The White House and CIA leaders "had made it clear from the beginning
that the goal of our task force was to find ways to remove President
Assad from office," Laux complained. "We had come up with 50 good
options to facilitate that. My ops plan laid them out in black and
white. But political leadership…hadn't given us the go-ahead to
implement a single one."
The CIA in 2012 proposed a detailed covert action plan designed to
remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power, but President Obama
declined to approve it, current and former U.S. officials tell NBC News.
It's long been known that then-CIA Director
David Petraeus recommended a program to secretly arm and train moderate
Syrian rebels in 2012 to pressure Assad. But a book to be published Tuesday
by a former CIA operative goes further, revealing that senior CIA
officials were pushing a multi-tiered plan to engineer the dictator's
ouster. Former American officials involved in the discussions confirmed
that to NBC News.
In an exclusive television interview with NBC
News, the former officer, Doug Laux, describes spending a year in the
Middle East meeting with Syrian rebels and intelligence officers from
various partner countries. Laux, who spoke some Arabic, was the eyes and
ears on the ground for the CIA's Syria task force, he says. (read the full story here).
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