Reply #5: franklin, ledeen, rhode, ghorbanifar, arms, etc

[buycitgo]

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0808-12.htm

The senior administration official identified two of the Defense officials who met with Ghorbanifar as Harold Rhode, Feith's top Middle East specialist, and Larry Franklin, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst on loan to the undersecretary's office.

Rhode recently acted as a liaison between Feith's office, which drafted much of the administration's post-Iraq planning, and Ahmed Chalabi, a former Iraqi exile disdained by the CIA and State Department but groomed for leadership by the Pentagon.

Rhode is a protege of Michael Ledeen, a neo-conservative who was a National Security Council consultant in the mid-1980s when he introduced Ghorbanifar to Oliver North, a National Security Council aide, and others in the opening stages of the Iran-contra affair.

A former CIA officer who himself was involved in some aspects of the Iran-contra scandal said that current intelligence officers told him it was Ledeen who reopened the Ghorbanifar channel with Feith's staff.

Ledeen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and an ardent advocate for regime change in Iran, would neither confirm nor deny that he arranged for the Ghorbanifar meetings. "I'm not going to comment on any private meetings with any private people," he said. "It's nobody's business."