If this new piece in the Times has the Chalabi story right, someone — and probably someone at the Pentagon — is in a world of trouble. Actually, there’s some other trouble coming down the pike in a few weeks. But then, sufficient to the day is the trouble thereof. So, to Chalabi. Here’s the key passage …
The F.B.I. has opened an espionage investigation seeking to determine exactly what information Mr. Chalabi turned over to the Iranians as well as who told Mr. Chalabi that the Iranian code had been broken, government officials said. The inquiry, still in an early phase, is focused on a very small number of people who were close to Mr. Chalabi and also had access to the highly restricted information about the Iran code.
Some of the people the F.B.I. expects to interview are civilians at the Pentagon who were among Mr. Chalabi’s strongest supporters and served as his main point of contact with the government, the officials said. So far, no one has been accused of any wrongdoing.
Hmmm. People who were close to Chalabi and had access to the highly restricted information about the Iran code. Hmmm. Who would be caught in the sweet spot of that <$Ad$>Venn Diagram?
I’ll try not to be too coy. There are a number of folks who could fit that bill. But for anyone who’s followed this story, there’s one guy who’s just got to jump right to the top of the list: an expert on Iran who is extremely close to Chalabi, served as his civilian Pentagon handler for some time in Iraq after the war, and is known for comparing Chalabi to Mohammed and other equally august worthies.
Anyway, that’s one pretty good possibility.
I could speculate about who else would have known this key piece of information. But the truth is that I just don’t know how such information would be compartmented. So it’s impossible for me to say. You’d figure that the folks at OSD involved in B-teaming the regular intelligence community’s Middle East analyses would have learned this information. And many of them are close to Chalabi. But again, that’s speculation.
The Chalabi virus was very widespread at the highest levels of this administration. So I’d say it’s possible, though not likely, that the culprit or culprits could be very high-level administration figures, particularly if they turn out to hang their hats in the White House complex rather than at the Pentagon.
One point that is key to keep in mind here is that if you know the way a lot of these guys treated Chalabi, how they thought of him, it’s really not at all surprising that they would have shared this sort of information with him. It would, frankly, be much more surprising if they hadn’t. Remember, this was Ahmed Chalabi, the ‘leader of Free Iraq’, the man of destiny around whom the democratic transformation of the region would turn like a wheel on an axle.
