This has massive implications. It is huge. It goes to the heart of how the Iraq war was foisted on the Congress for approval with WMD lies. Reports are flying everywhere (rumors and hearsay so far) that this spy investigation of Feith leads back to the fake documents saying Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger. The direct implication is that Israel’s Mossad are the ones who planted the faked documents so the U.S. would find them. These are the exact same documents that convinced John Kerry and others in Congress to authorize force in the fall of 2002 against Iraq, because they were the “proof,” shown only behind closed doors, that Iraq had a nuclear program (they did not).
Read after the link for one person’s take on this. A lot of journalists in Washington have been trying to break this story open for months, without getting very far until now. The possibility exists that this could end with the public being told that we were taken to war on the basis of a hoax, perpetrated by or with the cooperation of a foreign government.
The FBI investigation.*
For months, I have been working with my colleagues Paul Glastris and Josh Marshall on a story for the Washington Monthly about US policy towards Iran. In particular, it involves a particular series of meetings involving officials from the office of the undersecretary of defense for Policy Doug Feith and Iranian dissidents. To that end, we have pursued and cultivated numerous sources with knowledge of those officials, those meetings, and more broadly, Feith’s office’s seeming attempts to forge a rogue US foreign policy to Iran out of the Pentagon.
As part of our reporting, I have come into possession of information that points to an official who is the most likely target of the FBI investigation into who allegedly passed intelligence on deliberations on US foreign policy to Iran to officials with the pro-Israeli lobby group, AIPAC, and to the Israelis, as alleged by the CBS report. That individual is Larry Franklin, a veteran DIA Iran analyst seconded to Feith’s office.
Here is what I was told in the days before the FBI investigation came to light.
A source told me that some time in July, Larry Franklin called him and asked him to meet him in a coffee shop in Northern Virginia. Franklin had intelligence on hostile Iranian activities in Iraq and was extremely frustrated that he did not feel this intelligence was getting the attention and response it deserved. The intelligence included information that the Iranians had called all of their intelligence operatives who speak Arabic to southern Iraq, that it had moved their top operative for Afghanistan, a guy named Qudzi, to the Iranian embassy in Baghdad, that its operatives were targeting Iraqi state oil facilities, and that Iranian agents were infiltrating into northern Iraq to target the Israelis written about in a report by Seymour Hersh. According to my source, Franklin passed the information to the individual from AIPAC with the hope it could reach people at higher levels of the US government who would act on it. The individual from AIPAC told me that AIPAC presented the information to Elliot Abrams in the NSC. They also presented the part that involved Israelis who might be targeted to the Israelis, with the motivation to protect Israeli lives.
A couple weeks ago, my source told me, he was visited by two agents of the FBI, who were asking about Franklin. My source couldn’t tell if Franklin was being investigated for possible wrongdoing, or if the FBI was visiting him because Franklin required some sort of higher level security clearance or clearance renewal, perhaps in order to get some sort of new position or posting abroad. My source soonafter ran into another official from Feith’s office, the polyglot Middle East expert and Bernard Lewis protege, Harold Rhode. My source mentioned the FBI meeting and asked Rhode if Franklin was in trouble. “It’s not clear,” Rhode allegedly told my source.
A second source I met with this past week told me another story. A couple weeks ago, he got called by a consultant to the Pentagon he knows. A small group of Air Force reservists who speak Persian were being trained by the Pentagon at a camp in Virginia in a kind of Iran immersion course, that involved not only language immersion, but “how to play Iranian card games.” The consultant called my second source, an Iran expert, to see if this small elite group could meet with him. He said among the group of four that was supposed to come was Larry Franklin. Franklin in fact did not come, but sent his regrets in a note. My second source said by the way he was terribly impressed with the Iranian language skills that the group that did come possessed.
When the news broke tonight on CBS about the FBI investigation, I tried to get in touch with my first source. But when he answered his phone, he said he couldn’t talk, there were attorneys involved and he wasn’t free to discuss the case.
It’s no secret that some prominent neoconservative officials like Doug Feith, Vice Presidential advisor David Wurmser, and the former Defense Policy Board chair Richard Perle are sympathetic to the government of Ariel Sharon and the Likud government. Feith, Wurmsfer and Perle co-authored the paper, A Clean Break, which advocated that Israel abandon the Oslo peace process. But Franklin, although a passionate advocate of regime change in Iran, is not really among them. From modest beginnings, Franklin reportedly put himself through school, earned a PhD, and is now the Pentagon’s top Iran analyst. It would be an irony if he were to be the target of an investigation into passing US intelligence to Israel.
A friend points out one other irony is that what the Pentagon official is alleged in the CBS report to have passed to AIPAC and the Israelis is essentially a diplomatic document that describes a draft US policy position to Iran; in other words — hardly the crown jewells, and hardly enough to warrant wiretaps and surveillance of Aipac’s offices, he says. In other words, it’s not deeply technical knowledge about US satellite technology, for instance, or information the Americans had gotten from the Jordanians, or information about say a possible secret US back channel to Hezbollah. He wonders if this case is not politically motivated. It’s no secret as well that there’s intense competition over who would be national security advisor in a second term Bush administration. Anything that taints Feith and Wolfowitz could benefit their internal Bush administraiton foes.
We obviously haven’t heard the last of this yet. Stay tuned.
*Because of the import of this case, and the value of the reporting we have done, I am taking the liberty of simultaneously posting to my site and the Washington Monthly website. Check both sites for updates.
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