Nest of Spies
August 30, 2004
by Robert Dreyfuss
When Iranian “students” took over the U.S. embassy in 1979, they called it the “nest of spies.” Now it seems, the FBI has discovered a real nest of spies, Israeli ones. Inside the Pentagon. Some of the people allegedly involved are the very same people who were first mentioned in an article (“The Lie Factory”) by Jason Vest and myself in Mother Jones last year. (You can read it here .) That article cited Harold Rhode, a neocon operative in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessments, under the wizard-like Andy Marshall, and his sidekick, the laughably incompetent Larry Franklin.
Now Franklin, we all know, and perhaps Rhode, are under investigation by the FBI. Franklin is a minor cog in the Israeli nest of spies, who allegedly passed U.S. secrets on Iran to AIPAC, the Zionist lobby, who then passed it to the Israeli embassy. There are lots of details—but, so far, no one that I’ve seen has attempted to really analyze this. The basic paradox is: Ahmad Chalabi, the darling of Franklin’s neocon pals, is under investigation in Iraq and in Washington for spying for Iran. Franklin is under the FBI gun for spying for Israel, against Iran. Does this make any sense? Of course not.
Let’s assume that Chalabi and Franklin, two lower-level operatives for the same machine, are still working together. And that the machine, the great Neoconservative Empire Machine and its Israeli right-wing allies, is what needs to be investigated.
Franklin, for the past couple of years, has toiled away in the bowels of Paul Wolfowitz’s Iraq war team. A former U.S. intelligence official has this to say about him:
Anyone who knew Franklin from DIA and from the past few years in OSD knows that the "incompetent fool way out of his depth" description fits. The Newsweek story of his walking, "out of the blue," into a private FBI-surveilled lunch meeting is pure Franklin: clueless. His DIA colleagues and supervisors knew he could not be depended upon for important tasks; some suspected he was mentally unbalanced. Taking him on missions abroad was asking for trouble: unaccounted absences, flaky "special case" demands, embarrassments with US embassy staffs and foreign personnel. He should have been fired long ago. Franklin was notoriously sloppy with security, never could be relied upon by his colleagues or supervisors to pull his weight on assigned projects or even to be found, repeatedly left messes behind for others to clean up, almost never met a suspense, and shamelessly bowed and scraped to the powerful and influential of the day. Days after a buddy from Net Assessments brought him into the former [Near East and South Asia office] with a promotion, it was "Paul" this and "Paul" that, referring to the [Deputy Secretary of Defense]. He ingratiated himself to OSD seniors by trafficking poison on intelligence seniors they already believed to be ideologically unreliable. Add to that deep draughts of the Kool-Aid and you have a prescription for disaster. Mostly, though, this one looks like his own personal one, and not entirely undeserved.
Of course anyone as “clueless” as Franklin would be sloppy with classified material. The pro-Ariel Sharon clique in the Pentagon (and elsewhere in the U.S. government) is so tightly bound and incestuously linked to Israel that having to draw boundaries between what’s American and what’s Israeli must boggle their small minds. So this time Franklin got caught. (P.S. Don’t expect any big indictments, or any sweeping probe of Israel’s spy apparatus in the United States. Reports the New York Times : "American counterintelligence officials say that Israeli espionage cases are difficult to investigate, because they involve an important ally that enjoys broad political influence in Washington. Several officials said that a number of espionage investigations involving Israel had been dropped or suppressed in the past in the face of political pressure.” ) For the last two years I’ve watched Franklin, Rhode, Michael Rubin and others in the clique at meetings at the American Enterprise Institute, and what stands out above all is the fraternity-like bond that links them to one another, almost like a street gang.
For 25 years, this little clique has maintained sub rosa ties to Iran. They, and Israel, had multiple lines into Iran’s mullahs long before the Shah fell. Israel armed Iran throughout the 1980s, including during the 444 days when thugs held U.S. diplomats hostage. They were behind Iran-contra, trying to push the United States into a closer relationship with Iran when we were, sensibly enough, backing Iraq. And they’ve never let up. Since 2001, when they took power with the Bush administration, they’ve plotted war against Iraq and plotted how to establish ties with Iran’s national security apparatus and its military again, even if it meant undermining U.S. policy. A key figure in all this is Michael Ledeen, an AEI stalwart who’s long had intimate ties to Israeli intelligence. And then there is Ahmad Chalabi, another Mossad-linked creature.
We can discount, or throw out, Israel’s silly statement that it stopped spying against the United States after the Pollard affair. Israel has penetrated the United States so completely that it probably doesn’t even call it spying anymore. It's business as usual.
So the question is: What connects Ledeen, Richard Perle, Chalabi and Franklin? We know that the United States doesn’t really have an “Iran policy,” unless hoping that nothing happens qualifies as a “policy.” But what is the policy of Ledeen and Co.? They believe that Israel, Turkey, Iran, the Kurds, the Lebanese Christians and Pakistan can all be tied together in an alliance against the Arabs. That’s been true since the 1950s. What’s new is that Iraq presented them an opportunity: The Israel-Turkey-Iran et al. axis could take over and occupy part of the Arab bloc, thanks to the United States. Like the python who ate the deer, they are still struggling to digest it—though some, including myself but also including the CIA, believe they will choke on it. In any case, the gobbling up of Iraq hasn’t gone too well, but at least they’ve accomplished their secondary objective: the destruction and dismantling of Iraq as a nation and as a military force that could threaten Israel. And Ledeen, who organized Franklin’s secret missions to Iran since 2001, and Chalabi, who has secret missions of his own to Iran (both long exposed now), still believe that Iran is a useful partner in the anti-Arab axis.
More to come on Franklin, Rhode, Ledeen et al. this week. |
