Any of you guys ever enter those betting pools on college basketball, and despite your near fanatatical knowledge, lose your shirts year after year? Yeah, me too. And it seems the individual who grabs the kitty is always some chick who knows nothing about the sport. . .
So, despite the fact I enjoy politics and reading up on current events, I don't take it to heart that my predictions are almost 100% inaccurate - But, as is statistically prophecied, I seem to have finally got one right!
Iran-Contra II? Fresh scrutiny on a rogue Pentagon operation
By Joshua Micah Marshall, Laura Rozen, and Paul Glastris
Washington Monthly, September 2004
On Friday evening, CBS News reported that the FBI is investigating a suspected mole in the DoD who allegedly passed to Israel, via a pro-Israeli lobbying organization, classified American intelligence about Iran. The focus of the investigation, according to USgovernment officials, is Larry Franklin, a veteran DIA Iran analyst now working in the office of the Pentagon's #3 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 US policy toward Iran. In particular, the FBI is lookingwith 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 Dept and the CIA who have been counseling a more cautious approach.
Reports of 2 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.
While the FBI is looking at the meetings as part of its criminal investigation, to congressional investigators the Ghorbanifar back-channel typifies the out-of-control bureaucratic turf wars which have characterized and often hobbled Bush administration policy-making. And an investigation by The Washington Monthly - including a rare interview with Ghorbanifar - adds weight to those concerns.
The meetings turn out to have been far more extensive and much less under White House control than originally reported.1 of the meetings, which Pentagon officials have long characterized as merely a "chance encounter," seems in fact to have been planned long in advance by Rhode and Ghorbanifar. Another has never been reported in the American press.The administration's reluctance to disclose these details seems clear:the DoD-Ghorbanifar meetings suggest the possibility that a rogue faction at the Pentagon was trying to work outside normal US foreign policy channels to advance a "regime change" agenda not approved by the president's foreign policy principals or even the president himself.
The Italian Job
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. (According to UPI, Ledeen was then working for Feith as a consultant.) Also in attendance was Ghorbanifar and a number of other Iranians. 1 of the Iranians, according to 2 sources familiar with the meeting, was a former senior member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who claimed to have information about dissident ranks within the Iranian security services. The Washington Monthly has also learned from US 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.
Alarm bells about the December 2001 meeting began going off in US government channels only days after it occurred. On December 12th 2001, at the US Embassy in Rome, America's newly-installed Ambassador, Mel Sembler, sat down for a private dinner with Ledeen, an old friend of his from Republican Party politics, and Martino, the Italian defense minister. The conversation quickly turned to the meeting. The problem was that this was the first that Ambassador Sembler had heard about it.
According to US government sources, Sembler immediately set about trying to determine what he could about the meeting and how it had happened.
Since US government contact with foreign government intelligence agencies is supposed to be overseen by the CIA, Sembler first spoke to the CIA station chief in Rome to find out what if anything he knew about the meeting with the Iranians. But that only raised more questions because the station chief had been left in the dark as well. Soon both Sembler and the Rome station chief were sending anxious queries back to the State Dept and CIA Headquarters in Langley, respectively, raising alarms on both sides of the Potomac.
The meeting was a source of concern for a series of overlapping reasons. Since the late 80s Ghorbanifar has been the subject of 2 CIA "burn notices."
The Agency believes Ghorbanifar is a serial "fabricator" and forbids
its officers from having anything to do with him. Moreover, why were mid-level Pentagon officials organizing meetings with a foreign intelligence agency behind the back of the CIA - a clear breach of US government protocol?
There was also a matter of personal chagrin for Sembler: At State Dept direction, he had just been cautioning the Italians to restrain their contacts with bad-acting states like Iran (with which Italy has extensive trade ties).According to US government sources, both the State Dept and the CIA eventually brought the matter to the attention of the White House - specifically, to Condoleezza Rice's chief deputy on the NSC, Stephen Hadley.
Later, Italian spy chief Pollari raised the matter privately with Tenet, who himself went to Hadley in early February 2002. Goaded by Tenet, Hadley sent word to the officials in Feith's office and to Ledeen to cease all such activities. Hadley then contacted Sembler, assuring him it wouldn't happen again and to report back if it did.
The orders, however, seem to have had little effect, for a 2nd meeting was soon underway. According to a story published this summer in Corriere della Sera, a leading Italian daily, this 2nd meeting took place in Rome in June 2002. Ghorbanifar tells The Washington Monthly that he arranged that meeting after a flurry of faxes between himself and DoD official Harold hode.
Though he did not attend it himself, Ghorbanifar says the meeting consisted of an Egyptian, an Iraqi, and a high-level US government official, whose name he declined to reveal. The first 2 briefed the American official about the general situation in Iraq and the Middle East, and what would happen in Iraq, "and it's happened word for word since," says Ghorbanifar.A spokesman for the NSC declined to comment on this and other meetings and referred The Washington Monthly to the Defense Dept, which did not respond to repeated inquiries. Ledeen also refused to comment.
No one at the US Embassy in Rome seems to have known about this 2nd Rome meeting. But the back-channel's continuing existence became apparent the following month - July 2002 - when Ledeen again contacted Sembler and told him that he'd be back in Rome in September to continue "his work" with the Iranians (This time Ledeen made no mention of any involvement by Pentagon officials; later he told Sembler it would be in August rather than September.) An exasperated Sembler again sent word back to Washington and Hadley again went into motion telling Ledeen, in no uncertain terms, to back off.
Once again, however, Hadley's orders seem to have gone unheeded. Almost a year later, in June, 2003, there were still further meetings in Paris involving Rhode and Zhorbanifar.Ghorbanifar says the purpose of the meeting was for Rhode to get more information on the situation in Iraq and the Middle East. "In those meetings we met, we gave him the scenario, what would happen in the coming days in Iraq. And everything has happened word for word as we told him," Ghorbanifar repeats. "We met in several different places in Paris," he says, "Rhode met several other people - he didn't only meet me."
Not a "chance encounter"
By the summer of 2003, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had begun to get wind of the Ghorbanifar-Ledeen-DoD back-channel and made inquiries at the CIA. A month later, Newsday broke the original story about the secret Ghorbanifar channel.
Faced with the disclosure, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld acknowledged the December, 2001 meeting but dismissed it as routine and unimportant.
"The information has moved around the interagency process to all the depts and agencies," he told reporters in Crawford, TX after a meeting with Bush.
"As I understand it, there wasn't anything there that was of substance or of value that needed to be pursued further." Later that day, another senior Defense official acknowledged the 2nd meeting, in Paris, June, 2003, but insisted that it was the result of a "chance encounter" between Ghorbanifar and a Pentagon official. The administration has kept to the "chance encounter" story to this day. Ghorbanifar, however, laughs off that idea.
"Run into each other? We had a prior arrangement," he told The Washington Monthly: "It involved a lot of discussion, and a lot of people."
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.
Republicans on the committee, many of whom sympathize with the "regime change" agenda at DoD, have been resistant to such investigations, calling them an election-year fishing expedition. Democrats, by contrast, see such investigations as vital to understanding the central role Feith's office may have played in a range of a dubious intelligence enterprises, from pushing claims about a supposed Saddam-al Qaeda partnership and overblown estimates of alleged Iraqi stocks of WMD to what the committee's ranking minority member Sen. Jay Rockefeller calls "the Chalabi factor" (Rhode and others in Feith's office have been major sponsors of the Iraqi exile leader,who is now under investigation for passing US intelligence to Iran). With the FBI adding potential espionage charges to the mix,the long-simmering questins about the activities of Feith's operation now seem certain to come under renewed scrutiny.
Research assistance provided by Claudio Lavanga.
Joshua Micah Marshall is a Washington Monthly contributing writer and the editor of Talking Points Memo. Laura Rozen reports on national securityissues from Washington DC and for her weblog War and Piece. She can bereached at
lkrozen@yahoo.com .Paul Glastris is editor in chief of The Washington Monthly.
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