larry franklin, israel and iran

i rarely quote (or read) madsen - but let me at least use this as a segue:

"Rumsfeld and Israeli spy Larry Franklin reported to have been very close.

Larry Franklin, the Pentagon Office of Special Plans Iran and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst and reserve Air Force Lieutenant Colonel who was temporarily posted at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv, served as a virtual personal liaison for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, according to U.S. intelligence sources who have spoken to WMR. Franklin, who pleaded guilty to passing classified information, including CIA Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI), to two America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) officials who passed the information to an Israeli embassy Mossad agent, was sentenced to twelve years and seven months in prison and a $10,000 fine in January. The two AIPAC employees, Steven Rosen and Keith Weisman, were indicted for illegally receiving classified information. Franklin and other neo-con cell members -- Harold Rhode and Michael Ledeen -- conducted secret negotiations with the knowledge of Rumsfeld and Pentagon policy chief Douglas Feith -- with the Iranian government through the offices of Iran-Contra co-conspirator Manucher Ghorbanifar.

Ledeen has previously tried to point the finger at Condi.

According to U.S. State Department sources, Rhode is also very close to Iranian neo-con ally and Iraqi oil industry majordomo Ahmad Chalabi and that the relationship is said to be more than merely professional.

the idea of Rhodes and Chalabi as lovers? EWWWWWW

Although the Pentagon quickly distanced itself from Franklin after his arrest and revelations of the AIPAC-Mossad espionage program, U.S. intelligence sources report that Franklin accompanied Rumsfeld on his May 1, 2003 and February 26, 2004 trips to Kabul, Afghanistan and acted as his personal Pushto and Dari interpreter with Afghan officials. The sources claim that Franklin had a collegial photograph taken of himself with Rumsfeld and Afghan President Hamid Karzai during the Afghan visit. Franklin also speaks Farsi, Urdu, Arabic, and Hebrew. Franklin boasted to his colleagues that he learned the languages from his Pakistani, Afghan, and Iranian colleagues and bosses while working as a tax cab driver in New York City.

i have no idea what he is getting at here.

U.S. intelligence officials also revealed that Franklin repeatedly attempted to recruit other U.S. intelligence personnel to work in a "NOC" or "non official cover program." Later, it was discovered the "NOC" program was not American but Israeli.

that would be news.

The fact that Franklin was so close to Rumsfeld, whose coterie of advisers has been very small and largely non-inclusive of uniformed military personnel, makes Rumsfeld a prime suspect in the AIPAC espionage case and a possible severe national security risk."

that would also be news.

all of which brings me back to Sibel's interview with Guy James this past week, where she said:

And the fact that through (Perle & Feith's) lobbying firm, they provided a lot of classified information to both Turkey and Israel - and of course, Larry Franklin's involvement in these activities, which has not yet really become public.

which brings me back to the discussion over at DU where i posted Sibel's interview (i've been trying to get my head around the implications of what sibel said, and the comments over at DU).
Mark Levey writes:

"Sibel's point is quite valid -- if I'm correct about what she's hinting at -- all nuclear networks are multinational. An Iran specialist (Plame) would have to also be aware of ties to Pakistan, Turkey, China, Russia and other proliferation sources, because that's where the technology and components have flowed from, or in the case of Turkey, through. Then there are the biggest brokers, moneymen and enablers located in Washington, Bern and Riyadh which she also alludes to.

If (Larisa's) sources say that Plame's focus at BJ during the time she was outed was Iran, I will accept that. No reason to doubt it, and it raises the very interesting issue of Larry Franklin's salting Pentagon files with Iran WMD (dis)information(?) suggested by Naor Gilon, then the Mossad Chief of Station in Washington. This, I've concluded, was Track II of the same operation that stovepiped the Niger Yellowcake forgery through OSP to OVP that found its way into the 2003 State of Union and UN addresses. What Sibel seems to be saying about Franklin also supports a conclusion that Israel was involved in setting up Iraq and Iran for attack. My guess would be that Plame, along with her husband, was involved in debunking the case being assembled by the neocons for preemptive war with both countries."

Sibel (StateSecrets) replies to Levey:

right on - There is more into this; it is not limited to Iran. In fact, Iran was not the primary target. Iran's activities were mainly limited to 'Russia' most of which took place between 1993-1998.

Larisa replies to Levey thusly:

"I think you make an interesting point on Franklin...

The last sentence is not accurate (re Plame/Wilson). But the Franklin point is interesting. I suggest you continue in that direction.
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Go back to my original piece and read about what I say with regard to AQ Kahn and the time frame and what we have since learned. There is no way of saying this without saying too much, but Plame was simply focused on Iran.

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I think, as I have said, the Franklin aspect is interesting. You should follow that line of questions...

Levey adds:

"Franklin also received Iran WMD info from Israel, a la Yellowcake forgeries, that ended up in the reports he wrote at the Pentagon.

and

Here's another strand that ties the Plame and OSP-AIPAC cases.

The MEK, an Iranian resistance group condemned for terrorism, is a common element that runs through this story. The ongoing embrace of MEK is a sign of the continued power weilded by Donald Rumsfeld and other neocons and their efforts to push the U.S. into a war with Iran.

In the summer of 2002, a then little-known Iranian exile group accused Iran of being close to building a nuclear bomb. The neocons pounced on it, and the group was praised by President Bush. This group was the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCIR), an alias front group for the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which the U.S. State Department had designated a terrorist organization in 1997 for its fatal attacks on a variety targets, including several Americans. The NCIR was itself identified by State as a terrorist group in August 2003, but not before it had been publicly embraced, and then spurned, but later secretly embraced again by the Pentagon as a proxy army to carry out armed operations inside Iran. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7369510/site/newsweek /

It's interesting to note that at the same time that the NCIR's Iran WMD accuasations were being promoted by Pentagon neocons, Franklin and Wurmser at the OSP were also in the process of stovepiping phony Iraq WMD documents, the Niger Yellowcake forgeries. Franklin was also busily sharing classified documents with the Israeli Embassy.

Again, we see evidence of a two-track program, directed at Iraq and Iran, by the neocons to plant evidence of WMDs and their efforts to provide a premise for war. The first track of this program paid off when on March 20, 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq.

The NCIR claimed that Iran was making nuclear materials in violation of an agreement made with the IAEC in the mid-1990s to suspend enrichment. According to an April 11 article in Newsweek, a year before the NCIR made its accusations public, the CIA had already reported that Iran had restarted enrichment activitivites at Natanz. This used centrifuges based on a design originally provided by Pakistani proliferator, A.Q. Khan.

It is entirely likely that Valerie Plame was involved in putting together the Agency's 2001 finding. The CIA reportedly concluded that Iran was at least a decade away from a viable weapons program. The neocons, brandishing NCIR materials, then counterattacked, publicly pronouncing proof Iran would have the bomb in as little as 18 months. Here is reason enough, one can reasonably conclude, for the neocon cabal to seek to destroy the CIA's Iran assessment unit, Brewster Jennings, which employed Plame.

As Larissa reported on April 13, Rumsfeld and Cambone have 3000 MEK fighters at a base in eastern Iraq near the Iran border. Since late 2005, it has been suggested the MEK has been used by DoD Special Operations in conjunction with U.S. covert operations inside Iran, where terrorist bomb attacks attributed to MEK have alledgedly killed Iranians. http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/US_outsourcing_specia...

So, one sees, while the neocons failed in their earlier efforts to use the nuclear bomb-making accusations of NCIR as a pretext for preemptive attack on Iran, maybe there is a new hope in some quarters in DoD that MEK terrorism might provoke the Iranians into retaliation, finally providing a pretext for war. That campaign seems to have slowed down a bit in Lebanon, however, which was initially hailed by neocons as the start of a wider war with Iran.

The fact that this involves the same cast of characters as Plamegate and the OSP-AIPAC espionage case isn't one bit surprising. That the DoD/OVP/WHIG leadership are still at it, and the neocons continue to push the U.S. toward war with Iran is startling.

all of which is very interesting, if not a little difficult to piece together. Levey's suggestion that Franklin's chief crime wasn't passing information to israel, but salting the files is indeed intriguing. - as is his Track II argument.

Larisa has previously argued that Iraq was presumed to be a speedhump on the way to an invasion of Iran and that 'something went wrong in the summer of 2003' - as i noted yesterday, the invasion of iran has been 'imminent' for years. it appears to have been an act of luck that it didnt happen way back then, and they've been trying ever since - this past month being just the latest trigger/brink points. and regardless of what happens on monday morning, i strongly suspect that we'll see many more of them in the near future.

coming back to levey's arguments, one of the most remarkable propaganda elements of the franklin story is that he is publicly accused of giving secret info to israel - but as i've tried repeatedly to highlight, he was also giving secret info 'to iran' - i have no idea what secrets he gave to iran, or what this means - but i suspect that there's a very 'good' reason why this part of the story hasnt been covered, at all. it's almost as though the 'israeli spy' story is a limited hangout.

and when you throw in the fact that the pentagon and the state department both supported chalabi, and chalabi told the iranians that the US had broken the iranian codes, and that Franklin was providing both israel and iran with top-secret intelligence, and that franklin was a patsy, and that franklins' boss - harold rhodes - is apparently one of chalabi's lovers... and, well, it starts to look complicated all of a sudden, doesn't it?