Franklin moved over to the Pentagon from DIA, where he became the Iran expert, working for Bill Luti and Undersecretary of Defense for Planning, Douglas Feith. He was the "go to" person on Iran for Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and for Feith. This situation is pretty tragic, since Franklin is not a real Iranist. His main brief appears to have been to find ways to push a policy of overthrowing its government (apparently once Iraq had been taken care of). This project has been pushed by the shadowy eminence grise, Michael Ledeen, for many years, and Franklin coordinated with Ledeen in some way. Franklin was also close to Harold Rhode, a long-time Middle East specialist in the Defense Department who has cultivated far right pro-Likud cronies for many years, more or less establishing a cell within the Department of Defense.
UPI via Dawn reports,
' An UPI report said another under-investigation official Mr Rhode "practically lived out of (Ahmad) Chalabi's office". Intelligence sources said that CIA operatives observed Mr Rhode as being constantly on his cell phone to Israel, discussing US plans, military deployments, political projects and a discussion of Iraq assets. '
Josh Marshall, Laura Rozen and Paul Glastris have just published a piece in the Washington Monthly that details Franklin's meetings with corrupt Iranian arms dealer and con man Manuchehr Ghorbanifar, who had in the 1980s played a key role in the Iran-contra scandal. (For more on the interviews with Ghorbanifar, see Laura Rozen's web log). It is absolutely key that the meetings were attended also by Rhode, Ledeen and the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, Nicolo Pollari, as well as Rome's Minister of Defense, Antonio Martino.
The rightwing government of corrupt billionnaire Silvio Berlusconi, including Martino, was a big supporter of an Iraq war. Moreover, we know that the forged documents falsely purporting to show Iraqi uranium purchases from Niger originated with a former SISMI agent. Watch the reporting of Josh Marshall for more on this SISMI/Ledeen/Rhode connection
http://www.juancole.com/2004/08/pentagonisrael-spying-case-expands.html"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."
A veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal, Ledeen played an important role in the "arms for hostages" scheme by setting up meetings between the American government and the Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Not all that unexpected coming from a self-proclaimed advocate of Machiavelli's amoralism. Today, Ledeen is among the most visible and radical neoconservative ideologues whose passion for a campaign of serial "regime-change" in the Middle East is undiminished by the Iraqi debacle. Just as the Roman senator Cato the Elder finished his perorations with the command "Carthage must be destroyed," so Michael "Creative Destruction" Ledeen closes his hopped-up warmongering essays with "Faster, please!," an exhortation presumably addressed to his confreres in the Bush administration.
Ledeen has kept the neocon faith – and the same friends – for all these years. He's still buddies with Ghorbanifar. In December 2001, he had a meeting in Rome with Ghorbanifar in the company of the Pentagon's top Iran specialist, Larry Franklin, and Harold Rhode, assigned to the Office of Net Assessment, a Pentagon think tank. Also at the Rome conclave: a number of Ghorbanifar's Iranian friends, including a former senior official of the Revolutionary Guard. Rounding out the distinguished guest list, we have the Italian delegation, consisting of SISMI head honcho Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, and Italian Defense Minister Antonio Martino, a neocon favorite. Once again, Ledeen plays the middleman – but what kind of a deal was he trying to negotiate?
<snip>
"According to one former senior U.S. intelligence official who maintained excellent contacts with serving U.S. intelligence officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, 'Rhode practically lived out of (Ahmed) Chalabi's office.' This same source quoted the intelligence official with the CPA as saying, 'Rhode was observed by CIA operatives as being constantly on his cell phone to Israel,' and that the information that the intelligence officials overheard him passing to Israel was 'mind-boggling,' this source said. It dealt with U.S. plans, military deployments, political projects, discussion of Iraq assets, and a host of other sensitive topics, the former senior U.S. intelligence official said."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7681Michael Ledeen’s Fingers in the Niger Yellowcake
Tuesday October 25th 2005, 7:25 pm
Some of us, those who pay attention, have suspected for some time the fraudulent Niger yellowcake documents—so crudely slapped together as to be laughable—are tied to Michael Ledeen, the neocon’s neocon, who is connected to the neofascist Italian military intelligence agency, SISMI. Ledeen’s role in dispensing these bogus documents—a puzzle piece fitting into the larger scam used as a pretext by Bush and Crew to invade a helpless Iraq—is so well-known it has made it into the Wikipedia entry on the yellowcake forgery:
In an interview published April 7, 2005,
was asked by Ian Masters what he would say if it was asserted that the source of the forgery was former National Security Council and State Department consultant Michael Ledeen. (Ledeen had also allegedly been a liaison between the American Intelligence Community and SISMI two decades earlier.) Cannistraro answered by saying: “you’d be very close.”
Ledeen’s connection to SISMI goes way back—all the way back to Ledeen fingering the late and pathetic brother of Jimmy Carter, Billy, for allegedly hanging out with Yasser Arafat and George Habash, a PLO military leader, in Libya in October of 1978. Ledeen accused Carter of taking loans and expense money from the Libyans. (Obviously, this an old trick, used over and over, as the neocons now accuse British MP George Galloway of taking money from Saddam)
“‘SISMI was the architect of the scandal over Billy Carter,’ and that the material in this case was gathered mostly by Pazienza and by his American friend Michael Ledeen,” Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead write in their book, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (Sheridan Square Publications, 1986). As it turns out, Francesco Pazienza “was ultimately indicted in an Italian court (with Ledeen as an unindicted co-conspirator) for luring President Carter’s brother Billy into a compromising relationship with Qaddafi during the 1980 presidential campaign,” explain Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter (The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in Reagan Era,1987). In short, Ledeen is a dirty trickster, having cavorted with fascist elements in SISMI to undermine a presidential election in the United States. (see the Wikipeadia entry on Ledeen.)
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=84
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