Ledeen, Perle, et al, now brickin'
Usenet Supreme Loser ChuckWorth
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Subject:
[SpinLyme] Ledeen et al, in FBI cross-hairs ?
Date:
Sunday, January 28, 2007 3:34:26 PM
[View Source]
http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?
itemID=11965§ionID=107
ZNet | Israel/Palestine
Agents of Influence
by Robert Dreyfuss; The Nation; January 27, 2007
Did Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, run a covert program
with operatives in high-level US government positions to influence the
Bush Administration's decision to go to war in Iraq? The FBI wants to
know.
That's the story behind the latest Washington spy scandal, involving
Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and a mid-
level civilian Pentagon employee allegedly caught red-handed trying to
deliver US secrets to the Israelis.
It's not a routine spy case. According to sources familiar with the
investigation, the FBI is looking at a group of neoconservatives who
have occupied senior posts at the White House, the Pentagon and in
Vice President Cheney's office. It's not that they are supporters of
Israel -- no crime there -- but that some of them might be
conspirators in a clandestine operation launched by Sharon's Likud
Party. They make up the very network of ideologues -- from civilians
at the Defense Department to fellow travelers at right-wing think
tanks -- who have been accused of pushing George W. Bush into war. ***
The point of the probe, sources believe, is not to examine the push to
war but rather to ascertain whether Sharon recruited or helped place
in office people who knowingly, and secretly, worked with him to
affect the direction of US policy in the Middle East. The most likely
targets of the inquiry are Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense
for Policy, and Harold Rhode of the Pen
tagon's Office of Net Assessment.***
It's an explosive inquiry and one that raises the most sensitive
hackles, since it involves the possibility that US officials (most,
but not all, Jews) are working on Sharon's behalf. They include Feith
and a handful of other officials, including those in the inner circle
of his policy office who formed the core of the Office of Special
Plans (OSP). The probe faces stiff political resistance. Yet it may
have legs.
The investigation burst into the news in late August when CBS News
reported that the FBI had caught a Feith staffer, later identified as
Larry Franklin, trying to deliver what turned out to be a classified
draft of a presidential memo on Iran to AIPAC and an Israeli Embassy
diplomat. Subsequent attention focused largely on whether Franklin was
a spy for Israel, but in fact he is only a minor figure in a far more
sweeping probe that began two years ago.
What triggered the original investigation isn't known, but it is known
that it began at a critical moment, as Feith and Rhode began
assembling a team, which included Franklin, to form the OSP. It's been
widely reported that the OSP manufactured exaggerated intelligence
reports on the threat from Iraq, but less reported is the fact that
the OSP also carried out unauthorized operations. Several OSP
officials -- including Rhode, Franklin and Michael Maloof, one of the
two original staffers of the forerunner to OSP, joined by Michael
Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) -- took part in a
rogue Pentagon initiative, beginning in 2001 with unsavory wheeler-
dealers in Rome and Paris, to discuss regime change beyond Iraq, in
Iran and Syria. *** The CIA found out about the Rome meeting, and the
agency may have asked the FBI to start watching Feith, Rhode, Ledeen,
Franklin et al. Former CIA and Defense intelligence officials familiar
with the case stress that the FBI is l
ooking at an operation run by the Israeli prime minister, not by the
Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, and that the investigation is
based solely on concerns about foreign influence. "It's about Sharon,"
says a former senior CIA operations officer. "This has nothing to do
with anti-Semitism." ***
Some familiar with the case suggest that the FBI's investigation is
looking back as far as 1996, when Feith, Richard Perle, Feith's boss
at the Pentagon in the 1980s and until recently chairman of the
Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, and David Wurmser, a co-founder of
OSP who is now Cheney's Middle East adviser, wrote a radical memo,
called "A Clean Break," to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu calling for confrontation with Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the
PLO.
Since the investigation came to light, Sharon's closest allies have
led an effort to derail it. Screaming the loudest is Marc Zell,
Feith's former law partner, who is now an attorney in Israel tied to
the Likud's right wing and to the settler movement. "It's a cheap shot
by certain people inside the government to embarrass Doug and the
Pentagon leadership," Zell told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "Certain
elements inside the military and intelligence communities are unhappy
with the policy decisions of people in the upper echelon and attempt,
sometimes in a very crude way, to embarrass them." News of the
investigation stunned AIPAC, the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs, AEI and others in Likud's Washington circuit. And,
of course, AIPAC's friends in Congress are hopping mad. Ha'aretz, the
Israeli daily, said that news of the inquiry landed like the
"diplomatic equivalent of an unexploded cluster bomb."
Perle is demanding that the White House clamp down on the
investigators, according to the Boston Globe. "It's pretty nasty, and
unfortunately the Administration doesn't seem to have it under
control," the Globe quotes Perle as saying. But according to the
Financial Times, the White House is quietly doing just that: The
London daily reports that the White House is pressuring the FBI and
the Justice Department not to issue indictments in the case.
Other voices are also being heard. Democratic Representative John
Conyers wrote to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee
demanding an investigation into "substantial and credible evidence
that Pentagon officials...have engaged in unauthorized covert
activities." Conyers specifically cited Feith. And the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence is now deep into phase two of its own probe,
which includes examining the work of the OSP; its report is expected
after the November election.
The FBI has an ace in the hole that may allow it to resist White House
pressure. "By now," says a retired intelligence official, "the FBI has
gathered up so much material in grand jury records and things like
that that they are in a position to push back against pressure from
the Administration to back away from this. When they get pressure,
they leak to somebody. And the potential of disclosure is a real
threat to the Administration." In addition, the counterintelligence
probe could spin off investigations in several possibly related
scandals, including the Ahmad Chalabi case and the Valerie Plame leak,
not to mention the Franklin matter.
"They have no case," says AEI's Michael Ledeen. We'll see.