Hezbollah, a long-time political force in Lebanon, has the strongest military power among the Iran-backed groups. Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah has stopped short of declaring an all-out war against Israel, but the Israel-Lebanon border has seen a steady back-and-forth barrage of rockets and missile attacks that have sparked fears of a conflagration.
“Any escalation that shows that Hezbollah is making more use of its very capable rocket force into Northern Israel or into the Mediterranean, that would be a troubling sign,” former CIA Chief of Counterterrorism Bernard Hudson told The Cipher Brief during a recent Subscriber+Members briefing. “The thing I’d probably be most worried about is what I would call a “dead Archduke” moment,” referring to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand that sparked World War I.
“Some guy you've never heard of or some group you've barely heard of pulls off something that sets in motion a catastrophic chain of events that is very hard to tamp down. During the Cold War, the Americans and the Soviets had a good mechanism to keep that under control. That doesn't exist today.”
Hudson said he’s looking for things like a U.S. ship being hit with severe damage and loss of life. “Or if the Palestinians or somebody else manages to pull off a mass-casualty event in Israel. That's still possible, especially when you're firing sophisticated rocket systems into a country full of civilians. Those are the things that I would be most concerned about. It’s such a combustible situation.”
THE CONTEXT
The Cipher Brief interviewed three former senior CIA officers with deep experience, to share their unique insights on the region during a Subscriber+Member Exclusive briefing.
Bernard Hudson, Former Chief of Counterterrorism, CIA
Bernard Hudson is a retired CIA official who was the Agency’s Chief of Counterterrorism where he oversaw all aspects of the Agency’s efforts in the Global War on Terror. He also served as a fellow at Harvard University and is currently in the drone industry.
Ralph Goff, Former Senior Intelligence Executive, CIA
Former Senior Intelligence Executive, CIA
Ralph F. Goff is a 35 year veteran of the CIA where he was a 6-time “Chief of Station” with extensive service in Europe, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia including several war zones. As a Senior Intelligence Service Executive he was Chief of Operations for Europe and Eurasia responsible for all CIA activities and operations in dozens of countries.
Glenn Corn, Former Senior CIA Officer
Glenn Corn is a former Senior Executive in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who worked for 34 years in the U.S. Intelligence, Defense, and Foreign Affairs communities. He spent over 17 years serving overseas and served as the U.S. President’s Senior Representative on Intelligence and Security issues. He is an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of World Politics.
THE BRIEFING
This Cipher Brief excerpt of the full briefing has been edited for length and clarity.
The Cipher Brief: How would you gauge your level of concern about escalation right now, given what's happened over your decades-long career in the Middle East? Have you seen anything before at this level of complexity?
Goff: Never. This is a first in terms of complexity. I think the only bright spot in all of this would be that Hezbollah and the IDF have not gone at it, full tilt. They both seem to not be ready to go to war, although the efforts by the United States to negotiate some sort of mediation have failed. There's a bright, brief opportunity there to slowly walk all of this back.
Corn: I continue to believe that Hezbollah does not want a wider war, and they're a very calculating organization. Nasrallah is a very talented politician. He understands the consequences of expanding the war. But they have to continue to message the Israelis and of course, their base and their masters in Iran.
I am concerned that the Iranians are not getting the message that their use of proxies is creating major chaos in the Middle East, and the United States in my opinion, is going to have to take further action to get the Iranians to stop the Houthis.
And there are the other actors. I'm concerned that if the Iranians give Hezbollah the order to expand the war, then Hezbollah will do that, and it will not be good for the people of Lebanon or for Hezbollah.
The Cipher Brief: What do you think it would take for Iran to get that message?
Hudson: I think the Iranian appetite for escalation hasn't been fully met yet. I do believe that they would be very careful when it comes to Hezbollah because without Hezbollah, Iran's regional capabilities are vastly diminished, and respecting Israeli red lines has been a decades-long experiment between Hezbollah and Israel, where both sides understand where they can push and where they can't, and how to message each other behind the scenes.
One of the new dimensions in this, though, is that the Iranians are not limited to their proxies in Lebanon and have been very aggressive in using their proxies in Yemen with the Houthis.
The thing that strikes me the most is that this is the first Middle East crisis in decades where the regional default and expectation is not U.S. leadership. What you are seeing increasingly and what I think makes this so complex, is that absence of strong U.S. leadership or clear U.S. leadership. So, what you get is a regional set of governments freelancing their own national security priorities with a series of what I would call ‘limited-liability alliances’ that are not the subject of decades of hard alliance-building work, but pickup teams.
In that environment, it's very easy for people to mistake the other guy's intentions or push things too far. This is why I think Iran's influence, especially in the Red Sea, in statements like ‘Red Sea security has to be tied to Gaza’, should be forcefully pushed back on by the United States.
The Cipher Brief: The Biden Administration has designated the Houthis as a global terrorist organization. Do you think that matters?
Hudson: The designation of the Houthis as a terrorist group takes us back to where we were in January of 2021, when they were on the terrorist list. Being on the list is an important political statement that I think the Biden Administration has to take, but absent any policy behind it, it really is quite meaningless. The Houthis don't really participate in international forums, they don't try to travel around the world. A lot of the tools that you would normally use to push down a terrorist group don't work on them.
The biggest issue the United States must deal with when dealing with the Houthis, is confirming in the minds of U.S. regional allies Saudi Arabia, the UAE and some of the other states nearby, that whatever the Americans are going to do will diminish the ability of the Houthis to ever do this in the future.
Absent that, there's not going to be a lot of support for U.S. policy in Riyadh or Abu Dhabi because of the concern that the American response might just stir up the Houthis enough but not diminish their military capability. And when the American Navy goes on to some other priority, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and other regional players will be exposed to Houthi retaliation.
Goff: The challenges to U.S. diplomacy are also opportunities. One thing I've seen is criticism of the Red Sea Coalition–where, for example, countries have ships there but they're outside the coalition’s command and control and are doing their own thing. This is where the U.S. has to bring all of the parties to the table and say, look, the U.S. can hammer away at the Houthis, destroying their strategic and tactical offensive capabilities, but the Iranians will just replace them.
A coalition has to be constructed that will take on the Houthis and this has to include the Gulf States and other players in the region. If 20% of the world's shipping is going through the Red Sea, any country that participates in that shipping should be participating in the coalition and telling the Houthis, this is not about Gaza, this is about freedom of navigation in the seas and we're not going to stand for your attacks against ships that have nothing to do with the conflict.
There's an opportunity here, just like with Lebanon, with dealing with Hezbollah and negotiating with Israelis, this is an opportunity for U.S. diplomacy.
The Cipher Brief: What does the U.S. do next? The Administration has already come out with a number of warnings to the Houthis and has launched multiple retaliatory strikes. It doesn't seem to be deterring either the Houthis or Iran. So, what else can they do?
Corn: My personal opinion is that it's time to go to the Iranians themselves. The Iranians are really not paying a price for encouraging this instability. And the way I see it, the Iranians right now, are providing weapons and support to groups like the Houthis, and of course to Hezbollah and to Hamas. They're also now arming the Russian army, which is committing atrocities in Ukraine. I think it's time to start looking at what we can do to disrupt their ability, Iran's ability to provide those weapons to these forces that are attacking U.S. allies and us. And we should do it before it's too late. I fear every day when I wake up that there'll be a report that a U.S. ship has been hit by one of these rockets, and it will be a mass-casualty event. I think that the Iranians need to be given a very strong message that enough is enough.
The Cipher Brief: How do you deter Iran without escalating?
Hudson: There are a couple of options. You can do things to diminish their most expendable of all proxies, which is the Houthis. Going after anything in Hezbollah is very, very complex and probably Ill-advised unless it's a last resort. But the Houthis in particular, are a very erratic proxy of the Iranians. They are uniquely suited to be spoilers and they're highly ambitious about what they want to do, but they're also highly vulnerable to U.S. sea and air power.
I would strongly suggest that the US get its regional allies on board, but to Glenn's point, simply warning the Iranians, I think absent some sort of muscular move, I don't see that as having any impact.
The Cipher Brief: What role do you see China playing in what's happening in the Middle East and the current state of escalation?
Goff: That's a great question. The Chinese have an economic interest in ensuring that there's freedom of shipping through the Red Sea. They have exports, they have an export-based economy that they need to feed, so they need the shipping lanes to be open.
Their role frankly, will be determined by how successful and how robust the U.S. government effort is. The larger the gap is between what the U.S. wants to do and what we're capable of doing, is an opportunity for China to fill that gap.
We saw that with their diplomacy between Tehran and Riyadh. It was a clear signal from the to the United States, that if you don't have the stomach for leadership here in the Middle East, there are other players in the region and China's ready to step up.
Corn: Russia and China right now, see this to their benefit. They see that U.S. influence is waning. I agree with Ralph that China is more interested in the trade issue, but there are also some competing trade routes in that region, and the Chinese may be happy to see this instability right now. I think they were invited to participate in this naval coalition. They declined that opportunity.
Russia is clearly benefiting, but I would also suspect that Russia might be nervous that if the Iranians go too far and the United States and its allies do decide to go after targets inside Iran, it could be a problem for Putin and his war in Ukraine. The Russians continually like to have a balancing act of just enough chaos without total chaos, to keep the United States preoccupied with other problems, and not able to focus on what Russia is doing both in the region and around the world.
Hudson: Russia's sympathies probably lie more with ease of trade and probably with the Saudis and the Emiratis with whom they'd like to do more business deals. At the same time, as Glenn said, any opportunity to see the U.S. role diminish, they would welcome, especially if they don't have to do anything to make it happen.
With regards to China, one of the things you have to imagine is that Chinese military planners look very closely at what's going on in the Gulf and the U.S. effort to try to stop the Houthi attacks and sort of ask themselves, ‘Is a U.S. that can't secure navigation the same country that can actually challenge us in the Taiwan Strait?’
Cipher Brief Managing Editor Tom Nagorski and Writer Ethan Masucol contributed to this report
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