Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, right, consulting with Mayor Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf of Tehran in 2006. (Mehdi Ghasemi/ISNA, via Associated Press)

Wednesday’s New York Times features an article adapted from The Endgame:

Iran’s Master of Iraq Chaos Still Vexes U.S

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

WASHINGTON — When a senior Iraqi intelligence official traveled to Tehran in the summer of 2007 to meet with the Iranian leadership, he quickly figured out who was in charge of Iran’s policy toward its neighbor to the west.

It was not the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was Qassim Suleimani, the shadowy commander of Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force, who calmly explained that he was the “sole authority for Iranian actions in Iraq,” according to an account the Iraqi official later provided to American officials in Baghdad.

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Wednesday’s New York Times features an article adapted from The Endgame:

Wary of Israel, Iran Is Said to Err in Strikes

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

The Iranian military was so apprehensive about the threat of an Israeli airstrike on its nuclear installations in 2007 and 2008 that it mistakenly fired on civilian airliners and, in one instance, on one of its own military aircraft, according to classified American intelligence reports.

The civilian planes were fired on by surface-to-air missiles and antiaircraft batteries and intercepted by Iranian fighter jets.

“Iranian air defense units have taken inappropriate actions dozens of times, including firing antiaircraft artillery and scrambling aircraft against unidentified or misidentified targets,” noted a heavily classified Pentagon intelligence report, which added that the Iranian military’s communications were so inadequate and its training deficiencies so significant that  “misidentification of aircraft will continue.”

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Foreign Policy has published another exclusive account based on The Endgame.  The FP article describes General Petraeus’s plan to fly to Damascus and confront Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with evidence that Arab fighters were traveling through Syria to join Al Qaeda’s suicide bombing campaign in Iraq. But the Bush administration blocked the trip. Now some of these same terrorists have turned on the Syrian leader.

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Foreign Policy has an exclusive account from The Endgame, Gordon’s latest book on the war in Iraq, now in stores. The FP article describes the “Red Team Report,” a 2005 review that concluded the Bush Administration’s strategy in Iraq was off-course but which was largely ignored at the time.  It also features PDF copies of the still-classified document.

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