From Eli Lake, Daily Beast:  If you are a Syrian military officer in charge of some nasty chemical weapons, you’ve probably been friended or Skyped by the U.S. government. The message is simple: think twice before using or selling that mustard gas you are guarding. . . .

[W]ho were the midlevel officers in charge of the Syrian Air Force and Army units that controlled the stocks of sarin and mustard gas the Assad regime had been compiling for decades? And who was now running the Scud missiles and bombers that would be deployed to use these chemical weapons? According to current and retired U.S. and Western intelligence and defense officials, U.S. analysts began to hunt for email addresses, Twitter handles, Facebook accounts, phone numbers, and Skype contacts for those midlevel Syrian officers. The information was then used to deliver a pointed message: the U.S. government knows who you are, and there will be consequences if you use or transfer chemical weapons. . . .

The project to reach out to Syria’s midlevel officers is an important part of the Obama administration’s planning for how to prevent the use and illicit transfer of Syria’s chemical arsenal. To date, President Obama has taken a cautious approach to the civil war inside the country, offering humanitarian aid, but choosing against arming the rebels. On Thursday, outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee that they both favored a plan developed by the CIA to arm the rebels, a plan the White House rejected. . . .

For now, it’s unlikely Obama would authorize airstrikes on the known weapons depots and chemical labs. Instead, the hope is that Syrian officers can be persuaded to safeguard the material if the regime collapses. . . .

Charles Duelfer, a former CIA officer who served as the deputy chairman of the U.N. weapons-inspection team for Iraq and later as the head of the U.S. effort to find those weapons after the 2003 invasion, said there were two kinds of goals these types of operations can accomplish. “You want to transmit a message of deterrence,” he says. “It’s not just Bashar at the top that will be held responsible, it’s others down the food chain, too. You also want to know where the stuff is.”

The effort to reach out to midlevel officers is separate from other initiatives by the Syrian opposition to persuade officers to defect. The initiative to contact the Syrian officers, according to U.S. and Western officials, has been aided by Israel’s Unit 8200, the section of the Israel Defense Forces in charge of signal intelligence, or the monitoring of electronic communications.

Israel and the U.S. have utilized similar strategies in the past. Before the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there was an intelligence operation to contact midlevel officers in charge of battalions and smaller units to persuade them to stand down—with the promise of better treatment later on. Israel sent text messages to the cellphones of Gazans in 2008 during Operation Cast Lead, warning of aerial bombardments.

Eli Lake is the senior national-security correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast.  (graphic: agiledudes.com)

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