Iran-Contra II? Fresh scrutiny on rogue Pentagon operation -Josh Marshall

[Rose Siding]

On Friday evening, CBS News reported that the FBI is investigating a suspected mole in the Department of Defense who allegedly passed to Israel, via a pro-Israeli lobbying organization, classified American intelligence about Iran. The focus of the investigation, according to U.S. government officials, is Larry Franklin, a veteran Defense Intelligence Agency Iran analyst now working in the office of the Pentagon's number three civilian official, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.

The investigation of Franklin is now shining a bright light on a shadowy struggle within the Bush administration over the direction of U.S. policy toward Iran. In particular, the FBI is looking with renewed interest at an unauthorized back-channel between Iranian dissidents and advisers in Feith's office, which more-senior administration officials first tried in vain to shut down and then later attempted to cover up.

Franklin, along with another colleague from Feith's office, a polyglot Middle East expert named Harold Rhode, were the two officials involved in the back-channel, which involved on-going meetings and contacts with Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and other Iranian exiles, dissidents and government officials. Ghorbanifar is a storied figure who played a key role in embroiling the Reagan administration in the Iran-Contra affair. The meetings were both a conduit for intelligence about Iran and Iraq and part of a bitter administration power-struggle pitting officials at DoD who have been pushing for a hard-line policy of "regime change" in Iran, against other officials at the State Department and the CIA who have been counseling a more cautious approach.

Reports of two of these meetings first surfaced a year ago in Newsday, and have since been the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Whether or how the meetings are connected to the alleged espionage remains unknown. But the FBI is now closely scrutinizing them.........

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0410.marshallrozen.html

[aquart]

1. HMMMMM. Unlike DU, TPM's focus isn't on Israel.

Strangely, his story seems to be about some "back-channel" negotiations with Iranians about Iran. Americans negotiating with Iranians about Iran.

How amazingly different from everything I've been reading here all day.

[Jim Sagle]

10. Maybe he just doesn't "get it."

;-)

[KittyWampus]

25. Not Really, He's Just Pointing Here To Iranian Dissidents ala Chalabi

those willing to do the bidding of and business with Likud/PNAC'ers.

[Eloriel]

31. Perhaps it's because what DUers have so far been responding to

is the press coverage which featured U.S. policy and intel being passed through AIPAC to ISRAEL. Hmmmmmmm?

[progressivebydesign]

36. Is AIPAC the one that threw the HUGE party last night in NYC?

I remember hearing that a large pro-Israel lobbying group was throwing an enormous welcoming party for the GOP in New York City last night. How tight are they with the GOP.

[lil-petunia]

37. you got that right.

Hastert, Frist and others being welcomed like blood brothers.

[Eloriel]

38. Yes.

They are tight with whoever can butter their bread. Almost all the Dems are in their pockets too. The ones that aren't can easily lose their primaries to AIPAC-approved candidates.

[Classical_Liberal]

32. Maybe you should have read the whole thing

It is in the first paragraph.

On Friday evening, CBS News reported that the FBI is investigating a suspected mole in the Department of Defense who allegedly passed to Israel, via a pro-Israeli lobbying organization, classified American intelligence about Iran. The focus of the investigation, according to U.S. government officials, is Larry Franklin, a veteran Defense Intelligence Agency Iran analyst now working in the office of the Pentagon's number three civilian official, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.

also read today's www.juancole.com

[RainDog]

2. Ledeen, Ghorbanifar's old bud, was in on it too?

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3225660/

Oct. 19, 2003
Oct. 27 issue - Terrorism expert Michael Ledeen has refueled the fight between neocons close to the Pentagon’s civilian leadership and their foes at the CIA. Ledeen says that in early August, Manucher Ghorbanifar—an Iranian businessman whose claims of contacts among Tehran moderates touched off the Iran-contra scandal—put him in touch with an informant claiming to know where highly enriched uranium was hidden in postwar Iraq.

[aquart]

3. Ah! That's why Ledeen's name was so familiar.

[grasswire]

4. grrrrrrrrrr

"Over the last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee has conducted limited inquiry into the meetings, including interviews with Feith and Ledeen. But under terms of a compromise agreed to by both parties, a full investigation into the matter was put off until after the November election."

WHEN WILL DEMS LEARN???????????????

[JerseygirlCT]

14. WHY???

Why do they do this? I really do not understand.

[JHB]

34. Because of "Ed Koch" Dems...

...for whom Israel seems to be the 51st (but foremost) state.

It's not a big faction, but it's big enough, and apparently the Dem leadership figures a big fight over Israeli spying could just as easily work against it as for it.

[aquart]

5. Question: Iran-Contra hinged on the diversion of funds.

Does anyone have any inkling that a money trail is being investigated?

[UpInArms]

18. let's see .... does $8.8 billion in missing Iraqi funds

ring a bell?

All that money that the CPA can't account for?

[seemslikeadream]

21. Dov Zakheim was supposed to keep track of 1.3 trillion

but he had to resign in March to spend more time with the family without explaining where it all went. Someone should ask him where he got the 28 million he gave to Israel awhile back.

[JHB]

33. dupe

delete

[progressivebydesign]

35. Hmmm.. money from Afghanistant was funneled to Iraq before the war.

And.. no one made a big deal of it, though I think it should have been an impeachable offense. Bush got away with ciphoning off money from that Afghanistan war, to do the secret groundwork on the Iraq war, before Americans realized it was a done-deal.

THat worked just fine for Bush, and he suffered no after effects. So, it makes sense they would keep doing it. Wonder how much body armor this money would have purchased for our soldiers?

The new money trail is there... we have to find it.

[Rose Siding]

6. More from Laura Rosen, Marshall's colleague on this piece

The story is up, and I can now say that I tracked down and interviewed Ghorbanifar for it, earlier this month. With the current FBI investigation targeting those who met with him, I suspect I will be the last American journalist to do so for some time, but who knows, he's unpredictable, as are his American allies.

Go read the piece.

Key points:

1) The secret meetings between Pentagon officials and associates of Ghorbanifar in Europe went on for almost two years, a full year and a half longer than the Bush administration has acknowledged. Ghorbanifar told me of three meetings. While the Pentagon originally told the Post last year that Harold Rhode, an official in Feith's office, had simply run into Ghorbanifar in Paris in June 2003, Ghorbanifar tells me that the two spent weeks planning the meeting.

2) The Italian military intelligence organization SISMI provided logistics and security at the first meeting, in Rome, in December 2001. And the head of Sismi, Nicollo Pollari, as well as the Italian Defense Minister, Antonio Martino, attended the meeting, along with Michael Ledeen, Ghorbanifar, Pentagon officials Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin.

3) Ghorbanifar told me he has had fifty meetings with Michael Ledeen since September 11th, and that he has given Ledeen "4,000 to 5,000 pages of sensitive documents" concerning Iran, Iraq and the Middle East, “material no one else has received.” Ghorbanifar, speaking with me by telephone from France, says those meetings took place abroad because he has been refused a US visa the last two times he has applied.

4) Ghorbanifar has also been meeting with an assortment of other American officials, which I will write about later.

I will get more thoughts on the story up later. For now, go read the piece.

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/001070.html

[RainDog]

7. And SISMI was the source for the yellowcake forgeries

This is Sy Hersh's "Stovepipe" article in the New Yorker. Worth re-reading in light of this new information. btw, I think that someone fed Hersh disinformation which he included in the article, in light of the current investigation. This article is the one that mentions the "former disgruntled CIA employees" who faked the report and didn't think Cheney, Rumsfield, Condi, blah, blah would believe it. I think that information was given to Hersh to cover for who really planted the forgeries. ymmv.


http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact

"...Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had long complained about the limits of American intelligence. In the late nineteen-nineties, for example, he had chaired a commission on ballistic-missile programs that criticized the unwillingness of intelligence analysts “to make estimates that extended beyond the hard evidence they had in hand.” After he became Secretary of Defense, a separate intelligence unit was set up in the Pentagon’s policy office, under the control of William Luti, a senior aide to Feith. This office, which circumvented the usual procedures of vetting and transparency, stovepiped many of its findings to the highest-ranking officials."

(why did Hersh use the passive voice when writing about who was responsible for setting up the OSP?)

In the fall of 2001, soon after the September 11th attacks, the C.I.A. received an intelligence report from Italy’s Military Intelligence and Security Service, or sismi, about a public visit that Wissam al-Zahawie, then the Iraqi Ambassador to the Vatican, had made to Niger and three other African nations two and a half years earlier, in February, 1999. The visit had been covered at the time by the local press in Niger and by a French press agency. The American Ambassador, Charles O. Cecil, filed a routine report to Washington on the visit, as did British intelligence. There was nothing untoward about the Zahawie visit...

None of the contemporaneous reports, as far as is known, made any mention of uranium. But now, apparently as part of a larger search for any pertinent information about terrorism, sismi dug the Zahawie-trip report out of its files and passed it along, with a suggestion that Zahawie’s real mission was to arrange the purchase of a form of uranium ore known as “yellowcake.” (Yellowcake, which has been a major Niger export for decades, can be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors. It can also be converted, if processed differently, into weapons-grade uranium.)

The sismi report, however, was unpersuasive. Inside the American intelligence community, it was dismissed as amateurish and unsubstantiated. One former senior C.I.A. official told me that the initial report from Italy contained no documents but only a written summary of allegations. “I can fully believe that sismi would put out a piece of intelligence like that,” a C.I.A. consultant told me, “but why anybody would put credibility in it is beyond me.” No credible documents have emerged since to corroborate it... "

...the article has much more, including Cheney's interest in the uranium claim. Also remember, it was unprecedented that Cheney spent so much time at the Pentagon meddling in CIA work, from other reports.

Also includes Cheney trying to get money for Chalabi and the Iraqi defectors who were providing so much "useful" information for the OSP.

[seemslikeadream]

39. AIPAC's Overt and Covert Ops

The right-wing government of corrupt billionaire Silvio Berlusconi, including Martino, was a big supporter of an Iraq war. Moreover, we know that the forged documents falsely purporting to show Iraqi uranium purchases from Niger originated with a former SISMI agent. Watch the reporting of Josh Marshall for more on this SISMI/Ledeen/Rhode connection.

But journalist Matthew Yglesias has already tipped us to a key piece of information. The Niger forgeries also try to implicate Iran. Indeed, the idea of a joint Iraq/Iran nuclear plot was so far-fetched that it is what initially made the Intelligence and Research division of the U.S. State Department suspicious of the forgeries, even before the discrepancies of dates and officials in Niger were noticed. Yglesias quotes from the Senate report on the alleged Iraqi attempt to buy uranium from Niger:


"The INR nuclear analyst told the Committee staff that the thing that stood out immediately about the documents was that a companion document – a document included with the Niger documents that did not relate to uranium – mentioned some type of military campaign against major world powers. The members of the alleged military campaign included both Iraq and Iran and was, according to the documents, being orchestrated through the Nigerien Embassy in Rome, which all struck the analyst as 'completely implausible.' Because the stamp on this document matched the stamp on the uranium document , the analyst thought that all of the documents were likely suspect. The analyst was unaware at the time of any formatting problems with the documents or inconsistencies with the names or dates."

Journalist Eric Margolis notes of SISMI:

"SISMI has long been notorious for far right, even neo-fascist, leanings. According to Italian judicial investigators, SISMI was deeply involved in numerous plots against Italy’s democratic government, including the 1980 Bologna train station terrorist bombing that left 85 dead and 200 injured. Senior SISMI officers were in cahoots with celebrated swindler Roberto Calvi, the neo-fascist P2 Masonic Lodge, other extreme rightist groups trying to destabilize Italy, the Washington neocon operative, Michael Ledeen, and the Iran-Contra conspirators. SISMI works hand in glove with U.S., British and Israeli intelligence. In the 1960s and 70s, SISMI reportedly carried out numerous operations for CIA, including bugging the Vatican, the Italian president’s palace, and foreign embassies. Italy’s civilian intelligence service, SISDE, associated with Italy’s political center-left, has long been a bitter rival of SISMI. After CIA rejected the Niger file, it was eagerly snapped up by VP Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, who were urgently seeking any reason, no matter how specious, to invade Iraq. Cheney passed the phony data to Bush, who used it in his January 2003 address to the nation in spite of warnings from CIA. . . ."

So Franklin, Ledeen, and Rhode, all of them pro-Likud operatives, just happen to be meeting with SISMI (the proto-fascist purveyor of the false Niger uranium story about Iraq and the alleged Iran-Iraq plot against the rest of the world) and corrupt Iranian businessman and would-be revolutionary Ghorbanifar in Europe. The most reasonable conclusion is that they were conspiring together about the Next Campaign after Iraq, which they had already begun setting in train, which is to get Iran.

more
http://www.antiwar.com/cole/?articleid=3467

[Dover]

8. This article just seems to be rehashing info presented last year

in this article (by the guy who co-produced the movie, OUTFOXED):

http://www.jimgilliam.com/2003/08/inside_rummys_office_...

Pentagon hardliners pressing for regime change in Iran have held secret and unauthorized meetings in Paris with a controversial arms dealer who was a major figure in the Iran-contra scandal, according to administration officials.

At least two Pentagon officials (Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin) working for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith have held "several" meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian middleman in U.S. arms-for-hostage shipments to Iran in the mid-1980s.

The senior official and another administration source who confirmed that the meetings had taken place said that the ultimate policy objective of Feith and a group of neo-conservatives civilians inside the Pentagon is regime change in Iran.

He confirmed that Secretary of State Colin Powell complained directly to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld several days ago about Feith's policy shop conducting missions that countered U.S. policy.

...cont'd

So what's the point of the Wash. Monthly story? Unless they are laying the whole thing out sequentially, and this is just chapter one, I don't quite understand what all the hoopla is about.

I think Sidney Bloomenthal's article in Salon
(Washington's Chalabi nightmare) gives more context and info.
And the threads in the GD forum are chock full of information.

[buycitgo]

9. link don't work

this sounds like the same story......really disgusting confluence of TRAITORTOTS


http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0808-12.htm

[Dover]

11. Try this link........it's working for me.

http://www.jimgilliam.com/2003/08/inside_rummys_office_part_2.php

[allemand]

13. The SISMI connection is what is new and potentially explosive

"In late 2001, the SISMI officer brought the Niger Embassy employee a packet of documents --- those later identified as forgeries --- and instructed her to slip them in with the other documents she was providing to the ‘security consultant’ on an on-going basis.

She mixed those documents in with authentic documents which she had access to in the course of her work at the embassy. She then passed those documents --- again, a mix of authentic and forged ones --- to the ‘security consultant’."

<...> (earlier)

"What’s long been known about the Niger documents is that an Italian ‘security consultant’ tried to sell them to an Italian journalist named Elisabetta Burba. Burba’s editor at Panorama, in turn, instructed her to take them to the US Embassy in Rome. That is how they came into the hands of the American government."

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_08_01.php#003235

"The first meeting occurred in Rome in December, 2001. It included Franklin, Rhode, and another American, the neoconservative writer and operative Michael Ledeen, who organized the meeting. <...> Also in attendance was Ghorbanifar and a number of other Iranians. <...> The Washington Monthly has also learned from U.S. government sources that Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, attended the meetings, as did the Italian Minister of Defense Antonio Martino, who is well-known in neoconservative circles in Washington."

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0410.marshallrozen.html

Connect the dots.

[Snazzy]

12. They didn't want to get totally scooped (on something)--more coming

"It's the first installment of an investigative project that Joshua Micah Marshall, Laura Rozen, and I have been working on." -- Paul Glastris

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_08/004583.php

This isn't the tectonic plate shift--seems like they rushed to publish this today. Not sure why. What's going to be the Washington Monthly cover story? For one thing, if you read JMM's blog, you know he's got it in for Feith (and hear-hear on that). This is going to be all wrapped up together--"sweep it all up"--in a much longer article I'd think. Feith, Chalabi, Wilson/Plame, and the overall neocon shadow operation that is driving this mess. Not to mention just uncovering the general internal battle this mal-admin has been having since forever. That last bit the article certainly hints at, but if you go back through Talking Points, say search on "Feith" or "Plame" it's a safe impression that this will go way beyond Luti's deputies.

Don't know if they are simply waiting to go to press or waiting for something to happen.

---------

Another thing--the Larry Franklin bit--he is a cog, and he may even be Mossad somehow (although I'm thinking CBS overplayed that so far)--but: could this be a false-flag type sting that ended unexpectedly? We know Chalabi was on the out, and seems to have been passing stuff to Iran. What if they (a non-neocon they that is) were trying to nail him, gave him some fake stuff, and, lo and behold, it ends up on Sharon's desk?

(edits for clarity).

[Disturbed]

15. Why are most Dems in Congress...

appeasers to the Neo Fascists?

[RedSock]

16. because they benefit from the current system too

there are differences between the two parties -- absolutely -- but as Nader said, they are also very much alike.

they also benefit greatly from the way the current system is set up -- and do not want to rock the status quo boat.

[Rose Siding]

20. It's likely they traded for something else...

A stall in the tax-break renewal, an investigation of something they thought might be concluded more quickly and do more damage, a concession on intel restructuring.

The Senate dems don't have any fondness for this administration but they are powerless. Zero control in either House. They are at the mercy of "agreeable" repubs.

[ant]

24. thank god

I was thinking this was going to be The Big story and was disappointed when I read it. There didn't seem to be anything new in it, and there was no mention of Plame. I've even read the implication that Italian intelligence was involved elsewhere - wasn't it in the Finacial Times article from last month? Anyway, glad to see there's more to come.

I'm guessing that they wanted to just put something out because the story broke. This would be the second time part of their investigation has been scooped, sort of, so no doubt they're eager to get it all out before someone else does. (Not that I would think there's much competition from the pathetic, mainstream press.)

[Waverley_Hills_Hiker]

17. this storys timing is interesting...notice when it broke?

the worst possible time in the news cycle..Friday evening, the weekend before the GOP convention, which will bury it.

[screembloodymurder]

19. Could the classified information be related to Iran's nuclear

program? Is this "spy" story being used to cover a deliberate leak? Will this info be used by the Israelis as the basis for a first strike? Is Bush setting the stage for war with Iran? We won't know until Nov.

[Myrina]

22. I am confused

:shrug:

While the story was all over the network news this weekend, they all talked in terms - like those above - of the 'mole' passing intelligence FROM the US to Israel re: Iran.

I thought the big bugaboo was that he was in the position to pass faulty intelligence TO the US from Israel re: Iraq.

Is my thinking screwed up, or was the info passed in both directions and the networks just aren't mentioning the part that further proves Iraq was a set-up?

Thanks !

[Cush]

27. I'm sure there's more to it

we're probably only getting part of it right now

[mumon]

23. Wow Mel Sembler comes up in the story...

the guy who got his ambassador job by running a chain of Abu Ghraib-like drug "rehab" centers, according to numerous reports.

[matcom]

26. Dadcom is PISSED

says this it THE most INSANE administration that he could ever FATHOM!

Dadcom was stationed in Rome and KNOWS this stuff.

stay tuned.

[enough]

28. Please everybody read Juan Cole on this also.

Very important for putting everything together, MUST READ the whole article.

http://www.juancole.com/

very small snip>

So it transpires that the Iranians were willing to give up 5 key al-Qaeda operatives, whom they had captured, in return for MEK members.

Franklin, Rhode and Ledeen conspired with Ghorbanifar and SISMI to stop that trade. It would have led to better US-Iran relations, which they wanted to forestall, and it would have damaged their proteges, the MEK.

Since high al-Qaeda operatives like Saif al-Adil and possibly even Saad Bin Laden might know about future operations, or the whereabouts of Bin Laden, for Franklin and Rhode to stop the trade grossly endangered the United States.

snip>

[KoKo]

29. Great Reads in addition to Josh for your Dad are: Linda Rozen's, War

and Piece. She co-authored the article with Marshall...but have your Dad (if he's a reader) clik on her links after what she says about what's going on...

If your Dad is interested there's MORE to the story...with Ledeen...linked through it all.

[bloom]

30. I had noticed in the newspaper a couple week ago

Rice saying something about the "whole World" being against Iran for the nuclear possibilities. Sounded like they were working on getting people ready for war.

Thanks for the article.