@@ Jews, Iranian exiles, & Congressman Weldon @@
Arash
Volume 16, Issue 4
April 2005
Revealed: Right-wing contacts with Iranian exiles
Hard-liners want evidence that Iran is up to no good.
And they’re turning to strange sources to get it.
Laura Rozen in Washington
Jeet Heer in Toronto
For Iranians in exile -- and the Americans who become embroiled in their
intrigues -- Paris has long been the city of shadows. This is where the
Ayatollah Khomenei awaited the ominous victory of his Islamic revolution;
and where the deposed ministers and brutal spies from the late shah’s
government washed up in the 1979 revolution’s bloody aftermath.
For well over two decades now, dreamers and schemers who hope to overthrow
the mullahs have been lurking along the banks of the Seine, passing secrets
and lies through proxies, back channels, and middlemen. Among the Persian
plotters marooned in the French capital is a former minister of commerce in
the shah’s government, who has recently acquired the code name of “Ali”.
To the in?uential U.S. congressman who bestowed that somewhat unoriginal
alias on him, the elderly bureaucrat is actually an oracle who passes along
invaluable intelligence about terrorist conspiracies emanating from Tehran,
and an important asset who should be cultivated by the CIA.
Yet “Ali” is actually a cipher for Manucher Ghorbanifar, the notorious
Iranian arms dealer and accused intelligence fabricator -- and the potential
instrument of another potentially dangerous manipulation of American policy
in the Persian Gulf region.
http://www.bushwhackedusa.com/archive/images/Ghorbanifar.jpg
Manucher Ghorbanifar
“Ali’s” fervent advocate on Capitol Hill is Congressman Curt Weldon, the
conservative Pennsylvania Republican who serves as vice chair of the House
Armed Services Committee. The nine-term congressman has long nurtured a
penchant for the dramatic. With a degree in Russian studies from West
Chester University in his home state, Weldon has often displayed his
language skills on of?cial trips to Moscow to discuss Russia’s “loose nukes”
and the urgent need for a missile-defense system. Since the end of the Cold
War, he has carved out a niche as an expert on such truly frightening topics
as nuclear proliferation and high-tech terrorism.
http://www.defensenews.com/conferences/0403ftb/040103WELDON09.jpg
Curt Weldon
Curt...@mail.house.gov
As chairman of the House Subcommittee on Military Research and Development,
Weldon has held numerous hearings on the threat of Russian suitcase bombs
being in?ltrated into American cities and similar cataclysmic scenarios. He
often shows up in the press as a Cassandra warning against elaborate foreign
plots, from terrorist hackers destroying the Pentagon’s Internet capacity to
North Korean nuclear weapons exploding in the atmosphere of the United
States, creating an electromagnetic pulse that would cripple the nation’s
electrical utilities and electronic systems. He possesses a genuine gift for
elaborating these nightmare visions, which he may have sharpened while
reading the works of Tom Clancy. Indeed, he sometimes cites catastrophic
attack scenarios devised by the suspense novelist, an acqaintance of his who
has occasionally helped to raise money for Pennsylvania Republicans.
Unlike the stock characters in Clancy’s novels, however, the source Weldon
calls “Ali” is a real person; in fact, he’s a former Iranian government
of?cial. And so convinced is Weldon of the man’s veracity that he has not
only tried to persuade the CIA to pay Ali, he is also shopping a book based
on the startling information that the Iranian exile has passed along to him.
According to a report last December in The New York Sun, Weldon hopes to
soon publish an exposé of Iranian terrorist conspiracies, including an
alleged 2003 plot to crash a plane into New Hampshire’s Seabrook
nuclear-power plant that the congressman claims was later con?rmed in the
press
(http://www.stevequayle.com/News.alert/04_Terror/041217.Seabrook.nuke.html).
“Ali” ?rst mentioned the Iranian threat to the Seabrook reactor at a Paris
meeting with Weldon on May 17, 2003, according to the Sun article. Three
months later, on August 22, The Toronto Star reported the arrest of 19 men
in Canada for immigration violations; mostly Pakistanis (and one Indian),
they were suspected of being involved in a terrorist conspiracy. One of the
men in the suspected cell was reported to have been taking ?ight lessons,
and to have ?own an airplane directly over an Ontario nuclear-power plant,
according to the Star.
But as things turned out, the Canadian terrorism case is considerably more
ambiguous than Weldon’s breathless version. Ultimately the Canadian
government didn’t pursue terrorism charges against the 19 men, but deported
them for holding improper visas. Following up on the case in late November
2003, The Toronto Star reported that “what started out as a sensational
terrorism case has devolved into one of simple immigration fraud, with
of?cials now backing away from their initial claim that the men posed a
threat to national security.” The case is still a subject of intense
controversy in Canada, with human-rights groups charging that the government
trumped up the terrorism accusations based on ?imsy evidence.
Unimpressed by such scary but unsubstantiated stories, the CIA rejected
Weldon’s entreaties to engage with “Ali.” Frustrated by the agency’s
negative decision, the congressman complained in a letter to the chair of
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, with an attached memo titled
“Ali: A Credible Source”.
Responding to inquiries from the Prospect, Weldon’s of?ce con?rmed that the
representative has met twice with “Ali” in Paris, and maintained an active
correspondence with him. Their meetings were arranged by Peter Pry, a former
CIA strategic-weapons analyst and House Armed Services Committee staffer,
who advises the congressman on nuclear-proliferation issues.
Eventually Weldon tried to interest the CIA in “Ali,” but the agency was
wary because the informant won’t elaborate on his sources in Iran.
Frustrated by what he sees as a failure of the intelligence community,
Weldon wants to take the “Ali” story to the public. His press aides say that
former CIA Director James Woolsey -- a neoconservative stalwart who endorsed
the theory that Iraqi agents were probably behind the September 11
attacks -- has read Weldon’s new book manuscript and was most impressed by
it.
The Prospect has learned that the true identity of “Ali” is "Fereidoun
Mahdavi", formerly the shah’s minister of commerce and, more importantly,
the close friend and business partner of Ghorbanifar, legendary arms dealer,
infamous intelligence fabricator, and central ?gure in the Iran-Contra
scandal that almost brought down the Reagan administration. It was “Gorba”,
as he was known back then to Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, the rogue
National Security Council of?cer, who lured the Reagan administration into
secretly selling U.S. missiles to the Islamic regime in exchange for the
release of Western hostages.
“I knew him to be a liar”, North eventually acknowledged. Robert McFarlane,
the national-security adviser who approved the Iran-Contra arms trades, once
described Ghorbanifar as “one of the most despicable characters I have ever
met.”
Like Ghorbanifar, who maintains a family residence in Nice and frequents
certain Paris hotels, Mahdavi has lived in France ever since he ?ed Iran. He
currently occupies a Paris apartment with his wife, who is suffering from
cancer. Not long ago he was stricken by a heart attack, and is regarded with
sympathy by many in the local Iranian exile community, who consider him an
honorable ?gure. Reached on the telephone in January, he discussed his
various dealings with Weldon and Ghorbanifar.
“Maybe I met with Weldon one time,” he recalled. Told that Weldon plans to
publish a book based on his conversations with “Ali,” Mahdavi demurs. “I
will deny any quote,” he says. “I gave information to Weldon from
Ghorbanifar.” He insists that, because he cannot contact anyone in his
homeland, he could not have been the original source for the information
that the arms merchant asked him to pass to the congressman. “I am very
well-known in Iran,” he says. “Everyone knows me. I cannot call there”.
Mahdavi denied that he has received any money from the U.S. government or
any U.S. of?cial. “I am 74 years old,” he says. “If I have got one dollar
from one American, I will give you a million. I never got any money from the
Americans, and I don’t want any American money.” He sounded more circumspect
about his relationship with Ghorbanifar, though. “I know Ghorbanifar and I
am close with him, but I don’t want to be confused with him”.
Another former minister in the shah’s government, who also lives in Paris,
says that Mahdavi and Ghorbanifar have maintained long-standing commercial
and personal connections.
According to Dr. Akbar Etemad, who served as head of the Atomic Energy
Organization (1974-1978) in the Pahlavi regime, the pair went into business
together after the 1979 revolution, working mostly in Arab countries. Etemad
also con?rmed that Mahdavi has been passing along dubious “intelligence”
information, supposedly from inside Iran.
“Mahdavi says that he has this network in Iran that he gets information
from,” says Etemad. “Each time, he says his information will come true in
two months’ time. But all that information is fake. Ghorbanifar and Mahdavi
work very closely together. Ghorbanifar is unreliable. In that sense, he
might be dangerous”.
The CIA shares that harsh assessment of Ghorbanifar. If the intelligence
agency had any clue to Mahdavi’s association with Ghorbanifar, it is
scarcely surprising that its of?cials rebuffed Weldon’s overtures on behalf
of “Ali”.
Many years ago, the CIA issued an unusual “burn notice” on Ghorbanifar,
instructing its personnel not to deal with him and warning that he was known
to spread false information to advance his own interests.
Indeed, to CIA analysts still smarting from the humiliations of the Iraqi
intelligence ?asco, the reappearance of Ghorbanifar behind “Ali” must have
set off loud alarms.
The Iranian arms dealer not only symbolizes one of the most disgraceful
episodes in the history of American covert operations, which involved
selling sophisticated weapons to a terrorist regime in exchange for
hostages; with his neoconservative sponsors and opportunistic methods,
Ghorbanifar very much resembles Ahmad Chalabi, another slick operator who
eventually came to be viewed with the deepest suspicion -- but not before
his faulty “intelligence” about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction helped to
draw America into war.
Among those who have compared Ghorbanifar to Chalabi is Michael Ledeen
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/ledeen/ledeen.php), the neoconservative
writer and historian who has befriended both men. As the “freedom scholar”
at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to the
National Review, he now spends much of his time urging the Bush
administration to support efforts by Iranian dissidents to topple their
country’s theocratic rulers. Coming from Ledeen -- who also played a central
role in the Iran-Contra affair alongside Ghorbanifar, and who still defends
Chalabi -- the comparison of the shadowy pair is meant as a compliment. He
says that their poor reputation at the CIA and the State Department simply
proves the in?exibility of the American bureaucrats.
“They never liked Ghorbanifar, [which was] similar to them not liking lots
of other people, including Chalabi,” insisted Ledeen in a recent interview
with the Prospect. “It’s because [Chalabi and Ghorbanifar] want to work with
the American government and not for it. The CIA and State Department have a
dif?cult time with such people. But Chalabi is ?rst and foremost an Iraqi;
Ghorbanifar is an Iranian. There are times when their interests coincide
with those of the U.S. government. But they do not wish to be agents of the
American government. They are very happy to help when interests coincide.”
Considering that they don’t wish to serve as “agents” of the American
government, both Ghorbanifar and Chalabi have eagerly accepted American
money and weapons. In any case, Ledeen’s ?ne distinctions are unlikely to
assuage the worries of anyone disturbed by what Chalabi has done to U.S.
policy in Iraq -- or what Ghorbanifar might do to U.S. policy in Iran.
Indeed, the revived debate over Ghorbanifar’s character and competence is
particularly pressing now because neoconservatives such as Ledeen, who
listen closely to him, have gained in?uence over the Bush administration’s
Iran policy.
(While the Bush administration’s decision in early March to go along with
European allies in offering Iran economic incentives to abandon its nuclear
program was hailed as a decisive shift toward a diplomatic solution [and a
setback for the neoconservatives], the second part of the U.S.–European
agreement is equally important. The Europeans agreed that should Iran fail
to abide by international nuclear agreements, they will support the United
States in referring Tehran to the United Nations Security Council for
noncompliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. That could help the
United States to isolate Iran at the United Nations, reprising the prelude
to the Iraq invasion. Given the pending nomination of Undersecretary of
State [and über-hawk] John Bolton as Washington’s new UN ambassador, the
administration is clearly prepared to pursue a more aggressive, and perhaps
unilateral, policy toward Iran.)
Alone among those involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, Ledeen has never lost
faith in Ghorbanifar. In a December 1985 meeting with the CIA, he described
the Iranian as a “wonderful man … almost too good to be true.” He still says
Ghorbanifar “is my best source of information on Iran for 20 years. And the
CIA made a mistake about him and they don’t know how to get out of it. Once
a burn notice has been issued on somebody, they are never going to change
it. I think the CIA is a hopeless, stupid organization.”
Ledeen also insists that “the information Ghorbanifar provided during the
Iran-Contra period was invaluable. Ghorbanifar was the ?rst person I ever
met who knew what Hezbollah really was … . He was the ?rst person who was
able to identify factions within the Iranian regime about which we know
nothing. His information has been spot-on all along.”
It isn’t easy to measure the extent of Ghorbanifar’s renewed in?uence on
American policy. Even to his cohorts among the Iranian exile community in
Paris, he remains mysterious. Almost everywhere his name is mentioned, the
doubts about his integrity persist. A former intelligence of?cer serving the
shah’s military chief of staff, the 59-year-old Ghorbanifar has used his
connections with members of Iran’s current theocratic regime to sell the
promise of regime change to Washington contacts for more than two decades.
To his current American contacts, he markets himself much as he did during
the Iran-Contra era -- as the indispensable purveyor of intelligence
information about political machinations inside the Islamic Republic and the
Tehran regime’s sponsorship of nefarious terrorist plots. He is frequently
traveling, completing deals recently in such places as Spain and Iraq; his
trading has covered commodities from petroleum to peas to Persian carpets,
from small arms to guided missiles.
His ancestral family home is in the Iranian city of Isfahan. In an interview
last summer, he said that he had earned a doctorate in history by the time
he was 23 years old. During the twilight years of the shah’s government,
Ghorbanifar managed Star Line, a shipping company whose ownership was partly
taken over by Israeli businessmen in 1980. While he is often alleged to have
had ties with SAVAK, the shah’s brutal secret police, he and others say that
he worked for the intelligence unit of the Iranian armed forces.
After the revolution that overthrew the shah in 1979, but before the
theocratic rule of the mullahs solidi?ed, Ghorbanifar was embroiled in
clandestine struggles for power. Two of his Paris associates recall that he
and other members of his family participated in a July 1980 conspiracy
against Khomenei. The “Nojeh” plot was a failed coup attempt led by Iranian
air-force of?cers. When it collapsed, Ghorbanifar’s sister was among those
sentenced to death by the Islamic regime.
Seeking to save her life, Ghorbanifar, according to one of his friends,
found an intermediary in Dubai who made a covert arrangement with the
Iranian authorities. Ghorbanifar paid the intermediary a million francs, and
the Iranians commuted his sister’s death sentence to ?ve years in prison.
That deal was the beginning of his connections with the new regime in
Tehran.
By then the Shia revolutionaries were at war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and
apparently thought they could use Ghorbanifar’s shipping experience -- and
his Israeli connections -- to help them procure American weapons and spare
parts for systems the shah had purchased from the United States.
To obtain weapons for Iran, Ghorbanifar aggressively courted Israeli and
American of?cials. At ?rst he hooked up with the CIA as an informant, but
the agency soon decided that he was a fabricator and issued the burn notice,
discouraging any contact with him. In 1984, when he tried to open another
line of communication to the State Department, his advances were again
rebuffed.
His big break came later that year, when he met the Saudi billionaire arms
dealer Adnan Khashoggi. “The way that Ghorbanifar ?rst came to the attention
of the Israelis was because he was introduced to Khashoggi as one of those
who knew the people who controlled these very expensive, duty-free Persian
carpets in Hamburg,” recalls Ledeen. “These were very expensive carpets,
some used to belong to the shah, and Khashoggi was interested in buying
those carpets. Ghorbanifar was helping him, and they became friends.”
http://www.umsl.edu/~skthoma/kandg.jpg
Adnan Khashoggi & Manucher Ghorbanifar
Through Khashoggi, Ghorbanifar was able to link up with Israeli
policy-makers and intelligence of?cials, who in turn introduced the arms
dealer to Ledeen, then working as a consultant to Ronald Reagan’s
national-security adviser, Robert McFarlane. And through Ledeen, Ghorbanifar
at last found receptive ears for the deal he had long been trying to broker:
The United States and Israel would supply sophisticated weapons to Iran; in
return, Ghorbanifar convinced McFarlane, “moderate” elements in Tehran would
be empowered and enabled to release U.S. hostages held by Shia radicals in
Lebanon.
“And then as usual, the Americans betray their friends,” says an old
Ghorbanifar friend. As the Iran-Contra machinations proceeded, the Reagan
White House opened a “second channel” to the Iranians that bypassed Gorba.
His friend recalls that this decision caused “a very hostile relationship
between Ghorbanifar and the Americans. After that, they started to give bad
information about him.” If Ghorbanifar felt betrayed by the Reagan
administration, the feeling was certainly mutual.
Following the 9-11 terrorist attacks, Ghorbanifar saw an opportunity to
reopen his connections with the United States government, just as he had
perceived such an opportunity during the hostage crises of the Reagan era.
In the months after 9-11, the Bush administration was desperate for
actionable intelligence on terrorist threats and state sponsorship of
terrorist groups by hostile governments in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Around that time, Ghorbanifar called his old friend Ledeen, who no longer
consults of?cially for the U.S. government but is very well-connected in
both the White House and the Pentagon. He convinced Ledeen that he could
produce Iranian informants with crucial intelligence about an alleged
Tehran-backed terrorist threat to U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
“Ghorbanifar called me, and at ?rst I said, ‘Are you insane?’” Ledeen later
told The New York Times. “But he said he could arrange meetings with
Iranians [who had] current information about what Iran was doing. It wasn’t
information coming from him. He was just arranging the meetings.”
As ?rst reported in Newsday, Ghorbanifar secretly met with of?cials from the
Pentagon’s Of?ce of Special Plans in Rome in December 2001. The main topic
was the supposed threat to U.S. forces in Afghanistan, but the options for
regime change in Iran were also discussed.
How the Bush administration came to authorize the initial December 2001
meeting in Rome is a curious tale that suggests how far Ghorbanifar can
reach. The meeting included two Farsi-speaking Pentagon of?cials, Defense
Intelligence Agency Iran expert Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode, a polyglot
Middle East specialist, both then working for Undersecretary of Defense
Douglas Feith.
In a recent letter to the Washington Monthly, Feith explained what he called
“the real story” behind the Rome meeting. “The Department of Defense learned
from the White House that there were some Iranians who had information about
terrorist threats to U.S. forces in Afghanistan and who wanted to defect,”
he said. “(It turned out that the Iranians did not want to defect, but they
did want to share information directly with the U.S. government.) The
Iranians did not, however, want to deal with the CIA. [The Defense
Department] was asked to handle the contact.”
Douglas Feith concluded, “After the December 2001 meeting, it was decided
not to pursue the matter further. One factor in that decision was the
involvement of Ghorbanifar, whose participation in the Rome meeting
surprised the senior of?cials at [the Defense Department] who authorized the
trip.”
That unusual letter from Douglas Feith, who recently resigned and will leave
his post this summer, indicates that the White House had learned of the
talkative Iranians from a source outside the usual intelligence or
diplomatic channels at the CIA and the State Department. That means that
Ghorbanifar may have a contact who is passing his messages directly to the
White House. And according to Douglas Feith, that source didn’t warn the
Pentagon that Ghorbanifar would be present at the Rome meeting. One person
familiar with the Rome meeting, who asked not to be named, expressed
skepticism that the Pentagon was surprised by Ghorbanifar’s presence there.
An of?cial from SISMI, the Italian military intelligence agency, was also
present. In an interview with Italy’s La Republica newspaper, SISMI Director
Niccolo Pollari con?rmed that he was asked to facilitate the Rome meeting,
and that he sent an aide. (The Washington Monthly ?rst reported SISMI’s
involvement in the encounter between Ghorbanifar and the Pentagon.) Pollari
didn’t explain why the U.S. Defense Department would interview Iranian
informants in the presence of a foreign military intelligence service,
without the knowledge of the U.S. embassy in Rome and without any assistance
from the CIA, which would normally assume responsibility for such contacts.
In his letter, Douglas Feith asserts that the White House understood the
would-be defectors refused to deal with the CIA, which was why the Pentagon
took over.
In June 2003, Harold Rhode met with Ghorbanifar once more, this time in
Paris. The publicity about the meetings, combined with opposition from the
State Department and the CIA, reportedly led to the shutdown of the arms
dealer’s back channel the following autumn. Ghorbanifar’s contacts with the
U.S. government remained dormant. But by then “Ali” had commenced his
discussions with Congressman Weldon about Tehran’s terrorist plots. Cut off
once more by the Pentagon and the CIA, Ghorbanifar had already opened a
second channel via the unwitting Weldon.
The most striking aspect of Weldon’s sponsorship of “Ali” is how precisely
it follows the Ghorbanifar pattern of making a connection by telling a
prospective client what he wants to hear. Weldon has a long history of being
fascinated by fantastic foreign plots. Using “Ali” as an intermediary,
Ghorbanifar was able to feed that appetite, to penetrate Republican circles
in Washington again -- and to stoke neoconservative hostility toward the
Iranian regime.
Whatever political aims Ghorbanifar may be pursuing remain as murky as ever.
But given the controversies that have surrounded him for more than two
decades, and the messy aftermath of the Iran-Contra affair, it is remarkable
that he has once again surfaced as a middleman and intelligence source. Yet
the return of Ghorbanifar is merely one symptom of a much graver problem:
the paucity of reliable U.S. intelligence about people and events in Iran.
Lacking well-placed sources there, the U.S. government ?nds itself listening
again to someone with a track record of supplying false information and
playing both sides.
To see through the complex web woven by Ghorbanifar, it may help to remember
his friend Ledeen’s praise of the arms dealer as “almost too good to be
true.” That description is double-edged, of course, because someone who
tells us exactly what we want to hear is usually too good to be true. From
Oliver North to Curt Weldon, Ghorbanifar has an uncanny ability to exploit
the vulnerability of Americans trying to glean critical information about
Iran.
Ghorbanifar’s handling of his cats-paw “Ali” offers a glimpse of the dark
side of this master manipulator, who willingly uses a frail and ailing
associate as a front for his operations. Perhaps the last word on
Ghorbanifar should be left to one of his countrymen in Paris. “The culture
in Iran is to hide the thing that you mean,” the man explained. “There is a
proverb: ‘You have a tongue to hide your idea.’”
* Laura Rozen (http://www.warandpiece.com) reports on foreign affairs and
national-security issues from Washington, D.C.
* Jeet Heer (http://www.jeetheer.com), who is based in Toronto, frequently
writes for The Boston Globe and the National Post.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=9361
Iran-Contra II?
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0410.marshallrozen.html
In Bed with Terrorists
http://www.alternet.org/story/20739/
Still Dreaming of Tehran
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040412&s=dreyfuss
Mole Hunt
http://www.alternet.org/story/19804/
The Resurrection
http://www.alternet.org/story/19647/