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Here's what Vince Cannistraro, former CIA and DoD intelligence official, told Australia's ABC today about the Chalabi-Iran matter:
VINCENT CANNISTRARO:...Historic rivalries among various agencies and government officials about the value of Chalabi have pretty much been settled in the last few months. President Bush is apparently persuaded that Mr Chalabi is not someone the US can place any further confidence in.
And there are clear indications that Chalabi's head of intelligence and security, a man named Aras Karim Habib, who is a Kurdish Shia, is actually a paid agent of the Iranian intelligence service. There was an arrest warrant issued for Karim a few days ago, and he has apparently escaped to Tehran where he is beyond the reach of US law enforcement.
ABC's TANYA NOLAN: So as far as you know, the CIA does have hard evidence to prove that Mr Habib has been a paid Iranian agent?
VINCENT CANNISTRARO: Oh yeah, I think that's the case, but in this instance, it's not CIA that is the action agency, it is the Federal Bureau of Investigation which is a law enforcement agency, because the evidence has pointed quite clearly, not only the fact that Chalabi might be an agent of influence of the Iranian government and that Karim may be a paid agent of the Iranian intelligence service, but it is shown that there is a leak of classified information from the United States to Iran through Chalabi and Karim and that is the particular point that the FBI is investigating.
In other words, some US officials are under investigation on suspicion of providing classified information to these people that ended up in Iran.
TANYA NOLAN: And what was the nature of that highly classified information that was allegedly being passed to Tehran?
VINCENT CANNISTRARO: Well, there are differing reports but some of it I'm told centres on highly compartmented information of US military order of battle for one thing, and other special compartmented information that may have been passed.
I'm not privy to the classified information myself but I am told that the investigators are operating on the basis that very, very sensitive and highly classified information the US Government had, was given on an unauthorised basis to Chalabi and Aras.
You can read the rest here.
It would be very interesting to learn more know about how the INC managed the Saddam defection program. I am not sure I take at face value Cannistraro's assertion (made in some press reports) that Iran was responsible for the INC pre-war WMD bogus information. I am more inclined to the LA Times' Drogin report from Sunday citing US counterintelligence officials that the INC might have been acting on its own in that regard.
So, how to find out more about how the INC created a hall of mirrors effect by feeding a dozen defectors and documents to the intelligence services and media in targeted countries? I take it there were far more than the three who are constantly discussed as being responsible for the US being taken in. A fourth would be Khidhr Hamza.
The New York Times apology for its pre-war WMD reporting today helps identify at least one other defector put forward by the INC, and suggests one other:
On Dec. 20, 2001, another front-page article began, "An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago." Knight Ridder Newspapers reported last week that American officials took that defector — his name is Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri — to Iraq earlier this year to point out the sites where he claimed to have worked, and that the officials failed to find evidence of their use for weapons programs...
On April 21, 2003, as American weapons-hunters followed American troops into Iraq, another front-page article declared, "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert." It began this way: "A scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade has told an American military team that Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before the war began, members of the team said."...This Iraqi "scientist"...in a later article described himself as an official of military intelligence.