Chalabi Reportedly Told Iran That U.S. Had Code

WASHINGTON, June 1 — 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 general charge that Mr. Chalabi provided Iran with critical American intelligence secrets was widely reported last month after the Bush administration cut off financial aid to Mr. Chalabi's organization, the Iraqi National Congress, and American and Iraqi security forces raided his Baghdad headquarters.

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.

Mr. Chalabi and his aides have said he knew of no secret information related to Iran and therefore could not have communicated any intelligence to Tehran.

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 Iranians sent what American intelligence regarded as a test message, which mentioned a cache of weapons inside Iraq, believing that if the code had been broken, United States military forces would be quickly dispatched to the specified site. But there was no such action.

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. So far, no one has been accused of any wrongdoing.

In a television interview on May 23, Mr. Chalabi said on CNN's "Late Edition" that he met in Tehran in December with the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami. He also said he had met with Iran's minister of information.

Mr. Chalabi attacked the C.I.A. and the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, saying the agency was behind what Mr. Chalabi asserted was an effort to smear him.

"I have never passed any classified information to Iran or have done anything — participated in any scheme of intelligence against the United States," Mr. Chalabi said on "Fox News Sunday." "This charge is false. I have never seen a U.S. classified document, and I have never seen — had a U.S. classified briefing."

Mr. Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, said, "We meet people from the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad regularly," but said that was to be expected of Iraqi officials like himself.

Some defenders of Mr. Chalabi in the United States say that American officials encouraged him in his dealings with Iran, urging him to open an office in Tehran in hopes of improving relations between Iran and Washington. Those defenders also say that they do not believe his relationship with Iran involved any exchange of intelligence.

Mr. Chalabi's allies in Washington also saw the Bush administration's decision to sever its ties with Mr. Chalabi and his group as a cynical effort instigated by the C.I.A. and longtime Chalabi critics at the State Department. They believe those agencies want to blame him for mistaken estimates and incorrect information about Iraq before the war, like whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

One of those who has defended Mr. Chalabi is Richard N. Perle, the former chairman of the Defense Policy Board. "The C.I.A. has disliked him passionately for a long time and has mounted a campaign against him with some considerable success," Mr. Perle said Tuesday. `I've seen no evidence of improper behavior on his part. No evidence whatsoever."

Mr. Perle said he thought the C.I.A. had turned against Mr. Chalabi because he refused to be the agency's "puppet." Mr. Chalabi "has a mind of his own," Mr. Perle said.

American intelligence officials said that the F.B.I. investigation into the intelligence leak to Iran did not extend to any charges that Mr. Chalabi provided the United States with incorrect information, or any allegations of corruption.

American officials said the leak about the Iranian codes was a serious loss because the Iranian intelligence service's highly encrypted cable traffic was a crucial source of information, supplying Washington with information about Iranian operations inside Iraq, where Tehran's agents have become increasingly active. It also helped the United States keep track of Iranian intelligence operations around the world.

Until last month, the Iraqi National Congress had a lucrative contract with the Defense Intelligence Agency to provide information about Iraq. Before the United States invasion last year, the group arranged for Iraqi defectors to provide the Pentagon with information about Saddam Hussein's government, particularly evidence purporting to show that Baghdad had active programs to develop weapons of mass destruction. Today, the American intelligence community believes that much of the information passed by the defectors was either wrong or fabricated.

I don't post here but once in a blue moon but I read FR all the time and hold all of you in high esteem. Section9 is absolutely right -- horse hockey to the MAX. All the bits and pieces came together for me when I read Jack Wheeler's analysis, which I must post in its entirety due to restricted (subscriber-only) access:

THE REAL SCANDAL IN IRAQ
Behind The Lines
Dr. Jack Wheeler
Thursday, May 27, 2004

In order to understand what is going on in Iraq right now, it is simply imperative that you do a quick re-read of Childishness in Iraq written in August of 2003 and posted in Classics. This will give you the initial background on Ahmad Chalabi and the source of the vendetta Jordan’s King Hussein, the CIA, and the State Department have been conducting against him.

What’s changed is that the line in the second paragraph about Jerry Bremer following the lead of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz rather than “his putative bosses at State” is no longer true. Bremer’s real boss is Robert Blackwill, Deputy National Security Advisor at the White House. He is directly in charge of US policy and operations in Iraq, and he has sold out to the squishes at State and the CIA. Which means he has sold America out to the UN.

This is a first-class disaster, folks. It is the real scandal in Iraq, not the humiliation of Baathist thugs by seven yahoos in one cell block of Abu Ghraib. The trashing of Ahmad Chalabi, epitomized by Newsweek’s cover story this week entitled “Our Con Man in Iraq,” means that State and the CIA have staged a coup in Iraq – and that only Chalabi had the guts to oppose it. So he had to be destroyed.

Here’s the sordid deal. Just like Chalabi exposed King Hussein’s conspiracy with Saddam Hussein to dismember Saudi Arabia in 1990 (again, read Childishness in Iraq), and warned that the CIA’s plot to have Iraqi officers overthrow Saddam in 1996 had been penetrated (it was, it failed, dozens of officers were shot), so now Chalabi exposed Saddam’s gigantic oil-for-food bribery scheme.

It was Chalabi’s people who found the Oil Ministry documents and gave an initial summary of the bribes to an Iraqi newspaper, Al Mada, which published a list of 270 bribe-takers on January 29, 2004. Billions of dollars in bribes were dispensed by Saddam through the UN program to politicians, bureaucrats, and journalists in over a score of countries – including the son of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the crook who administered the program, Benon Savon, and vast numbers of French, German, and Russian officials.

And Chalabi has the goods on them all. "The Iraqi regime, like all dictatorships, kept meticulous records with countless cross-references," he notes – and all those records are in his and the Iraqi National Congress’ possession.

This left Bob Blackwill with a choice. He could cooperate with Chalabi, authorize a full independent forensic accounting of the bribery scheme, use its disclosure to flush out the massive corruption within the UN bureaucracy and force French, German, Russian, and UN support for securing peace and democracy for Iraq. Or he could panic, demonize Chalabi, and make a deal with Kofi Annan that in exchange for squelching the scandal, the UN would give its imprimatur over the creation of an interim Iraqi government to be appointed by a UN bureaucrat, Lakhdar Bhrahimi.

Now you see why this is such a disaster. The tragedy is that it could have been the total opposite, an opportunity at last to put the insufferable arrogance of Kofi Annan’s United Nations and the America-hating “international community” on a leash. The Bush White House has instead acted precisely as we would expect of a Kerry White House – sell out control of American foreign policy and national security to the UN.

For the blame cannot be laid just at Blackwill. There can be no “If only the Czar knew” cop-out. George Bush has failed us here. He has wimped out. His support of Rumsfeld and refusal to fire him over Abu Ghraib was not from strength, but from weakness. He was allowed to keep Rummy as long as control of Iraq was taken away from the Pentagon and given to State.

Bush’s capitulation was formalized on May 11, when he signed a National Security Presidential Directive giving the State Department full authority to direct US operations in Iraq after June 30, and not the Pentagon.

This is why the raid on Chalabi’s home in Baghdad on May 20, conducted by Iraqi and US security forces and CIA agents, was not only done without Rumsfeld’s approval, it was done without his knowledge. It was ordered by Bob Blackwill via Jerry Bremer, who did not say a word of the order to the Pentagon.

Then the media campaign to trash Chalabi was launched, with every pimp for State and prostitute for the CIA in journalism – from traditional Pogos like Newsweek and the New York Times to websites like Stratfor to columnists like Arnaud de Borchgrave -- parroting every slander State-CIA could invent.

Arnaud’s case is especially sad, for he is converting his reputation as a legendary war correspondent into that of a trollop who writes what he’s bidden by the countries and agencies that pay him to do so. Thus he writes in a UPI column on May 20, “With Tehran’s blessing, Chalabi went to establish cordial relations with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq’s supreme Shiite leader.” Arnaud knows full well this is a lie – that the Mullahs in Tehran want Sistani killed – they are terrified of him setting up a separate Shia power center in Iraq and are backing the cleric-thug Muqtada al-Sadr. Yet he writes it anyway, because he was instructed to do a hit piece.

Perhaps you’re wondering here, “Yes, Jack, I know that the State Department is riddled with and run by liberal squishes – but surely the CIA folks aren’t, right?”

This may disillusion some, but the demoralizing truth is that Langley is dominated by left-wing gutless bureaucrats just like Foggy Bottom. There are a lot of good people in the Agency (or, for old timers, The Three Bad Words), especially in paramilitary ops. But a very substantial fraction of Langley desk-jockeys are as squishy as any pinstripe.

The tragic fact is that the CIA has never recovered from its emasculation by Senator Frank Church (D-ID) and Jimmy Carter’s DCI Stansfield Turner in the 1970s. Bill Casey under Reagan didn’t have the time before Iran-Contra to turn it around. Thus the disgrace of the CIA’s pathological support of Islamofascist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan in the 1980s – which was responsible for the Taliban’s seizure of power and Al Qaeda given sanctuary in Afghanistan from where the September 11 attack on America was planned.

This story is told in Gulbuddin and the CIA, written in October 2001, updated and posted in Classics.

Now we can see that the biggest mistake of George Bush’s presidency was not firing Clinton’s holdover, George Tenet and installing his own CIA Director. Tenet and Blackwill, with Colin Powell’s acquiescence, have staged a palace coup, overthrowing Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz regarding Iraq.

With Chalabi out of the way and the Oil-For-Food scandal squelched, they are free to have their stooge, octogenarian Adnan Pachachi named by Brahimi as Iraq’s interim president. This will delight all the Arab dictators and princes in the Middle East, as he is a fellow Sunni Arab, and will signal the intention of the US to help keep them in power. It will infuriate the Kurds and Shias who comprise over 80% of Iraqis.

Real democracy in Iraq and the Middle East? Fuhgeddaboutit. The pinstripe and spook sophisticates are far too “realistic” to lift a finger to achieve it – and will do their level best to stymie any effort to. They will do whatever is necessary to ensure George Bush’s noble dream of real freedom for Iraq remains a pipedream.

So as our soldiers continue to win the war in Iraq militarily, the war is already lost politically. That, folks, is the real scandal in Iraq.

* * *

NOTE: The article referenced in the first paragraph is available to non-subscribers and I STRONGLY urge you to read it. It explains so much, and all the usual suspects emerge in all the usual places. Also one or two AHA! moments.

GO: http://tothepointnews.com/article.php?id=99&i=

NOTE: I should also say I am still optimistic that GWB & Rumsfeld are a coupla steps ahead of this little State/CIA party. It seems to me the Staties have displayed a bit of flailing desperation here, that reeks of overplaying their hand. Patience is in order, and patience is what GWB OWNS. A few very smart guys (Perle, Ledeen, someone at Am Spectator) have even speculated that the smear of Chalabi may actually improve his chances of one day being duly elected in Iraq. And please do not misunderstand: Chalabi is in no way a saint or a savior or the end all, be all. But the trashing of Chalabi represents a far greater concern re: our internal war behind the war.

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