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Here's some background on the INC's Information Collection Program, from a very good February 2 2004 Knight Ridder piece.
It is here that there seemed to be a really interesting, concrete and operational nexus of INC intelligence operations and the US officials who received the fruit of their labor.
The INC's Information Collection Program started in 2001 and was "designed to collect, analyze and disseminate information" from inside Iraq, according to a letter the group sent in June 2002 to the staff of the Senate Appropriations Committee...
The letter, a copy of which was obtained by Knight Ridder, said the information went directly to "U.S. government recipients" who included William Luti, a senior official in Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's office, and John Hannah, a top national security aide to Cheney.
The letter appeared to contradict denials made last year by top Pentagon officials that they were receiving intelligence on Iraq that bypassed established channels and vetting procedures.
The INC also supplied information from its collection program to leading news organizations in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, according to the letter to the Senate committee staff...
The Information Collection Program is now overseen by the DIA, the Pentagon's main intelligence arm, which took over when the State Department decided to give it up in late 2002.
The defense official defended the current support of the INC effort, saying that it has been of some help to the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group...
INC-supplied informants also have identified insurgents who have been waging a guerrilla war that has claimed the lives of more than 500 U.S. troops and hundreds of Iraqis, he said...
"You never take anything at face value," he continued. "When the INC gives information, we absolutely pursue it. You never know what that golden nugget is going to be."
Were the offices of the ICP raided on Thursday? Would be worth finding out.
Meantime, the New Republic's Spencer Ackerman warns, I may be too quick to dismiss some of the obvious suspects.
Re: Names we don't know: surely someone from the Intelligence Collection Program is friendly with Chalabi. Who makes the payoffs? It's always been reductive -- or, to put it differently, impressionistic -- to say that whole agencies are anti-Chalabi; surely there's someone in the ICP who's taken a shine to him. Not to be conspiratorial, but I wonder if the OVP/OSD (uh, not to be reductive) Chalabi allies didn't have something to do with the leak. Whatever the intel that got its way to Chalabi was, it had some kind of value to him, and even if the OVP/OSD crowd didn't know what it was, they could still have known that it existed, and that it should make its way to Chalabi. I have no reason to doubt your sources when they say it's someone deep in the weeds; I just mean that often those guys are bagmen and not the sorts of folks who decide to let certain documents slip -- at least not without authorization.
Noted and I agree with this. Am the first one willing to believe that it was one of our friends from the OSP/OVP but am hearing differently. Trying to keep an open mind and pass on what I can.
On possible motives for those who leaked classified intel to Chalabi, Spencer writes:
Possible motive: Chalabi can stay a step ahead of his political competitors. I would imagine the intercepts useful to him are those from Iran, Syria, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. In each case, he and his crowd would be able to know what foreign actors are doing/planning in Iraq -- information he can leverage either to position himself directly over his competitors, or to make other notable figures indebted to him. For instance, if he can listen in on what the Iranian Pasdaran are talking about, he could either a) figure out what they're doing/planning with SCIRI and he can manuever accordingly, or b) pass on that information to a nonaligned/anti-Iranian force like Sistani's people, who become reliant on Chalabi for information.
Those sponsoring Chalabi clearly want him to have a leg up, or to have him positioned well for the future, in which case leaking classified stuff to him is in their perceived interest. I could be completely off-base, but i imagine Chalabi's allies could simply make low men on the totem pole (in intel or otherwise) known that the higher-ups don't mind if chalabi gets his hands on ... stuff, and they can interpret that at their discretion. like how no orders exist telling military intelligence or MP jailers to torture anyone, but the atmosphere certainly seems to have been set from above.
I find this highly persuasive. Particularly the argument that a possible motive of the leaker to Chalabi of a highly technical decoding type technology might have been to help Chalabi with his own intelligence collection on foreign country activities in Iraq, such as Iran's backing of SCIRI. Or perhaps even, the motive was to provide Chalabi's Information Collection Program with the tools it needed to be useful for US force protection?
I find this highly persuasive.
UPDATE: Let me be clear. When Chalabi was considered by the Pentagon to be a partner of the US, and Chalabi's Information Collection Program was on the Pentagon payroll, and when one of the ICP's mandated duties was to provide intel that would benefit US force protection, it is not a stretch to believe that one of ICP's customers might have reasoned that Chalabi and the ICP could have provided very useful intelligence to US forces on say Iranian intelligence activities among the Shia in Iraq. Perhaps it was reasoned Chalabi's crew could provide superior intelligence on such activities, if they just had access to the intercepts the US had access to. And so, is it such a stretch to think that this kind of sensitive technology might have been passed to Chalabi, with an eye to improved US force protection? And then over time, US counterintelligence discovered, Chalabi and crew were passing it on to the very foes from which they were supposed to protect US forces?
I found this highly plausible.