Flunking Our Future: MAUREEN DOWD - The Basics in Iraq

CORRECTED LINK
THE COMPLETE ARTICLE

The New York Times

Flunking Our Future
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 20, 2006

Once our leaders get a grasp of the basics in Iraq, we can hit them with a truly hard question: What on earth do we do now?

The only sects that may be more savage than Shiites and Sunnis are the Democratic feminist lawmakers representing Northern and Southern California.

After Nancy Pelosi and Jane Harman had their final catfight about who would lead the House Intelligence Committee, aptly enough at the Four Seasons’ hair salon in Georgetown, the new speaker passed over the knowledgeable and camera-eager Ms. Harman and mystifyingly gave the consequential job to Sylvestre Reyes of Texas.

Mr. Reyes promptly tripped over the most critical theme in the field of intelligence. Jeff Stein, interviewing the incoming chairman for Congressional Quarterly, asked him whether Al Qaeda was Sunni or Shiite.

“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” the lawmaker guessed.

As Mr. Stein corrected him in the article: “Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an Al Qaeda clubhouse, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.”

--MORE-

Flunking Our Future: MAUREEN DOWD - The Basics in Iraq

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
The New York Times

Flunking Our Future
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 20, 2006

Once our leaders get a grasp of the basics in Iraq, we can hit them with a truly hard question: What on earth do we do now?

The only sects that may be more savage than Shiites and Sunnis are the Democratic feminist lawmakers representing Northern and Southern California.

After Nancy Pelosi and Jane Harman had their final catfight about who would lead the House Intelligence Committee, aptly enough at the Four Seasons’ hair salon in Georgetown, the new speaker passed over the knowledgeable and camera-eager Ms. Harman and mystifyingly gave the consequential job to Sylvestre Reyes of Texas.

Mr. Reyes promptly tripped over the most critical theme in the field of intelligence. Jeff Stein, interviewing the incoming chairman for Congressional Quarterly, asked him whether Al Qaeda was Sunni or Shiite.

“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” the lawmaker guessed.

As Mr. Stein corrected him in the article: “Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an Al Qaeda clubhouse, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.”

--MORE-

Reyes Should Have Known Better, But He’s Hardly Alone

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY – SpyTalk
Dec. 15, 2006 – 8:27 p.m.

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

Poor Silvestre Reyes.

The proud Texas Democrat spent most of last week under a media heat lamp that turned him into a poster boy for Washington’s ineptness in the Middle East.

That was unfair, in one sense: He’s not special.

Reyes’ evident ignorance about Islamic terrorists is common among members of the intelligence oversight committees and rampant in the ranks of new recruits to the spy agencies themselves, according to sources well-acquainted with both.

Reyes, however, had the misfortune to be the ascendant Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s awkward choice to head the House Intelligence Committee.

As the fresh new face of the Democrats’ shaky grasp of national security issues, he’s fresh meat for a Washington press corps whose hands hurt from beating up on Republicans for their handling of the Iraq war and the elusive Osama bin Laden.

And give Reyes credit for this: After his inability to answer elementary questions about Islam turned him into a global laughingstock, he declined to resort to the cornered politician’s usual dirty tricks.

Reyes might have claimed, for example, that I misquoted him, or took his words out of context, or—a common dodge—mouse-trapped him with a “gotcha” question.

Instead, the five-term congressman, Vietnam vet and former Border Patrol officer turned out to be a stand-up guy, in contrast with the usual Washington standards.

“The CQ interview covered a wide range of topics,” said Reyes in an official statement hounded out of him by the television networks, “other than the selected points published in the story.”

That’s true. And indeed, I had planned to devote another column to my interview with Reyes, who says he’s going to run a far more muscular oversight committee than the Republicans.

But his widely televised remarks prompted intelligence insiders to come forward with additional — and depressing — tales that only served to remind that Reyes is hardly the only intelligence official here who can’t tell the difference between Sunnis and Shiites more than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. soil.

Former Army intelligence Col. Rich Reynolds, who spent over two decades in the Middle East, told me he was startled recently to hear about several young CIA intelligence analysts at the CIA headquarters who were completely unfamiliar with Israel’s disastrous 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

The analysts’ current area of responsibility? Lebanon.

Likewise, a young intelligence analyst specializing in terrorist finances at the Department of Homeland Security was baffled a few weeks back by a question about hawalas, the ubiquitous Arab shops that work like an informal Western Union network to transfer money around the Middle East.

Experts think hawalas are one of al Qaeda’s prime channels for moving cash.

“What’s a hawala?” she asked.

Another young CIA analyst at the National Counterterrorism Center, according to a former White House National Security Council official who continues to work on intelligence matters, seemed totally surprised to learn that the terrorist group most responsible for killing Americans before 9/11 was not al Qaeda or a Palestinian faction but Hezbollah. The Iran-backed Shiite“Party of God” killed more than 300 Americans in suicide bombings in Beirut and Saudi Arabia in the 1980s and 1990s.

Newcomers

For months, intelligence insiders, current and retired, have been telling me that the spy bureaucracies suffer from two major problems among many.

One is that the last of the Cold Warriors who spent careers conducting clandestine operations against tough Soviet and other opposition services have retired or are on the verge of retirement.

As with a baseball team in a rebuilding phase, the clubhouse is full of fresh faces.

U.S. intelligence is also losing top talent to higher paying Washington-area contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI, Titan and Science Applications International Corp.

“[A]nd we end up leasing them back,” Ron Sanders, chief human capital officer at the National Intelligence Directorate, told National Public Radio last month — at a cost far above what the government was paying them for the same job.

Some experts think one way to stanch the bleeding would be for the intelligence agencies to put a cap on salaries that they will pay contractors.

In the meantime, according to multiple sources, the CIA, FBI and other agencies have found themselves promoting relative newcomers — people with three to five years experience — into supervisory roles in the battle against sophisticated terrorists, not to mention the espionage services of China, Russia, France, Israel and other “friendly enemies.”

Lives at Stake

All of which magnifies the importance of strong congressional oversight and expertise on the intelligence panels — and on the part of the members themselves, not just staff.

Retired CIA official Richard J. Kerr, who worked in four of the agency’s divisions during a 32-year career and headed two of them, frequently briefed the Intelligence committees, which he found a dispiriting affair.

“One of my complaints about the oversight committees is that they really know relatively little about the intelligence product, and never enough to know what they could do to improve it,” Kerr related in an e-mail last week.

“They are critics, but not critics of the substance.

“I have known only two members willing to come out to CIA to get detailed briefings,” Kerr continued. “They all repeat the same chestnuts — what we need is better coordination and sharing” among the 17 agencies of the so-called intelligence community.

“That ignores the problem that most intelligence failures are because there is insufficient information, or the analysts (and most importantly, their leaders) don’t ask the right questions.”

Jack Cloonan, a legendary former FBI counterterrorism agent, was incensed last week to read that Silvestre Reyes thought al Qaeda was “predominately Shiite” —which is 100 percent wrong — and couldn’t put Hezbollah in either of Islam’s two main warring branches.

“There is absolutely no excuse, five years out from 9/11, to not know the difference [between Sunnis and Shiites], to not know that Osama bin Laden is a Sunni.,” Cloonan told ABC’s Jake Tapper Dec. 13.

“It’s just, frankly, unacceptable. There’s no other word to describe it.”

A number of readers who contacted me suggested that Reyes was failed by his staff, who failed to properly brief him in advance of my interview.

But Cloonan brushes that aside.

“You have to eat, sleep and drink this stuff,” he said. “People’s lives are at stake. I wish people would understand that.”

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.

Source: CQ Homeland Security
© 2006 Congressional Quarterly Inc. All Rights Reserved

Oh, great! The Democrats’ new Intelligence Chairman is an ijiot

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY – SpyTalk
Dec. 8, 2006 – 7:43 p.m.

Democrats’ New Intelligence Chairman Needs a Crash Course on al Qaeda

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

Forty years ago, Sgt. Silvestre Reyes was a helicopter crew chief flying dangerous combat missions in South Vietnam from the top of a soaring rocky outcrop near the sea called Marble Mountain.

After the war, it turned out that the communist Viet Cong had tunneled into the hill and built a combat hospital right beneath the skids of Reyes’ UH-1 Huey gunship.

Now the five-term Texas Democrat, 62, is facing similar unpleasant surprises about the enemy, this time as the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

That’s because, like a number of his colleagues and top counterterrorism officials that I’ve interviewed over the past several months, Reyes can’t answer some fundamental questions about the powerful forces arrayed against us in the Middle East.

It begs the question, of course: How can the Intelligence Committee do effective oversight of U.S. spy agencies when its leaders don’t know basics about the battlefield?

To his credit, Reyes, a kindly, thoughtful man who also sits on the Armed Service Committee, does see the undertows drawing the region into chaos.

For example, he knows that the 1,400- year-old split in Islam between Sunnis and Shiites not only fuels the militias and death squads in Iraq, it drives the competition for supremacy across the Middle East between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia.

That’s more than two key Republicans on the Intelligence Committee knew when I interviewed them last summer. Rep. Jo Ann Davis, R-Va., and Terry Everett, R-Ala., both back for another term, were flummoxed by such basic questions, as were several top counterterrorism officials at the FBI.

I thought it only right now to pose the same questions to a Democrat, especially one who will take charge of the Intelligence panel come January. The former border patrol agent also sits on the Armed Services Committee.

Reyes stumbled when I asked him a simple question about al Qaeda at the end of a 40-minute interview in his office last week. Members of the Intelligence Committee, mind you, are paid $165,200 a year to know more than basic facts about our foes in the Middle East.

We warmed up with a long discussion about intelligence issues and Iraq. And then we veered into terrorism’s major players.

To me, it’s like asking about Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland: Who’s on what side?

The dialogue went like this:

Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?

“Al Qaeda, they have both,” Reyes said. “You’re talking about predominately?”

“Sure,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” he ventured.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an al Qaeda club house, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.

That’s because the extremist Sunnis who make up a l Qaeda consider all Shiites to be heretics.

Al Qaeda’s Sunni roots account for its very existence. Osama bin Laden and his followers believe the Saudi Royal family besmirched the true faith through their corruption and alliance with the United States, particularly allowing U.S. troops on Saudi soil.

It’s been five years since these Muslim extremists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center.

Is it too much to ask that our intelligence overseers know who they are?

Civil War

And Hezbollah? I asked him. What are they?

“Hezbollah. Uh, Hezbollah...”

He laughed again, shifting in his seat.

“Why do you ask me these questions at five o’clock? Can I answer in Spanish? Do you speak Spanish?”

“Pocito,” I said—a little.

“Pocito?! “ He laughed again.

“Go ahead,” I said, talk to me about Sunnis and Shia in Spanish.

Reyes: “Well, I, uh....”

I apologized for putting him “on the spot a little.” But I reminded him that the people who have killed thousands of Americans on U.S. soil and in the Middle East have been front page news for a long time now.

It’s been 23 years since a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed over 200 U.S. military personnel in Beirut, mostly Marines.

Hezbollah, a creature of Iran, is close to taking over in Lebanon. Reports say they are helping train Iraqi Shiites to kill Sunnis in the spiralling civil war.

“Yeah,” Reyes said, rightly observing, “but . . . it’s not like the Hatfields and the McCoys. It’s a heck of a lot more complex.

“And I agree with you — we ought to expend some effort into understanding them. But speaking only for myself, it’s hard to keep things in perspective and in the categories.”

Reyes is not alone.

The best argument for needing to understand who’s what in the Middle East is probably the mistaken invasion itself, despite the preponderance of expert opinion that it was a terrible idea — including that of Bush’s father and his advisers. On the day in 2003 when Iraqi mobs toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, Bush was said to be unaware of the possibility that a Sunni-Shia civil war could fill the power vacuum, according to a reliable source with good White House connections.

If President Bush and some of his closest associates, not to mention top counterterrorism officials, have demonstrated their own ignorance about who the players are in the Middle East, why should we expect the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee to get it right?

Trent Lott, the veteran Republican senator from Mississippi, said only last September that “It’s hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what’s wrong with these people.”

“Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion?” wondered Lott, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after a meeting with Bush.

“Why do they hate the Israelis and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference?

“They all look the same to me,” Lott said.

Haunting

The administration’s disinterest in the Arab world has rattled down the chain of command.

Only six people in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad are fluent in Arabic, according to last week’s report of the Iraq Study Group. Only about two dozen of the embassy’s thousand employees have some familiarity with the language, the report said.

The Iraq Study Group was amazed to find that, despite spending $2 billion on Iraq in 2006, more wasn’t being done to try “to understand the people who fabricate, plant and explode roadside bombs.”

Rare is the military unit with an American soldier who can read a captured document or interrogate a prisoner, my own sources tell me.

It was that way in Vietnam, too, Reyes says, which “haunts us.”

“If you substitute Arabization for Vietnamization, if you substitute . . . our guys going in and taking over a place then leaving it and the bad guys come back in. . . .”

He trails off, despairing.

“I could draw many more analogies.”

Yet Reyes says he favors sending more troops there.

“If it’s going to target the militias and eliminate them, I think that’s a worthwhile investment,” he said.

It’s hard to find anybody in Iraq who thinks the U.S. can do that.

On “a temporary basis, I’m willing to ramp them up by twenty or thirty thousand . . . for, I don’t know, two months, four months, six months — but certainly that would be an exception,” Reyes said.

Meanwhile, the killing is going on below decks, too, within Sunni and Shiite groups and factions.

Anybody who pays serious attention to Iraq knows that.

Reyes says his first hearings come January will focus on how U.S. intelligence can do a better job helping the troops in Iraq.

It may be way too late for that.

“Stop giving me tests!” Reyes exclaimed, half kidding.

“I’m not going to talk to you any more!”

Next: More on intelligence topics from my interview with Rep. Reyes.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.

Source: CQ Homeland Security
© 2006 Congressional Quarterly Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Iraq: Top Dem Wants More Troops

<>As the debate over Iraq intensifies, leading Democrat Silvestre Reyes is calling for the deployment of more U.S. troops.

WEB EXCLUSIVE

By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball

Newsweek

Updated: 4:33 p.m. MT Dec 5, 2006

Dec. 5. 2006 - In a surprise twist in the debate over Iraq, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, the soon-to-be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he wants to see an increase of 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops as part of a stepped up effort to “dismantle the militias.”

The soft-spoken Texas Democrat was an early opponent of the Iraq war and voted against the October 2002 resolution authorizing President Bush to invade that country. That dovish record got prominently cited last week when Speaker designate Nancy Pelosi chose Reyes as the new head of the intelligence panel.

But in an interview with NEWSWEEK on Tuesday, Reyes pointedly distanced himself from many of his Democratic colleagues who have called for fixed timetables for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Coming on the eve of tomorrow’s recommendations from the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton commission, Reyes’s comments were immediately cited by some Iraq war analysts as fresh evidence that the intense debate over U.S. policy may be more fluid than many have expected.

“We’re not going to have stability in Iraq until we eliminate those militias, those private armies,” Reyes said. “We have to consider the need for additional troops to be in Iraq, to take out the militias and stabilize Iraq … We certainly can’t leave Iraq and run the risk that it becomes [like] Afghanistan” was before the 2001 invasion by the United States.

Reyes also stressed that there needed to be greater “political accountability” demanded of the Iraqi government. But on the core issue of the U.S. commitment, Reyes—a Vietnam War veteran who partially lost his hearing in that conflict—even compared his position to that of another Vietnam vet, Sen. John McCain, a staunch supporter of the Iraq war. Like Reyes, McCain also has called for an increase in U.S. troop strength. When asked how many additional troops he envisioned sending to Iraq, Reyes replied: “I would say 20,000 to 30,000—for the specific purpose of making sure those militias are dismantled, working in concert with the Iraqi military.”

When a reporter suggested that was not a position that was likely to be popular with many House Democrats, Reyes replied: “Well again, I differ in that I don’t want Iraq to become the next Afghanistan. We could not allow Iraq to become a safe haven for Al Qaeda, for Hamas, for Hizbullah, or anybody else. We cannot allow Iran or Syria to have a free hand in there to further destabilize the Middle East.”

Reyes added that he was “very clear” about his position to Pelosi when she chose him over two rivals—Rep. Jane Harman of California and Rep. Alcee Hastings—to head the critical intelligence post. One widely cited reason that Harman, a moderate Democrat who supported the war, didn’t get the nod from Pelosi is that the Speaker-designate wanted somebody who would be more aggressive in standing up to the Bush White House—which Reyes promises to be on other issues like domestic wiretapping and CIA secret prisons.

But when asked what he told Pelosi about his thinking on Iraq, Reyes replied: “What I said was, we can’t afford to leave there. And anybody who says, we are going pull out our troops immediately, is being dishonest … We’re all interested in getting out of Iraq. That’s a common goal. How we do it, I think, is the tough part. There are those that say, they don’t care what Iraq looks like once we leave there. Let’s just leave there. And I argue against that. I don’t think that’s responsible. And I think it plays right into the hands of Syria and Iran.”

Reyes also said he is eager to see the recommendations Wednesday from the bipartisan panel headed by former secretary of State Jim Baker and former Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Lee Hamilton. By some accounts, the panel is set to recommend an adjustment of course that will include the beginning of troop withdrawals pegged to progress on the ground along with other political and diplomatic initiatives. But Reyes said such ideas are not likely to substantially change his own views on the subject. “I’m very interested in reading what their recommendations are. But this is my position.”

Reyes’s comments were immediately blasted by one Iraq war critic who expressed concerns that they would give new respectability to an idea that has lost considerable support in official Washington as the violence in Iraq has escalated. “I think he [Reyes] needs a course in Insurgency 101,” said Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who has been active in an anti-war group called the Steering Group for Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. “Have they learned nothing from Vietnam? If he pushes this and gets some support for it, and with McCain in the Senate, it could become more respectable … I think Reyes has got a lot to learn.”

Yet one prominent Iraq war supporter, Cliff May, the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy who served on an advisory panel that worked with the Baker-Hamilton group, said he was stunned and pleasantly surprised by Reyes’s views. “Wow, that’s remarkable,” May replied when NEWSWEEK told him of Reyes’s comments. “Whenever anybody like myself suggests that we need more troops, we get told that it’s not politically feasible. But if you have a leading Democrat saying it, that strikes me as very significant …. I think it’s dawning on a lot of people that the price of a U.S. defeat would be dire.”

One source familiar with aspects of the Baker-Hamilton panel’s deliberations said that the idea of an increase of U.S. troop strength of 20,000 to 30,000 had been pushed by some U.S. military commanders for some time. However, Democratic members of the commission were unwilling to go along with any proposal that would indicate an expansion of the U.S. mission in that country, according to the source, who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters.

Yet another member of the Baker-Hamilton advisory panel praised Reyes for proposing the idea of increasing troops, saying it showed that he “doesn’t just fall back on political reflex.” But, added Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who formerly served as a U.S. political advisor in Iraq, Reyes’s ideas were unlikely to bear fruit unless accompanied with a far more extensive strategy that included a “political and diplomatic” initiative to reorder and rebuild support for the Iraqi government. “You can’t sustain an increase of 20,000 to 30,000 troops for very long—maybe four to six months,” Diamond said. “Can you really secure progress on the ground in terms of knocking out death squads and militia activity in four to six months? It won’t make sense unless it’s combined with very intensive political and constitutional activity. Otherwise putting in more troops is like putting more fingers in the dyke … I don’t think there is any magic bullet.”

URL

New House Intelligence Chairman Secretly Met With Iran-Contra Arms Dealer

OVERSEEING THE OVERSEERS. One thing you may not know about Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tx), now being considered as a compromise candidate to chair the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), is that he joined his friend and colleague, outgoing congressman Curt Weldon at a meeting with infamous Iran Contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, against the advice of the Agency, and without informing the U.S. ambassador in Paris, as is proper protocol. The meeting took place at the Sofitel hotel on Rue Boissy D'Anglas around the corner from the US embassy in Paris on a Saturday morning in the spring of 2004 (see update below), according to two sources. (The US government was actually surveilling the hotel lobby that morning out of concern that Iranians might potentially try to harm the congressmen; Weldon apparently loudly asked the concierge for a room for a secret meeting). Ghorbanifar and his business partner were trying to entice the U.S. congressmen to take up the cause of trying to make Ghorbanifar a paid U.S. intelligence asset again on the Middle East, but the CIA would have nothing to do with him, given that he was deemed a fabricator and made the subject of two CIA burn notices in the 1980s, and caused much grief for U.S. policymakers who dealt with him during the Iran Contra affair (think of then-National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane sitting at a Tehran airport with a cake on his lap for Rafsanjani, who wouldn't meet with him, as Ghorbanifar had promised he would, the plane of missile parts from the U.S. sitting in the hangar behind him; Ghorbanifar blamed the mishap on the Americans). What does this say about Reyes' judgment, meeting with a guy like this? Or his knowledge of U.S. operations gone amok?

I put in a call to Reyes' office to ask about that, not for the first time, and am still waiting to hear back. Will post their response if and when it comes. (Also at the meeting, according to my sources, was Congressman Solomon Ortiz [D-TX], who also has not responded to previous inquiries on the matter). One obvious concern is that the House intel committee has, of course, as its chief responsibility oversight of the intelligence community; when the oversight committee potential chairman makes a judgment call like this, what does it mean for the soundness of the vetting that intelligence operations and analysis and personnel decisions can be expected to get?

You can judge the quality of the intelligence Ghorbanifar and his associate were trying to sell the congressmen on by picking up a copy of Weldon's book, Countdown to Terror, which is drawn from it, and read more about the whole affair here and here.

Update: The meeting date was either Friday 29 August 2003 or Saturday, August 30, 2003. Reyes, Ortiz and Weldon were returning from a Congressional delegation that included Russia, and Uzbekistan, on a "technical stopover" in Paris 28/29 August, to give the (US military) crew rest. Weldon had dinner the Friday night before at the ambassador's residence, at which he told the ambassador, when asked, that he had no meetings planned in Paris. He and his group met as planned the next morning with his source Fereidoun Mahdavi who brought his business partner Ghorbanifar to the meeting in a corner of the mostly empty Sofitel lobby in the morning 9am. The US government had spotters on the corner outside and in the lobby out of concern that Ghorbanifar might try to set Weldon up. After Mahdavi and Ghorbanifar showed up, the spotter in the lobby was instructed not to linger.

Reyes' spokeswoman Kira Maas denies Reyes has ever met with Ghorbanifar.

Then CIA station chief in Paris Bill Murray says in response to that: "Weldon, Ortiz and Reyes were part of a Congressional delegation which was in France in late August 2003 for a planned meeting that Weldon planned with his source. I was supposed to go to that meeting but had been given instructions not to after I had learned from my own sources that Ghorbanifar was going to attend the meeting. Therefore I called Weldon, I told him I wouldn't go to the meeting. I also told him his source's information was not very good. He told me that my superiors in Washington would not agree with that and had told him it was first class information. The meeting was held. Ghorbanifar attended."

Update II: For his part, Mahdavi remembers meeting Congressman Solomon Ortiz at that 2003 Sofitel meeting to which he brought Ghorbanifar. About Reyes: "It's possible. At the time, the whole effort of Weldon was to get me in contact with the CIA. I assume no one from the intelligence committee was there." He also tells me outgoing House intelligence committee chairman Peter Hoekstra brought a delegation of eight congressmen -- four Democrats and four Republicans - to meet with him last year. Mahdavi says he had dinner with the Congressional delegation led by Hoekstra at the Hotel Opera in Paris in the summer of 2005. He also says he has met with Weldon "several" times.

In sum, the CIA station chief at the time understood that Weldon, Reyes and Ortiz, staying at the Hotel Sofitel in Paris, were scheduled to meet with Weldon's Iranian intelligence source, Fereidoun Mahdavi, on the morning of the 29th or 30th August 2003 at the hotel. When he learned from his sources that Mahdavi planned to bring Ghorbanifar to the meeting, he alerted Weldon that he would not attend, and that meeting with Ghorbanifar was not a good idea. The Congressional Record of November 10, 2003 documents that Weldon, Reyes and Ortiz of the Armed Services committee indeed traveled together on a congressional delegation and were in Paris at that time, and charged the taxpayers the same amount for their Paris stays ($397.00 each for two nights hotel on the 28th and 29th Aug 2003). Indeed, Congressional Travel records indicate that while Reyes joined Ortiz and Weldon on their trip two days late (Ortiz and Weldon went first to Serbia and Ukraine, Reyes joined up with them on the 24 August in Russia), flying commercially, that he departed on the same day with them from France, and they all reported identical charges for their time in France. The embassy sent spotters to scout the hotel lobby and street out of concern that Ghorbanifar, considered a foreign agent for Iran, might try to set the congressmen up. The spotter in the lobby saw a group of congressmen in the lobby of the Sofitel waiting for the 9am meeting, and heard Weldon ask the concierge for a room for a secret meeting, and complain that the CIA was quote chickening out of the meeting again. The spotter saw Mahdavi and Ghorbanifar come in to the lobby, and the group including the congressmen and the Iranians take a seat at a table in a corner of the mostly empty lobby restaurant area. He was instructed not to linger after Ghorbanifar arrived and had made sure no one was around who would harm or set up the congressmen and left. Mahdavi, a participant in the meeting, remembers specifically Weldon, Ortiz and Ghorbanifar there at the table, but isn't sure about Reyes, saying it's possible. I have called Reyes' office previously (as well as Ortiz and Weldon for that matter) to ask about allegations he attended the meeting, and indeed, had his spokeswoman's direct line penned into my US Congress handbook because of the earlier few times I called, but she has never gotten back to me until yesterday, when I included her statement. Perhaps it's time for Congressman Reyes' office to offer an explanation for what he was doing that morning that his colleagues Weldon and Ortiz met with Ghorbanifar and Mahdavi? If he wasn't at the meeting, it would be useful to know what he was doing, since the two colleagues he traveled with were at the meeting with Ghorbanifar and Madhavi. I welcome a fuller explanation, since I had understood from a reliable source that he was there.

--Laura Rozen

Posted by Laura Rozen on November 17, 2006 02:48 PM | Permalink