IRANAMOKAGAIN

Secret Talks With Iranian: Sources: Meetings 'unauthorized' (Knut Royce and Timothy M. Phelps, August 8, 2003, Newsday)

Pentagon hardliners pressing for regime change in Iran have held secret and unauthorized meetings in Paris with a controversial arms dealer who was a major figure in the Iran-contra scandal, according to administration officials.

The officials said at least two Pentagon officials working for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith have held "several" meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian middleman in U.S. arms-for-hostage shipments to Iran in the mid-1980s.

The administration officials who disclosed the secret meetings to Newsday said the talks with Ghorbanifar were not authorized by the White House and appeared to be aimed at undercutting current sensitive back channel negotiations with the Iranian regime.

"They [the Pentagon officials] were talking to him [Ghorbanifar] about stuff which they weren't officially authorized to do," said a senior administration official. "It was only accidentally that certain parts of our government learned about it."

The official would not identify those "parts" of the government, but a former intelligence official confirmed they are the State Department, the CIA and the White House, itself.

The senior official and another administration source who confirmed that the meetings had taken place said that the ultimate policy objective of Feith and a group of neo-conservatives civilians inside the Pentagon is regime change in Iran. [...]

The senior administration official identified two of the Defense officials who met with Ghorbanifar as Harold Rhode, Feith's top Middle East specialist, and Larry Franklin, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst on loan to the undersecretary's office.

Rhode recently acted as a liaison between Feith's office, which drafted much of the administration's post-Iraq planning, and Ahmed Chalabi, a former Iraqi exile disdained by the CIA and State Department but groomed for leadership by the Pentagon.

Rhode is a protege of Michael Ledeen, a neo-conservative who was a National Security Council consultant in the mid-1980s when he introduced Ghorbanifar to Oliver North, a National Security Council aide, and others in the opening stages of the Iran-contra affair.

A former CIA officer who himself was involved in some aspects of the Iran-contra scandal said that current intelligence officers told him it was Ledeen who reopened the Ghorbanifar channel with Feith's staff.

Ledeen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and an ardent advocate for regime change in Iran, would neither confirm nor deny that he arranged for the Ghorbanifar meetings. "I'm not going to comment on any private meetings with any private people," he said. "It's nobody's business."

Can't wait to hear folks start trying to explain to the American people, who justifiably loathe the Iranian government, why working for regime change is a bad thing.

MORE:
Pentagon met with discredited figure from Iran-Contra scandal (PETE YOST, August 8, 2003, AP)

Pentagon officials met over a three-day period in late 2001 with a long-discredited Iranian who was a middleman in the Iran-Contra scandal, Defense Department officials said Friday.

Manucher Ghorbanifar sat in on a series of meetings in Europe between two defense officials and two other Iranians who the Bush administration had been told had information useful to the United States in its then-fledgling global war on terrorism, a senior defense official said on condition of anonymity. The meetings occurred not long after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he said.

One of those two defense officials in the 2001 meetings also had another chance contact in 2003 with Ghorbanifar, the Pentagon source said late Friday. The 2003 meeting was unplanned and unscheduled, the source said.

Earlier Friday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said at President Bush's Texas ranch that Pentagon officials met more than a year ago with Ghorbanifar, and referred to it as a single meeting.

Standing at Rumsfeld's side, Bush said, "We support the aspirations of those who desire freedom in Iran" when he was asked if the meeting with Ghorbanifar was a good idea and if his administration wants a regime change in Iran.

Are AP and Newsday even reporting the same story? Posted by Orrin Judd at August 8, 2003 8:46 PM