This is BooMan’s bailiwick (geographically and otherwise), but Laura Rozen’s post at War & Piece — about Rep. Curt Weldon, who’s campaigning to chair the House Homeland Security Committee (he’s currently vice-chair) — intrigued me:

Image Hosted by ImageShack.usCheck out my new piece from the Prospect about the Pennsylvania Republican’s Iran intelligence source, who Weldon has been pushing to get on the CIA payroll. It’s a follow up to the piece Jeet Heer and I reported in April on yet another back channel between the Iran Contra arms dealer Manoucher Ghorbanifar and US officials. Weldon is supposed to appear on Meet the Press Sunday [schedule] to discuss his new book, and you’ll definitely want to read our pieces as background to that. Supporters of discredited intelligence sources such as Ahmad Chalabi – incredibly – blame the CIA for not doing a good enough job of vetting the lying defectors Chalabi provided to the US intelligence community. Here’s an example where the CIA did its job and did weed out some hucksters on the take. [emphases mine]


And who can’t help but be even more intrigued when they read the following from the Washington Post:

Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), whose flair for drama has included lugging around a replica of a suitcase-size nuclear bomb, alleges in a new book that Iran is:

  • hiding Osama bin Laden
  • is preparing terrorist attacks against the United States
  • has a crash program to build an atomic bomb and
  • as a Shiite country, is the chief sponsor of what is a largely Sunni-directed insurgency in Iraq.

In “Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information that Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America . . . and How the CIA Has Ignored It,” Weldon accuses the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and his colleagues on the House and Senate intelligence committees of ignoring his trove of information.


The WaPo copy editor must have howled his head off over that blowgun lead.


So, where Laura Rozen at War & Piece defends the CIA, Weldon condemns it.


And, in her article for The Prospect, Ms. Rosen further exposes Weldon’s turgid fantasies:

Countdown to Terror, … Weldon’s sensationalistic new book about his personal struggle to combat the Iranian terrorism threat despite the alleged resistance of the CIA, is based entirely on the Pennsylvania Republican’s freelance communications with a secret source he code-named “Ali.” Much of Weldon’s book … consists of reproduced pages of comically overwrought “intelligence” memos faxed from the Iranian émigré’s Paris location to Weldon’s office between 2003 and 2004.

Here’s what the WaPo says about “Ali”:

These secrets, [Weldon] says, come from “an impeccable clandestine source,” … code-name[d] “Ali,” an Iranian exile living in Paris [and] close associate of Manucher Gorbanifar. Gorbanifar is a well-known Iranian exile whom the CIA branded as a fabricator during the 1980s but who was used by the Reagan White House as a middleman for the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran.


Switch Iran for Iraq, and Gorbanifar for Ahmed Chalabi — an Iraqi exile whose claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were distrusted by the CIA but were embraced by the Defense Department and the White House — and Weldon’s book reads like the conservative argument for the invasion of Iraq.


Most fascinating yet, Ms. Rozen has unmasked the mysterious “Ali”:

[I]n an exclusive interview … Weldon’s “Ali” — who was identified in an April article by me and Jeet Heer as Fereidoun Mahdavi, a frail, elderly former minister of commerce in the shah’s government and a longtime business associate of Iran-Contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar — said he was stunned and perplexed to learn that Weldon had used his information to write a book [and] never even told him about the book.


Mahdavi also said that the bulk of the information … was originally sourced from none other than Ghorbanifar, the subject of a rare CIA “burn notice” after the agency found him to be a “fabricator” more than two decades ago during the Iran-Contra affair.


“Many information that I have given to Weldon is coming from Ghorbanifar,” said Mahdavi. … “Because Ghorbanifar used me, in fact, to pass that stuff because I know he has problems in Washington.”


[……………….]


Several Iranian exile associates … have told the Prospect that Mahdavi, living in reduced circumstances … is in fact financially dependent on Ghorbanifar. They have been involved in various businesses together, from petroleum shipping to arms dealing to (more recently) intelligence peddling, since both washed up in Paris after the Iranian revolution in 1979.


“Although Mahdavi expresses understanding of the motives of his old pal and business partner Ghorbanifar,” reports Ms. Rozen, “he says he is utterly baffled by Weldon’s decision to use his information as the foundation of a book that the congressman never once mentioned to him”:

“I assume that if [Weldon] wanted to publish a book, I assure you I would have heard it,” Mahdavi said [in disbelief]. …


[A]fter receiving a fax with a Congressional Quarterly article about Weldon’s forthcoming book and the amazon.com book description, Mahdavi spoke again in shock and anger.


“Someone is using me for their purposes,” he raged. “How is it possible that something like that book comes out and the people who publish it don’t inform me? … [I]f you had not called me and told me there is a book coming out from Weldon, I would have never known about it. … I am sure, there is a fight between all these [U.S. government] organizations, and they are using this issue and using me.”


“Among those who agree,” says Ms. Rozen, “is the former senior CIA official who met with Mahdavi in response to Weldon’s pressure on the agency to accept the Mahdavi/Ghorbanifar information. The tale of ‘Ali’ suggests that the agency is assiduously seeking to weed out another fabricator like Ghorbanifar (or Iraqi fabulist Ahmad Chalabi) from corrupting U.S. intelligence information on Iran.”