Iran-Contra II?
Fresh scrutiny on a rogue Pentagon operation.
By Joshua Micah Marshall, Laura Rozen, and Paul Glastris
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.
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.
One 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. One of the Iranians, according to two
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 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.
Alarm bells about the December 2001 meeting began going off in U.S.
government channels only days after it occurred. On December 12th 2001, at
the U.S. 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 U.S. government sources, Sembler immediately set about trying
to determine what he could about the meeting and how it had happened. Since
U.S. 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 Department and CIA
Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, 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 1980s Ghorbanifar has been the subject of two 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
Department 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 U.S. government sources, both the State Department and the CIA
eventually brought the matter to the attention of the White House --
specifically, to Condoleezza Rice's chief deputy on the National Security
Council, Stephen J. 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 second meeting
was soon underway. According to a story published this summer in Corriere
della Sera, a leading Italian daily, this second 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
Rhode. Though he did not attend it himself, Ghorbanifar says the meeting
consisted of an Egyptian, an Iraqi, and a high-level U.S. government
official, whose name he declined to reveal. The first two 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 Department,
which did not respond to repeated inquiries. Ledeen also refused to comment.
No one at the U.S. Embassy in Rome seems to have known about this second
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 Ghorbanifar. 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
departments 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 second 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 Rockerfeller (D-WV) 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 U.S. intelligence to Iran). With
the FBI adding potential espionage charges to the mix the long-simmering
questions about the activities of Feith's operation now seem certain to come
under renewed scrutiny.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0410.marshallrozen.html
--
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me
to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been
enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money
power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the
prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and
the Republic is destroyed."
-- U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 (letter to Col. William F.
Elkins)
Ref: The Lincoln Encyclopedia, Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY)
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