http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2005/12/michael_ledeens.html#moreMichael Ledeen's "Wilderness of Mirrors"by emptywheel Summary: In this post, I look at a series of columns Michael
Ledeen has written using former Counterintelligence chief James Jesus
Angleton (JJA) as a literary foil. In the earliest of these JJA
columns, Ledeen basically uses the character of the noted paranoid JJA
as an excuse to formulate his own baseless conspiracy theories. But of
late, Ledeen has been using the device to excuse intelligence breaches
he--or his very close allies--have been involved in. In this new
formulation, Ledeen seems to be alluding to JJA as a way to boast of
his own conspiracies to those in the know, while setting up straw man
arguments to otherwise deny the conspiracy. Michael Ledeen is regularly haunted by a crazy old ghost. Not just any ghost. He's visited by the longtime head of US Counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton (JJA), conjured up through an old ouija board he bought in New Orleans. Or at least that's what Ledeen contrives in a series of columns. He first used this device, I think, to give himself cover for exploiting current events to make great paranoid claims. Want to turn the Chandra Levy murder into a case of international espionage? Conjure JJA to tell you that Gary Condit was a double agent--blackmailed into trading intelligence in exchange for silence about his multiple affairs. When Levy threatened to expose her affair, she threatened to ruin the double agent arrangement. Want to use the DC Sniper case to drum up fear about Islamic terrorists? Have JJA explain to you that Mohammed's attacks were done at the behest of an Islamic terrorist group who was actually probing US defenses. Want to exploit the anthrax attacks in your attempts to launch a war against Iraq? Make JJA explain how, contrary to all the evidence, the attacks were obviously a plot of Saddam's. You see, by the end of his life, JJA was absolutely fricking nuts. He had spent his life hunting double agents--heck, he even was a close friend of Kim Philby. And by the end, he had been seeing double for so long he had by most accounts become certifiably paranoid. By invoking JJA, Ledeen allows himself to posit all manner of wacky plots without damaging his (in some crowds, anyway) considerable credibility. But Ledeen's use of the JJA device has changed in recent years, in
ways that I think merit some attention. Sometime in 2004, Ledeen begins to use the JJA device to project blame onto the CIA and others (Richard Armitage is a favorite scapegoat) for failures of the Bush Administration. So Ledeen channels JJA to excuse the Bush Administration for failing to predict 9/11. The August 6 PDB? Just one isolated, "vague" piece of intelligence. And Richard Clarke's mountain of evidence? A better justification of a hard line against Iran than evidence that Bush ignored 9/11. This use of the JJA device is more complex than its earlier use to
build grand conspiracy theories. Ledeen is still using JJA to make
claims that are not defensible, similar to the way he used JJA to make
totally unsubstantiated conspiracy claims. But he's now making
logically inconsistent claims, so he can rage against ignored
intelligence without acknowledging that Bush ignored it.
Let JJA claim that these are unspecific threats, rather than having to make such a ridiculous claim himself. But after dismissing the ability of intelligence to draw conclusions from such information, Ledeen has JJA suggest that we should be using the same evidence to attack Iran. What is at once inconclusive intelligence is, through the magic of JJA, also a casus belli.
Clarke's book at once contains too little evidence to argue we
should have anticipated 9/11, but enough evidence to argue we should do
something about Iran. In this more complex form, Ledeen uses JJA to
make logically incompatible arguments--to simultaneously exonerate his
allies for not meeting the Ledeen standards of paranoia in the past,
but demanding that they act on his paranoia in the future. Ledeen's use of JJA to issue denials for himself Many of Ledeen's most recent uses of JJA serve not to exonerate his allies, but to exonerate himself or others involved in plots they have propagated. He uses JJA to mock the AIPAC espionage investigation, the Chalabi leak case, the Plame and Niger forgery investigations--all intelligence breaches in which Ledeen is reputed to have a very close role. Ledeen, like Larry Franklin, has used close ties with Israel to leverage for a hard line against Iran (indeed, a hard line against Iran is about all he writes about of late). Ledeen was instrumental in helping Chalabi make the case for war against Iraq. And his role as a broker of the the Niger forgeries has been widely alleged. So these are all conspiracies in which he was at least tangentially involved. His strategy in these JJA dialogues changes again. At several points, he uses JJA to just completely excuse his own behavior.
A friend of yours has shared code word intelligence with one of your own worst enemies? No big deal. JJA was great friends with Kim Philby, after all. Or take Ledeen's explanation for the Plame affair, that it was just an attempted political assassination (of Bush, not Wilson!).
You see, Vice Presidents are supposed to be able to out their own spies. In other cases, Ledeen uses JJA to mock (but not refute) the claims to conspiracy advanced about his plots, as in this passage from this column on Franklin.
Ledeen, here, sounds like the rational one. But it's just a ruse. He's arguing that because the Israelis got caught once, they wouldn't spy on us again. Now that gives me comfort But the thing is, when Ledeen deals with his own involvement in these plots, he never denies--or even credibly disproves--the case against him. Here's his take on his role in the Niger forgeries.
Note
that Ledeen doesn't bother to answer the accusation that he "schlepped"
these documents. Instead he launches into a word game. He claims to be
arguing against those who "say that the Italian
intelligence
service never transmitted the documents to us." Notice the double
negative, which would suggest Ledeen was arguing that SISMI in fact had
given us the documents. But then he shifts the focus of his argument
again. He points out that Italy and SSCI had concluded that SISMI
didn't provide the forgeries. But what he's really
offering is a technical denial, solely that they didn't hand over the
documents themselves (as eRiposte has
shown,
they provided near-transcriptions of the documents, corrected to make
them more plausible). Which they didn't. But now he tries to discredit
the Rozen/Marshall/Hersh argument, that Rocco Martino dealt the
documents to Burba, who passed them on to the embassy. But he
mischaracterizes their argument to do so. And finally, he finds some
way to argue that since the documents came through State--through his
buddy Bolton's department, no less!--the CIA is responsible for not
having discredited the document. Huh? A comparison of methods--two columns on Ahmed Chalabi The Chalabi column is particularly interesting, because it allows us to compare how Ledeen uses the JJA device with how he makes a similar argument in a more traditional essay. Ledeen wrote a traditional essay on the Chalabi leak just four days after publishing his JJA dialogue. In the JJA column, he excuses Chalabi by completely mischaracterizing the reports of the Chalabi leak and then refuting those mischaracterized claims.
Um, no. I'm not aware of any portrayal of the Chalabi leak in which the leak was discovered because Chalabi communicated it in code that had been broken. Rather, the CIA noticed that Iran stopped using the code and put that fact together with earlier statements from Chalabi they had intercepted. Much of this straw man argument seems to be tongue in cheek, because Ledeen later raises an issue that he must know actually hurts his case and he does it using the same mocking tone.
The thing is, the Chalabi episode by itself proves the CIA was probably correct to deny these exiles entry. They were denied entry for the same kind of double-dealing Chalabi was accused of (double dealing with Iran, not Iraq). And one of the exiles, Ali Karem, was challenged precisely because of his relationship with his cousin, Aras Karem, who is still alleged to be the key link between Chalabi and Iran. In other words, raising this history doesn't exonerate Chalabi. It simply reminds those in the know of how long the relationship between Chalabi and Iran has been suspected. And Ledeen seems to think this is witty, not alarming. In other words, Ledeen mocks the entire story as a wacky conspiracy--even though he as much as admits that the concern is well-founded. In contrast, in Ledeen's traditional essay, he admits the INC has
been infiltrated by Iranian intelligence.
But he then uses that admission to shift the blame, once again, to scapegoat CIA and Richard Armitage. The scapegoat claim requires Ledeen to turn two more justifiable accusations on their head--that Chalabi ruined the 1996 coup in Iraq, and that his defectors were largely responsible for the mobile weapons claims.
Which finally leaves Ledeen arguing that it doesn't matter if Chalabi is a spy, because our own intelligence services have still screwed up.
Now, both of Ledeen's claims--that Chalabi exposed the 1996 plot as amateur and that Chalabi wasn't directly responsible for the mobile weapons lab claims--are more misdirection. At least according to Bob Baer, it was partly Chalabi's involvement in the 1996 coup attempt that caused the US to withdraw support from an associated CIA-supported plot (See No Evil 200). And no greater authority than Chalabi himself asserts that Chalabi's defectors were responsible for the mobile weapons lab claims (and he says this even after Judy's article backing off the claim the trailers are mobile weapons labs).
So Ledeen, in both the traditional essay and the JJA form, mocks the claim against Chalabi and then introduces reasons why readers should believe the worst about Chalabi (if they're sufficiently aware to understand the oblique references to his past). But in the essay, he treats the claims against Chalabi with some seriousness in an attempt to shift blame. Whereas the dialogue comes off as almost a gleeful confession that, yes, Chalabi might be a double agent and did you know that the Neocons have been involved in his double dealing from day one??? Why channel James Jesus Angleton? Which is why I'd like to reconsider Ledeen's use of JJA. At first glance, it appears he chooses to channel JJA because it allows him to claim expertise on intelligence issues he doesn't have and do so in a way that pushes the bounds of sanity. But Ledeen also presents JJA as a very close friend. He calls him "my old friend." He describes JJA's voice as "that gravelly near-whisper I knew so well." These are curious claims. Ledeen returned to the US from his stint of writing books on fascism in Italy in 1977. While Ledeen got involved in Republican smear politics immediately--writing articles alleging Carter had ties to Libya--his ill-fated career in counterintelligence didn't start until several years later, well after JJA had been ousted from the CIA in 1974. Now, Angleton died in 1987, so it's certainly possible Ledeen knew him. But where would he have met him? I'm not sure. But it's worth considering that JJA occupied the same nexus between Italy, Israel, and US intelligence as Ledeen (JJA apparently doesn't have Ledeen's well-established ties to Iranian fabricators, but his association with British intelligence before the war might amount to the same thing). JJA was rumored to favor Italian fascism when he lived there as a youth, managed counterintelligence in Italy after World War II, and has been alleged to be connected with the founding of Propaganda Due. And for much of his career he managed the CIA's relationship with Mossad. If these allegations are correct, JJA and Ledeen share a fondness for fascism (the fascist movement, Ledeen would say), close operational ties to Israel and Italy, and a habit of seeing ghosts behind every tree. Which gives Ledeen's mockery of his own conspiracies a very different spin. At the risk of sounding like JJA (or Ledeen) myself, Michael Ledeen and JJA traveled similar paths in counter-intelligence, where a well-cultivated paranoia about enemies justifies all manner of covert activities. For JJA (as far as we know--there were accusations of much more), this justified establishing a wide-ranging spy network within the US. For Ledeen, it justifies trading secrets with friends and enemies and, apparently, constructing elaborate plots to bring the country into a unjustified war. His JJA columns may have started as something else. But of late they
seem to have turned into celebrations of Ledeen's own conspiracies ...
at least for those in on the joke. Ledeen admits the truth My overall impression, then, of Ledeen's JJA articles relating to issues he's involved with, is that he's taunting his opponents--acknowledging the sheer ineptitude of his plots, but laughing that he hasn't been discovered yet. I find one detail of these dialogues really telling. In both his JJA dialogues and his traditional essays, he occasionally attacks journalists by name. Ledeen attacks Josh Marshall particularly bitterly in one of the dialogues (apparently for Marshall's exposure of Michelle Ledeen's gravy train job in Iraq courtesy of the Heritage Foundation). He attacks Seymour Hersh repeatedly in his traditional essays. But I have not found one mention of Hersh in the JJA dialogues. Hersh, you'll recall, is the guy who brought down JJA in 1974 by exposing his domestic spying activities in a blockbuster article in the NYT. Perhaps, in his dialogues, Ledeen would rather not admit that a little real exposure might bring down the whole charade. Maybe that will happen for Ledeen soon. On several key points, he has already been proved wrong, as in this passage where he predicts the Franklin case will never result in indictments.
Put up or shut up, indeed.
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