Yesterday's McClatchy's article Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials? brought back some memories:
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.
Back in 2005 I wrote a few posts called The Italian Job Timeline about the Yellowcake forgeries based on Nur-Al Cubicle's translation of an investigative series by Italian journalists.
The Fall/Winter 2001 entry:
...Defense Minister Antonio Martino tells Pollari to expect a visit from an old friend of Italy.
This old friend is Michael A. Ledeen, a veteran of American parallel intelligence conduits, who had been previously declared persona non grata by Rome during 1980s. [Likely because of kidnapping of Abu Abbas, orchestrated by Ledeen and Oliver North, and the attempted “extraordinary rendition” of Abbas through Italy—Nur] [also possibly because of his involvement in the Bologna train station bombing and kidnapping of Aldo Moro — Shystee] Ledeen is in Rome on a mission from the Office of Special Plans, created at the Pentagon by Paul Wolfowitz to collect intelligence which would support a war on Iraq.
There's an article in Rolling Stone that details this very meeting and the run-up to it:
Completing the rogues' gallery that assembled in Rome that day was the man who helped Ledeen arrange the meeting: Nicolò Pollari, the director of Italy's military intelligence. Only two months earlier, Pollari had informed the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein had obtained uranium from West Africa—a key piece of false intelligence that Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
What is interesting is the different Rashomon-like interpretations of what happened that day: were the Americans being duped by Iranian agents? Were the Americans collecting bogus intelligence they could use to justify and invasion of Iraq? Were the Iranians selling bogus intelligence that would help to justify attacking Iran?
Then again, another interpretation is that these people are morons.
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I'm going to go with "D" - they're all morans
All-purpose head: "Did _________ dupe Pentagon officials?"
All these years now of Iran and North Korea as supposedly the biggest threats and we have zip all nothing for agents in place or an intelligence community infrastructure with any core competency for either nation. Zip, nada, bupkis.
Should be grateful, I suppose, that the lot of them aren't smarter than they are. We could have been in real trouble.
Oh, and Ledeen; there's a shelfload of books waiting to be written, all the fuckups he's had a finger in. One-man wrecking crew, that idiot. You would think, the money we spend, we could manage to get at least a couple of real pros.
Thanks, good catch. I skipped right past the article, thought it was a rehash of the Iraq yellowcake BS. Same scam, same mark, same conduit, just change the name by one letter and talk fast. Clueless, this crew.
redux all over again
the whole eight years of bush/cheney foreign policy incompetence
has been iran-contra recycled -
by watergate republicans.
shystee
you wrote: Were the Iranians selling bogus intelligence that would help to justify attacking Iran?
I know close to little or nothing about this, but the sentence seems to makes more sense....to justify attacking Iraq?
Sorry, thanks for any help in clarifying this.
whaleshaman
Just saw your comment. It seems nonsensical, but that is actually the gist of the RS article, which relies heavily on an interview with Ledeen, so...