A couple days ago, Josh Marshall raised one of the most interesting questions about the Chalabi-Iran espionage case so far. The fact that as far back as the mid 1990s, elements of the US government have believed that Aras Karim, Chalabi's now fugitive intelligence chief who has headed the Pentagon-funded Information Collection Program in Baghdad, was an Iranian intelligence agent.

He writes:

We've been discussing for some time that Chalabi's connections to the Iranians...has been known about for years. But suspicions that Aras Karim was an Iranian agent are not new either.

Take this October 13th, 1998 New York Times article, which says that "An F.B.I. report said Mr. Karim's cousin Aras Habib Muhamad Al-Ufayli, who had been the intelligence chief for the Iraqi National Congress, had a 'well-documented connection to Iranian intelligence.'"

So, how could someone even suspected by US government agencies of being an Iranian intelligence operative [and reports suggest Aras Karim was considered to be a full fledged, on the payroll Iranian intelligence operative, not a fellow traveler receiving occasional tactical support from Tehran] be trusted by the powers that be at the Pentagon to run the intelligence program in Baghdad that was to help ensure US force protection, among other tasks? How was this permitted? Who signed off on this?

Let's go back to 2001, when the Information Collection Program was created, presumably in the weeks after September 11 when Paul Wolfowitz was agitating for the war to be taken to Baghdad. As Knight Ridder reports:

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.

Can one imagine during the Cold War that a Soviet defector suspected by the US government of being a Soviet agent would be permitted to head a sensitive US government-funded intelligence program in Germany, that not only was long believed to be providing blatantly false misinformation about Soviet troop and weapons issues, but is charged with providing intelligence to ensure the protection of US forces stationed there? That intelligence reports provided by him would be sent to the Defense Secretary and the Vice President's office directly?

It would be madness. Asking a suspected agent of one's very enemies to be trusted with the most sensitive US intelligence and the security of US lives, operations, communications. Who would let such a person into the inner sanctum of US intelligence operations?

It's beyond madness.

How did this happen? Who signed off on Karim at the Office of the Secretary of Defense? How was he let in in the weeks after September 11 into the inner sanctum of the secretive US intelligence operation being assembled in the Pentagon? Is that not out and out treason?

Posted by Laura at May 23, 2004 02:07 PM