Mother Jones: Three Days in Rome

[Ian_rd]

This is the most important article you will read today. Mother Jones tells the story of a fraudulent intelligence peddler and the Washington hawks all too eager to believe him. It happened with Iraq, and now it's happening with Iran. This is an excellent inside look at the early stages of how lies are spread in order to start a war.

Three Days in Rome

In which a neoconservative jack-of-all-trades, a pair of Pentagon hawks, and an Iranian exile with a knack for tall tales try to outflank the CIA and conjure a coup in Tehran.

<snip>

CIA sources are unconvinced <about intelligence source Ghorbanifar>. "They drag these guys out and say they're from the Revolutionary Guard," Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA director for Europe, told me. "In fact, they're actually from some rug store. In any city, i's an industry."

Rhode and Franklin, in any event, were impressed. As the meeting was breaking up, Rhode sent a classified cable from the telex room of the U.S. Embassy in Rome back to the Pentagon, reporting that the group had "made contact with Iranian intelligence officers who anticipate possible regime change in Iran and want to establish contact with the United States government." The cable, portions of which were obtained by Knight Ridder's Washington bureau, continued, "A sizable financial interest is required."

Intelligence sources have their suspicions about what the money was to go for. "My thought is that he was trying to do a Chalabi, asking them to tell the president that there's Iranians waiting to rise up," one former U.S. intelligence official told me. "It would be comical except that they have a lot of money, and people pay a lot of attention. All they need is purchase someplace, and the virus spreads very quickly."

<snip>

At their tense meeting in Iraq, the CIA officer gave the <Ghorbanifar> associate a series of test questions, all of which he flunked. Then the officer asked him to provide a small sample of the uranium. He refused and walked out. "He's a fabricator," a former U.S. intelligence official told Royce. "These fabricators were produced by Ghorbanifar. They read headlines, try to cater to your fears, and they draw from real facts."

Ghorbanifar had better luck with Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), who has met with him in Paris and has now published most of his claims in a book, Countdown to Terror, that promises to reveal Iran as "the iron glove behind all our enemies." Weldon's main source, a mysterious Iranian whom the congressman code-names "Ali," is, in fact, Ghorbanifar's longtime business partner and personal secretary, Fereidoun Mahdavi. ("Dear Curt," begins one memo from "Ali" that Weldon quotes in the book. "I confirm again a terrorist attack within the United States is planned before the American elections.") Mahdavi, in turn, told me that the information he gave Weldon came from Ghorbanifar, who appears to have used him as a kind of cutout—a vehicle for laundering intelligence. U.S. intelligence sources confirmed to me that Weldon has identified Mahdavi as his source. Weldon, they say, has also demanded that Mahdavi be put on the U.S. payroll.

Read the whole story: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/07/three_days_in_rome.html

[donsu]

1. I posted this article and it was mostly ignored - thanks for posting it

again

it's interesting what information gets the silent treatment

[Ian_rd]

2. Hehe - looks like it will go down again mostly unread.

But really. How amazing is Mother Jones?

- Proud Contributor to Mother Jones Investigative Fund :patriot:

[midnight]

3. Where are they going to get soldiers to fight this war?

Will they hire dick's boys from the black water?