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Re: l'Affaire Chalabi. Am told by an individual at a certain neoconservative institution that there is quite a difference between the public statements and private water cooler talk about this issue chez eux....
"A lot of people even here who have had a lot of exposure to Ahmad would not be surprised to learn he’s playing both ends against the middle..."
About the perceived discrepancy between the OSD distancing itself from Chalabi versus well known outside-of-government neocons defending Chalabi, this individual says: "I think part of it is simply that a lot of the perception of closeness to Chalabi thing on the part of the administration was a misunderstanding." Paul Wolfowitz, he suggested, was not really close to Chalabi. Chalabi's real constituency was always people outside of government than in, he said.
For those still defending him, he said, he believes there is some suspicion that "electronic intercepts" of what whoever might have been telling the Iranians is not really very reliable. If the evidence is all based on intercepts, he said, they would be dubious. It depends what the evidence is. He believes we will be hearing more exactly about the nature of the alleged evidence against Chalabi in the coming days and weeks.
More later.
Update: Not sure what he's saying around the proverbial water cooler. [And in fact, his piece suggests that if there is real evidence against someone like Chalabi, we shouldn't expect to ever know about it; which would seem to totally contradict what the individual above suggested. It would also mean that the only intelligence scandals we ever hear about are cooked up ones...]. But is he really so sure that James Jesus Angleton was the greatest unliving expert on intelligence ever? From what I understand, the CIA Soviet counterintelligence program was pretty much shredded to bits by the end of Angleton's tenure in 1974, and the Soviets/Aldrich Ames ultimately kind of won on this one, and had almost every CIA asset in the Soviet Union killed.