Just Out at the Forward: "The Operator: The Double Life of a Military Strategist." A propos of the Senate Intelligence committee's Phase II report release today, a profile of a Washington military strategist with a double life. The Niger forgeries? Italian intelligence showed them to him before Dick Cheney heard about Iraq and yellowcake. (He refused to back channel them). Abu Omar rendition? He knew about it as it was going down in Italy. Back when Dick Cheney was House Intelligence committee minority leader, Cheney even told him what Iran Contra operation wasn't authorized and notified to Congress. And recently, the consulting services of the author of "coup d'etat: a practical handbook" have been in demand from groups seeking to overturn the Iran regime.

... Many of these past associations emerged in a recent episode revealed during my meeting with Luttwak: that he was shown the infamous Niger forgeries by a friend with the Italian intelligence agency Sismi, when he was working as a consultant to a Sismi contractor named Luciano Monti in the 2001-2002 time frame, but that he refused to back-channel them to the Bush administration. (He never agrees to back-channel intelligence, Luttwak said, and these looked like forgeries to him.) The allegations in the forgeries, of course, became one of the Bush White House’s most controversial casus belli for the Iraq war — and, after proven phony even on the eve of the invasion, among the most embarrassing and politically damaging for the president and vice president, who cited the bogus uranium allegations despite warnings from the CIA not to. [...]

But some 25 years later, covert Iran intrigues and operations were again on Luttwak’s mind when he spoke with me this year. Speaking at a panel held at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank, in February, Luttwak hinted at post-Revolutionary travels in Iran. “I recommend that you take a trip to Iran,” Luttwak mischievously suggested to audience members. “Isfahan is beautiful, as is Tabriz in the north, where the people crave to be Turks,” he said, before describing being offered whiskey — the good stuff — by locals he met, a sign of their defiance to the mullahs.

Luttwak told me he had traveled to Turkey on a prospective assignment a couple years ago that involved advising Azeri Iranians how they might agitate for more independence from the Tehran regime. He walked away from the assignment, he described, when it became evident to him that the operation was not, as he had originally thought, authorized by the necessary governments.

But in April, Luttwak told me, he was off to Paris to meet with another Iranian group seeking his consulting services. “My client is an anti-Iran group,” Luttwak said. “They are serious enough to have come up with funds to hire consultants.” He wouldn’t reveal which group it was, except to say it was authorized to operate in France. ...

Iran is also central to Luttwak’s thinking about America’s own political landscape and the current presidential race. When we met in February, a day after Maryland’s Democratic primary, Luttwak said that he was supporting Hillary Clinton because he thought she would be most inclined to order air strikes on Iran. Contrary to conventional wisdom, as always, Luttwak said that direct conversations he had had with a certain leading Republican presidential candidate convinced him that this person, under the influence of war-weary Pentagon brass, would be disinclined to order such military action. As for his opinion about presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, Luttwak took a preemptive swipe at the candidate’s elite American supporters who might be under the delusion, according to Luttwak, that Obama would improve America’s image in the world, arguing in a May 13 New York Times op-ed the exact opposite: that the Muslim world would see Obama as a heretic. The Times’s public editor devoted his entire June 1 column to debunking the allegations Luttwak cited in the piece and criticizing the Times’s editors’ decision to run it. ...

Go read the whole thing.

Regarding Sismi showing Luttwak the Niger forgeries: He was working at the time as a consultant to a Sismi contractor called APRI S.p.a. headed by Luciano Monti. "I was their consultant for methods,” Luttwak said, looking up the details in his income tax returns. (He mentions both Sismi director press aide Pio Pompa and former Sismi director Nicolo Pollari as contacts). He refused to back channel the documents to Washington, and would have nothing to do with them, and was later told they were determined to be forgeries, as he had thought. Perhaps others who got an early peak at them were not so scrupulous.

Posted by Laura at June 5, 2008 05:42 PM