Jeffrey Goldberg's New Yorker piece on the Israeli settlers in Gaza and the West Bank is one of the richest and bleakest pieces from Israel I've seen.

The settlers reject the idea of a demographic crisis. They still see themselves as Sharon once saw them—as the avant-garde of Zionism, heirs to the pioneers of the early twentieth century who restored the Jews to Palestine. But, should they somehow prevent the emergence of a viable Palestinian state, they may well be the vanguard of Israel’s demise as a Jewish democracy.

They are, for the moment, prevailing.

Goldberg captures the true depths of fanaticism of these people who are willing quite literally to sacrifice the lives of their children for what they believe is an obligation to inhabit the land God decreed should belong to the Jewish people. He then speaks with leaders of Hamas who share if not exceed the same depth of fanaticism, the same willingness to literally sacrifice the lives of their children for this cause.

One of the proponents of the Israeli settler movement, Rabbi Samson, tells Goldberg:

“...If we were willing to kill their civilians, this war would be over in a week...If the military operated without consideration for civilian deaths, think about how many lives would have been saved! In any case, their children are born with Molotov cocktails in their hands. These are a people as unfeeling as jackals.”

Like many ideologues of aggressive settlement, Rabbi Samson drew lessons directly from the Bible, without the moderating influence of two thousand years of rabbinic Judaism. In the Bible, the heroes are warriors and killers; the Talmud, compiled after the destruction of the Temple and the dispersal of the Jews, asks, “Who is a hero?” and answers, “He who controls his passions.”

Still getting caught up after having been unplugged in the mountains. Some interesting stories over the weekend adding new dimensions to the Chalabi mystery.

This from the Baltimore Sun's excellent investigative reporter Scott Shane, which suggests the only non Iraqis who participated in the raid on Chalabi's compound earlier this month were eight armed US DynCorps contractors seconded to the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior. [Also present was an American employee of the INC, Peg Bartel, whose note of outrage at the raid was sent round by Laurie Mylroie.]

When Iraqi police raided the Baghdad home and offices of politician Ahmad Chalabi on May 20, U.S. officials hurried to distance themselves, saying that the operation was an Iraqi affair and that no U.S. government employees were involved.

But eight armed American contractors paid by a U.S. State Department program went on the raid, directing and encouraging the Iraqi police officers who eyewitnesses say ripped out computers, turned over furniture and smashed photographs.

Some of the Americans helped themselves to baklava, apples and diet soda from Chalabi's refrigerator, and enjoyed their looted snacks in a garden outside, according to members of Chalabi's staff who were there.

The contractors work for DynCorp, a subsidiary of California-based Computer Sciences Corp. and the company in charge of training and advising Iraqi police through a State Department contract.

A State Department official confirmed the DynCorp workers' presence during the raid. A DynCorp spokesman declined to comment.

The participation of gun-toting American contractors paid by U.S. taxpayers in a raid that the U.S. government has insisted it did not order is only the latest instance of problems posed by the estimated 20,000 contract security workers serving with more than 60 companies in Iraq.

Could it be true that US officials working directly for US agencies were not involved in the raid? That the White House decision to cut off Chalabi was not coordinated with the raid on Chalabi's compound?

This new Time piece suggests that coordination may not have been directed by the NSC or Washington, but that Iraq czar Jerry Bremer himself authorized the raid. Further, it discusses the White House tasking NSC Iraq envoy Robert Blackwill with developing a memo on sidelining Chalabi, who had lost the President's favor after a February 2004 interview. In that interview in the the Daily Telegraph, Chalabi was cited as saying something to the effect, WMD intel be damned, I got what I wanted.

The White House meeting in late April opened with the presentation of a seven-page, single-spaced memo titled "Marginalizing Chalabi." Drafted by the National Security Council (NSC), the document detailed three options for sidelining the controversial Iraqi political figure Ahmad Chalabi — methods ranging from gently pushing him offstage to cutting off U.S. funds for his intelligence-gathering operation. Once a Pentagon favorite to lead Iraq, Chalabi had been criticizing Washington for dragging out the transfer of power to Iraqis. It was time for Chalabi to go.

The April memo marked the beginning of the White House's strategy to cut its ties to Chalabi — a campaign that reached its climax late last month when Iraqi police, backed by U.S. forces, raided the former exile's house and office in Baghdad. But that move hardly came out of the blue. New details of the relationship between the U.S. and Chalabi, provided to TIME by senior Administration and intelligence officials, reveal that after a decade of lobbying Washington, Chalabi began to lose his footing early this year after he ran afoul of President Bush and L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq...

The NSC office of Iraqi expert Robert Blackwill was commissioned to draft a plan to cut its ties to Chalabi. Blackwill's recommendations for "marginalizing Chalabi" were endorsed by State Department and CIA officials, who have long criticized intelligence provided by Chalabi.

The Iraqi had also fallen out with Ambassador Bremer. In early spring an Iraqi judge issued a search warrant in an investigation into alleged theft of property and government vehicles by members of Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.). Bremer wanted to make an example of the I.N.C. and prove that no political party is above the law, but the search was stymied: according to a senior U.S. official, the police couldn't get into the I.N.C. offices the first time they went. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officials who were working in a Pentagon-funded intelligence program attached to Chalabi's group stopped the officers at the door, arguing that the sensitive intelligence inside needed to be protected. But on May 13, after the Administration decided to cut off the $335,000 monthly subsidy to the I.N.C., the DIA agents vacated the I.N.C. offices. Administration officials say Bremer sent the police back a week later, backed by U.S. soldiers. Bremer has denied prior knowledge of the raid, but sources say he authorized it. Bremer didn't inform the White House or the Pentagon of the timing of the move, an official says, but Chalabi had few allies left in Washington willing to defend him.

And what role did alleged espionage charges involving Chalabi and the INC play in the White House decision? It's still being unearthed, Time reports:

The extent of Chalabi's alleged malfeasance is still being unearthed. Senior Administration officials tell TIME that the U.S. is investigating whether Chalabi revealed to the Iranians highly sensitive information about how the U.S. gathers intelligence in the region. Other U.S. officials told TIME that the FBI has begun reviewing logs and other data that might turn up clues as to when sensitive information was divulged; the feds are also interviewing and giving lie-detector tests to U.S. officials in Iraq who may have had access to the information.

Meantime, the Sunday Times is reporting in the most detail about the Iraqi charges of kidnapping and corruption that prompted the May 13 raid on Chalabi's compound itself. Further, the Sunday Times says a whispering campaign about alleged espionage charges involving Chalabi surfaced in the US within hours of the raid.

The investigation into Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress initially seemed unlikely to trouble President George W. Bush - allegations of corruption are endemic in post-war Iraq - yet the presence of US military personnel at the raid on Chalabi's home signalled a breach in Washington's relations with the man dubbed the Savile Row Shi'ite. Within hours, anonymous US intelligence officials were alleging at private briefings that the 59-year-old Iraqi had passed US secrets to the hardline Shi'ite regime in Tehran and that Habib was in the pay of Iranian intelligence.

Chalabi shrugged off the allegations, but they made embarrassing reading for
the Pentagon neo-conservatives who had promoted him as a suitable successor
to Saddam.

Meantime, Kevin Drum has the latest on a weekend raid on the Ramadi offices of the Iraqi National Congress.

As Kevin says, stay tuned.

This from Knight Ridder:

A senior INC adviser, who requested anonymity, said ties between Chalabi and conservatives in Washington are exaggerated. For example, he said, Chalabi hasn't spoken to Cheney since before the war began in March 2003, and he hasn't spoken with U.S. government officials at all since the raid on his house.

and this from Newsweek's Mark Hosenball:

It now appears that the Bush administration's decision to distance the United States from Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi was considered at the very top. But the controversy over the intelligence activities of Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress may have a long way to go. Senior officials tell NEWSWEEK that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were briefed several weeks ago about intelligence indicating that someone in Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress gave the Iranian government "extremely sensitive" and "highly classified" info which could jeopardize U.S. intelligence sources and even "get people killed." Intelligence sources say potential suspects for the leak include Chalabi himself and his intelligence chief, Aras Habib. The National Security Council and other D.C. agencies also knew a couple of weeks in advance that Iraqi authorities had issued arrest warrants for some INC officials and were planning some sort of police action. The White House apparently did not know that authorities in Baghdad were planning to raid Chalabi's house; some officials were skeptical of Defense Department claims that top Pentagon officials were in the dark about the impending raid, since it was Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz who signed off on a decision to cut off a $340,000 monthly stipend that the Defense Intelligence Agency was paying the INC for intelligence gathering.

Sources said that Pentagon intelligence agencies—including the DIA, according to some officials—sent out confidential "referrals" asking the FBI to investigate the alleged INC leak of classified information to Iran. Law-enforcement sources say the FBI is investigating who in the INC might have leaked U.S. secrets to Iran—and who in the U.S. government might have leaked secrets to the INC. Chalabi and other INC reps have denied passing on any U.S. secrets.

I think my informed theory of a few days back stands. The White House was notified of the alleged INC intelligence breach to Iran by a foreign government, in mid April. Very possibly Britain, during Blair's trip to Washington April 16th. But it could have been another ally. I still think given the timing of the visit and the strength of the relationship, and other intelligence sharing arrangements between the two, it was most likely Britain.

Secondly, about Condoleezza Rice's meeting with the pro-Chalabi crowd last week. I am told Rice requested the meeting with Perle, Woolsey, Gingrich, Pletka, Rubin et al, to ask them not to go off the reservation, in reaction to the White House cut off of Chalabi. And if you have noticed, they have refrained for the most part from directing their public criticism directly at the White House, attacking the CIA, DIA and State instead for a policy decision that came from the very top.

Jane Mayer has the whole story here: the cracked codes, Francis Brooke and the Rendon Group, Chalabi's willingness to be fish or foul, Shiite nationalist or moderate secularist, Iranian or neocon agent, to accumulate power and wealth.

Most interesting is how Chalabi and Francis Brooke set out deliberately to model the INC's American public relations efforts on the successful examples of the pro-Israel and pro-Africa National Congress movements.

The C.I.A. had been forced to abolish domestic operations after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies, and it had folded many of its overseas programs when the Cold War ended. So it outsourced the Iraq project to the Rendon Group. According to Brooke, the company signed a secret contract with the C.I.A. which guaranteed that it would receive a ten-per-cent “management fee” on top of whatever money it spent. The arrangement was an incentive to spend millions. “We tried to burn through forty million dollars a year,” Brooke said. “It was a very nice job.”...

In 1996, Chalabi and Brooke set up shop in Georgetown, and mapped out a strategy. They studied how the African National Congress had won mainstream support, by portraying apartheid as tantamount to slavery. They also examined how various American Jewish groups organized themselves to support Israel. “We knew we had to create a domestic constituency with some electoral clout, so we decided to use the aipac model,” Brooke said, referring to the American Israel Political Action Committee.

In June, 1997, Chalabi gave a speech at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, in Washington. He told the audience that it would be easy to topple Saddam and replace him with a government that was friendly to Israel, if the U.S. would provide minimal support to an armed insurgency organized by the I.N.C. Although Chalabi later denied that oil had played a role in his campaign, he gave an interview to the Jerusalem Post in 1998 in which he spoke of restoring the oil pipeline from Kirkuk to Haifa, which had been inoperative since the creation of Israel, in 1948.

Chalabi’s pitch stirred enthusiasm and curiosity among a group of American neoconservatives who had played crucial roles in the first Bush Administration but were now scattered among Washington think tanks. After the fall of Communism, the neoconservatives were eager for a new cause, and Chalabi—an educated, secular Shiite who was accepting of Israel and talked about spreading democracy throughout the Middle East—capitalized on their enthusiasm. Judith Kipper, the Council on Foreign Relations director, said that, around this time, Chalabi made “a deliberate decision to turn to the right,” having realized that conservatives were more likely than liberals to back the use of force against Saddam.

As Brooke put it, “We thought very carefully about this, and realized there were only a couple of hundred people” in Washington who were influential in shaping policy toward Iraq. He and Chalabi set out to win these people over. Before long, Chalabi was on a first-name basis with thirty members of Congress, such as Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich, and was attending social functions with Richard Perle, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, who was now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Dick Cheney, who was the C.E.O. of Halliburton. According to Brooke, “From the beginning, Cheney was in philosophical agreement with this plan. Cheney has said, ‘Very seldom in life do you get a chance to fix something that went wrong.’”

Wolfowitz was particularly taken with Chalabi, an American friend of Chalabi’s said. “Chalabi really charmed him. He told me they are both intellectuals. Paul is a bit of a dreamer.” To Wolfowitz, Chalabi must have seemed an ideal opposition figure. “He just thought, This is cool—he says all the right stuff about democracy and human rights. I wonder if we can’t roll Saddam, just the way we did the Soviets,” the friend said.

Chalabi was running out of money, however, and he needed new patrons. Brooke said that he and Chalabi hit upon a notion that, he admitted, was “naked politics”: the I.N.C.’s disastrous history of foiled C.I.A. operations under the Clinton Administration could be turned into a partisan weapon for the Republicans. “Clinton gave us a huge opportunity,” Brooke said. “We took a Republican Congress and pitted it against a Democratic White House. We really hurt and embarrassed the President.” The Republican leadership in Congress, he conceded, “didn’t care that much about the ammunition. They just wanted to beat up the President.” Nonetheless, he said, senior Republican senators, including Trent Lott and Jesse Helms, “were very receptive, right away.”

This about Chalabi's forgery shop is also quite intriguing, given the role forged documents seemed to play in the US's pre-war Iraq intel misestimates.

In retrospect, one detail of Chalabi’s operation seems particularly noteworthy. In 1994, Baer said, he went with Chalabi to visit “a forgery shop” that the I.N.C. had set up inside an abandoned schoolhouse in Salahuddin, a town in Kurdistan. “It was something like a spy novel,” Baer said. “It was a room where people were scanning Iraqi intelligence documents into computers, and doing disinformation. There was a whole wing of it that he did forgeries in.” Baer had no evidence that Chalabi forged any of the disputed intelligence documents that were used to foment alarm in the run-up to the war. But, he said, “he was forging back then, in order to bring down Saddam.” In the Los Angeles Times, Hugh Pope wrote of one harmless-seeming prank that emerged from Chalabi’s specialty shop: a precise mockup of an Iraqi newspaper that was filled with stories about Saddam’s human-rights abuses. Another faked document ended up directly affecting Baer. It was a copy of a forged letter to Chalabi, made to look as if it were written on the stationery of President Clinton’s National Security Council. The letter asked for Chalabi’s help in an American-led assassination plot against Saddam. “It was a complete fake,” Baer said, adding that he believed it was an effort to hoodwink the Iranians into joining a plot against Saddam; an indication of American involvement, Chalabi hoped, would convince them that the effort was serious. Brooke acknowledged that the I.N.C. had run a forgery shop, but denied that Chalabi had created the phony assassination letter. “That would be illegal,” he said. To Baer’s dismay, the letter eventually made its way to Langley, Virginia, and the C.I.A. accused him of being involved in the scheme. Baer said he had to pass a polygraph test in order to prove otherwise.

Mayer also has some pretty devastating details about the New York Times hiring Chalabi's niece to run their Baghdad office, while the niece was simultaneously working to promote Chalabi's fortunes, and help him flee the desert where he'd been stranded after being airlifted in by the US military. [They fired her when "word of her employment reached editors in New York."]

Still reading. More later.

Spencer Ackerman has got the story on Iyad Allawi's at long last successful coup.

A Shia, he was nonetheless an enthusiastic Baathist in his youth, organizing Iraqi students for the party before the 1968 revolution and working in Europe as a functionary for the Baath afterward. Officially the head of the Iraqi Student Union in London, Allawi served as a handmaiden for Iraqi intelligence in the 1970s, bringing well-heeled Arab students to the attention of the Baath security apparatus. His intelligence work sharpened his key attributes: his ability to cultivate a variety of power players and his eagerness to play them off one another for his benefit...

He's not exactly known for his commitment to democracy. His cousin Ali is defense minister. Governing Council member Mahmoud Othman explained that Allawi's nomination "has a great deal to do with security." It may be that the U.S. has decided to bet on a compliant strongman. Right now, though, it's not clear how strong he really is. Then again, that's typically been the way Iyad Allawi has preferred it.

Thomas Jefferson, apparently, he is not.

Josh Marshall has the run down on the confusion and intrigue surrounding Allawi's, ugh, election to the job.

Chalabi's AEI supporters have taken to the media in the days since the US-Iraqi raid on Chalabi's Baghdad compound, to try to put out the message that Chalabi is a victim of a smear campaign led by an incompetent CIA that has much to be defensive about. But the real target of the neocon defense of Chalabi is not American public opinion so much as the neocons' own former supporters in the Bush administration. They are deeply stung, I am told, by recent events, that reflect how unwelcome their own positions have become in the upper reaches and the bureaucracy of the Bush administration.

Today the New York Times' Elizabeth Bumiller reports on Richard Perle, Jim Woolsey, Danielle Pletka, Newt Gingrich, and other Chalabi supporters mostly from AEI making a pilgrimage to the offices of Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley last Saturday, to try to get the White House to reverse course. Rice, in typical fashion, conceded nothing, apparently.

Ms. Rice told them she appreciated that they had made their views known. But she gave no hint of her own opinion, participants said, and made no concessions to their point of view.

The neocons' real angst, the real tension, as has been noted many places including here before, is not between those who long mistrusted Chalabi at the CIA and State Department, and those who have long championd his virtues, such as Richard Perle and Jim Woolsey. The real tension is between those neocons out of government who have long championed Chalabi's virtues, such as Perle, Woolsey, Ledeen, and Pletka, and those inside of government who once supported Chalabi but for the past month and a half have gone on silent about him. Word is that those who have seen what Chalabi is accused of doing, which is limited to those with the security clearance and need to know, including Feith, Wolfowiz, Cheney and their senior staff, can't distance themselves quickly enough from Chalabi.

As Bumiller writes:

Although Mr. Chalabi's supporters outside the administration have been caustic in their comments about his treatment, there has been relative silence so far from Mr. Chalabi's supporters within the administration. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who favored going to war in Iraq and was a patron of Mr. Chalabi, did not respond to numerous requests this week for an interview.

Mr. Wolfowitz's spokesman, Charley Cooper, said in an e-mail message that Mr. Wolfowitz believed that Mr. Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress "have provided valuable operational intelligence to our military forces in Iraq, which has helped save American lives." Mr. Cooper added in the message that "Secretary Wolfowitz hopes that the events of the last few weeks haven't undermined that."

The current views of Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, are not known. Both strongly supported Mr. Chalabi before and during the war in Iraq.

I am also intrigued by the Weekly Standard's reluctance so far to weigh in on the Chalabi matter. As the magazine's being leaked Doug Feith's classified memo to the Senate Select Intelligence committee on the alleged connections between Hussein and Al Qaeda last August suggests, the Standard apparently has excellent sources inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense. I suspect they are being told that what Chalabi is accused of doing is deadly serious. [update: a friend says the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol has never been a fan of Chalabi, or the concept Chalabi and his supporters tried to promote that the US should just aggressively back the INC and perhaps provide it with a little airpower to unseat Hussein.]

What's more, I am told that prominent elements of the pro-Israel contingent in Washington are also persuaded that Chalabi is someone dangerous to US and Israel's national interests. I can only wonder if the relationship between Mossad and the Likud is as hostile as the one between the US's neocons and the CIA. But I am told Mossad hates Chalabi.

One really wonders if the neocons, who are being so cleaved by recent events, will survive as a cohesive ideological movement after this. This seems to me to be shaping up to be one of the decisive turning points for the movement as a whole, similar to during the Carter administration, when many neocon Democrats, like Wolfowitz, Kirkpatrick and Perle, frustrated with what they perceived to be Carter's weak foreign policy towards the Soviet Union, ultimately abandoned him for the Republican party and Reagan.

Even if Bush is reelected next fall, the neocons are sure to play a far less influential role in foreign policy. And if Bush loses, the neocons and their Iraq/Middle East project are certain to be perceived to be one of the main reasons. How will they write the history of what went wrong? And why their ideas failed, in Iraq? Who will they blame for the failure? From the gist of the columns and interviews so far, everyone but themselves. Isn't that what they are always accusing Middle Easterners of doing? Blaming all their failures on somebody else?

UPDATE: A colleague has some interesting thoughts, not on the neocons' fall from power, but on the forces that brought them to power in the first place.

He asks, why did the neocons come to power in the Bush II administration, and the Sharon government come to power in Israel? Intelligence failure. And the perception in both countries that their national security establishments, the CIA, and the Mossad/Shin Bet, were discredited by their failure to predict or prevent the second intifadah and the 9/11 terror attacks. Discredited was not just their failure to foresee the attacks, but the very basis for their counter terror strategies: working with the current leadership in the Palestinian Authority and Middle Eastern states, accepting a large degree of status quo, etc. The pragmatic, realist approach.

Now that the neocons' grand strategy for the US defeating the increasingly unstable political order it helped create in the Middle East has seemingly been discredited as well, at least in implementation if not as an idea, what will the future template for regime change and democratization look like?

How about one the Clinton administration successfully achieved in Serbia: aggressively (and peacefully) backing the student group Otpor and its correllary in other tyrannies, not with weapons, but with the lessons in strategic nonviolence and overthrowing dictatorships taught by Harvard scholar Gene Sharp? I got to witness that revolution, which was a thrilling thing, and even more so because it was achieved by Serbian people themselves, not by NATO or the CIA.

The Vulcans believed the US military was the tool to achieve their foreign policy goals. But maybe what was wrong was not their goals but their chosen means of achieving them.

Just got a very interesting unsolicited call from an occasional contact who knows some of these players pretty well. Someone one would more than expect to be extremely friendly to their positions as well. And he told me that:

1) The charges against Chalabi passing highly sensitive US intelligence to Iranian intelligence are true.

2) It involves a piece or pieces of signals intelligence. Intelligence involving how the US listens to Iranian communications, who it taps, bugging, etc.

3) The evidence of Chalabi's intelligence breach came to the US government from a European government. The proof was given to the US by a European government/intelligence agency.

The timing of Tony Blair's visit with Bush in Washington April 16, 2004 is looking more and more interesting. Since mid-April seems to be the time that decisively turned the White House against Chalabi. Made it turn on a dime.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum urges caution about the intel on Chalabi, given how flawed the US and UK's pre-war Iraq intel proved to be. Agreed. In addition, let me just clarify, that it was my presumption that the European government that might have been the one which allegedly presented evidence of Chalabi's espionage to the US was Britain. My guess that it might very well have been Britain was based largely on the facts that 1) two people including the source above told me that the evidence the US received about Chalabi's betrayal came not initially from a US domestic intelligence agency but in fact from a trusted European government/intelligence agency, and 2) then my deducing that the timing of the White House decisively cutting off Chalabi came in mid April, around the same time Blair visited Bush to talk matters Iraq. I think it's important to keep in mind - and this has been reiterated by numerous sources - that it was the White House that decided to cut Chalabi off, around mid April.

Thanks to Atrios for the mention.

This is one of Ledeen's more interesting recent articles.

...Before getting any deeper in this story, I want to repeat that Chalabi is a friend, and that I don't believe he's an Iranian agent. I do believe that the INC, along with every other significant organization in Iraq, has been penetrated by the extremely skilled Iranian intelligence services, and therefore I would not be at all surprised to find one or another of his associates working with Tehran...

If we're going to worry about Iraqi political groups' associations with Iran, let's look at the really dramatic cases. There's Abdul Aziz al Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). SCIRI is funded directly by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (RG) to the tune of $1.2 million a month, and significant numbers of SCIRI members are paid personally by the RG. Hakim reports regularly to an Iranian intelligence official named Sulemani, surely one of the most dangerous men in the country...

But Hakim is a member of the Governing Council and is in our good graces.

Then there's the Dawa party, represented on the Governing Council by Ibrahim Jaffari. The Dawa is a fundamentalist Islamic party that was part of the Iranian-supported campaign against Saddam Hussein in the early 1980s. Its leaders lived in Iran for years — Jaffari was there from 1982-89 recruiting Iraqis to spy in their homeland, and reportedly informed on Iraqis in Iran who might be problems for the regime — and the party is funded directly by the Iranians. Dawa was believed involved in terrorist attacks against United States targets in the Persian Gulf in the early and mid-1980s. On his frequent trips to Iran, Jaffari meets the top leaders of the Islamic Republic, including Supreme Leader Khamenei.

But Jaffari is in our good graces.

Then there are the Kurds, most of whom are actively engaged in commerce with Iran, including arms, explosives, and alcohol. Jalal Talabani is closely linked to the Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian Intelligence Service, and reported to Tehran on U.S. activities in 1996 during the failed uprising against Saddam. His deputy reports directly to Iranian intelligence. Massoud Barzani, the other prime Kurdish leader, uses his cousin as a conduit to Iran, and the cousin is the head of Kurdish Hezbollah, an Iranian creation. Barzani meets regularly in Baghdad with the Iranians' top man, who was a guest in Barzani's house just two weeks ago. Barzani and Talabani both get funding from Iran.

Both Barzani and Talabani are in our good graces...

I would be the last to argue that we should exclude any Iraqi simply because he has good relations with the Iranian regime — he really has no choice...My questions are simply: If it is bad for Chalabi to do it, why isn't it equally bad for all the rest of them? And if Iran is an enemy, why aren't we treating the mullahs and their henchmen as such?

The answer is, because this "story" isn't about any of that. It's about the failure of the intelligence community to do its job properly, and the fear that they may be held to account...

If Chalabi's handful of defectors hornswoggled the entire U.S. intelligence community, then why are we spending tens of billions of dollars on it each and every fiscal year?...

In my view, the worst of the dupes are those who refuse to see what is in front of our collective nose. Somehow, despite a torrent of evidence, this administration refuses to recognize that Iran was, and is, the greatest menace to us, the greatest sponsor of the terror network, and either in possession of atomic bombs or soon to have them. Even if Chalabi turns out to be a master spy, he cannot be blamed for this enormous intelligence and policy failure. Yet we still have no Iran policy. And the nuclear clock continues to tick in Tehran.

I think this piece is interesting at several levels. One, Ledeen clearly seems to know a lot about current operations involving Iranian intelligence. Two, from what I understand he opposes any sort of policy of US engagement with Iran, or US semi official back channel discussion [any sort not conducted by himself anyhow] with Tehran, even on its nuclear policy; but here he seems to be sanguine about such relationships occurring between the Iraqi leadership the US has helped install, and the Iranian regime. He shows himself utterly absolutist, ideological in the first case, and yet in the case of the Iraqis much more pragmatic. Third, the possibility a US sponsoree like Chalabi might have misled US intelligence about Saddam's banned weapons program is blamed by Ledeen entirely on the US intelligence community, and not at all on Chalabi who perpetrated the alleged deception, nor on his out of government American friends who went all out to champion Chalabi's integrity. Talk about refusing to take any sort of accountability. These are out of government friends of Chalabi who often portray themselves as great authorities on intelligence matters and the region. Yet they don't seem to consider that they should be held accountable -- even morally -- if it turns out that Chalabi indeed was a lying opportunist deceiving two timing Iranian double agent. That said, I think Ledeen raises a legitimate point -- the intelligence community of the US should be more able to protect itself from being deliberately misled by defectors. It is staggering to think that a defector program managed by Chalabi could have gone so far to deceive not just US intelligence but the intelligence agencies of leading governments around the world. How could that have happened?

Fourth, Ledeen himself has reportedly been a freelance negotiator with representatives of Iran at various points, as in during Iran contra. Why does he feel he and his crew are entitled to conduct some sort of back channel foreign policy that he seems to believe Armitage, the Senate-confirmed deputy secretary of state, is not entitled to? Who is authorized to conduct the US's foreign policy on Iran?

An All-Chalabi package at Slate. No Chalabi to be found at all at the Weekly Standard [-- for days now, editorial still trying to compare notes with their sources in OSD and their sources at AEI. Epic struggle.] I hear that certain individuals may have been interviewed, but by existing probes...Feith's press guy told me he is going on travel today for bilateral discussions [wonder with whom and what the purpose of those are; e.g. are they of the type, 'Marc, can I have my old office back?' or otherwise]. And Doyle McManus of the LA Times on NPR's Diane Rehme this morning, saying Pentagon is saying Chalabi's defector management program wasn't the only source for their pre-war Iraq intelligence. Clearly. That's not really answering the question. The key divide between current and former Chalabi supporters I'm told remains between those who've seen what Chalabi is alleged to have done, and those who haven't.

Save him. This is the tale of an earnest young fellow Kansan news junky military brat, who blogs at Winds of Change, recruiting himself to AEI. Who answered his call? The dean himself.

...Joe, in an act that can only be described as the act of an absolute saint, decided to pull out all the stops in obtaining other sources for letters of recommendation for me - even going as far as to contact occasional WoC commenter Michael Ledeen to explain the situation to him. With the help of Joe, Robin Burk of USMA West Point, Scott Talkington, one of the CGSC terrorism instructors, and the associate director of the Center for Tactical CounterTerrorism (you meet interesting folks blogging), I soon had my AEI resume complete with some very nice recommendations.

Finally, around mid-April, I received a very cordial phone call from Michael Ledeen.

In all honesty, my first reaction was that was this was some kind of a prank call by several of my peers, who knew about my desire to be an intern at AEI, as well as my high respect for Ledeen and his work. As the realization sunk in that it was Ledeen I was talking to on the phone, I imagine I was acting more than a little stupidly, but he was very kind and very patient to me as he calmly explained that I had indeed been accepted into AEI's internship program for the summer of 2004.

When does his plane land? It may not be too late.

This is one thing AEI and Heritage do really well, and places like Brookings do horribly: cultivate and provide a forum for serious young people who want to get in to the foreign policy discussion in DC, study issues like terrorism, etc. The bureaucracy and credentials one needs to get into a CSIS or Brookings for a program assistant job that pays as much as Washingtonienne's is fairly considerable. The snob factor is pretty considerable too. And the kid probably wouldn't have the opportunity at a Brookings to work on his own stuff either. Without the credentials, the PhDs and the resume as a former deputy director of the such and such, who is going to listen to him? And let's face it, the forum and events on Iraq, intelligence issues, and foreign policy at AEI are just better than any where else in town. [Although since very recently, they seem to have gone dark on the Iraq issue. A planned event for the 25th never materialized, given current events]. They are rarely boring, as so many staid panels and conferences at other places around town are. Noticed in the recent Wash Post article about young conservatives getting jobs in Iraq by posting their resumes at Heritage -- whatever you have to say about an administration that decided to pick their Iraq staff via such a system -- it's smart of Heritage to provide a vehicle for helping to find young conservatives jobs. Why aren't the more lefty think tanks helping out with something like this?

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias agrees, and the comments he's elicited are interesting too.

UPDATE II: A serious proposal: Michael Ledeen should put Dan Darling to work creating an AEI blog on foreign policy and national security. I've been dying to see such a thing. Why not? Faster, Iran, and all that?

Tamara Chalabi, Ahmad's daughter, wrote a piece on her participation in a Iraqi National Congress delegation to Tehran for a week in June 2003, en route to northern Iraq.

Iran in support of ‘regime change’ in Baghdad

The week-long meetings in Tehran were a compelling game of seduction between westernised liberal secularism (best personified by Kanan Makiya) and committed political Islam as represented by the Iranian officials who oversee the ‘Iraq file’.

The game was played out around elaborate lunches (with non-alcoholic beer) and late-night teas, offered by our hosts with quintessential Persian hospitality. The discussions were as fascinating as they were endless. There was surprise too, as our hosts listened politely to our frank advocacy of democracy in Iraq, blunt rejections of an Iranian-style government, and elaborate renditions of meetings with high-ranking US officials that reflected a good relationship with the Iraqi opposition.

As a witness to these meetings, and beyond the different strategic and tactical positions, I was struck by the sheer competence of both sides. These Iranian officials displayed a level of knowledge of Iraq and its problems that I could not imagine encountering in the most advanced western think-tanks.

Of course, Iran is both neighbour and (in the 1980-88 war) recent enemy. But the detailed understanding these officials had of Iraqi society also informed their firm commitment to supporting an end to Saddam. Despite the traditional anti-US rhetoric in Iran and its branding as part of the “Axis of Evil”, the Iranians’ readiness to back an Iraqi opposition in alliance with the US was palpable.

Wonder, how palpable?

Meanwhile, am told to expect major Pentagon push back in the next day or so against certain aspects of the Chalabi story as it has been reported.

[thx to R]

Here's the full UPI Richard Sale piece, excerpted and commented on in next two entries below.

CPA handlers suspected in espionage

By Richard Sale
UPI Intelligence Correspondent

WASHINGTON, May 25 (UPI) -- Officials of Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority are suspected of having leaked extremely sensitive CIA and Pentagon intercepts to the U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress which passed them on to the government of Iran, according to federal law enforcement officials and serving and former U.S. intelligence officials.

These sources also acknowledged that the Bush administration has been the victim of an enormous Iran-perpetrated intelligence fraud that worked to provoke a U.S. military invasion of Iraq in order to defeat Iran's bitter, long-time enemy, a campaign of deception which one U.S. source called "positively a most brilliant and extraordinarily successful operation."

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has launched a full field investigation into the matter, these sources said.

"The Iranians took us to breakfast, lunch and dinner," said former CIA operations chief Vince Cannistraro, declining to elaborate.

The chief agent of the deception was the U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, and Chalabi himself has been "an active agent of influence of Iran throughout the whole period Bush administration," in the words of one former long-time Middle East agent.

He added that Chalabi has been an Iranian agent of influence since the 1990s and before: "He made it very clear that his existence depended on Iran."

Chalabi's brother also works for the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Lebanon, he said.

Chalabi allegedly passed National Security Agency/CIA intercepts to intelligence agents of the Iranian government using intermediaries or "cut-outs" or "gophers" within the INC, another former CIA agent said.

Some of the intercepts, dated from December, were the basis for a recent Newsweek story, but there are others of a later date in possession of the FBI, this source said.

A former very senior CIA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told United Press International, "Chalabi passed specially compartmented intelligence, extraordinarily sensitive stuff, to the Iranians."

This source said that some of the intercepts are believed to have been given Chalabi by two U.S. officials of the Coalition Provision Authority, both of whom are not named here because UPI could not reach them for comment.

Other targets of the probe include senior and other Pentagon officials who dealt with Chalabi on a regular basis, this source said.

One former CPA official has returned to the United States and is employed at the American Enterprise Institute, the former very senior official said, a fact which FBI sources confirmed without additional comment.

The other is still a working Pentagon official, federal law enforcement officials and former CIA officials said.

"These leaks went way beyond some senior Pentagon official talking out of school," the former very senior agency official said. He explained that U.S. officials "are within their authority" and are allowed to talk to someone like Chalabi, but the discussions are "never disseminated."

Chalabi maintains that he is the victim of a disinformation campaign by the CIA, which has waged a vendetta against him since the collapse of a CIA-backed coup attempt against Saddam Hussein in 1995. Chalabi says he warned the CIA that their plot was penetrated by Iraqi agents.

Administration officials said that Chalabi's INC dispatched fake defectors to several Western European or other allied governments before the start of the war with information designed to blacken Iraq and portray it as a "dire menace and garner support," in the words of one.

Chalabi also had an agent from Iran's Ministry of Interior and Security in his entourage, these sources said.

One person who wasn't surprised by the latest flap was former top CIA Middle East field officer Bob Baer, who worked with Chalabi when the latter was in northern Iraq in 1995.

Soon after a meeting with Chalabi, Baer was recalled to Washington to face an FBI criminal investigation into the charge that he had violated Executive Order 12333, issued by President Reagan in 1981, forbidding the assassination of foreign leaders by U.S. intelligence personnel.

Baer was accused, he said, of hatching a plot to kill Saddam Hussein, except the plot was a "total and complete fabrication of Chalabi's," Baer said.

He then referred to the account in his book, "See No Evil," in which Chalabi met with two Iranian intelligence officers, telling them that the National Security Council under senior Clinton adviser Anthony Lake, had dispatched an "NSC team" to northern Iraq to get rid of Saddam.

According to the account, which Baer confirmed for UPI, Chalabi staged a fake phone call in the middle of the meeting with the Iranians, but left a forged letter, written on NSC stationary out on the table for the Iranians to read.

Baer denied any plot on his part, took a polygraph, passed, and the matter was ended -- except he never forget the talents for fabrication possessed by Chalabi.

"He absolutely cooked the whole thing up," Baer said.

Chalabi had hoped to "swindle the Iranians" into believing that the NSC and the Clinton White House were finally serious about getting rid of Saddam and would have no choice but to support the effort, Baer said.

He went on to say that Chalabi had been behind some extremely clever and successful disinformation campaigns, including being the moving force behind a book, "Saddam's Bombmaker," by Khidhir Hamza.

"That was absolutely a Chalabi disinformation operation," Baer told UPI, and he went on to name several topflight U.S. daily newspapers that had been victims of phony Chalabi stories about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs in the months before the war.

"He's very slick, very clever with manipulating the facts," Baer said of Chalabi.

Former CIA analyst Stan Bedlington told UPI that the agency had tried to "use and recruit" Chalabi, but that his "information never checked out and was never any good," and so he was dropped "like a hot potato."

Another former CIA agent said that the agency claimed that Chalabi had failed polygraph tests and labeled him as a "fabricator," and even "put out a what the agency calls a `black book' on him, to warn other agencies away," he said.

The intelligence fraud appears to be very widespread, several officials said.

A U.S. intelligence official was quoted in a Newsday story last week as saying: "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information that "kept the Iranians informed about what we were doing."

Several U.S. officials said that from the time Chalabi was flown by the Pentagon into Iraq following the close of combat operations, his followers, especially his FIF militia, had posed a problem.

According to administration officials, Chalabi set up at the Baghdad Hunt Club, from which he was expelled by top U.S. administrator Paul Bremer.

But Chalabi was accompanied by several hundred members of the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdestan), a Kurdish-Iraqi political party/militia headed by Jalal Talabani, U.S. officials said.

After their transfer to his own forces, the FIF, Chalabi saw that the Kurdish reinforcements were issued uniforms, insignia, and credentials of Chalabi's 700-man militia which were described by one U.S. official as "your basic bunch of street thugs."

Baer confirmed this account from knowledge and continuing access to his own U.S. intelligence sources, saying that the FIF who were attached to U.S. units -- including FBI, CIA and military troops -- "acted as a criminal enterprise."

Baer said they were desultory in performing any duties but quite energetic when it came to stealing. "They were real thieves," Baer said. "The FBI and CIA would wake in the morning to find that their computers or other equipment had
been stolen."

In addition, Chalabi's FIF had made off with a bunch of U.S. Jeeps, which resulted in batteries in U.S. helicopters beginning to disappear: "The helicopter batteries were compatible for the Jeeps," Baer said.

The CPA eventually decided to deactivate the FIF, and the majority of U.S-based hangers-on returned home, he said.

[thx to M and R.]

Hmm. Chalabi's brother works for Iranian MOIS/Vevak in Lebanon? That's kind of interesting. But maybe it gives each brother a certain amount of value, and a certain amount of protection, with their own agencies. One working outright for the Americans, and perhaps covertly with the Iranians; and the other working outright for the Iranians, and perhaps covertly for the Americans. I wonder if this is a common template?

FBI must have interviewed them as potential witnesses, not suspects. It's an important distinction, and the UPI excerpt seems to make it a bit fuzzy. I think Blumenthal gets it right.

UPDATE: Or maybe they were not interviewed at all. Stay tuned...should be able to post more late on this tonight.

UPI scoop? Via Dreyfuss' blog Wednesday.

Next is this, from UPI yesterday, reporting that the FBI is investigating a Pentagon official and a former Pentagon official for having passed classified info to Chalabi. Though not named, the two officials in the UPI story are, according to my sources, Harold Rhode, an official in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, and Michael Rubin, now at the American Enterprise Institute. Reports UPI:

Officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority are suspected of having leaked sensitive CIA and Pentagon intercepts to the U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress, which passed them on to the government of Iran, according to federal law enforcement officials and serving and former U.S. intelligence officials.

These sources also acknowledged that the Bush administration has been the victim of an enormous Iran-perpetrated intelligence fraud that worked to provoke a U.S. military invasion of Iraq in order to defeat Iran's bitter, long-time enemy, a campaign of deception which one U.S. source called "positively a most brilliant and extraordinarily successful operation."

This source said that some of the intercepts are believed to have been given to Chalabi by two U.S. officials of the Coalition Provision Authority, both of whom are not named here because UPI could not reach them for comment.

Other targets of the probe include senior and other Pentagon officials who dealt with Chalabi on a regular basis, this source said.

One former CPA official has returned to the United States and is employed at the American Enterprise Institute, the former very senior official said, a fact which FBI sources confirmed without additional comment.

When Dreyfuss asked Rubin if the story was accurate, Rubin told Dreyfuss "it is untrue."

Can someone send me the UPI original story if they find it? It should be from May 25, 2004.

Update: Hearing much skepticism about this story from various colleagues. One who has run down the AEI part of this said it's wrong on numerous levels. Another colleague expressed skepticism that the characters referred to in the UPI piece would have had access to such sensitive intel, which would seem to make sense. Having not yet been able to see the original UPI Richard Sale piece, I am not sure exactly what the piece is really suggesting: that the two individuals were visited by the FBI to be interviewed as potential witnesses? That is what seems most plausible.

That seems to be what Sidney Blumenthal is suggesting in his Salon piece today.

When is the Pentagon going to stop giving hundred million dollar contracts to Chalabi's cronies? Contracts in which Chalabi seems to get handsome 'consulting' fees? This from the LA Times Wednesday.

The U.S. Army has, for the second time, awarded a contract to supply the Iraqi security forces to a consortium of companies with little arms experience and whose participants include a friend of controversial Iraqi official Ahmad Chalabi.

ANHAM, a joint venture based in Vienna, Va., was the winner of a $259-million contract...The consortium includes many of the same companies as a group headed by Nour USA, whose contract to supply the Iraqi forces was canceled this year amid protests from competing firms and confusion surrounding the bidding procedures...

Army spokeswoman Jan Finegan identified one of ANHAM's component companies as HAIFinance, founded in part by A. Huda Farouk. Another is American International Services, of which Farouki is part-owner. Both were part of the Nour USA consortium.

Newsday's Knut Royce - the real Chalabi stalker in chief - explained when Nour won - and then lost - the first contract in this piece. And just how tight Chalabi and Farouki are. Chalabi seemed to basically drain Petra Bank, feeding the money via Farouki and then going on the lam, the first time. Royce also reports that Chalabi is reported to have personally been awarded a $2 million fee "for helping to arrange the contract." Read it and weep.

One wonders....do any of Chalabi's strong supporters have consulting fees at stake in any of these contracts?

''Get me Wolfowitz!'' Chalabi is alleged to have demanded, when his compound was raided last week, Robert Novak writes in his Monday column. "But it was too late for Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz or anybody else to save the erstwhile American favorite in Iraq."

In fact, Wolfowitz...had signed off on cutting ties with the designated leader of a future democratic Iraq...

The last straw for Chalabi, according to intelligence sources, was the discovery of his contacts with the Iranian regime. The same sources say the wealthy Iraqi Shiite had sent armed agents to harass private citizens. Now that his Iraqi National Congress has lost its $340,000 monthly intelligence subsidy, Chalabi has dispersed his agents around Iraq, according to U.S. military sources...

Chalabi years ago was a CIA resource, but the agency dropped him as unreliable. He then was picked up by the neo-cons as their man in Iraq to replace Saddam Hussein. Richard Perle, who became a leading Rumsfeld adviser after 2000, for years had claimed the ability of the INC to smoothly grasp power in Iraq. On Feb. 16, 2001, on CNN's ''Crossfire,'' he told me the Iraqi dictator could be driven from power without U.S. troops by the INC's ''political challenge to Saddam that will lead ultimately to piercing the veil of his invincibility.''...

Chalabi's previous governmental sponsors developed instant amnesia. Rumsfeld's comment last week after the Chalabi raid displayed the master of obfuscation at his best: ''I certainly was not aware there was going to be a raid on a home, if in fact there was one. My understanding is that the Iraqis are involved in this, and you'd best ask them.''

Instant amnesia indeed. But Perle seems to have it too.

Quote du jour:

Some contend that neoconservatives resemble the communists they once ridiculed, blaming the failures of communist ideology on the Kremlin's execution.

"It's an argument that shows that they didn't understand the problem to begin with, that you just cannot use military force to dictate outcomes everywhere in the world," said Charles Pena, head of defense studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

This is all good too:

Neoconservatives widely predicted an easy occupation followed by an immediate peace, followed by "a flourishing democracy which would cause a domino effect across the region creating democracies elsewhere," said Peter Singer, a national security fellow at the Brookings Institution. "And then the very first foreign policy position taken by this new democratic Iraq, run by their exile friends, would be to recognize Israel, and that would somehow end the Arab-Israeli conflict, and bunnies would dance in the streets, and we would find life on Mars."

Ouch!

Go read Sidney Blumenthal in Salon on the investigation into who leaked to Chalabi.

A former staff member of the Office of Special Plans and a currently serving defense official, two of those said to be questioned by the FBI, are considered witnesses, at least for now. Higher figures are under suspicion. Were they witting or unwitting? If those who are being questioned turn out to be misleading, they can be charged ultimately with perjury and obstruction of justice. For them, the Watergate principle applies: It's not the crime, it's the coverup.

So the FBI has already paid a visit to people in the Pentagon, and questioned at least two, as witnesses for now.

I have heard from another contact that computers at certain offices of the Pentagon have been gone through by the FBI. I think this is going to get really interesting.

The great divide in the neocon push-back: Streaking past the others, Richard Perle has now suggested to journalists that the reason Chalabi has been targeted by the White House of late....is because Iran set him up! But Perle didn't have time to talk to Laurie Mylroie to get her on the same page before he spoke. This from the Forward.

One of [Chalabi's] top American allies, Richard Perle, says he thinks the Iraqi leader was actually a victim of a plot between the CIA and Tehran.

In an interview Monday with the Forward, Perle, a leading neoconservative, said that Iran may have suggested to CIA officials that it had received sensitive intelligence from Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress in order to discredit him.

"Iranians are involved in Iraq in a very damaging way, and the last thing they want is Chalabi in power," said Perle, a former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory board to the Pentagon. "They very well may have induced the CIA to believe Chalabi gave them [sensitive intelligence]. And the CIA was certainly very happy to see that."

...Perle claimed the CIA was eager to seize upon Chalabi's reported links to Iran to win over the White House to its long-held opposition to Chalabi. "They have convinced the White House," said Perle, a former Reagan administration official with close ties to the Israeli right. "There is no question [the raid] was a U.S. operation and that it was politically motivated."...

Laurie Mylroie, another strong Chalabi supporter, rejected the notion of an Iran-CIA plot to sabotage Chalabi.

"The Iranians communicated and said nothing regarding Chalabi passing things on," said Mylroie, author of the recent book, "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror."

"Why should they want to discredit Chalabi?" Mylroie said. "The CIA made it up."

I think it's a bit comical to think that Perle is pushing this idea that the CIA and Iranian intelligence are in such regular contact. I thought that was your friends, Mr. Perle?

Slate's Jack Shafer has a good point, here. What every one wants is not for the Times to continue to disappoint on the investigative front. We want them to use their incredible resources to break this thing down.

It's easy to get hung up on the wording of today's editors' note and complain that the Times didn't adequately apologize, or bitch that nobody from the Times was taken out and shot for his crimes. But ignore the editors' note for a moment. The true test of the Times is on the horizon: Having promised to set the record straight on the Iraq WMD story, what sort of journalism will the newspaper commit?

Rise to the challenge, guys and gals. Explode this story. It is still there for the taking.

Post Script: Here are some stories I would attack if I had the resources.

1) The full profile of the INC's defector management program. Who exactly were the defectors? How did they get delivered to the US government? to the media? Where did the coaching occur? 'Where are they now?' [Khidr Hamza] etc.

2) The role -- past and present -- of the US handlers of the INC -- Francis Brooke. The Rendon Group? [Are they still on the payroll to promote the INC? What happened to their contracts on this issue?] Laurie Mylroie seems to have been awfully close. Perle, etc.

3) The real story of INC intel chief Aras Habib Karim, and the intel program he managed for the INC and how it intersected with the OSD, the Information Collection Program. So far, the New York Sun's Eli Lake's reporting on this issue has left everyone else in the dust.

4) The alleged Jordanian dossier? Referred to in the NY Post piece

5) Other countries? The US was not the only country whose intelligence agency was convinced in large part by the INC-managed defectors about Saddam's WMD program. What was the story in Denmark? In Germany? In Britain?

6) What really made the White House, in April, turn decisively against Chalabi and the INC? What happened?

That's a start.

The Prospect's Matthew Yglesias brings to my attention this Wall Street Journal editorial today. In it, the Journal staff reveal that they were leaked a classified Pentagon report, which -- surprise surprise -- declared that Chalabi's INC "proved to be head and shoulders above the information provided by" other Iraqi political organizations with which it was cooperating.

Don't you wonder if this report itself was leaked to the WSJ, not by the Pentagon, but by the INC to its friends with access to the WSJ editorial board? Laurie Mylroie, or the woman who spends night and day writing about the UN oil for food scandal? [and who's taken up Mylroie's other obsession that Iraq might have been involved in the Oklahoma City bombing?] I wish I could remember her name, Victoria or Valerie, her initials are VB, I think.

Isn't this part of the problem with Chalabi's neocon supporters? Much like the Feith memo ending up in the Weekly Standard's hand? That showed that Feith and his staff thought that raw intelligence scraps were the same thing as a professional intelligence analysis?

Secondly, remember how neocons like David Brooks wailed on about how everyone was accusing the neocons of being "a cabal," of conducting secretive conspiratorial foreign policy etc.?

"The Chalabi Fiasco: The Iraqi politician is a pawn in a much larger strategic game," the editorial is breathlessly entitled.

Who's crying conspiracy theory now?

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.

Reuel Gerecht has asked that I add this to his original statement, posted below. I will just post the whole thought here. Again, he's referring to the allegations contained in a CBS report made by US intelligence officials that say Chalabi met with a "nefarious" character from the "dark side" of Iran's intelligence service, an individual who is known to plot operations against the United States, and never reported it to his US contacts.

...This info all sounds deeply, deeply dubioius. The specifics of an Iranian intel meeting with Chalabi are, however, likely. The Iranian [Chief of Station] COS in Baghdad I think met with Chalabi on occasion--and he certainly met other Iranians on a regular basis--as do MANY Iraqis, including such folks as Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim of SCIRI and Ibrahim Jafari of the Da'wa, on whom the CPA has often been dependent for communication with Sistani. And last I checked, Chalabi is not an employee of the USG and therefore not required to run to Mr. Bremer or the CIA COS in Baghdad and say, "I just met an Iranian." If he were not meeting with a whole variety of Iranians--especially the "dark force" guys in Intel and the Guards Corps, he would be an idiot, and certainly not the type of fellow you would want on the Governing Council.

It is possible that Aras Habib, the INC security and intel fellow, has an extracurricular relationship with Iranian intelligence. Whether that relationship, if it even exists, is fundamentally different from the relationships that Iranian intel probably has with numerous Iraqis in such organizations as SCIRI or Dawa, whether that relationship denotes control, and whether AH has ever given them info worth any money they may have paid him, is an entirely different question. It would be a very good idea for the NSC and the Senate and House Intel committees to yank up all the intercept, assuming intercept is at the bottom of this, and take a very close look at the history of American intercept of the MOI and see whether the analysis of this makes sense, to be sure we're not being sucker-punched by USG employees to hate Chalabi, hate the War, (oddly) blame Chalabi for the war, and hate those in the Pentagon and elsewhere who disagreed with the CIA about Chalabi, or by Iranian intel. Given the paucity of known facts in this case, I certainly wouldn't write with the certitude that so many in the press seem to have on this subject. It's odd. Given the closed nature of American intel, it's not astute.

Reuel's call for skepticism is a point well taken. And while the jury is still out, I think the neoconservatives would do much better to put Reuel on CNN than Laurie Mylroie. The fact is, neither Reuel nor we the civilian audience really know as a fact what evidence the US government has on Habib, or on Chalabi, for that matter. We are all potentially being spun. And not just by the USG; as happens, there is plenty of spinning coming from the usual places.

What's my take? I myself am convinced there's something to the charges that Chalabi and Habib have a covert relationship with Iranian intelligence. Of two types, secret meetings and actual US intelligence given to the Iranians. [I agree with RMG that Iranian intelligence is certainly meeting with SCIRI and Dawa but SCIRI and Dawa were not co-located with the DIA on a Pentagon-funded intelligence program, nor did we go to war based on the misinformation provided by their defectors, and whatever funds they may be getting from the CIA now, it doesn't amount to the nearly $40 million we gave Chalabi and co.] It is legitimate in my opinion that Chalabi and Habib should have been expected to behave according to a higher standard of transparency and forthrightness in terms of secret meetings with Iranian intelligence, given the fact that they were on the Pentagon payroll to provide intelligence to the DIA.

The White House (especially this White House) doesn't turn on a dime so easily. Think how long we've suffered through "misstatements" on the Iraq troop issue, for example. Something happened, more than Chalabi got to be a pest.

What's more, I have sources telling me that the people who are most troubled by the charges are in the Pentagon office of the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense's office. eg people who have both been made aware of what the nature of the charges are, and how it could affect them.

And there are the FBI, CIA and DIA investigations. And the CIA and DIA and whoever else really did go in to Baghdad and basically smash apart Chalabi's offices, with guns and sledgehammers. There are other ways to stop working with a pest, and one way would be just to cut him loose from the payroll, and tell Mr. Brahimi he's welcome to put whoever he wants on the Iraqi transitional government. [Permission he was apparently granted.]

Once a virtue, now a liability? This from the Guardian's Julian Borger:

Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader accused by the CIA of passing US secrets to Tehran, claimed to have close links with Iranian intelligence seven years ago, according to a former UN weapons inspector. Scott Ritter, who before the war insisted that Saddam Hussein did not have significant weapons stocks, made the claim to Andrew Cockburn, a Washington-based journalist and the author of a biography of the ousted Iraqi dictator.

"When I met [Mr Chalabi] in December 1997 he said he had tremendous connections with Iranian intelligence," Mr Ritter said, according to an article by Mr Cockburn published today in the Guardian. "He said that some of his best intelligence came from the Iranians and offered to set up a meeting for me with the head of Iranian intelligence."

Mr Chalabi has repeatedly denied passing secrets to the Iranians and has denounced the allegations made by US intelligence officials as a CIA "smear".

He also denied providing false information about weapons of mass destruction to the US.

He said he only put the CIA in touch with three defectors, who were believed to have had critical information. The FBI and US intelligence agencies are re-examining information provided by or channelled through Mr Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, to determine whether the decision to go to war in Iraq was influenced by Iran.

Mr Ritter told the Guardian he stood by his allegation. He said he never made the trip to Iran because the CIA refused permission.

Meanwhile, both Democratic and Republican senators have called for an investigation into the alleged links between Mr Chalabi and Iranian intelligence.

US intelligence officials have said they have hard evidence that Mr Chalabi passed US secrets to Tehran, and that his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, was an Iranian agent. Mr Habib is being sought by Iraqi police, and according to one American press report is now in Tehran...

The Pentagon defends the INC's intelligence input. An official said yesterday: "We should point out that the INC has provided valuable intelligence that has saved coalition lives and has provided great quantities of documents from Saddam's regime that are of great value."..

Richard Perle, a former adviser to the Pentagon, and one of the INC's most outspoken backers in the capital, said he did not believe the CIA's allegations against Mr Chalabi.

"I believe they have been hostile to Ahmad Chalabi for a long time and are not to be trusted on this and I think they are seeking to transfer responsibility for their own intelligence failures to others," Mr Perle told BBC Radio 4's Today programme yesterday.

According to US intelligence sources, the FBI has opened an investigation into the leak of secret information to the INC from within the administration...

A Pentagon official confirmed that a "reassessment process" was under way, but refused to give details.

Crashing on deadline this morning, so posts later. Meantime, this Conason piece puts l'affaire Chalabi in the proper context of the Bush administration's larger failings in its approach to the Iraq project.

Back when Bush was running for president, supporters deflected concern about his utter ignorance of foreign affairs with assurances that he would surround himself with the most brilliant, seasoned, adult advisors. Everything would turn out well so long as the people he selected to formulate and execute policy were the right choices, in every sense. Unfortunately for him, those choices have performed less adequately than advertised, their swollen self-regard notwithstanding.

From the intelligence bungling that drove the decision to invade Iraq to the arrogant diplomacy that drove away traditional U.S. allies to the false expectations and inept planning that created postwar chaos, Bush's neoconservative policy elite promoted mistaken assumptions and bad decisions. Now, as Iraqis and Americans suffer the consequences of those errors, the neocons demand more of the same failed policies, and continue to imagine that U.S. military power will salvage their misadventure.

At the moment, the neocons' blustering matters somewhat less than their blundering. The news emerging from Iraq suggests that although they regard themselves as hardheaded realists, they are in fact silly dreamers.

Keeping Sistani happy... Hussain Shahristani, a Shiite nuclear scientist close to Sistani, trained in London and Toronto, who was jailed in Abu Ghraib for ten years under Saddam Hussein, proposed by Brahimi and Blackwill to serve as the Iraqi caretaker government prime minister. The WaPo reports:

Shahristani, who has a doctorate in nuclear chemistry from the University of Toronto, served as chief scientific adviser to Iraq's atomic energy commission until 1979, when Hussein became president. When he refused to shift from nuclear energy to nuclear weaponry, he was jailed. For most of a decade, he was in Abu Ghraib prison, much of it in solitary confinement. He escaped in 1991 and fled with his wife and three children to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq and, eventually, Iran, where he worked with Iraqi refugees. He later moved to Britain, where he was a visiting university professor.

But unlike other exiles, Shahristani was not active in opposition parties, choosing instead to focus on humanitarian aid projects. He does, however, have a critical connection: He is close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country's most powerful Shiite cleric, whose support is essential for the viability of an interim government.

Shahristani, who has described himself as an adviser to Sistani, said he has met with the ayatollah several times since the fall of Hussein's government. Shahristani said Sistani has played a "very, very constructive" role in Iraq over the past year. Iraqi officials familiar with Brahimi's mission said Shahristani's lack of political affiliation could be an asset, allowing him to serve as a bridge between various factions.

Shahristani crossed into Iraq two days before Hussein fell to deliver aid to the city of Karbala. Since then, he has divided his time between Karbala and the southern port of Basra, working on humanitarian projects in both places.

"I've been actively working to help the Iraqi people to free themselves from Saddam's tyranny, but I have always concentrated on serving the people and providing them with their basic needs rather than party politics," he said.

Iraqi officials familiar with Brahimi's mission said it was an op-ed piece Shahristani wrote for the April 29 Wall Street Journal that piqued Brahimi's attention. Headlined "Election Fever," the piece criticized the U.S. occupation authority for failing to prepare for elections sooner and for promulgating an interim constitution that was drawn up behind closed doors. He called for the government taking power on June 30 to have limited powers aimed at preparing the country for elections -- a position advocated by Sistani.

Now everybody's coming clean..."The New York Times prepares an 'Editors' Note' about its prewar WMD reporting," Slate's Jack Shafer reports.

Post Script: Who's next? The Weekly Standard? AEI? It's almost too much to bear.

Post-Script II: This is about as forthcoming as Rumsfeld on Abu Ghraib.

More pushback? Maybe. Or maybe just the perspective of someone who believed the CIA would do well to meet with some Iranian spooks as well. This from Reuel Gerecht, a former Middle East expert at the agency, now at AEI and a frequent contributor to the Weekly Standard. He's reacting to an email I sent him asking about the allegations by US intelligence officials in the CBS report I mention below, that Chalabi met with a "nefarious" character from the "dark side" of Iran's intelligence service, an individual who is known to plot operations against the United States, and never reported it to his US contacts.

Laura, This info all sounds deeply, deeply dubioius. The specifics of an Iranian intel meeting with Chalabi are, however, likely. The Iranian [Chief of Station] COS in Baghdad I think met with Chalabi on occasion--and he certainly met other Iranians on a regular basis--as do MANY Iraqis, including such folks as Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim of SCIRI and Ibrahim Jafari of the Da'wa, on whom the CPA has often been dependent for communication with Sistani. And last I checked, Chalabi is not an employee of the USG and therefore not required to run to Mr. Bremer or the CIA COS in Baghdad and say, "I just met an Iranian." If he were not meeting with a whole variety of Iranians--especially the "dark force" guys in Intel and the Guards Corps, he would be an idiot, and certainly not the type of fellow you would want on the Governing Council. Best, Reuel >>

Was Chalabi required to tell his American sponsors about his meetings with Iranian intelligence officials? Does it just look bad that he met with a particularly nasty sort and kept it from his administration friends? Does it look especially not good combined with the fact of the INC until recently getting $340,00 a month from the Pentagon to provide intelligence to the DIA, and his intelligence chief Aras Habib Karim apparently going on the lam to Iran? After passing off some apparently very limited distribution US intelligence to someone in Tehran?

I hope we understand the real story soon enough.

Meantime, the Prospect's Matt Yglesias chronicles the ties between Chalabi and certain administration officials, one of whom recently told Newsweek magazine he was never really that close with Chalabi:

The press stories would have him as my brother. I met him a few times. He was very smart, very articulate.

Ahmad who?

This from Wonkette:

Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations Department, Part 2 #

From the president's address on Iraq: "Iraqis can be certain a free Iraq will always have a friend in the United States of America. "

His name is Richard Perle.

Bush's Remarks on Iraq at the Army War College [WP]

We are helpless in the face of neocon humor.

From the Guardian's Julian Borger today:

"An intelligence source in Washington said the CIA confirmed its long-held suspicions when it discovered that a piece of information from an electronic communications intercept by the National Security Agency had ended up in Iranian hands. The information was so sensitive that its circulation had been restricted to a handful of officials.

"This was 'sensitive compartmented information' - SCI - and it was tracked right back to the Iranians through Aras Habib," the intelligence source said.

Hmm.

And this, later on: "An intelligence source in Washington said the FBI investigation into the affair would begin with Mr Chalabi's 'handlers' in the Pentagon."

Whole piece here.

Still processing. There's something to this electronic intercept story. But the proof of the chain of custody leading to Aras Habib Karim just hasn't been explained or reported out yet that I've seen.

What really is Ahmad Chalabi thought to have done with Iran? One too many friendly conversations too far? A meeting unreported? Passing off a bit of US operational intelligence that the Iranians likely already had?

That's not what I'm being told. It was suggested to me today to revisit the allegations in the CBS 60 Minutes piece from May 21, 2004. I was told that gets at the real line that Chalabi is believed to have crossed, between a guy who has a relationship of convenience with neighboring Iran, to a guy who is working for the bad guys.

Here is that CBS transcript:

DAN RATHER, anchor:

Now a follow-up to a story first reported on this broadcast last night that Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the US-appointed Governing Council in Iraq and a former favorite of the Bush administration, is suspected of passing US secrets to Iran. "60 Minutes" correspondent Lesley Stahl broke this story and she's back tonight with new details. Lesley.

LESLEY STAHL reporting:

Dan, senior intelligence officials were stressing today that the information Ahmad Chalabi is alleged to have passed on to Iran is so seriously sensitive, that the result of full disclosure would be highly damaging to US security. Because of that, we are not reporting the details of what exactly Chalabi is said to have compromised at the request of US officials at the highest levels. The information involves secrets that were held by only a handful of very senior intelligence officials. Meanwhile, we have been told that grave concerns about the true nature of Chalabi's relationship with Iran started after the US obtained, quote, "undeniable intelligence" that Chalabi met with a senior Iranian intelligence officer, a, quote, "nefarious figure from the dark side of the regime, an individual with a direct hand in covert operations against the United States."
Chalabi never reported this meeting to anyone in the US government, including his friends and sponsors.

So two important points here: US intelligence officials are telling CBS that there is "undeniable" evidence that:

1) Chalabi himself has been having unreported meetings with

2) A senior Iranian intelligence official "with a direct hand in covert operations against the United States." In other words, someone who plans operations to kill Americans.

A terror master, some might say.

It's hard to see how anyone could interpret that as benign in any way. And I am again told today that Wolfowitz et al do not find it benign and believe this is gravely serious.

Why were 2,000 pages removed from the copy of the Taguba report delivered to the Senate Armed Services committee investigating abuses at Iraq's soon-to-be razed Abu Ghraib prison?

Time reports:

Committee aides discovered belatedly that their copy of the 6,000-page report on prison abuses produced by Major General Antonio M. Taguba might not be complete. The copy they got after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's testimony on May 7 was a thick document with 106 annexes, and it was quickly arranged into separate binders. Only later did the committee stack up all the pages, compare them with a ream of 6,000 blank pages and decide that at least 2,000 pages were missing. "We'd certainly like to know why they're missing," said Republican Senator John McCain. Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita insisted, "If there is some shortfall in what was provided, it was an oversight." Committee staff members haven't actually counted the pages. Chairman John Warner will investigate this week to see what is missing.

Oversight? The New York Times reports that the missing pages include "200 pages from Colonel Pappas's sworn statement, including a document titled, Draft Update for Secretary of Defense."

Meantime, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski is relieved of her command, and the Pentagon announces that the top Iraq ground commander Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez will be replaced, and the DoD says Sanchez's dismissal has nothing to do with Abu Ghraib? Because they want a four-star general to head the multi-national force in Iraq after June 30? Hmm. That sounds about as convincing as the bogus explanation William Cohen gave for dismissing Wes Clark in the wake of the Kosovo war involving Ralston needing to get promoted within a two month time window of finishing his other command, or something.

Who did Ahmad Chalabi piss off? Paul Bremer, the New York Sun's Eli Lake reports, in a piece today pushing the line that Chalabi's oil-for-food investigation would have contained uncomfortable revelations about how Bremer had managed Iraq's post-war Iraqi oil revenue fund. [He seems to be getting some push-back from his sources.] Lakhdar Brahimi, says Slate's Fred Kaplan; it is to the UN's Brahimi of course that the Bush White House has turned in desperation to coordinate Iraq's political transition, and indeed, that transition plan has become the main talking point for Bush's Iraq exit strategy (and his own reelection hopes). But it is deep in Kaplan's piece that I think the turning point, the really key player Chalabi pissed off, may be revealed:

The crucial rupture took place last month, when Chalabi started actively resisting Bush's plan for transferring sovereignty to Iraq on June 30. A central element of this plan is to turn the transition planning over to the United Nations' envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi. Such a move threw off Chalabi. Brahimi has turned out to be Chalabi's most formidable rival...

The problem is that Bush, who once heaved contempt on the United Nations, now realizes that Brahimi is his only hope for an exit strategy or a coherent Iraqi strategy of any sort—which he desperately needs before the November election. Chalabi's hostility to Brahimi is, in Bush's eyes, hostility to Bush...With Bush grinding his teeth, the Pentagon's neocons had to surrender. Last month, the National Security Council decided to cut ties with Chalabi, according to the current Time. His allowance was pulled a few weeks later.

The person who Chalabi crossed too far may very well be the White House envoy to Iraq who has spent the past three months working with Brahimi and sipping tea with Sistani and Kurds and Adnan Pachachi in the hopes of salvaging some sort of US exit strategy from Iraq, Robert Blackwill. Condaleezza Rice's former boss at the Bush I National Security Council. A man with (trust me) a limited amount of patience. And who, unlike Brahimi, or even Bremer I suspect, was regularly in direct daily phone contact with Rice, and via her, the president.

As far as I can tell, the decisive rupture for Chalabi came not because the State Departmant and CIA were becoming more powerful in the Green Zone at the expense of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, or that Chalabi refused to turn over the oil for food documents to Bremer, or that Karl Rove is trying to send a message to the neocons, or even that the Iraqis were investigating alleged massive corruption by the INC in the Finance Ministry, de-Ba'athification program, the currency transition, etc. [all true]. The decisive rupture of course was when the White House decided to cut Chalabi off. When the President of the United States and his entourage decided to cut Chalabi off. Back in mid-April. [Seemingly before King Abdullah of Jordan came May 5 with any sort of intelligence dossier on Chalabi.]

Now how does this fit with the Iran espionage charges? I suspect that there has been a long time US counterintelligence investigation of Chalabi and crew involving Iran, but that it had been moving along on a separate track from the Chalabi-is-a-pest track, below the radar of the White House, until the two tracks had a reason to converge, seemingly in April. [Perhaps in the person of Robert Blackwill.] I don't think, like Ledeen, that we can dismiss the Iran espionage charges as purely politicized. Why? Because it's pretty clear that Chalabi's intel chief Aras Habib Karim has split to Iran for a reason, and that the US intelligence community has a lot of reason to believe he is truly a long time on-the-payroll spy for Iran. His position heading the DIA-led Information Collection Program in Iraq had two DIA officials working in his very office, and a source familiar with the set up tells me the intel sharing in such a setting is certainly two-ways. It truly seems like an Iranian spy was heading up a joint US-INC intel shop in Baghdad for much of the past year. [Just think for a moment about how compromising such a scenario presents in and of itself.] What's more, it's clear that there had been a much longer relationship that involved regular sharing of sensitive information between high and mid level Pentagon civilians and intelligence and military staffers assigned to the office of the Secretary of Defense, and the INC's Aras Habib Karim and Chalabi. Even after it became obvious in the wake of the war and the failed hunt for Iraq's WMD that what the two had fed the OSD and the Office of the Vice President was all lies, paid for by $33 million American taxdollars. Still, Wolfowitz and Feith kept Chalabi's crew on the payroll, and put Karim in an even more sensitive position, working in the very same offices with DIA personnel reporting back to the Pentagon and DIA, on matters including US force protection in Iraq. Stepping back, it's hard to understand how any serious person could not be sobered up by the gravity of the Iran espionage charges involving Aras Habib Karim, and trying to assess how much such a set up potentially threatens the lives of US troops and compromises US operations in Iraq.

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.

Chalabi's best friend, at least, when Ahmad's not in Tehran, Richard Perle, described in this long Post business piece. [Thx to S for the heads up.]

The Prospect's Matt Yglesias points out a seeming mystery here: if the charges against Chalabi are so grave and rock solid as have been reported, why are not various administration officials and neocons singing from the same song book?

...Based on what I'm hearing from people the administration isn't simply playing its cards close to the chest -- rank-and-file people on the right are just as confused as I am. Again, if Chalabi's friends have flipped, you would expect a unified message to bubble downwards and outwards from the center, internally if not publicly. Moreover, Chalabi's friends in media and think tank circles certainly don't seem to have turned against him. If their better-connected allies inside the Pentagon have, this is puzzling. The Sun tries to explain this by saying they haven't had access to the evidence themselves. Fair enough, but why can't they seem to convince anyone just on their say-so -- we're talking about a group of people who know each other and have collaborated together on and off for years.

Point well taken. But think of it this way.

Wolfowitz, Feith, Luti, and the people in their offices, in particular, and the DIA people assigned to liaise with Chalabi/the INC/the Information Collection Program, are the subject of multiple counterintelligence investigations. (There must be a DIA one, there is an FBI one, I suspect there's a CIA one, there may be more). And that could shut one up pretty quickly. It seems in the course of such investigations quite likely that such people's computer hard drive and phone records may be sifted through at any moment.

Say you're Wolfy's chief of staff. Say you have just been sitting in the room during some meetings at which Chalabi was present during which strategy was discussed, intelligence was discussed, operations were discussed, documents were discussed, maybe even passed around. [At the time, he was your partner, heck, he was providing most of the "intelligence" on WMD and Saddam's connections to Al Qaeda and defectors you were basing major decisions on.]. You are more than dimly aware of other such meetings and activities by other players close to and far from you, within the Pentagon, in Baghdad, in the White House, who knows, at Richard Perle's gourmet dinner table.

One might get very very quiet. The stakes are very high. People will go to jail. One may get an attorney who would order one to be very quiet.

I don't think it's surprising that Michael Ledeen and Michael Rubin don't get a phone call from Wolfy saying the game is up. And here is what we are being told Chalabi and/or Habib gave to Iran.

[editor's note: I took out my original version's reference to "criminal" investigations. I don't know that's true.]

Post Script: I should clarify. So, in my example above, if you were that staffer to Wolfowitz, or Luti, and

a) you had been present at a few "ambiguous" meetings with Chalabi or Habib himself that involved discussion of sensitive material, and

b) now your office is aware that there are multiple counterintelligence investigations into both what sensitive US intelligence senior INC officials pased to Tehran, and into who on the US side gave such sensitive US information to Chalabi and company, and

c) your boss and other people in the office aren't chatting away so much these days about the investigation, or Chalabi, and

d) even if you were not the person who passed Chalabi the code book or sent him sensitive plans about US operations or backgrounders on US intelligence on Sadr, or interception or decoding technology, and you were not even exactly sure who it was, but

e) your notes, computer and telephone records, your boss's notes, computer and telephone records could be taken to be part of an investigation, and

f) you and your colleagues could be asked to testify even as witnesses at some point, as part of a grand jury/FBI investigation, a DIA review, a DOD IG investigation, or at potential Congressional hearings into what Chalabi/ the INC passed to Iran and into what exactly your office might have shared with Chalabi, then

g) you would still have every reason in the world to keep quiet right now.

UPDATE: Told the FBI has not yet interviewed/visited Wolfowitz [they probably can't even get a building pass]. A separate individual told me that there is unlikely to be a DOD Inspector General investigation. Am told there are DIA, CIA and FBI counterintelligence investigations.

Who is the kind of person who would be asked to be a go-between between Doug Feith's fourth floor Pentagon offices, and the Baghdad Information Collection Program headed by Chalabi's now fugitive intelligence chief Aras Habib Karem? It wouldn't be a high level official. We know when Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz travel more or less. Someone more mid level, or someone seconded from the DIA say to the office of the secretary of defense. Someone who would be more vulnerable than a high level Bush appointee.

Update: Some of these people are the kind of in-the-trenches staffers to Luti and Feith who were assigned to work closely with Chalabi that I would find particularly interesting.

Victor Bout Follow Up:

Wow. Alex Harrowell blogging out of the UK sure seems to have the goods on the US-UK coalition forces using an airline owned by notorious black market arms dealer Victor Bout to transport supplies to Iraq. Unfreakingbelievable.

He writes:

Le Monde reported the day before (really the same day because it is an evening paper) that a Bout airline operating under the name "British Gulf" was transporting goods for the US forces in Iraq, with the strong suggestion that his removal from the blacklist was a quid pro quo.

British Gulf International Airlines appears to be based in Sharjah, but registered in Kyrgyzstan (does this sound ominous yet?), and was formed from the assets of a company of the same name registered in Sao Tome of all places, but interestingly also based in Sharjah, in the Sharjah Airport Free Zone. (Its phone number is 06-5570316. Isn't the net great?) It would appear that the owners of BGIA folded their shelf company in Sao Tome and formed another with the same aeroplanes. It apparently operates some four Antonov 12s, of which at least 2 and possibly another were originally registered to old BGIA. The old version of the company possessed some four An12s and an An26. AeroTransport.org lists one of those An12s as "ultimate fate obscure" but does reveal that the An26 was given its registration, S9-BOV. Oddly enough, although as far as is known the "new" BGIA took over the "old" one's entire fleet, this aircraft is still listed as being with the "old" firm. Another An-12, S9-CAQ, is in storage in Sharjah under the "old" company's name. This stored ship, serial number 3341408, has a past. Its last owner was an outfit called Savanair based in Luanda, Angola. There, some five of its sisters were leased from none other than the Bout company Santa Cruz Imperial. Its friend S9-BOT (serial 5343305) was last registered to a "private operator in Angola". Who could that possibly be?

Now, you might be wondering if we - the Glorious Coalition - would really have dealings with this bunch of pirates. What about this? It is a record of purchase agreements signed between the US Defence Energy Support Centre and commercial enterprises. At the top of page 29, there is a listing for:
British Gulf International Airlines, TC
SAIF Zone, A3-24
PO BOX 26078
Sharjah, UAE.

The date of the agreement is given as the 5th of April, 2004. Now, what exactly is a Defence Energy Support Centre? ...It is the US armed forces' organisation for the supply of fuel. Looking up the DESC's contract instruction manual (aren't you glad I did it and not you), here, we find the details of how to interpret those purchase agreements. The "Signal Code" on the agreement shows "which activity receives the fuel and which activity receives the bill". On the one in question it is A, which according to the manual means "Ship to requisitioner/Bill requisitioner". That would appear to mean that the fuel is to be shipped to the billing address.

Which means that, without a doubt, British Gulf is working in our names. We are supplying its fuel.

Go check out this website. Amazing gumshoe and enormously disturbing to think the likes of Bout are being used by the Defense Department. It's like a very bad spy novel.

This is a real scandal. But it's a scandal occurring in a season of non stop jaw-dropping scandals, from Abu Ghraib to our Iraqi golden boy being a spy for Tehran, to the world's most notorious arms dealer being on the US payroll, so the competition is tight.

The difference between neocons who still defend Chalabi and those who wish they never laid eyes on him comes down to who has seen the real charges against him, suggests this New York Sun piece.

The charges and the evidence against Mr. Chalabi are so grave, administration officials say, that some of Mr. Chalabi’s long-standing allies have begun to distance themselves from him, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz who once testified before Congress on behalf of the legislation that started the initial public stream of funding for the exiled leader’s Iraqi National Congress.

“If the evidence against him were nonsense,Wolfowitz would have said it was nonsense,” a Pentagon official told The New York Sun. “This is serious evidence, whether or not it’s proven in the end, it’s at least credible enough that we are concerned and angry about it.” Another administration official described the evidence as “irrefutable.”

There are multiple counterintelligence investigations, including an FBI probe, inside the government in an effort to find the person who passed the sensitive intelligence to the former exiled leader.

That information was so secret, two administration officials said, that the evidence against Mr. Chalabi has only been shared at the most senior levels of the government,and many working level policy-makers have been rebuffed in their requests to see the particulars on the erstwhile American ally.

For this reason, many of his lowerlevel defenders within the administration have cast doubts on what the evidence against Mr. Chalabi means and dismiss the charges against him as either a set-up from the Iranians or a smear job from his foes at the CIA.

[That probably means you, Harold.]

This piece also reports that fugitive Chalabi intelligence chief Aras Habib Karem, now reported to be in Tehran, passed a DIA-administered lie detector test. "When the Pentagon took over the Information Collection Program in the fall of 2002, Mr. Karem took a lie detector test in which he was asked about his ties to foreign governments, including Iran’s, and did well enough that the DIA went ahead with the program with Mr. Karem at its helm." I'm not sure if that doesn't speak worse for the reliability of polygraphs rather than well for Habib.

Great stuff here as well about Chalabi's cozying up to Shiite fundamentalists in Iraq, his family's funding of mosques in Iran, and AEI fellows Richard Perle's and Michael Rubin's continued defense of him....which is either naive....or worse.

The piece reiterates how Feith and Wolfowitz and others in the administration who have apparently been made aware of the actual charges against Chalabi cannot distance themselves from him fast enough. Is that because they are the subjects of investigation into who leaked what to Chalabi?

Meantime, wonder why, with some notable exceptions, everybody seems to hate Chalabi? Kevin Drum has a helpful timeline.