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Last update - 01:48 06/06/2008 Congress: Pentagon concealed useful Iranian intel from CIA in 2001 By The Associated Press Tags: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney  Pentagon officials concealed from U.S. intelligence agencies potentially useful tips from Iranian agents in 2001 and 2002, including one that Tehran allegedly sent hit teams to Afghanistan to kill Americans, a Senate committee reported Thursday. The Iranians also told Pentagon employees at a December 2001 meeting in Rome of a purported tunnel complex used to store weapons and covertly move personnel out of Iran after Sept. 11, 2001, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. In addition, the Iranians told of a long-standing relationship with the Palestine Liberation Organization and the growth of anti-government sentiment inside Iran. The information was questionable, the report suggests, citing the sources: a discredited former arms dealer who was peddling a plan to overthrow the Iranian government and a former U.S. official whose leads had failed to yield any substance for the CIA. Advertisement Nonetheless, the report sheds new light on the mistrust and lack of cooperation by Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld with the CIA after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Two Republicans, Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine, joined with majority Democrats on the report. Other committee Republicans, in a dissent, said the report proved a "disappointment" to people looking for evidence that the Pentagon did anything "unlawful" by arranging the meeting with the Iranians. They said the report had nothing to do with the original scope of the review - prewar intelligence on Iraq. Further, the Pentagon's own intelligence arm, the Defense Intelligence Agency, had the names of the Iranian agents but did not contact them, the dissenting senators said. The report also examined statements by top Bush administration officials between October 2002 and March 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, about the threat from Iraq. These officials, from President Bush on down, deliberately distorted facts to convince people in the United States that they should support the invasion, the report contended. According to the report, officials erroneously linked Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 attacks and al-Qaida; claimed Iraq would give terrorist groups chemical, biological or nuclear weapons; and said Iraq was developing drones to spread chemical or biological agents over the United States. None was borne out by intelligence. "These reports are about holding the government accountable and making sure these mistakes never happen again," said the committee chairman, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. Bush's press secretary, Dana Perino, said the problem was flawed intelligence heading into the war. "We had the intelligence that we had, fully vetted, but it was wrong. And we certainly regret that," she said. To Rockefeller, the problem was concealing information that would have undermined the case for war. "We might have avoided this catastrophe," he said. The report found that most of the administration's statements about the threat from Iraq were substantiated by available intelligence, but officials often did not mention the level of dissension or uncertainty about the information. The report's Iran-related information focuses on the series of meetings in Rome over three days in December 2001. The U.S. was fighting in Afghanistan and working on initial planning for the Iraq war. The undersecretary for policy at the time, Doug Feith, sent two Pentagon employees to the Rome meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian middleman already dismissed by the CIA as untrustworthy, and two Iranians - one a current member of the security service, the second a former member. The meetings also involved an unspecified foreign government's intelligence service. Michael Ledeen, a former Pentagon official and an analyst with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, arranged the meeting and attended. In one meeting, Ghorbanifar pressed for a change of government in Iran and, on a napkin, outlined a plan to do that, saying it could cost as much as $25 million, according to the report. Ledeen pursued Ghorbanifar's plan through at least May 2003, the report said. In a letter to Feith, he outlined the Iranian request for a $7 million loan, money for a secret intelligence activity and money for an Iranian media outlet in Southern California. In return, Ghorbanifar promised photos of suspected terrorists inside Iran, the locations of purported Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that he claimed had been moved to Iran, and events that would lead to mass insurrections within Iran. The report said Bush's deputy national security adviser at the time, Stephen Hadley, failed to fully inform then-CIA Director George Tenet and then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage about the meeting. Hadley and the Pentagon were within their rights to conduct the meeting, the report said. White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Hadley made the appropriate notifications about the meeting. The report said Defense Department officials refused to allow "potentially useful and actionable intelligence" to be shared with intelligence agencies, even throughout the Defense Intelligence Agency. Then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz briefed the head of the DIA on the Iranian intelligence but would not let him discuss it, the report said. Ledeen said Thursday that the notion that the meetings were kept secret from U.S. intelligence is "nonsense" and that he had briefed the U.S. ambassador to Italy twice. "Any time the CIA wanted to find out what was going on all they had to do was ask," he said. One of the two Pentagon representatives, Larry Franklin, now faces jail time after pleading guilty to espionage-related charges unrelated to the Rome meeting. Franklin told the committee he believed the intelligence gathered at the meetings "saved American lives." He passed word of the alleged hit teams to a special operations forces commander in Afghanistan. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Terrorist donuts U.S. Arabs irate over criticism of celebrity cook's kaffiyeh. All the way to hell Rosner's blog: It's Obama's good intentions that pro-Israel activists fear.   1.   Un-intelligence 02:41  |  joebhed 06/06/08   2.   Neocons pawned by Iranian intelligence agents 20:12  |  steve 06/06/08   3.   u.s. will soon notice that iran is already at war with it. 20:40  |  frenz 06/06/08

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