On Monday, in this space, I stated what for me was obvious: that Larry Franklin, the apparent Israeli spy, and Ahmad Chalabi, the known Israeli spy and leading Friend of Neocons, were peas in a pod. I wrote:
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.
Today’s Washington Post reports exactly that. It’s a stunning break in the Franklin case, which isn’t really the Franklin case at all, but a broader counterintelligence inquiry aimed at the Pentagon’s nest of spies run by Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and Bill Luti. The circle, it ought to be obvious, is blissfully leaking secrets to the likes of Chalabi and AIPAC, and apparently blundered not once, but twice now—most recently when they sent Franklin stumbling into a meeting with AIPAC and the Embassy of Israel. Says the Post:
FBI counterintelligence agents are investigating whether several Pentagon officials leaked classified information to Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, according to a law enforcement official and other people familiar with the case.
Several sources familiar with the case say the probe now extends to other Pentagon personnel who have a particular interest in assisting both Israel and Chalabi, the former Iraqi dissident who was long a Pentagon favorite but who has fallen out of favor with the U.S. government.
Hmm. Who could that be? Which “personnel” might want to assist both Israel and Chalabi? Now the point is, assisting Israel and Chalabi makes sense because they are the same thing. And of course Chalabi isn’t spying for Iran, unless you think trying to build up the already existing Iran-Israel axis (remember Iran-contra) means spying for Iran. Chalabi is on Israel’s team, and vice versa, and so are the neocons. For a decade, they’ve been scheming to topple Saddam Hussein, wreak havoc in the Arab world, and boost the security of Israel. Before that, from 1979 to 1988, Israel supported Iran in its war with Iraq, helped arm the mullahs, and built strong connections to Iran’s military-industrial complex. Chalabi has multiple ties to the Israelis, and both have multiple ties to Iran and to various components of Iraq’s restive Shiite gangs.
The Post quotes a follower of Feith and Co. charging that the whole spy inquiry is just some petty CIA vendetta against “neoconservatives”:
Another official, an ideological ally of Feith's, said, however, that the investigation is part of an effort by some in the intelligence community to discredit Pentagon hawks. "This is part of a civil war within the administration, a basic dislike between the old CIA and neoconservatives," the official said.
But since when are “the CIA” and “neoconservatives” equal players? The CIA and the FBI are charged with protecting national security, a job that they do with, let’s say, uneven success. But the neoconservatives have a decades-long history of spying for Israel. This has long been known to U.S. counterintelligence officials. For the first time in memory it seems that the CIA and the FBI are actually doing something about it.
The N.Y. Daily News—the Daily News!—reports that the real target of the investigation is the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. (Anyone seen Abe Shulsky lately? What’s he doing anyway? Shulsky was the first director of OSP, and I was the first to out him in The American Prospect in 2002.). Anyway, the Daily News :
An unorthodox Pentagon outfit responsible for much of the Bush administration's discredited intelligence on Iraq is the target of a broad FBI national security probe, sources told the New York Daily News Wednesday.
The secretive Office of Special Plans and a related project are being investigated over how they obtained top-secret intelligence and whom they shared it with, according to four federal sources.
"It involves the improper transfer of information," said one source briefed on the case. "A lot more is going to come out."
So AIPAC is being watched, the Israeli Embassy has clammed up, AEI is not saying much and Franklin is getting ready to sing in front of a grand jury:
Franklin is expected to testify about his activities next week before a federal grand jury, said a fifth federal source.
The intelligence source said it's not clear what, if anything, Franklin will be charged with, "but I doubt it will be full-blown espionage."
No, it will be half-blown espionage. Or, make that fully blown.
Now since the investigation was announced to Condi Rice and Steve Hadley two years ago, the question is: Did they tell Elliot Abrams? If so, they blew the investigation, because Abrams is part of the conspiracy. I hope the FBI was watching who told who what at the White House, but it’s obvious that this investigation was known to all the principals since 2002. I suppose they assumed they were so powerful that no one, no one would accuse them of being spies. We’ll see. That rag, the New York Sun—home of Eli Lake, junior mouthpiece of neocons—is reporting that the Attorney General Ashcroft himself is intervening in the case, possibly because his special pipeline to Jesus told him that Zionists must be protected at all costs. From the Sun :
According to sources familiar with the investigation, the U.S. district attorney in charge of the probe, Paul McNulty, has ordered the FBI not to move forward with arrests that they were prepared to make last Friday when the story broke on CNN and CBS. 'He put the brakes on it in order to look at it,' a source familiar with the investigation told the Sun. 'To see what was there. Basically the FBI wanted to start making arrests and McNulty said "Woa, based on what? Let's look at this before you do anything.”
Mr. McNulty was only assigned the case by Attorney General Ashcroft last Friday when federal agents came to AIPAC's offices in Washington to request files and hard drives. 'Ashcroft wanted to make sure this case was being handled properly,' the source familiar with the probe said. 'I would not expect any action on this for at least three weeks.' This source added that a grand jury is now being selected, but it was likely the charges, initially reported as espionage, would be scaled back to the mishandling of classified information.
Sure, let’s “scale it back.” Why not? It’s only a few neoconservatives.
