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Just Out: From Kurdistan to K Street: Inside Washington's covert foreign policy apparatus, middlemen like Shlomi Michaels are key:
Read on. As Harper's Ken Silverstein says, "There are a few hundred people who make the world work but no one has ever heard of." Posted by Laura at November 17, 2008 07:35 PM
... On a spring afternoon in 2004, up the street from the White House, former CIA officer Whitley Bruner was on his way to meet a new contact. An old-school, Harvard-trained Arabist, Bruner had been to a lot of meetings like this—some mundane, some of greater consequence, like the time, back in 1991, when he got instructions to contact an Iraqi named Ahmad Chalabi. ("I told him, 'My name is Whitley Bruner, we have mutual friends, and I'd like to talk to you about Iraq.'") Low-key and efficient, Bruner had retired from the Agency in late 1997 and in 2004 landed a job with the private intelligence outfit Diligence LLC. The assignment, which had him shuttling between Washington and the Middle East for clients seeking opportunities in the Wild West of post-Saddam Iraq, didn't look all that different from his old job, and it brought him into contact with a continuing array of intriguing characters.
That spring day, Bruner was headed for the office of one of the most powerful Republican lobbyists in Washington—Ed Rogers, a former White House aide in the Reagan and first Bush administrations. Rogers had a soft Alabama drawl and an unsurpassed GOP resume; he was also known to like spooks, so much so that his company, Barbour Griffith & Rogers, had acquired a controlling stake in Diligence. Bruner had only to go upstairs.
As Bruner took a seat in Rogers' office, he noticed a man who "radiated clandestinity," he recalls, with close-cropped hair and military bearing. They shook hands, and "He broke every bone in my hand. When I heard his Israeli accent, it was not hard to guess his background."
The intense stranger introduced himself as Shlomi Michaels. He was a former commando with Israel's elite internal counterterrorism force, the Yamam; he had since become one of the middlemen who work the seams between the worlds of security, intelligence, and international business, along with a few more colorful sidelines including a private investigations/security business in Beverly Hills. Even as ex-Israeli commandos turned security experts go, Bruner thought, this one seemed unusually well connected—his business partner was former Mossad head Danny Yatom. Before arriving in Washington, Michaels, a dual Israel-US citizen, ran a string of businesses in Beverly Hills: a coffee/chocolate shop franchise, a martial arts training outfit, real estate investments, and a high-tech security business aimed at "high worth" Hollywood clients. After 9/11 he left Los Angeles, alighting first in New York (where he taught counterterrorism for a semester at Columbia University) and then in DC, where he would soon launch a lucrative venture to cash in on the Iraq War and its aftermath.
But on this day, Michaels had a different proposition for the former CIA officer—one, he suggested, that could make the assembled men a handsome commission and even help President George W. Bush get reelected. He had a well-placed Iraqi source—a former officer in an Iraqi military psychological operations unit, he said—who had gathered hundreds of pages of contracts, maps, and photographs documenting meetings between Iraqi and Ukrainian officials. The information, Michaels said, would prove that Iraq had pursued a covert chemical weapons program. Michaels wanted Bruner to set up a meeting for him and the Iraqi source with the CIA. To turn over the whole dossier, he wanted $1 million. [...]
There was one more story Michaels' Israeli associate in Jordan told me. Yatom, he said, claimed to be working with Michaels in partnership with the former head of the CIA ... and former FBI chief ... Could this be true? I decided to ask the ex-Mossad chief himself. ...