Lawrence A. Franklin--AIPAC--Chalabi

It reads like the plot of a spy novel. I'm talking about the arrest of uber neocon Larry Franklin for passing classified information to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com explains it all in an article for The American Conservative, State of the State Secrets. It goes to the heart of the manufactured "intelligence" that took us to war in Iraq and the part pro Israeli forces played in those decisions.

An analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency, Franklin served in the Air Force Reserve and did several tours of duty attached to the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv. As Iran desk officer with the Defense Undersecretary for Policy, Near East South Asia, Franklin later moved to Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), where he and his fellow neocons cooked the intelligence on Iraq according to Ahmad Chalabi’s special recipe and then served it up piping hot to Dick Cheney’s boys, who delivered it straight to the White House. As Seymour Hersh relates, they called themselves "the Cabal"—a bit of self-mockery that, in retrospect, seems all too descriptive. OSP functioned, in effect, as a parallel intelligence agency. Its mission was to bypass the CIA, the DIA, and the mainline intelligence community and give the War Party the answers they wanted.

And now we add more shady characters from Douglas Feith's office, an Italian and some Iranians to the mix.

In December 2001, Franklin, along with Harold Rhode, a Middle East expert and Franklin’s colleague in Feith’s policy shop, and neoconservative writer Michael Ledeen—at the time working for Feith as a consultant—met with the infamous Manucher Ghorbanifar, of Iran-Contra fame, and a group of Iranians, including a former high official of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Also in attendance: Nicolo Pollari, head of the Italian intelligence service, and Italian Defense Minister Antonio Martino. As writer Laura Rozen tells it, Ghorbanifar told me he has had fifty meetings with Michael Ledeen since September 11th, and that he has given Ledeen ‘4,000 to 5,000 pages of sensitive documents’ concerning Iran, Iraq and the Middle East, ‘material no one else has received.’"

In trying to discover how Iran had gotten its hands on vital U.S. secrets, including information on how the U.S. was eavesdropping on the Iranian government’s encrypted internal communications, the FBI must surely have taken some interest in these activities. Their chief suspect, after all, was Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress supplied much of the grist for the OSP’s mill.

A raid on Chalabi’s Baghdad headquarters brought the whole affair into the open, and the Chalabi investigation has reared its head again in the Franklin affair. The Washington Post reports that the initial stage of the inquiry into Chalabi’s activities as a double agent "focused on the activities of a US military reservist who was serving at the US Embassy in Israel."

I suggest you read the entire article to get the picture of how the neocons agenda is actually the agenda of the ultra conservative faction of our "ally", Israel.

Like a dorsal fin poking just above the water, the Franklin spy trial promises us a glimpse of a creature much larger than appears at first sight. Whether the trial will draw it up to the surface remains to be seen. In any case, the magnitude of the problem posed by the covert activities of our ally—heretofore ignored or covered up—is all too clear.