'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Larry Franklin Affair, contd.

Kudos to Laura Rozen of "War and Piece" for the interview she got in which wellknown international arms-and-snakeoil salesman Manouchar Ghorbanifar spoke (=bragged) about the number of meetings he's had about the Iran situation with Michael LeSleaze; the Italian Defense Minister and the head of Italian Military Intelligence; and Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin from Doug Feith's office.

It surprises me not one whit that Ghorby and LeSleaze (a.k.a. Ledeen), who have been co-conspirators from the the days of the Iran-contra affair of the mid-1980s, if not before, would have had numerous meetings in recent years. Heck, they're probably godfathers for each other's children, or whatever the relevant cultural indicator of familial intimacy is.

There is nothing I find "shocking" in that-- not even knowing that LeSleaze was hired to be a consultant to Wolfie at the DOD at some point. LeSleaze also has a long, nasty history of dirty business with the Italian military "intel" folks.

And it seems kinda unexceptional that LeSleaze would have taken his good friends Rhode and Franklin to meet with Ghorby and the Italians, either... Except that, according to the Washington Monthly story by Rozen, Josh Marshall, and Peter Glastris, the US Ambassador in Italy--where most or all of the meetings were held--didn't know about them. And when the ambassador, Mel Sembler, found out about one of the meetings, in December 2001, he "ratted" on the conspirators to the local CIA station chief and to his own boss, Colin Powell.

Powell and CIA head George Tenet then went screaming to the NSC leadership. Obviously!! They knew that Ghorbanifar had been bad news ever since the days of the Iran-Contra affair, and must have asked what the heck Feith's people thought they were doing meeting with him!?!??? According to the WaMo article, the Italian mil-intel chief had also checked in with Tenet...

Anyway, the upshot was that Condi Rice's deputy, Stephen Hadley put the word out: No more meetings with Ghorbanifar. But soon enough, the meetings resumed...

Thus far, the whole story seems unexceptional. It is quite possible that Feith and his people-- who don't really know that much about Iran (see Juan Cole's take on this)--could be fairly easily seduced by the promises of that practiced snake-oil salesman Manouchar Ghorbanifar... Especially if he came with the warm recommendation of Wolfowitz consultant Michael LeSleaze...

So I can see Franklin and Rhode going along to the meetings throughout 2002, flush with excitement, thinking, "Hey, for Iraq we've got 'our man' Chalabi-- and now, for Iran, we've got all this hot info from 'our man' Ghorbanifar!!! And we're his main handlers! Yay for us!!!"

I've written much on JWN before about just how eager the neo-cons were to buy all the snake-oil that Chalabi was selling them up to March 2003. (Like here and here.) It doesn't take too much imagination to realize that similar kinds of people hearing the practiced blandishments of old Ghorby could be similarly seduced...

And it seems that, from another end of the story, the reason the FBI made its hurried public announcement on Friday about the investigations and possible arrests at the Franklin end of the case was because CBS's Lesley Stahl was about to break that part of the story on "60 Minutes".

However, a number of intriguing questions and loose ends remain to be clarified:

(1) It seems clearer and clearer to me that, by pursuing the FBI investigations in the case, and then strategically "leaking" some info about them, there are some people in the administration who wanted to smack Feith and his people on this score. Fairly hard. Did the leakers know the trail would also lead to the true hardball players of AIPAC, as well? Who knows?

(2) If Franklin (and perhaps others) wanted to pass on to Israel the alleged "info" about Iran that they were getting from Ghorby--and possibly other internal U.S. government info about Iran-- then why would they do it through AIPAC, of all channels??

Okay, maybe the hope would be that by doing it that way, they would not be passing info directly to any "foreigners", and they would not be doing it for money. On both counts, unlike Jonathan Pollard.

But still, why would anyone at AIPAC agree to being such a conduit? (I realize AIPAC has denied any involvement. Naturally. But I am certain the Fibbies would not have mentioned the organization at all unless they had some hard-and-fast evidence about the involvement of some of its people.)

There are, after all, any number of other pro-Israeli, "American" organizations Franklin could have used as a conduit. And one would think that AIPAC's people would have been professional and savvy enough not to have gotten tangled up with the matter.

One would think. Except that, of course, AIPAC has its share of blunderers and glory-seekers, just like any other organization...

Meanwhile, I have been interested to follow the coverage of this whole affair in Ha'aretz. In Sunday's edition, there were a number of pretty scared-sounding articles on the subject, including this piece by Nathan Guttman titled "'Dual loyalty' slur returns to haunt American Jews". The paper even started a BBC-style "give us your view" page on the issue, that presented quite a bit of discussion on the whole 'dual loyalty' thing.

(Personally, for some of the pro-Likudniks in the US government, I think a bit of "dual" loyalty--implying a degree of loyalty to the wellbeing of the US citizenry as well that of Israelis--might be welcome... But I know full well that most Jewish Americans aren't like them.)

In Monday's edition, however, Ha'aretz seems happy to be able to play the story down. Guttman relievedly led with this:

The U.S. administration believes that the Federal Bureau of Investigation will refrain from charging suspected Pentagon mole Larry Franklin with espionage, American media said Sunday. The FBI apparently lacks any evidence that the Pentagon data analyst was operated by either Israel or the American Israel Public Affairs Commitee (AIPAC).

... And he ended with this:

AIPAC has made no change in its events scheduled to coincide with the Republican National Convention opening Monday in New York. Sunday the lobby co-hosted with other Jewish organizations a major event in New York that was supposed to feature senior Republican Party officials. Jewish sources were hopeful Sunday that the affair will die down in a few days and wind up as an ordinary investigation into a leak, not an espionage scandal. American media outlets Sunday devoted less attention to the mole story, with headlines given over to pre-convention protests in New York.

I sense, from reading the pieces in Ha'aretz and elsewhere that the main focus of Israeli anxiety is not that Israel may become associated in the minds of Americans with any plans for drawing the US into a future war with Iran--a war that is anyway, imho, extremely unlikely at this point-- but rather that at a time when things are notably not going well for the US in Iraq, the attention of Americans may be drawn toward the role Israel and its US proteges already played, in the past, in helping to draw the US government into that war.

In fact, many of the articles in Ha'aretz segué seamlessly between consideration of the two issues, as though they were one.

Does it seem as though, just possibly, some of those Israeli writers have a guilty conscience about their government and its American proteges having--with, it must be admitted, the massive support of the Jewish-Israeli public-- played a huge role in getting the US government into its current entagnglement in Iraq? Yes, it does.

I say: let this discussion begin. Ha'aretz's's Akiva Eldar, to his credit, does a good job of laying out the principal facts of the case in Monday's paper. His main piece of evidence: Feith and Perle's role in the infamous "Clean break" document of 1996.