Keeping Secrets From the CIA. Why was CIA cut out of clandestine meetings with Iranian informants?

[maddezmom]

The Senate Intelligence Committee is about to release a report that sheds new light on "inappropriate" back-channel contacts between Pentagon officials and a group of Iranian informants—including a key figure from the Iran-contra affair.

In December 2001, two Pentagon Mideast experts—Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode—secretly traveled to Rome. They met with a group of Iranians who supposedly had information about plans by Iranian-backed terrorists to attack Americans—including U.S. troops who were then closing in on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The meetings were approved by high-level officials at the White House and the Pentagon. The CIA, however, was kept in the dark. When the CIA and the State Department found out about the meetings a few weeks later, they strenuously protested to the White House and demanded that the contacts be terminated immediately. At least officially, the White House complied.

Now, years later, the Senate Intelligence Committee is finally producing a report on its investigation of those meetings. The document is part of the panel's "phase two" investigation into the misuse of pre-Iraq War intelligence. The report is not likely to satisfy either the White House or the administration's most vocal critics. While Intelligence Committee officials are keeping details of the report under wraps, several sources familiar with its contents—who asked for anonymity discussing an unpublished report—said that congressional investigators found nothing illegal about the secret contacts. The meetings were brokered by two Iran-contra figures: Michael Ledeen, a Washington academic and prominent neoconservative activist who was close to a number of senior Bush administration officials at the time, and Manucher Ghorbanifar, a Paris-based Iranian businessman who served as a middleman for arms deals in the 1980s and was long ago branded a "fabricator" by the CIA. U.S. intelligence agencies said at the time that Ghorbanifar had a history of offering information that proved unreliable.

But in the report, the panel does conclude that senior Bush administration officials (including then deputy Defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz and deputy national-security adviser Stephen Hadley) approved the meetings without informing the CIA or its director at the time, George Tenet, thereby allowing intelligence gathering outside of normal channels. The sources say the report also suggests that Ledeen misled the National Security Council about the meetings--a charge that Ledeen strongly denied this week in an e-mail exchange with NEWSWEEK.

morehttp://www.newsweek.com/id/136084

[bananas]

1. k&r nt

[Uncle Joe]

2. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, maddezmom.

[yurbud]

3. if the CIA had been there, they might have called bullshit on the whole deal.

[sofa king]

4. Hmm. Rome, Franklin, Ghorbanifar and Ledeen and not one mention of "Niger" or "Israel."

That's some mighty snake-like writing to slither between those scandals in order to spin a yarn about a third.

[bobthedrummer]

5. The neocon dominated folks clustered about Rumsfeld/Cheney (called "the crazies", "the cabal",

"Vulcans", etc) created their own "intelligence group" designed to bypass Congressional oversight, traditional national security checks and balances, and everything else so that their extreme RW criminal agenda(s) could proceed-as it has.