@@ Nest of Spies @@
Arash
August 30, 2004
Nest of spies
By Robert Dreyfuss
When Iranian "students" took over the U.S. embassy in 1979, they called it
the "nest of spies." Now it seems, the FBI has discovered a real nest of
spies, Israeli ones. Inside the Pentagon.
Some of the people allegedly involved are the very same people who were
first mentioned in an article ("The Lie Factory") by Jason Vest and myself
in Mother Jones last year. (You can read it here
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html ) That article
cited Harold Rhode, a neocon operative in the Pentagon's Office of Net
Assessments, under the wizard-like Andy Marshall, and his sidekick, the
laughably incompetent Larry Franklin.
Now Franklin, we all know, and perhaps Rhode, are under investigation by the
FBI. Franklin is a minor cog in the Israeli nest of spies, who allegedly
passed U.S. secrets on Iran to AIPAC, the Zionist lobby, who then passed it
to the Israeli embassy.
There are lots of details-but, so far, no one that I've seen has attempted
to really analyze this. The basic paradox is: Ahmad Chalabi, the darling of
Franklin's neocon pals, is under investigation in Iraq and in Washington for
spying for Iran. Franklin is under the FBI gun for spying for Israel,
against Iran. Does this make any sense? Of course not.
Let's assume that Chalabi and Franklin, two lower-level operatives for the
same machine, are still working together. And that the machine, the great
Neoconservative Empire Machine and its Israeli right-wing allies, is what
needs to be investigated.
Franklin, for the past couple of years, has toiled away in the bowels of
Paul Wolfowitz's Iraq war team. A former U.S. intelligence official has this
to say about him:
Anyone who knew Franklin from DIA and from the past few years in OSD knows
that the "incompetent fool way out of his depth" description fits. The
Newsweek story of his walking, "out of the blue," into a private
FBI-surveilled lunch meeting is pure Franklin: clueless. His DIA
colleagues and supervisors knew he could not be depended upon for important
tasks; some suspected he was mentally unbalanced. Taking him on missions
abroad was asking for trouble: unaccounted absences, flaky "special case"
demands, embarrassments with US embassy staffs and foreign personnel. He
should have been fired long ago. Franklin was notoriously sloppy with
security, never could be relied upon by his colleagues or supervisors to
pull his weight on assigned projects or even to be found, repeatedly left
messes behind for others to clean up, almost never met a suspense, and
shamelessly bowed and scraped to the powerful and influential of the day.
Days after a buddy from Net Assessments brought him into the former [Near
East and South Asia office] with a promotion, it was "Paul" this and "Paul"
that, referring to the [Deputy Secretary of Defense]. He ingratiated
himself to OSD seniors by trafficking poison on intelligence seniors they
already believed to be ideologically unreliable. Add to that deep draughts
of the Kool-Aid and you have a prescription for disaster. Mostly, though,
this one looks like his own personal one, and not entirely undeserved.
Of course anyone as "clueless" as Franklin would be sloppy with classified
material. The pro-Ariel Sharon clique in the Pentagon (and elsewhere in the
U.S. government) is so tightly bound and incestuously linked to Israel that
having to draw boundaries between what's American and what's Israeli must
boggle their small minds. So this time Franklin got caught. (P.S. Don't
expect any big indictments, or any sweeping probe of Israel's spy apparatus
in the United States. Reports the New York Times : "American
counterintelligence officials say that Israeli espionage cases are difficult
to investigate, because they involve an important ally that enjoys broad
political influence in Washington. Several officials said that a number of
espionage investigations involving Israel had been dropped or suppressed in
the past in the face of political pressure." ) For the last two years I've
watched Franklin, Rhode, Michael Rubin and others in the clique at meetings
at the American Enterprise Institute, and what stands out above all is the
fraternity-like bond that links them to one another, almost like a street
gang.
For 25 years, this little clique has maintained sub rosa ties to Iran. They,
and Israel, had multiple lines into Iran's mullahs long before the Shah
fell. Israel armed Iran throughout the 1980s, including during the 444 days
when thugs held U.S. diplomats hostage. They were behind Iran-contra, trying
to push the United States into a closer relationship with Iran when we were,
sensibly enough, backing Iraq. And they've never let up. Since 2001, when
they took power with the Bush administration, they've plotted war against
Iraq and plotted how to establish ties with Iran's national security
apparatus and its military again, even if it meant undermining U.S. policy.
A key figure in all this is Michael Ledeen, an AEI stalwart who's long had
intimate ties to Israeli intelligence. And then there is Ahmad Chalabi,
another Mossad-linked creature.
We can discount, or throw out, Israel's silly statement that it stopped
spying against the United States after the Pollard affair. Israel has
penetrated the United States so completely that it probably doesn't even
call it spying anymore. It's business as usual.
So the question is: What connects Ledeen, Richard Perle, Chalabi and
Franklin? We know that the United States doesn't really have an "Iran
policy," unless hoping that nothing happens qualifies as a "policy." But
what is the policy of Ledeen and Co.? They believe that Israel, Turkey,
Iran, the Kurds, the Lebanese Christians and Pakistan can all be tied
together in an alliance against the Arabs. That's been true since the 1950s.
What's new is that Iraq presented them an opportunity: The
Israel-Turkey-Iran et al. axis could take over and occupy part of the Arab
bloc, thanks to the United States. Like the python who ate the deer, they
are still struggling to digest it-though some, including myself but also
including the CIA, believe they will choke on it. In any case, the gobbling
up of Iraq hasn't gone too well, but at least they've accomplished their
secondary objective: the destruction and dismantling of Iraq as a nation and
as a military force that could threaten Israel. And Ledeen, who organized
Franklin's secret missions to Iran since 2001, and Chalabi, who has secret
missions of his own to Iran (both long exposed now), still believe that Iran
is a useful partner in the anti-Arab axis.
More to come on Franklin, Rhode, Ledeen et al. this week.
* Written by veteran investigative reporter Bob Dreyfuss , The Dreyfuss
Report offers readers the story behind daily headlines and policies pursued
on behalf of national security.
http://www.tompaine.com/archives/the_dreyfuss_report.php#001636