The Previous War with Iran

From Richard Clarke and Steven Simon’s NYT editorial

While the full scope of what America did do remains classified, published reports suggest that the United States responded with a chilling threat to the Tehran government and conducted a global operation that immobilized Iran’s intelligence service. Iranian terrorism against the United States ceased.

Clarke implies here that he of course knows that there was such a chilling threat and global operation. His book also suggests that war with Iran was much closer than generally realized after the Khobar bombings. The threat I can imagine easily enough, but I’m quite curious about what the global operation was exactly. Subsequent and previous events both seem to indicate that widespread covert intelligence operations such as this have not traditionally been the strong suit of the secret agencies, and I’m not aware of any published accounts of it–again, quite unusual.