as the major threat to Israel, because they were the more educated and secular Palestinians. They had fought a very effective campaign against Israel, whereas Hamas has had very limited success. The book predicts the current Palestinian crisis where (PLO) Fatah and Hamas militias battled each other in the streets of Gaza and in other parts of Palestine for dominance over the Palestinian people. Dreyfuss claims that the political and economic isolation of Hamas is currently suffocating the new government. Gaza is running out of gas and public workers have not been paid for many months. This has been a strategic victory for Israel in a classic example of divide and conquer.

Bibliography

• Hostage to Khomeini, cowritten with Thierry LeMarc, New Benjamin Franklin House, 1981. ISBN 978-0-933488-11-3 - PDF download
• Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, Metropolitan Books, 2005. ISBN 0-8050-7652-2

Critical Articles

The Nation’s man in Tehran: Who is Robert Dreyfuss?"

 

A Quote by Robert Dreyfuss

Page	Quote	Date
Monte Overacre	“Monte Overacre's most important job was recruiting overseas spies. He worked on the campus of a university (though he carefully guarded the identity of the university) in the San Diego area, where he managed a team posing as telecommunications academics, recruiting visiting foreign technology experts to spy for the U.S. back in their home countries-from South America to Europe, Africa to Asia-to keep the agency on top of new technological innovations. Under the guise of running a series of seminars on telecommunications, Overacre and his MXSCOPE team would invite scientists, engineers, and government and corporate officials from all over the world to come to San Diego. Once there, unwitting attendees would be scoped out by Overacre, evaluated, and targeted for recruitment as potential CIA agents, or "assets," after they returned to their home countries. The recruitment efforts were typically unsavory. "The old methods work even with the nerds, sometimes even better," he wrote. "Trips to massage parlors, strip clubs, wild bars with aggressive white women, etc., make these guys come unglued, just like any truck driver. Once you have gotten a guy laid and paid the bill for him, you have a friend for life. Eventually, the recruits would probably be handled by a CIA case officer working out of the U.S. embassy or, more frequently, operating under nonofficial cover, posing as an American businessman. By then, the new agents likely would be on the CIA’s payroll.”	1998

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References

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