@@ Mossad agent & fabricator @@
Arash
December 22, 2003 issue
Exclusive: Regime Change in Iran? One Man's Secret Plan
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Newsweek/Photos/mag/031222_Issue/031213_periscope_vl.vlarge.jpg
Iran's Chalabi? Manucher Ghorbanifar says he talked secretly with Pentagon
officials about plans for regime change in Iran
By Mark Hosenball
What was international man of mystery Manucher Ghorbanifar up to when he met
with top Pentagon experts on Iran? In a NEWSWEEK interview in Paris last
month, Ghorbanifar, a former Iranian spy who helped launch the Iran-contra
affair, says one of the things he discussed with Defense officials Harold
Rhode and Larry Franklin at meetings in Rome in December 2001 (and in Paris
last June with only Rhode) was regime change in Iran.
Ghorbanifar says there are Iranians capable of organizing a peaceful
revolution against the ruling theocracy. He says his contacts know where
Saddam Hussein hid $340 million in cash. With American help, he says, this
money could be retrieved and half used to overthrow the ayatollahs. (The
other half would be turned over to the United States.) Ghorbanifar says he
told his U.S. interlocutors that ousting the mullahs would be a breakthrough
in the war on terror because top Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden,
are in Iran. ("You won't be surprised if you find that Saddam Hussein is on
one of the Iranian islands.")
Among other intel Ghorbanifar says he and associates gave the Pentagon: a
warning that terrorists in Iraq would attack hotels. He also says he had
advance info about Iranian nukes and a terrorist plot in Canada. Financial
gain was never his objective, he says: "We wanted to give them the money,
not to take the money."
The Pentagon cut off contact with Ghorbanifar, whom the CIA years ago
labeled as a fabricator, after news about the talks broke last summer.
But controversy about the Iranian still reverberates in Washington.
Administration sources say that when White House officials OK'd what they
believed was a Pentagon effort to gather info about Iranian terrorist
activity in Afghanistan, they didn't know Ghorbanifar was involved.
When senior officials learned in 2002 about Ghorbanifar-and that regime
change was on his agenda-they decided further contacts were "not worth
pursuing."
But Ghorbanifar says he continued to communicate with Rhode, and sometimes
Franklin, by phone and fax five or six times a week until shortly after the
Paris meeting last summer. (The Pentagon says any such contacts were
sporadic and not authorized by top officials.)
In Congress, investigations into the Ghorbanifar story have sparked partisan
tensions. Democrats want to know if the Ghorbanifar contacts are evidence of
"rogue" espionage by a secretive Pentagon unit that allegedly dealt with
controversial Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi; Republicans want to know whether
the CIA refused to meet with potential informants merely because the
middleman-Ghorbanifar-was someone the agency distrusted.
A Defense official says any discussion that Ghorbanifar had with Pentagon
experts about regime change was a "one-way conversation."
http://msnbc.msn.com/Default.aspx?id=3706341&p1=0
Pacifist
news:alIDb.2160$cW5....@newscontent-01.sprint.ca
Ghorbanifar was deeply implicated in the Iran Contra affair. It's
amazing that people in Washington still talk to him.
P
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