Friday, September 29, 2006

Madsen on Sibel, Plame, Grossman, Dickersons and Brewster Jennings

The following is taken from Wayne Madsen, in full.
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Sep. 28, 2006 -- SPECIAL REPORT. CIA counter-proliferation front company's cover blown by State Department official two years before White House leak to media.

U.S. intelligence sources, speaking on conditions of strict anonymity, have told WMR that the cover status of Brewster Jennings & Associates, the counter-proliferation front company that Valerie Plame Wilson and her CIA counter-proliferation non-official cover (NOC) colleagues used as a front for their operations, was blown in two phone calls placed in June 2001 to two foreign intelligence agents in Washington, DC by then-Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman. The calls were intercepted by the FBI, which had targeted the communications of Grossman and the two foreign intelligence agents as part of a counter-intelligence investigation, according to the sources.

The FBI counter-intelligence operation was investigating a weapons smuggling and influence-peddling ring that was centered on the activities of the American Turkish Council (ATC). a major Turkish lobbying organization in Washington, DC headed up by George H. W. Bush National Security Adviser, retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft. According to U.S. intelligence sources, a principal player in the ring was Grossman, a career foreign service officer who served as U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 1994 to 1997 and then moved back to Washington where he served as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs.

At the end of June 2001, the FBI learned, through its surveillance of the ring, Beyaz Enerji (White Energy), a Turkish energy firm, told its ATC interlocutors in Washington that it was sending a high-level team to the United States to negotiate the procurement of nuclear materials for Turkey's nuclear power program (the term "white" or "beyaz" in the name of the firm refers to "clean" energy). In turn, the ATC contacted four individuals who had access to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico and asked them to arrange a three month visit to the labs by the Turkish nuclear specialists (October through December 2001) to ascertain Turkish requirements.

The Beyaz Energy group also made known its desire to purchase U.S. nuclear energy consulting firms that maintained access to facilities like Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore in California. However, at the same time Beyaz Energy was making its play for access into U.S. nuclear labs, Brewster Jennings and Associates, the CIA cover company of Valerie Plame Wilson, was very close to penetrating the Beyaz Energy ring, known to the CIA as part of a major nuclear black market operation involving key players in Turkey, Pakistan, Israel, Iran, and the former Soviet Central Asian states. According to CIA sources, the ring also involved a key ATC ally in Washington -- the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a group that provided important access to top U.S. political leaders for Turkish military and industrial chiefs.

When Beyaz Energy began to encounter "consultants" with Brewster Jennings, they expressed an interest to their ATC interlocutors in buying the firm along with other energy consulting companies.

According to U.S. intelligence sources, at the end of June 2001, the FBI intercepted two phone calls from Grossman in which he told the called parties to "stay away from Brewster Jennings... they're the government . . . they're nothing but a cover." One of the calls was to a Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) top agent in Washington. The other call, bearing an almost identical message, was made to a Northrop Grumman official who was a key player with the ATC. The Northrop Grumman official made a phone call to his ATC handler, stating, "Our guy warned us off Brewster Jennings." A U.S. intelligence source stated that "Grossman's name was all over the FBI wiretaps in 2001" and the name "Brewster Jennings" first became known to the FBI counter-intelligence agents from these intercepts.

According to CIA sources, Brewster Jennings and Associates was "finished" in the Summer of 2001. Plame was transferred to the CIA's Counter-proliferation Division's Joint Task Force on Iraq (JTFI), where she and her colleagues were pressured to come up with "evidence" of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

Grossman, who now works for the Cohen Group of former Defense Secretary William Cohen, was, according to U.S. intelligence sources, a subject of interest to counter-intelligence agents since his stint as U.S. ambassador in Ankara. One of Grossman's embassy officials was U.S. Air Force Major Douglas Dickerson, who worked in the embassy's military attaché office and was responsible for logistics matters with the Turkish military. While in Ankara, Dickerson met and later married Melek Can Harputlu, who U.S. intelligence sources claim was on the payroll of the MIT (Mýllý Ýstýhbarat Teskýlati) -- the Turkish Intelligence Agency. U.S. intelligence sources confirmed that Grossman ordered Dickerson to assist International Advisors, Inc. (IAI), a lobbying firm registered in 1989 by Douglas Feith under the stewardship of Richard Perle. The main task of IAI was to represent the government of Turkey in the United States and "promote the objective of U.S.-Turkey defense industrial cooperation."

IAI, for which Feith was CEO and sole stockholder, also steered hundreds of thousands of dollars to Feith's law firm, Feith and Zell (FANZ), which, along with Perle, was involved in setting up the Bosnia Defense Fund and amassed millions of dollars of contributions from Muslim countries for Bosnia. A Riggs Bank source confirmed that Perle was not concerned when it was discovered that Bosnian funds were being used to buy arms that were falling into the hands of Iranian and Al Qaeda units in Bosnia and that when confronted with these problems, shouted to the Riggs interlocutor, "just make it fucking happen!"

Soon, Dickerson, under Grossman's aegis, was promoted to handle all U.S. weapons procurement for Turkey, Azerbaijan (where Richard Armitage was heading up the U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce), Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan. In 1996, the Defense Department's Inspector General's office launched an investigation of a U.S. military officer at the Ankara embassy who was caught receiving a bribe from MIT agents. Shortly after the investigation started, Dickerson was transferred to a U.S. Air Force base in Germany. Dickerson's wife, Melek Can worked for the German-Turkish Business and Cultural Association, known to be a cover for MIT activities in Germany. In 1997, Grossman left Ankara to head up the State Department's European Bureau.

In 1998, Dickerson was transferred from Germany to Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. In 2001, after George W. Bush became president, Dickerson was promoted and placed in charge of weapons procurement for Turkey, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington. Melek Can obtained positions with the ATC and Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA).

Following the 911 attacks, Melek Can applied for a translator job at the FBI's Washington Field Office. In a Justice Department Inspector General report, it is stated that Melek Can failed to list on her application her prior jobs with ATA, ATAA, and the German-Turkish Business and Cultural Association. When FBI translator Sibel Edmonds (a Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani translator who worked with Melek Can) complained publicly about MIT's penetration of the FBI, Senators Patrick Leahy and Charles Grassley pointedly asked the FBI why no Special Background Investigation (SBI) was conducted on Melek Can. The FBI's responded that Melek Can entered the FBI "through the backdoor" with her husband's Top Secret/SBI being sufficient grounds to grant Melek Can access to FBI classified information. At the same time, the Dickersons were, according to U.S. intelligence sources, working closely with the ATC.

Edmonds' charges against the Dickersons were highlighted in a June 2002 Washington Post article. On September 9, 2002, the Dickersons left Washington for Belgium, where Major Dickerson was assigned to the U.S. Air Force NATO office. Soon, there were three separate investigations of Edmonds' espionage charges against the Dickersons: the Justice Department IG probe, a similar probe by the Department of Defense IG led by Joseph Schmitz, and a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee investigation led by Leahy and Grassley.

Two weeks after the Dickerons arrived in Belgium, Schmitz sent a letter stating that Major Dickerson's relationship with the ATC while at DIA was "within the scope of his duties." The DOD IG terminated the investigation.

Two weeks after the DoD shut down its investigation of Major Dickerson, Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the State Secrets Privilege and imposed a "gag order" on Edmonds' making any further comments to the media about her wrongful termination suit against the FBI, which was prompted by her raising concerns about the Dickersons. The invocation of the State Secrets Privilege by Ashcroft was specifically requested by the Defense and State Departments.

Upon publication of a Vanity Fair article in August 2005 about the Edmonds case and those of other national security whistleblowers, the Department of Defense and U.S. Air Force opened a joint IG investigation of Major Dickerson and Edmonds' charges, who was still safely ensconced at the NATO office in Belgium. When the DoD invited Edmonds to be interviewed without her lawyer present at a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) at Fort Myer, Virginia, she declined, citing the potential threats inherent in such a solo appearance. Schmitz (the son of racist California Republican Rep. John Schmitz and brother of pedophile schoolteacher Mary Kay Letourneau) resigned on Sept. 9, 2005 to take the general counsel job with the Prince Group, the holding company for Blackwater USA, the private military contractor that was amassing lucrative Pentagon contracts.

When the DoD/USAF IG investigators asked Major Dickerson once again about the allegations that had re-surfaced against him, U.S. intelligence sources report he told them that he would "start talking" if the investigation proceeded. The DoD/USAF IG investigation of Dickerson was once again quickly terminated. In January 2006, Dickerson was promoted in rank to Lieutenant Colonel and transferred to the U.S. Air Force base in Yokota, Japan, where he was assigned as the 374th Logistics Readiness Squadron’s acting commander.

U.S. intelligence sources stated that the "same people" who have continually protected Perle and Feith since the 1980s were also protecting Dickerson and Grossman. CIA sources, including those who served in Istanbul tracking nuclear smuggling in the late 1980s, also confirm that the Turkish-U.S. nuclear black marketeering ring was directly tied to the Abdul Qadeer Khan nuclear smuggling ring in Pakistan, an operation that sold sensitive nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea, and Libya. The ATC and ATAA in Washington is directly tied to and supported by AIPAC and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) reported a U.S. counter-intelligence source. In fact, JINSA is an "Aegean" member of the ATC. The source said that Valerie Plame Wilson was targeting the ATC and Turkey at the height of her counter-proliferation work in 2001, but special interests associated with AIPAC and JINSA, which the source claims control ATC, scuttled Plame Wilson's operation by exposing Brewster Jennings as a CIA front company.

The CIA's counter-narcotics division is also keenly interested in ATC and its connections to NATO. A Turkish hashish kingpin, Huseyin Baybasin, now jailed in the Netherlands for narcotics smuggling, stated that the Turkish military and its NATO interlocutors are totally involved in the drug trade in Turkey. He said the Turkish military uses MIT and Turkish embassies, consulates, military missions (particularly the Turkish military attaché offices in London and Amsterdam) as drug smuggling facilitators. The Turkish military also reportedly uses its hated Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) enemies to help transport drugs throughout Western Asia, especially heroin now being produced in Afghanistan at record high levels.

On June 10, 2003, Grossman, who was trusted by the Cheney neocon cabal in the White House, received a memo drafted by an analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR's) on INR's skepticism about President Bush's State of the Union charge that Iraq had tried to procure uranium from Niger. The memo described a February 2002 CIA meeting at which Joseph Wilson was mentioned as the best candidate to undertake a mission to Niger to check on the uranium allegations. The memo also reportedly identified Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA counter-proliferation officer and associated her with the Brewster Jennings & Associates cover company (keep in mind that Grossman had already compromised the company's covert status in June 2001).

Since Grossman joined the Cohen Group as Vice Chairman in January 2005, the firm has become a top client for the ATC. In October 2005, Grossman was appointed a board member of Ihlas Holding, a media corporation that recently sold its TGRT Television network to Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp. U.S. law enforcement sources confirm that Feith remains under a DoD IG investigation that is being spurred by North Carolina Republican Rep. Walter Jones.
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I'll have more on this later.

11 comments:

PrissyPatriot said...

Go Sibel! We're with you 110%

Anonymous said...

Hi Lukery,

Another great post.

With repect to Sibel Edmonds' documentary, I didn't hear a thing on my local TV newscasts this weekend. Just happened across your posting on the topic yesterday.
It seems there is effectively a news blackout in liberal Massachusetts' webmedia:


Case in point. These are two searches I performed just now on the Boston.com/Boston Globe search engine. It is searching the past 30 days for the topics below

BOSTON GLOBE SEARCH (searched September 29, 2006_ checked for the last 30 days)

"kill the messenger" matched 0 document(s). The results appear below. To get the full text of a story, click on the headline. If you did not find what you're looking for, try searching again with a different term.
No documents matched
It appears that no stories matched your query. This may have happened for three reasons:
• NO MATCHES
You may have accurately entered a query, yet The Globe published no stories that matched that query. You may want to try searching for something else using the form at right, or try the Globe archives, which contains Globe stories from 1979 to the present.
• BAD QUERY
If you want to refine your search or alter the phrasing so that it is more focused, you can do so at right.
• RIGHTS ISSUES
It may also be the case that an article did run in The Boston Globe's print edition, but is not online. That is the case with some freelance writers and correspondents to whose work we do not have the electronic rights. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to post those stories on this web site. The only way to read them is to contact the Globe's reprint department at (617) 929-2000, or view the Globe on microfiche at your local library.
We hope this information has been helpful. If you need additional assistance, please refer to our help area, or contact us at any time.
Thank you.

-----and----

"sibel edmonds" matched 0 document(s). The results appear below. To get the full text of a story, click on the headline. If you did not find what you're looking for, try searching again with a different term.
No documents matched
It appears that no stories matched your query. This may have happened for three reasons:
• NO MATCHES
You may have accurately entered a query, yet The Globe published no stories that matched that query. You may want to try searching for something else using the form at right, or try the Globe archives, which contains Globe stories from 1979 to the present.
• BAD QUERY
If you want to refine your search or alter the phrasing so that it is more focused, you can do so at right.
• RIGHTS ISSUES
It may also be the case that an article did run in The Boston Globe's print edition, but is not online. That is the case with some freelance writers and correspondents to whose work we do not have the electronic rights. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to post those stories on this web site. The only way to read them is to contact the Globe's reprint department at (617) 929-2000, or view the Globe on microfiche at your local library.
We hope this information has been helpful. If you need additional assistance, please refer to our help area, or contact us at any time.
Thank you.

lukery said...

thanks Prissy!

PDaly - the film was shown in France and Belgium last week, and will be shown in a few other places in the fall - including Australia, yay. They are still negotiating for a US release - let's hope it is soon.

I haven't seen any English language reviews for the film yet, but there were some great ones in the French press. I've posted some at sibeledmonds.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

Yes, I've seen those. I also watched the YouTube trailer you posted. Looks great. I remember reading a Karen Kwiatkowski article a while back after she was interviewed for "a documentary" which in retrospect was this one, I believe.

Looking forward to a US release.

lukery said...

hiya - the press release for the film is here

Karen doesn't get a mention (perhaps the film-makers didn't use it)

Interviewees are: David Albright, Philip Giraldi, John Cole, Joseph Trento, Glenn Fine, David Rose, Daniel Ellsberg, Coleen Rowley (FBI), Russell Tice (NSA), Bogdan Dzakovic (DHS), John Vincent (FBI), Steve Elson (FAA), John M. Cole (FBI), and Matthew Fogg, among others.

Track said...

How many nuke devices are terrorist groups looking for? It would seem one or two at most. So I don't understand the profit angle. Are the parts expensive? I'm sure they are. But if Iran (we are told) doesn't have the ability to make nukes, how would a terrorist group like Al Qaeda make nukes from a hodgepodge of parts? The sellers profit and the buyers hope to assemble a crude device? Do the sellers only care about the profit and simply dismiss the potential consequences? Or do the sellers WANT to make the world insanely dangerous?

lukery said...

Noise - I think that we need to separatetwo things - one is the ability/intent of States to acquire nuclear technology (think AQ Khan and Libya eg) - and the other issue is 'terrorists' getting some end-product that they can use in a 'dirty bomb' or some such.

"Do the sellers only care about the profit and simply dismiss the potential consequences? Or do the sellers WANT to make the world insanely dangerous?"
i think, and hope, but don't know, that it's the former.

Anonymous said...

lukery and noise---

You raise an interesting point. The way I read this article (and I know, Madsen, so grain of salt) it almost appears to me that the interests behind AIPAC and ATC almost _want_ a nuclear armaggedon. Or at least the appearance of one.

My cynical side says this is all a ploy by certain AIPAC and neocon interests to at least "salt" the Middle East with nuclear components, enough so that they can justify the US attacking them and occupying them (so's we can get their oil!). It kills two birds with one stone, as not only are the petroleum resources secured for exculsive distributorship by Western corporations, but it also appeals to the hard right in Israel, because they think that will allow them to finally contain ME terrorism and breathe easy at night.

The problem is, as we've seen with Iraq, is that the West isn't all together on this plan, and that the insurgents have proven far more resourceful than the neocons might have anticipated, making a productive occupation impossible. I'm sure there are also other shadowy interests opposing these designs, e.g. factions tied to Russia or China, who may be indirectly helping the insurgency.

Of course, I think the main stumbling block for this ridiculous plan is getting the US gov't to play along. Clearly people like Plame and her units, as well as the FBI CI division were doing everything in their power to thwart these kinds of operations. It's good to know that there are some people, even in the IC, that believe in limited gov't, the rule of law and the American experiment.

In sum, I think the neocons truly believed the terrorist groups in the ME, Iran, and the 'stans would have by now acquired enough nuclear components by their own initiative to justify these incursions (prob through the likes of AQ Khan). But when that turned out not to be the case, they decided to sort of actively "help" them along (and what if they actually DID manage to build a working device, oh boy...). So either the neocons are so motivated by creating their own reality (and denying what the rest of us see) because they're *so* upset that their predictions haven't come true yet (don't laugh, ego is a dangerous thing), or the worldwide petroleum resources are a lot smaller than we've been led to believe and peak oil is real and it's now.

Most likely, it might be a combo of both, with the oil co's pressuring the likes of Cheney and Libby about "those invasion plans they've had on the shelves for years" and with the idealogues just not accepting the fact that they were WRONG all these years (about the cold war and now about nuclear terrorism), and finally deciding to create their own game with their own rules, consequences be damned.

Add in the money-grubbing Bush 41 cabal (Scowcroft, Saudi interests, Turkish smugglers, Iran-Contra boys, etc.) and the Machiavellian Texas Mafia (Rove, Bush 43, Hughes, Delay), and you've got quite the perfect storm....

lukery said...

lots of great points - thnx Viget and EW. I'll FP most of it.

FTR - i usually add a Madsen disclaimer to my posts - and so i presume (in my head at least) that people know what i mean when i post his stuff (i posted the disclaimer over at KTM)

in this case, madsen got a lot right - but there are some things that are new to me - including the stuff about the Turk nuke company and their efforts to buy consultancies etc. His post seems to be in response to the stuff that i have been posting - in which case it'd be interesting to know the identities, and motivations, of his sources. I know that they arent people that i speak to.

It has been suggested to me (by someone other than a source) that perhaps the WMR article might have been salted with him in order to discredit the story. conceivable. Having said that, I'd probably be willing to grant madsen some wriggle room with his odd choice of language: "associated her with the Brewster Jennings & Associates" - that appears to be an unusual choice of words.

Anonymous said...

I don't know for sure when or why the Neocon stance on Iran changed -- but it had clearly happened by 1995, when the Foundation for Democracy in Iran was set up by Kenneth Timmerman, Peter Rodman, Joshua Muravchik and Iranian exiles with the goal of toppling the Iranian government.

"A Clean Break" in 1996 states, "Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon..."

One way or another, the change is likely to have been sparked by Iranian backing for Hezbollah. It almost certainly would not have occurred before the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988 and was probably associated with the rise of tensions in southern Lebanon in the early 90's.

lukery said...

thnx everyone