@@ New Hampshire reactor is going "Chernobyl" @@
Arash
December 14, 2004
Congressman Warns of Iranian Attack on U.S.
By Jew Eli Lake
WASHINGTON -- A senior Republican congressman
(http://www.house.gov/curtweldon) has been warning America's intelligence
community for more than a year of an alleged Iranian plot to crash
commercial airliners into a New Hampshire nuclear reactor.
Since February 2003, Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania has held a series of
secret meetings in Paris with a former high-ranking official in the Shah's
government who has correctly predicted, according to Mr. Weldon, a number of
internal developments in Iran ranging from the regime's atomic weapons
programs to its support for international terrorism, including Al Qaeda.
Based on two informants inside the mullahs' inner circle, Mr. Weldon's
source, whom he code-named "Ali," relayed allegations to the Pennsylvania
lawmaker that an Iranian-backed terrorist cell is seeking to hijack Canadian
airliners and crash them into an American reactor. :)
The target of the operation was only identified by Ali as SEA, leading Mr.
Weldon to predict it was the Seabrook reactor in New Hampshire, about 40
miles north of Boston. Ali told the congressman that the attack was first
planned for between November 23 and December 3, 2003, but was postponed to
take place after this year's presidential election.
For nearly two years, Mr. Weldon tried to quietly press the CIA and a Senate
panel that oversees Langley to follow up on the intelligence his Iranian
source in Paris was providing. But these efforts came to nothing, according
to Mr. Weldon. So now Mr. Weldon is going public. The congressman said in an
interview last week that he intended to publish a book early next year
outlining the intelligence he has collected from various sources that he
said will detail an Iranian plot to conduct a more lethal attack on America
than September 11, 2001.
"I get a lot of wackos who come to see me, who claim to have information,"
he said. "In this case, this source came to me from a former member of
Congress, a Democrat. I followed up a lead. That lead developed an ongoing
process of information-sharing for two years that I took to the highest
levels of the intelligence community."
In Washington, the new book from Mr. Weldon, based in part on his meetings
with Ali, will provide fresh ammunition for the Republicans against an
intelligence community perceived by the White House as hostile to the
president's policies.
Last month, the new director of the CIA, Porter Goss, a former chairman of
the House Intelligence Committee, sent many of the most senior analysts and
operations officers into early retirement. In a speech he gave to the staff
at Langley, Mr. Goss had to remind the employees that the president sets
national security policy.
But if Mr. Weldon's source turns out to be right, America could also be
losing a valuable intelligence asset on Iran, a country where most
intelligence analysts in America concede the CIA has too few human sources.
The congressman's experience with America's spy service in the last year
echoes frustrations from other American officials and analysts who have
cultivated Iranians willing to provide America with intelligence, but who
have been ignored. After a December 2001 meeting in Rome between Pentagon
analyst Larry Franklin and Iran-Contra figure Manucher Ghorbanifar, the
State Department and CIA went out of their way to shut down the channel. Mr.
Franklin is now the target of a grand jury investigation into alleged
espionage activities for passing information to the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee.
A summary of Ali's predictions were outlined in a November 2003 letter to
the Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
Senator Roberts from Kansas. In its opening lines, Mr. Weldon wrote, "This
letter is to warn you of an intelligence failure in the process of
happening."
Later in the letter, Mr. Weldon, who is the vice chairman of the House Armed
Services Committee, wrote, "I am not asserting that such an attack shall
occur. But given [Ali's] record of accurate predictions, shouldn't the
Intelligence Community at least be investigating his story?"
The letter and an accompanying memo titled, "Ali: a Credible Source," goes
into detail about information Mr. Weldon's source provided that was later
confirmed in the press. For example, Ali first passed on the Iranian threat
to the reactor at a Paris meeting on May 17, 2003.
On August 22, 2003, the Toronto Star reported the arrest of 19 people in
Canada for immigration violations who were suspected of being connected in a
terrorist conspiracy. One of the men in the cell was taking flight lessons
and had flown an airplane directly over an Ontario nuclear power plant,
according to the newspaper.
So, impressed with the quality of his source's information, Mr. Weldon met
in 2003 with the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, to plead
his case to get funding for Ali. But the CIA, according to the Pennsylvania
lawmaker, demanded to know the identities of Ali's sources inside Iran, a
condition Mr. Weldon said was unreasonable given the high-risk espionage.
"I took this straight to the top," Mr. Weldon said in an interview. "I
wanted to work through the channels but I did not get anywhere."
Frustrated with the CIA's response, Mr. Weldon took his case to the Senate
panel that oversees the agency.
He pressed them in the 2003 letter to hold a hearing on the matter and urge
the CIA to get Ali the money to continue to pay off his sources inside the
Islamic republic. According to Mr. Weldon, the committee did not respond in
any meaningful way. "One or two senior people called the chief of staff. Not
the kind of response I wanted. I had to get this off my shoulders," he said
in an interview.
Mr. Weldon said more of Ali's intelligence will be shared in his forthcoming
book, which he promised would "shake Washington."
He said that the manuscript, which he has just completed, details how Iran's
supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, "has set up a separate entity in the
government the president does not know about, which includes all the
terrorist groups connected to bin Laden and others. They are avowed to
consummate a major attack inside the United States. In the book I name this
plot."
http://www.nysun.com/article/6231