August 11, 2003	Monday	Jumadi-us-Sani 12, 1424

WASHINGTON: As Karl Marx might have said, “A spectre is haunting Washington — the spectre of Iran-Contra”.

Even some of the people and countries are the same. And the methods — particularly the pursuit by a network of well-placed individuals of a covert, parallel foreign policy that is at odds with official policy — are definitely the same.

Boiled down to its essentials, the Iran-Contra affair was about a small group of officials based in the National Security Agency (NSC) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that ran an “off-the-books” operation to secretly sell arms to Iran in exchange for hostages.

They used the proceeds to sustain the Nicaraguan contras — US-sponsored rebels fighting Managua’s left-wing government — in defiance of both a congressional ban and of official US policy as enunciated by the State Department and President Ronald Reagan. It was never clear whether Reagan understood, let alone approved, the operation.

The picture emerging from the latest reports about the manipulation of intelligence in the drive to war with Iraq, as well as efforts by administration hawks to deliberately aggravate tensions with Syria, Iran, and North Korea in defiance of official State Department and US policy, suggest a similar but much more ambitious scheme at work.

As with Reagan, in this case, too, it is difficult to determine whether Bush — or even his NSC director, Condoleezza Rice — fully understands, let alone approves, of what the hawks are doing.

There was some hint of a parallel policy apparatus dating back just after the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001. It was known early on, for example, that the Pentagon leadership, without notice to the State Department, the NSC, or the CIA, convened its advisory Defence Policy Board (DPB), headed by Richard Perle, to discuss attacking Iraq within days of the attacks.

The three agencies were also kept in the dark about a mission undertaken immediately afterward by former CIA director and DPB member James Woolsey to London to gather intelligence about possible links between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, as if the CIA or the Pentagon’s own Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) could not be trusted.

While Woolsey’s trip recalls the more benign shenanigans of the Iran-Contra crowd, consider some of the more recent press reports.

Item: Iran-Contra alumnus Michael Ledeen (and close Perle associate) has renewed ties with his old acquaintance, Manichur Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms merchant who became the key link between the NSC’s Oliver North, the operational head of Iran Contra, and the so-called “moderates” in the Islamic Republic.

To what end? It appears that certain elements in the Pentagon leadership, specifically Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith, are trying to sabotage sensitive talks between Tehran and the State Department on co-operation over Al Qaeda and other pressing issues affecting Afghanistan and Iraq.

They think Ledeen’s old friend Ghorbanifar can help, according to ‘Newsday’, which reported on Friday that two of Feith’s senior aides — without notice to the other agencies — have held several meetings with the Iranian, whom the CIA has long considered “an intelligence fabricator and nuisance”.

Item: US aircraft and Special Operations Forces (SOF) intercepted and destroyed a residential compound and two small convoys that were heading from Iraq into Syria in mid-June, killing as many as 80 civilians. They then subdued and arrested five Syrian guards across the border, taking them back to Iraq, where they were held and interrogated over the strong objections of the State Department for five days.

For what purpose? The Pentagon says it thought senior Saddam Hussein officials were trying to make a run for it on a smuggling route. But an expose last month by ‘The New Yorker’ suggested that the raid and arrests may have been part of a deliberate effort to inflame tensions with Damascus and thus put an end to remarkably close co-operation between Syria, the CIA and the State Department in the campaign against Al Qaeda.

Item: Certain “high-level circles within the administration” were reported by the right-wing ‘Washington Times’ on Friday to be hoping to persuade Chinese military officers to co-sponsor a coup d’etat with their North Korean counterparts against leader Kim Jong Il.

While it is not clear the proposals have been acted on concretely, the Times noted that the Pentagon leadership disagrees strongly with the State Department’s efforts to engage Kim in talks to persuade him to abandon his nuclear-weapons programme in exchange for a non-aggression pledge.

Item: Anonymous “senior administration officials” informed a prominent conservative columnist of a covert CIA operative (whose name he then published) jeopardizing her career and possibly exposing numerous ongoing covert actions and agents who worked with her.

To what end? The agent is the wife of Joseph Wilson, a retired career foreign service officer who publicly exposed President George W. Bush’s now-infamous assertion that Iraq had tried to buy uranium yellowcake in Africa as a fabrication.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.