War and Piece

Why Tenet quit. Or more precisely, why did Tenet quit now? According to the Times and Newsweek, because of the forthcoming 400 page Senate Select Intel committee investigation report into Iraq pre-war intelligence.

Here's Newsweek's take:

Congressional sources said the timing seemed to be influenced by the impending release of a massive Senate Intelligence Committee report that one official described as a “devastating indictment” of the agency’s handling of pre-war intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Another report expected next month from the national commission investigating the September 11 attacks is expected to roundly criticize the agency’s failure to develop sources inside Al Qaeda and piece together evidence—including information in its files on two of the hijackers—that might have helped uncover the plot.

And the New York Times:

George J. Tenet's resignation may have been hastened by a critical, 400-page report from the Senate intelligence committee that was presented to the Central Intelligence Agency for comment last month.

Government officials and people close to Mr. Tenet said the classified report is a detailed account of mistakes and miscalculations by American intelligence agencies on the question of whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons before last year's invasion by the United States. An unclassified version of the report is to be made public later this month. Some close to Mr. Tenet say the report was among the factors that led him to step down from a post he had considered leaving for several years.

Maybe a better question to ask, as Slate does, is how did Tenet keep his job for so long? But, politically, didn't Bush pick the wrong fall guy to help his reelection chances? Why reward Chalabi and his supporters with this? [I guess, some of them have FBI polygraphs and jail time to contemplate, if that's any small comfort. Tenet's only going to have to retire. And I know for a fact the Senate Select intelligence committee has been interviewing members of Feith's Office of Special Plans as well of late.] As devastating an indictment of the CIA's pre-war Iraq intelligence as the Senate Select Intelligence committee is likely to make, and as devastating as the 9/11 commission report will likey be for Tenet and the FBI, it's not only incompetence in the administration that hurts Bush -- and there's plenty to go around. It's that Americans resent those in the Bush administration who deliberately, willfully deceived them. People like Feith, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and members of Feith's and Cheney's staff. As they say, it's not the mistake, it's the cover up, the specter of real deceit, that outrages people. And loses votes.

This administration has plenty of incompetence to go around. But it's those whose incompetence - in managing the Iraq post-war for instance - was the direct result of ideological zeal and contempt for the truth - who should be in the White House cross hairs. If you need to dump someone overboard, start with Feith. You don't need an FBI counterintelligence investigation to fire him.

Meantime, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Sun have pieces on just how extraordinarily damaging Chalabi's alleged leak to the Iranians is to the US. I mean, it's not like we were worried about Iran's nuclear program or something, were we?

This from the Post's Dana Priest and Walter Pincus:

In a closed-door damage assessment on Capitol Hill, National Security Agency officials said the disclosure cut off a significant stream of information about Iran at a time when the United States is worried about the country's nuclear ambitions, its support for terrorist groups and its efforts to exert greater influence over Iraq.

The LA Times reports:

Reports citing secret intercepts of another country's intelligence traffic typically are given the highest level of classification and are shown to only a handful of U.S. officials. Transcripts would be stamped as a top-secret National Security Agency product, with a code word to indicate they were encrypted signals that had been intercepted and decoded.

These are considered among the most valuable of intelligence products, and federal law even provides for the death penalty in some cases in which "communications intelligence or cryptographic information" has been disclosed.

"The number of people who could have leaked this is small, in the dozens or less," said Flynt Leverett, a former CIA officer and former Middle East director for President Bush's National Security Council. "If this is true, someone in this administration did this. It really cries out for accountability."

As the Sun's Eli Lake and others report, Chalabi's own attorneys have written to Ashcroft and Mueller asking them to investigate, who leaked to the press, what Chalabi leaked! Talk about gall. Former CIA Counterterrorism Center director and Iran contra alum Duanne Clarridge, who himself once faced the Agency's wrath for publishing his memoir without CIA vetting approval, weighs in in the Sun, on Chalabi's behalf. This piece neglects to mention that Clarridge has recently reportedly been on the payroll of the Rendon Group to promote Chalabi and the INC. This from the Sun:

The American intelligence community is conducting an extensive damage assessment of its Iranian operations in light of recent intelligence that alleges Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi disclosed to an Iranian agent that America had penetrated secret communications in Tehran. Administration officials briefed both the House and Senate intelligence committees on the matter yesterday... Attorneys for Mr. Chalabi yesterday sent a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller asking them to launch an investigation into who leaked information about the alleged Iranian leak to the press... A former director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, Duane Clarridge, told the Sun that the damage assessment was 12 years too late. "Since 1992, everybody in northern Iraq knew the Americans were reading the Iranian ciphers," he said. "Since World War II, the United States government has assiduously never talked about signals intelligence. The fact that so many unnamed officials are doing so now shows that this is a political act of desperation to make sure that Chalabi does not run Iraq." But many in the intelligence community believe the charges are true, based on an intercepted conversation between two Iranian officials discussing in detail America's ability to crack what the Islamic republic had believed before was an encrypted communication... Mr. Chalabi has a doctorate in mathematics [and]...completed a thesis on prime numbers, one of the building blocks of modern cryptology. Sharing information about code breaking is considered as serious an intelligence breach as disclosing the identities of agents in foreign countries...Indeed, the penalty for disclosing penetrated communications to a foreign government is a minimum 10 years in jail. The damage assessment centers around the ultrasecret National Security Agency, America's code breakers and eavesdroppers, according to an administration official.

A couple things I am mulling over. A certain joint super secret CIA-NSA program is interesting to explore as the likely source of the US's original success in breaking the Iranian Ministry of Information and Security's communications code. They do the embassy break ins and the like. Secondly, I am interested in the "chain of custody" of the intelligence reported to have been given by Chalabi to Vevak. For instance, it seems possible that someone say at DIA on loan to the Office of Doug Feith might have originally been aware of the US's success in breaking Vevak's code and passed on that information to a colleague in the same office who did not himself have the same access. And then it was that person, likely a close Chalabi confidante and handler, who leaked it to Chalabi who passed it to Vevak's Suleymani. More on this to come.

Also worth pondering, how soon can Tenet get out with his book, and when will he appear on 60 Minutes?

You get off a long plane ride, jetlagged, and discover when you finally meet the ethernet again, that in your absence, all hell has broken loose! Everybody has lawyered up, certain people are being polygraphed!, and a grand unifying theory of lies and espionage and pre war intelligence is somehow emerging. I hate vacations.

Posts will be slow 'til Monday.

TENET RESIGNS.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - CIA Director George Tenet, under fire for his agency's intelligence lapses in Iraq, resigned and will leave in July, the Bush administration announced on Thursday.

President Bush said Tenet submitted his letter of resignation on Wednesday night at the White House and told the president he would leave his post for personal reasons.

"He has done a superb job on behalf of the American people. I accepted his letter," Bush told reporters as he was leaving the White House to begin a trip to Italy and France.

Tenet will continue as CIA director until mid-July, when his deputy John McLaughlin will become acting director.

Can we expect to see Richard Perle start to defend Chalabi's leaks of the most sensitive US intelligence to the Iranian terror masters? Ledeen? Harold Rhode? Michael Rubin? I hear Larry Franklin isn't defending Chalabi any more.

There are only two defenses I can see: it's not true (seems the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of, it's true). Or, it's okay that Chalabi did it.

Or, there's a third. How about, WE WERE WRONG. We were fools, and dupes. But none of these people seem to have the moral capacity to admit they were wrong. What kind of blindness, what kind of pathological arrogance, prevents these people from ever admitting they are wrong?

MORE: A friend says Chalabi supporters may also use the defense, Chalabi was framed by Iranians who wanted him to be politically neutralized in Iraq. [As if he even needed to be neutralized by outside forces!] That the two Iranians who were detected in an intercept to be discussing what Chalabi supposedly gave them could have been trying to frame him. I find this deeply unconvincing. [Remember how each shred of bogus intel about ties between al Qaeda and Saddam these very same neocons clung to as the holy grail? This is that in reverse].

A question. Is Chalabi simply believed to have conversationally told an Iranian source that the US had broken XYZ communications code? Or is he actually believed to have had physical access to some sort of code breaking technology itself? Why does this matter? Because the number of US officials who might have known the formeris certainly greater than the latter. Even a civilian Pentagon official known to be very close to Chalabi and who believes himself a huge expert on Iran and the Middle East might have heard the latter and passed it on to Chalabi.

STOP THE PRESSES. Chalabi disclosed to Tehran the US had broken Iran's secret communications code. "Drunk" Pentagon civilian reportedly gave Chalabi the higly classified information. From the New York Times, which along with other news orgs apparently had known about the nature of the breach, but complied with US intelligence officials' request not to disclose its exact nature, 'til today, since it was already leaking out:

Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader and former ally of the Bush administration, disclosed to an Iranian official that the United States had broken the secret communications code of Iran's intelligence service, betraying one of Washington's most valuable sources of information about Iran, according to United States intelligence officials...

The Bush administration, citing national security concerns, asked The New York Times and other news organizations not to publish details of the case. The Times agreed to hold off publication of some specific information that top intelligence officials said would compromise a vital, continuing intelligence operation. The administration withdrew its request on Tuesday, saying information about the code-breaking was starting to appear in news accounts...

American officials said that about six weeks ago, Mr. Chalabi told the Baghdad station chief of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security that the United States was reading the communications traffic of the Iranian spy service, one of the most sophisticated in the Middle East.

According to American officials, the Iranian official in Baghdad, possibly not believing Mr. Chalabi's account, sent a cable to Tehran detailing his conversation with Mr. Chalabi, using the broken code. That encrypted cable, intercepted and read by the United States, tipped off American officials to the fact that Mr. Chalabi had betrayed the code-breaking operation, the American officials said.

American officials reported that in the cable to Tehran, the Iranian official recounted how Mr. Chalabi had said that one of "them" — a reference to an American — had revealed the code-breaking operation, the officials said. The Iranian reported that Mr. Chalabi said the American had been drunk...

The account of Mr. Chalabi's actions has been confirmed by several senior American officials, who said the leak contributed to the White House decision to break with him.

It could not be learned exactly how the United States broke the code. But intelligence sources said that in the past, the United States has broken into the embassies of foreign governments, including those of Iran, to steal information, including codes.

The F.B.I. has opened an espionage investigation seeking to determine exactly what information Mr. Chalabi turned over to the Iranians as well as who told Mr. Chalabi that the Iranian code had been broken, government officials said. The inquiry, still in an early phase, is focused on a very small number of people who were close to Mr. Chalabi and also had access to the highly restricted information about the Iran code.

Some of the people the F.B.I. expects to interview are civilians at the Pentagon who were among Mr. Chalabi's strongest supporters* and served as his main point of contact with the government*, the officials said.

More soon. [Big thanks to E.]

Post Script: If this* doesn't sound like a certain Pentagon civilian deputy to Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans......[Alas, am told by a friend that it's not. That individual doesn't have that sort of access. Times piece is sure pointing in that interesting direction, however, isn't it? Wisful thinking?]

Post Script II: Not to be totally obnoxious. But someone riffed today on the theme, wonder if Iran did not believe that what it had gotten from Chalabi was so valuable? And would the CIA really want to disclose if something truly highly sensitive had been compromised by espionage? I think one well informed friend must have known the basic story for a while.

Will Congress please initiate public hearings, and will someone please put whoever gave this stuff to Chalabi in jail?

A friend claims to know about the specific intercepts but won't say because the agency asked him not to. What's left to be compromised at this point? [Update, now apparently he got permission to say. I'm still waiting to hear. Something about two Iranians....What? I'm losing you.]

MORE: From the NY Sun:

American intelligence officials have collected intelligence in the last six weeks that strongly suggests Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi has compromised America’s penetration of Iranian top secret communications in Tehran, according to American officials. Concerns about the intelligence breach first surfaced after Mr. Chalabi held an unreported meeting with an Iranian Revolutionary Guard General whose last name is Sulaymani, according to an American intelligence official. General Sulaymani heads the Quds command, for the revolutionary guard, a unit of that service in charge of funding anti-Israeli terror organizations as well as anti-American activities inside Iraq. The information on Mr. Chalabi was collected through a separate report regarding two Iranian officials discussing the information Mr. Chalabi apparently gave them.

Hmm. The last time I heard Suleymani mentioned was in Michael Ledeen's NRO piece last week, when he wrote:

[SCIRI's] Hakim reports regularly to an Iranian intelligence official named Sulemani, surely one of the most dangerous men in the country. And SCIRI has its own militia, the Badr Brigades, which at least until very recently conducted military maneuvers with units of the Revolutionary Guards on Iraqi territory adjoining the Iranian border.

Are the Iranians rolling over laughing at having hoodwinked among the very most zealous pro Israel members of the US foreign policy elite, into accepting into their inner circle someone sending the very most sensitive US intelligence to the very people planning and conducting terror operations against Israel and the US? How easy does it get?

Assume for the sake of argument that Chalabi has thrown more than a few scraps of US intelligence the Iranians way over the past decade. Do you think the Iranians found it any more reliable than what the US has gotten from Chalabi over the past decade?

Is it possible Chalabi really did pass something valuable to the Iranians recently, something that most smoke seems to suggest involves signals intelligence, and the Iranians didn't realize what they had gotten?

Secondly, if it was really so valuable as some reports allege, wouldn't the US intelligence community have an interest in not disclosing it?

Finally, reports suggest seized in the May 13 raid on Chalabi's China house compound was Chalabi's personal computer. While some reports suggest the seeming FBI and CIA operatives present at the raid may have been DynCorp employees on contract with the Iraqi ministry of the interior [who would seem to be subcontractors ultimately of the CPA in any case, at least until June 30], does anyone really doubt that the laptop is not now in the custody of US counterintelligence agencies, rather than the Iraqi judge who issued the arrest warrants for members of the INC in regards to kidnapping and corruption? All reports suggest such an investigation is underway. I do hear again that a source high in the Pentagon does say the difference in perceptions about the espionage allegations remains between those few US officials who have been briefed on what senior INC officials are alleged to have given the Iranians, and those who haven't.

The New York Sun's Eli Lake reports that Ahmad Chalabi asked his nephew Salem Chalabi to back the choice of Iyad Allawi as the interim Iraqi government's prime minister.

Mr. Allawi’s nomination Friday to lead the interim government was supported by one of his rivals in the old Iraqi resistance, Ahmad Chalabi. Mr. Chalabi, who spent the weekend in Najaf trying to broker a resolution of the standoff between Muqtada al-Sadr and American forces, instructed his nephew, Salem Chalabi, by satellite phone to vote for Mr. Allawi’s nomination, according to Iraqi National Congress sources.

“On the governing council there were some differences, but there has been a lot of cooperation between Dr. Chalabi and Iyad Allawi,” one of Mr. Chalabi’s deputies, Haidar Musawi, told the Sun yesterday.

Does Chalabi think the Caretaker Government is set to fail, and therefore Allawi's association with it will neutralize him politically over the medium term?

Meantime, the US' and UN's choice for president of the Caretaker Government, Adnan Pachachi, has resigned, after Iraqi Governing Council members chose Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer as the new transitional government's president. Al-Yawer, a Sunni, who was educated in Saudi Arabia and at Georgetown, has reportedly been quite critical of the US occupation.

After the announcement of the members of the new cabinet, the IGC dissolved itself.

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?