By John Walcott | McClatchy Newspapers[1] Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar was suspected by the CIA of passing forged documents to the U.S. during the Iran-Contra situation, and had been completely abandoned by the CIA as totally unreliable. He had been a close associate to LtC. Oliver North.
WASHINGTON — Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that a small group of Pentagon officials who'd collected dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran from Iranian exiles might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service . . . to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.
A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the group's activities after only a month, and Pentagon officials never followed up on investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.
The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator. [Snip]
The aborted counterintelligence investigation probed some Pentagon officials' contacts with Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar [1}, whom the CIA had labeled a "fabricator" in 1984. Those contacts were brokered by an American civilian, Michael Ledeen [2], a former Pentagon and National Security Council consultant and a leading advocate of invading Iraq and overthrowing Iran's Islamic regime.
According to the Senate report, the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity unit concluded in 2003 that Ledeen "was likely unwitting of any counterintelligence issues related to his relationship with Mr. Ghorbanifar."
The counterintelligence unit said, however, that Ledeen's association with Ghorbanifar "was widely known, and therefore it should be presumed other foreign intelligence services, including those of Iran, would know."
Stephen Cambone [4], then the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, shut down the counterintelligence investigation after only a month, the Senate report said.
The Senate report said that Pentagon officials never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a comprehensive analysis of whether Ghorbanifar or his associates tried "to directly or indirectly influence or access U.S. government officials."
The counterintelligence investigators recommended that U.S. officials attempt "to map Ghorbanifar's relationship within Iranian elite social networks and, if possible, his contacts with other governments and/or intelligence organizations," but that effort was never undertaken.
The Senate committee also found that Pentagon officials concealed the contacts with Ghorbanifar from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department. Pentagon officials also provided Senate investigators with an inaccurate account of events and, with support from two unnamed officials in Cheney's office, continued meeting with Ghorbanifar after contact with him was officially ordered to stop.
The first meetings with Ghorbanifar, which were disclosed in August 2003 by the Long Island, N.Y., newspaper Newsday, took place in Rome in December 2001. They were attended by two Pentagon Iran experts, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin; by an Italian military intelligence official, and by Ledeen.
On the Iranian side were Ghorbanifar, an unidentified Iranian exile from Morocco and an alleged Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps defector.
Among other things, the Iranians told the Americans about:
_ Iranian "hit teams" they said were targeting U.S. personnel and facilities in Afghanistan.
_ What they claimed was Shiite Muslim Iran's longstanding relationship with the secular Palestine Liberation Organization.
_ "Tunnel complexes in Iran for weapons storage or exfiltration of regime leaders," and about the alleged growth of anti-regime sentiment in Iran.
Franklin [1], who, in an unrelated matter, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to prison in 2006 for providing classified information on Iran policy to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, passed the information about the alleged Iranian hit squads to a U.S. Special Forces commander in Afghanistan. Although a DIA analyst told the Senate committee that he couldn't speculate on whether the information had been "truly useful," Ledeen and Pentagon officials claimed it saved American lives, the committee said.
During the Rome meetings, Ghorbanifar also laid out a scheme to overthrow the Iranian regime on a napkin during a late night meeting in a bar. "The plan," said the Senate committee, "involved the simultaneous disruption of traffic at key intersections leading to Tehran that would create anxiety, work stoppages and other disruptive measures" in a capital city famous for its traffic congestion.
Ghorbanifar asked for $5 million in seed money, Franklin told the committee, and indicated that if the traffic jam plan succeeded, he'd need additional money.
"The proposed funding for, and foreign involvement in, Mr. Ghorbanifar's plan for regime change were never fully understood," the Senate committee said.
Nevertheless, Ghorbanifar's proposals grew more ambitious — and expensive. A February 2002 memo from Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman referred to an unnamed foreign government's support for a Ghorbanifar plan that would cost millions of dollars. A later summary referred to contracts "that would assure oil and gas sales in the event of regime change". The U.S. ambassador to Italy said that DOD officials "were talking about 25 million for some kind of Iran program."
After Franklin and Rhode returned from the Rome meetings, the Senate report said, two series of events began to unfold in Washington that were typical of the gamesmanship that plagued the Bush administration's national security team.
"First," the report said, "State Department and CIA officials attempted to determine what Mr. Ledeen and the DOD representatives had done in Rome, and second, DOD officials debated the next course of action."
When the CIA and the State Department discovered that Ledeen and Ghorbanifar were involved, they opposed any further contact with the two. Ledeen's contacts, the Defense Human Intelligence Service concluded, were "nefarious and unreliable," the Senate committee reported.
According to the report, Ledeen, however, persisted, presenting then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith with a new 100-day plan to provide, among other things, evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly had been moved to Iran — Saddam Hussein's archenemy. This time, the report said, Ledeen solicited support from former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and from three then-GOP senators, Sam Brownback of Kansas, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.
Rhode and Ghorbanifar met again in Paris in June 2003 with at least the tacit approval of an official in Cheney's office, the Senate report said.
He reported back to officials in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, but "there is no indication that the information collected during the Paris meeting was shared with the Intelligence Community for a determination of potential intelligence value," the report said.
[2} American civilian, Michael Ledeen was another individual who used Ghorbanafar as a source, and was upset with the CIA when the issued a "burn Notice" (meaning do not use this individual or information he provides - he is a known liar.) Ledeen had vouched for Ghorbanafur to National Security Adviser Robert McFarland who then used his data in the Iran-Contra situation. Ledeen was also tightly linked to the Yellow Cake Forgeries which led George Bush to include the statement "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." in his 2003 State of the Union speech. The book The Italian Letter describes how a forged letter became a key element in the invasion of Iraq. Michael Ledeen is a key player in the book, in large part because of his connections with Italian Military Intelligence. The NeoCon Michale Ledeen still supports the invasion of Iraq and pushes actively for air strikes on Iran.
[3] Larry Franklin worked in Douglass Feith's Office of Special Plans, an organization set up to use Intelligence reports rejected by the CIA and the rest of the Intelligence community. The so-called Intelligence reports from OSP were then stove-piped directly into Vice President Dick Cheney's office. Cheney was known to dislike and distrust the CIA and the rest of the Intelligence Community because he felt they ignored, downplayed, or rejected significant Intelligence reports.
[4] Stephen Cambone was the much disliked Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld who shut down the investigation after only a month. He was known as Rumsfeld's chief henchman, and the orders to Intelligence personnel and contractors to "soften up" prisoners came from his office. He resigned shortly after Donald Rumsfeld left the job of Secretary of Defense. It seems probable to me that he and Douglas Feith worked closely together stovepiping Intelligence information to the office of the Vice President.
Consider also the Iraqi National Congress which was set up under the leadership of Ahmed Chalabi after the Persian Gulf War to coordinate the activities of the various anti-Saddam groups attempting to overthrow Saddam's government. Chalabi has a record of illegal dealings and is known to have numerous Iranian contacts. Since he is a Shiite, this is not surprising but it leads to speculation that he has long been an agent for Iran. Yet since he was close to the American NeoCons and considered one of them, the Pentagon had initially planned to install him as the new leader of Iraq after America removed Saddam. His inability to obtain on the ground support from Iraqis ended that effort shortly after the Pentagon delivered him to Baghdad in 2003. Suspicion that he is and has been an agent for Iranian Intelligence persist. Using the INC to confirm false intelligence sent thorugh other sources to the American NeoCons and the Pentagon and Office of the Vice President is exacly the kind of activity a foreign Intelligence agency bent on sending bad Intelligence to the top American Officials would conduct.
There is also the fact that America has used Iraq as a counter to Iran since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and in fact covertly supported Iraq when Saddam attacked Iran in the early 80's. If Iranian Intelligence could get Americans to removed Saddam from power that action would make Iran much safer. It has to be assumed that the Iranian Intelligence Services has been working hard to distract America from Iran and to get Saddam removed. That certainly has been the effect of the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Have we been witnessing the very successful efforts of Iranian Intelligence to remove Saddam, Iraq and weaken America in the Middle East?
There's no smoking gun yet, but it certainly fits the publicly known motivations of the various players in the last two decades. Then there is the fact that Stephen Cambone shut down the internal investigation of those Pentagon - Office of the Vice President players after only one month with no results reported. That's so suspicious that it is close to an admission of guilt. Any report of an investigation that resulted in such a report would be politically disastrous to the Bush administration, and they have been very good at shutting down such investigations.
Maybe it's time to reopen that investigation. Hey! It might exonerate all the various Bush administration players from suspicion. But it might also show them as stupid rubes played for suckers by Iranian Intelligence, too.
I know which alternative that I consider more likely.
If you are curious and have some time on your hands, here are the (large!) PDF files that contain the Phase II report:
- "Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information"
- "Report on Intelligence Activities Relating to Iraq Conducted by the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans Within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy"
Addendum 6/6/08 3:40 PM
The New York Times has now published its reflections on the Senate report on Intelligence. It's not kind to the Bush administration. Instead it's a compendium of example of how it is possible to lie by misdirection and technically accurate yet highly misleading statements.
It took just a few months after the United States’ invasion of Iraq for the world to find out that Saddam Hussein had long abandoned his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. He was not training terrorists or colluding with Al Qaeda. The only real threat he posed was to his own countrymen.The New York Times Editors also make it quite clear that this report was available nearly five years ago, but was buried by the Republican Senators on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.
It has taken five years to finally come to a reckoning over how much the Bush administration knowingly twisted and hyped intelligence to justify that invasion. On Thursday — after years of Republican stonewalling — a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee gave us as good a set of answers as we’re likely to get.
The report shows clearly that President Bush should have known that important claims he made about Iraq did not conform with intelligence reports. In other cases, he could have learned the truth if he had asked better questions or encouraged more honest answers.
The report confirms one serious intelligence failure: President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials were told that Iraq still had chemical and biological weapons and did not learn that these reports were wrong until after the invasion. But Mr. Bush and his team made even that intelligence seem more solid, more recent and more dangerous than it was.
The report shows that there was no intelligence to support the two most frightening claims Mr. Bush and his vice president used to sell the war: that Iraq was actively developing nuclear weapons and had longstanding ties to terrorist groups. It seems clear that the president and his team knew that that was not true, or should have known it — if they had not ignored dissenting views and telegraphed what answers they were looking for.
Over all, the report makes it clear that top officials, especially Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, knew they were not giving a full and honest account of their justifications for going to war.
The report was supported by only two of the seven Republicans on the 15-member Senate panel. The five dissenting Republicans first tried to kill it, and then to delete most of its conclusions. They finally settled for appending objections. The bulk of their criticisms were sophistry transparently intended to protect Mr. Bush and deny the public a full accounting of how he took America into a disastrous war.
The report documents how time and again Mr. Bush and his team took vague and dubious intelligence reports on Iraq’s weapons programs and made them sound like hard and incontrovertible fact.
The lies told by the Bush administration are not the work of just a few individuals. The entire Republican leadership in Congress and in the White House all got behind those lies.
And why?
To misdirect the American public into a war against Iraq which was no threat to anyone other than their own people, and to direct Americans away from the real threats of terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan, largely funded by Saudi Arabian money.
It sounds insane, unless the only purpose was to gain power in the American government for a permanent minority party by faking an external threat that did not exist. Still, why did they ignore the threat that did exist?
It still sounds insane. But that's the Party of Ronald Reagan and the movement conservatives. Threats and fear where none really exists while ignore real threats right in front of their eyes because to recognize the real threats would jeopardize their power in government, which allows them to corruptly steal taxpayer money left and right.
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