As the election for the new Pope began a fascinating US radio interview with a former senior CIA official was broadcast in which the name Michael Ledeen (See Lobsters 31, 45, 47) came up in connection with the forged Niger uranium documents cited by both the US and UK governments in the build-up to the war on Iraq.
By coincidence Ledeen was much involved on the first occasion the late Pope came to wide public attention in May 1981. Soon after the election of US President Ronald Reagan an attempt was made to assassinate John Paul II in St Peter’s Square. While it was known almost immediately that the would-be assassin was a Turkish fascist, Mehmet Ali Agca, a Reader’s Digest article, ‘The Plot to Kill the Pope’, a little later marked the start of a concerted US-based publicity effort to blame the outrage on the KGB through the so-called Bulgarian Connection. (1)
The author of the Digest article and many other pieces blaming the rise of international terrorism on the Soviet Union at the time Reagan was planning the deployment of a new generation of nuclear weapons in Europe, was Claire Sterling. She was helped by two others: Paul Henze, a senior CIA official who had been station chief in Turkey, and Ledeen, who at the time worked as a consultant for senior Reagan administration member Alexander Haig.
The Pope is now dead but Ledeen is still very much alive, propagandising for years with his old pal Richard Perle from their base at the American Enterprise Institute for a war on Iraq and now for similar intervention in Iran and Syria. Ledeen was a regular contributor on terrorism and the defence of Ariel Sharon’s Israel in The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator when Conrad Black was owner.
In the April 3 2005 radio interview with Los Angeles public radio KPFK, Vincent Cannistraro, the former CIA head of counterterrorism and intelligence director at the National Security Council under President Reagan, was asked about the Niger documents. This was in the context of deficient US intelligence in Iraq and the unreliability of exiles and defectors, and the source code-named Curveball, in particular. Cannistraro said of former CIA chief George Tenet:
‘He was very concerned about getting along with the administration…… and “playing along” really meant to sustain the conceptions of the policy makers – particularly at the Pentagon and the Vice-President’s office – that Saddam Hussein was a real and imminent danger.
‘To do that, you had to accept some of these alarming reports that kept coming in, being fed by Ahmed Chalabi and his INC group. In many cases the information was fabricated information, for example, about an alleged attempt by Saddam Hussein to acquire nuclear material, uranium, from Niger. This, we know now, was all based on fabricated documents. But it’s not clear yet – either from this report [Bush’s presidential commission], or from any other report – who fabricated the documents.’
‘You’d be very close’
At this point the interviewer asks Cannistraro where the Niger document – quoted by President Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address – was fabricated: ‘It originally came out of Italian intelligence, I think SISME [sic], or SISDE [sic] –I’m not sure which one.’
Cannistraro replies: ‘It was SISME [sic], yeah … [D]uring the 2000s when we’re talking about acquiring information about Iraq. It wasn’t that anyone had a good source on Iraq – there weren’t any good sources. The Italian service, the military intelligence service, was acquiring information that was being hand-fed to them by very dubious sources. The Niger documents, for example, which apparently were produced in the United States, yet were funnelled through the Italians.’
Interviewer: ‘Do we know who produced these documents? Because there’s some suspicion…’
Cannistraro: ‘I think I do, but I’d rather not speak about it right now, because I don’t think it’s a proven case …’
Interviewer: ‘If I said “Michael Ledeen”?’
Cannistraro: ‘You’d be very close …’
From this distance – and without fingerprinted originals of the Niger documents –it’s impossible to say whether Ledeen was responsible. It’s also important to remember the tension between intelligence professionals, such as Cannistraro, and the influential neo-con network in Washington DC, of whom Ledeen has been a prominent member since moving back there from Rome in the late-1970s.
On the other hand, consider these facts about Ledeen. He was a founding member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and his wife is a leading light in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). After leaving the United States for Italy he is known to have had close connections with the Italian secret service (SISMI) when living in Rome in the mid-1970s, in part through his associate Francesco Pazienza and his links to the Propaganda Due (P2) masonic network and its connections with the NATO – and intelligence-linked Gladio operation. At the time Ledeen was writing for The Daily American, for long linked to US intelligence operations in Italy, and teaching at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) centre in Bologna. (Ledeen’s old friend Paul Wolfowitz was dean of the SAIS headquarters in Washington before becoming deputy to Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.)
Ledeen was the principal source of the ‘Billygate’ stories that helped undermine the Jimmy Carter White House by suggesting links between Libya and Carter’s brother Billy. As we have seen, he was also a key figure in spreading the KGB plot to kill the Pope story soon after Reagan was elected president.
Following the US invasion of Grenada in 1983 Ledeen was given the job of assembling and publishing ‘documents’ from the Caribbean island purporting to justify the US invasion.
There is no evidence I am aware of linking Ledeen to the similar evaluation of documents in Baghdad following the Iraq invasion 19 years later. It is interesting to note, though, that it was a Conrad Black paper for which Ledeen wrote, The Daily Telegraph, which lost the libel action in which they claimed the Baghdad ‘documents’ fingered the then Labour MP George Galloway.
During the Reagan presidency Ledeen was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, along with another old neo-con associate, John Negroponte (a key administration figure in the Iraq war and now about to head George Bush’s new US intelligence organisation). Ledeen was the key link with Manucher Ghorbanifar and Adnan Khashoggi in the supply of arms from Israel.
In earlier articles I have shown the direct links between Israel and its Western allies in promoting the ‘war on terror’. It’s also worth requoting the example cited by former US Congressman Paul Findley in his They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront the Israeli Lobby (Chicago: Lawrence Hill and Co., 1985):
‘During the Iranian hostage crisis in 1980, columnist Jack Anderson quoted “US intelligence reports”, actually supplied by the Israeli embassy by way of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, that the PLO had mined the embassy to frustrate any rescue attempt by the United States. The intelligence reports proved to be bogus.’
Ledeen has been a leading figure in the neo-con ‘anti-terror’ network for a quarter of a century and in that time has shown himself to be a willing part of its propagandising machine. When Cannistraro, a key figure in the Reagan years with intimate knowledge of both Ledeen and its foreign policy and intelligence activities, says the source of the forged Niger documents was ‘very close’ to Michael Ledeen, it’s hard to think of anyone with a better motive or a stronger track record in Cold War and ‘war on terror’ disinformation.
Wolfowitz, New Labour and the BBC
On June 10 1997, shortly after New Labour was elected, Paul Wolfowitz was special guest at a party thrown by the British Ambassador in Washington, Sir John Kerr. Wolfowitz was there as Dean of the Johns Hopkins Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington D.C., the US organising centre for the British American Project (BAP), set up with US money 12 years earlier. Wolfowitz was a member of the US advisory committee to the BAP, selecting ambitious young Americans to join the network of similarly high-flying Britons picked by the UK advisory committee of which Jim Naughtie has long been a leading light since his recruitment to the BAP in 1989.
The (June/July 1997) issue of the BAP Newsletter that reported the party – and thanked Julia Hobsbawm for her efforts in organising it – headlined the New Labour victory ‘Big Swing to the BAP’, listing Mo Mowlam, Chris Smith, Peter Mandelson, Liz Symons, George Robertson and Jonathan Powell as important BAP members appointed to high office under new Prime Minister Tony Blair. After listing a small number of non-Labour BAP candidates in the election the newsletter added: ‘Meanwhile James Naughtie (’89) and Jeremy Paxman (’90) gave them all a hard time on BBC radio and television.’
Ambassador Kerr told the party that ‘the BAP’s powerful combination of eminent fellows and close transatlantic links threatened to put the embassy out of a job. The Project was clearly a threat to the very existence of diplomats.’
Wolfowitz is reported in the newsletter as speaking ‘of the importance of the relationship between the US and the UK and the history of SAIS’s sponsorship of the Project since its inception in 1985.’ How soon before Wolfowitz as World Bank President is ‘given a hard time’ by Naughtie and Paxman on the Today programme and Newsnight?
Money Jim
Missing from the obituaries of Sunny Jim were details of his financial activities that permitted him to buy his expensive Sussex farm way back in 1968 when many Labour MPs were struggling on relatively small salaries. Callaghan’s directorship of the Commercial Bank of Wales owned by Julian Hodge – Sir Julian after being honoured by Labour in 1970 for his services to Wales – is now lost in the mists of time.
Much more current in Court 73 of the Royal Courts of Justice is the role of Callaghan as friend of Agha Hasan Abedi, the founder and president of the crooked Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Callaghan was on the payroll of BCCI, which collapsed owing £20bn in 1991. Its aggrieved depositors and creditors began an unprecedented action last year against the Bank of England for failing to regulate a bank known for its involvement in drugs, money laundering, funny accounting and as a financial conduit for assorted intelligence agencies.
Last year the court heard of a meeting 1989 between Lord Callaghan and Robin Leigh-Pemberton, the bank’s governor from 1983 to 1993, in which Callaghan repeatedly attested to the integrity of his good friend Mr Abedi. By then, Leigh-Pemberton (subsequently Lord Kingsdown) was deeply suspicious of BCCI, but couldn’t persuade Lord Callaghan of Abedi’s dubious character. The case continues – by the time this article appears it will have clocked up more than 200 days – and more may yet be disclosed of the darker side of the late Sunny Jim.
Notes
[1] There was an attempt to revive this nonsense in April 2005. See ‘View from the bridge’ in this issue – ed.