Because Rob in Baltimore and I started doing some research on this breaking news about the possible Israeli mole, and we uncovered lots of VERY interesting stuff on various Pentagon officials who may or may not have anything to do with the burgeoning scandal. Nonetheless, the info we uncovered is so, well, bizarre, in terms of the interconnecting Web between these folks, that we felt obliged to report it - as LONG and almost-conspiratorial all of this may sound. Enjoy.
The CBS story in an earlier post noted "With ties to top Pentagon officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the analyst [alleged spy] was assigned to a unit within the Defense Department tasked with helping develop the Pentagon's Iraq policy.... CBS News was told document the passing of classified information from the mole, to the men at AIPAC, and on to the Israelis. "
Rob and I thought we'd look around the Net and see if we could find, just out of curiosity, any analysts tied to Douglas Feith who worked on Iraq policy, and who may have had ties to Israel and AIPAC. Here's what we found.
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ABC's Nightline says the man in question speaks Farsi.
The NYT is reporting that "the Pentagon analyst who officials said is under suspicion was one of two department officials who traveled to Paris for a secret meeting with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer who had been a central figure in the Iran-contra affair."
According to Newsday, "The senior Administration official identified two of the defence officials who met Mr Ghorbanifar as Harold Rhode, Mr Feith's top Middle East specialist, and Larry Franklin, a Defence Intelligence Agency analyst on loan to the undersecretary's office."
The NYT says that the Ghorbanifar meeting was set up by Michael Ledeen. ("The secret meetings were first held in Rome in December 2001, were approved by senior Pentagon officials and were originally brokered by Michael Ledeen, a conservative analyst at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute.") More on Ledeen in a sec. The NYT also reminds us who Ghorbanifar is: "Mr. Ghorbanifar was a central figure in the Iran-contra affair in the 1980's, in which the United States government secretly sold arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages in Lebanon and to finance the fighters, known as contras, opposing the Sandinista government in Nicaragua." And in a moment you'll read how Ledeen has ties to Ollie North. I know, this is very weird stuff.
Check out what the rest of the article says about Mr. Rhode:
Mr Rhode recently acted as a liaison between Mr Feith's office, which drafted much of the Administration's post-Iraq planning, and Ahmed Chalabi, a former Iraqi exilegroomed for leadership by the Pentagon.------------
Mr Rhode is a protege of Michael Ledeen, who was a National Security Council consultant in the mid 1980s when he introduced Mr Ghorbanifar to Oliver North, a NSC aide, and others in the opening stages of the Iran-Contra affair.
A quick aside about Ledeen's daughter, Simone. She was sent to Iraq to work for the CPA and was one of six people basically running the country's entire budget, according to the Washington Post:
Simone Ledeen had imagined -- ornate mosques, soldiers in formation, sand blowing everywhere, "just like on TV." The 28-year-old daughter of neoconservative pundit Michael Ledeen and a recently minted MBA, she had arrived on a military transport plane with the others and was eager to get to work.A lot of money she was handling there.
They had been hired to perform a low-level task: collecting and organizing statistics, surveys and wish lists from the Iraqi ministries for a report that would be presented to potential donors at the end of the month. But as suicide bombs and rocket attacks became almost daily occurrences, more and more senior staffers defected. In short order, six of the new young hires found themselves managing the country's $13 billion budget, making decisions affecting millions of Iraqis.
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Now more on Rhode at Mother Jones:
Called in to help organize the Iraq war-planning team was a longtime Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, a specialist on Islam who speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi. Though Feith would not be officially confirmed until July 2001, career military and civilian officials in NESA began to watch his office with concern after Rhode set up shop in Feith's office in early January. Rhode, seen by many veteran staffers as an ideological gadfly, was officially assigned to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, an in-house Pentagon think tank headed by fellow neocon Andrew Marshall. Rhode helped Feith lay down the law about the department's new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation. In one telling incident, Rhode accosted and harangued a visiting senior Arab diplomat, telling him that there would be no "bartering in the bazaar anymore.... You're going to have to sit up and pay attention when we say so."------------
Rhode refused to be interviewed for this story, saying cryptically, "Those who speak, pay."
According to insiders, Rhode worked with Feith to purge career Defense officials who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz and Feith wanted. Rhode appeared to be "pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with," says a former analyst. "They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the fuck out of there."
The MOJO piece then leads us to another man named Wurmser:
Just after September 11, 2001, Feith and Rhode recruited David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies for AEI, to serve as a Pentagon consultant.------------
Wurmser would be the founding participant of the unnamed, secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon, set up in Feith's office, which would be the nucleus of the Defense Department's Iraq disinformation campaign that was established within weeks of the attacks in New York and Washington. While the CIA and other intelligence agencies concentrated on Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda as the culprit in the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz and Feith obsessively focused on Iraq. It was a theory that was discredited, even ridiculed, among intelligence professionals. Daniel Benjamin, co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror, was director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the late 1990s. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq," he says. "We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact." Indeed, that was the consensus among virtually all anti-terrorism specialists.
In short, Wurmser, backed by Feith and Rhode, set out to prove what didn't exist.
So we did a look searching on Wurmser:
Michael Isikoff reports on 8/9: Days after 9/11, a senior Pentagon official lamented the lack of good targets in Afghanistan and proposed instead U.S. military attacks in South America or Southeast Asia as "a surprise to the terrorists," according to a footnote in the recent 9/11 Commission Report. The unsigned top-secret memo, which the panel's report said appears to have been written by Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith, is one of several Pentagon documents uncovered by the commission which advance unorthodox ideas for the war on terror. The memo suggested "hitting targets outside the Middle East in the initial offensive" or a "non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq," the panel's report states. U.S. attacks in Latin America and Southeast Asia were portrayed as a way to catch the terrorists off guard when they were expecting an assault on Afghanistan.1. We know Wurmser worked for Feith on Iraq policy
The memo's content, NEWSWEEK has learned, was in part the product of ideas from a two-man secret Pentagon intelligence unit appointed by Feith after 9/11: veteran defense analyst Michael Maloof and Mideast expert David Wurmser, now a top foreign-policy aide to Dick Cheney.
....Other proposals got greater traction. The 9/11 Commission says the idea of attacking Iraq also was pushed in a Sept. 17 memo by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz argued that the odds were "far more" than one in 10 that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks...
The CBS article about the spy notes that "With ties to top Pentagon officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the analyst was assigned to a unit within the Defense Department tasked with helping develop the Pentagon's Iraq policy." In the Newsweek piece above, Maloof is called an analyst with DOD and Wurmser is reportedly now a top foreign policy aide to Dick Cheney.
2. Wurmser is married to an Israeli-born national who espoused overthrowing Saddam and who works with a former Israeli intelligence officer
David Wurmser is married to Israeli-born Meyrav Wurmser who heads Middle East studies at the neo-conservative Hudson Institute, and has ties to Israeli intelligence, Douglas Feith, and other Bush defense officials: "[Mrs. Wurmser] is, along with a former Colonel in Israeli intelligence, the co-founder of a charity which monitors the Arab media for anti-semitic opinions... Mrs Wurmser was among a group of neo-conservatives who wrote a report intended as advice for the then incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996... [The report] also spoke about removing Saddam Hussein from power. Other signatories of that report included Richard Perle, David Wurmser and Douglas Feith - who is now number three at the Pentagon." - BBC
3. The "charity" Mrs. Wurmser ran is named MEMRI.
4. MEMRI allegedly has ties with Israeli intelligence
From The Guardian:
The reason for Memri's air of secrecy becomes clearer when we look at the people behind it. The co-founder and president of Memri, and the registered owner of its website, is an Israeli called Yigal Carmon.I also spoke a while back with an Israeli embassy official who bragged to me and others that MEMRI was a successful Israeli government operation.
Mr - or rather, Colonel - Carmon spent 22 years in Israeli military intelligence and later served as counter-terrorism adviser to two Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin.
Retrieving another now-deleted page from the archives of Memri's website also throws up a list of its staff. Of the six people named, three - including Col Carmon - are described as having worked for Israeli intelligence. Among the other three, one served in the Israeli army's Northern Command Ordnance Corps, one has an academic background, and the sixth is a former stand-up comedian. Col Carmon's co-founder at Memri is Meyrav Wurmser, who is also director of the centre for Middle East policy at the Indianapolis-based Hudson Institute, which bills itself as "America's premier source of applied research on enduring policy challenges".
5. David Wurmser worked at an organization with a connection to AIPAC
David Wurmser used to work at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "The Washington Institute for Near East Policy: Founded in 1985 by Martin Indyk, who previously worked at the pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC." - Jerusalem Post
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CONCLUSION: I have NO IDEA what any of this means, other than there is a VERY large Web of connections between all of these rather nasty-sounding people. We just thought all of this was interesting enough to let you all sift through and come to your own conclusions. Read the rest of this post...
