Now here's another one. Manucher Ghorbanifar, one of the key scamsters that suckered Ollie North and his team of hot-shot amateur spy-diplomats back during the Reagan Administration, figures in yet another dispute between Rummy and the CIA (my emphasis):
The drama's central figure is Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer based in Paris who was involved in the Iran-Contra affair during the Reagan administration.The CIA wound up following up on one of Ghorbanifar's bogus tips and nothing came of it. They made a point of saying afterward that Ghorbanifar "a fabricator who has peddled false information for financial gain".
At that time, the CIA gave him two lie detector tests, which he failed. In 1984 and 1985 the CIA issued two "burn notices", warning all members of the US government not to go anywhere near him.
That did not stop two Pentagon officials from meeting Mr Ghorbanifar in December 2001 in Paris and January 2002 in Rome, lured by his promises to build bridges to influential Iranians who were interested in bringing down the Tehran theocracy.
The meetings took place in secrecy, intelligence sources say, and the CIA director, George Tenet, and the secretary of state, Colin Powell, only found about them when the Rome meeting was reported by the US ambassador to Italy.
Nevertheless, according to one source, the meetings continued until they were leaked to the press this summer and the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, ordered a halt.
But Mr Ghorbanifar maintained lines of communication with the neoconservative thinktank, the American Enterprise Institute, and in particular a friend from the Reagan days, Michael Ledeen, and through him passed on an extraordinary story.
This can't be good. It just can't be good. We've been here before. Been there, done that. It didn't work out at all.
Tags: bud mcfarlane, eliot abrams, iran-contra affair, john poindexter, nanucher ghorbanifar, michael ledeen, oliver north
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