Lesser Neocons of L'Affaire Plame - by Christopher Deliso

From start to finish, the Niger deception and the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame depended on a relay team of hawkish officials providentially placed throughout various government agencies. These included the CIA, the Pentagon and its Office of Special Plans (now under official investigation by the Pentagon's Office of the Inspector General), the State Department, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), performing a handoff of information from the point of origin (the CIA) to the ultimate "commissioners" of the inquiry, the masterminds in the White House and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Considering the frequently attested intra- and interfactional nature of all of these agencies, it is understandable why the highest officials in the land jostled to get their "people" strategically inserted throughout the departments, where they could garner inside information and hinder the objectives of their ostensibly direct employers whenever they conflicted with the goals of their real minders.

Aside from the high-visibility officials involved or presumably involved in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame – Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, etc. – we also have a generous sprinkling of neocons who, while somewhat less well known, have played a crucial role in not only the Plame outing but in policy-crafting and, perhaps, criminal activities as well.

The present study considers four such figures: David Wurmser and Frederick Fleitz, both formerly employed in the State Department office of the Madman with the Handlebar Mustache, John Bolton; Marc Grossman, a longtime State Department official recently turned lobbyist; and Eric Edelman, like Grossman a former ambassador to Turkey, longtime Cheneyite, and current recess appointee to Doug Feith's old position as No. 3 in the Pentagon.

John Bolton's Attack Dogs

While he has always been an outspoken opponent of arms control of all kinds, John Bolton was assigned to precisely that brief by the Bush administration in May 2001. Now his brief has been changed to acting UN ambassador, though he has in the past called for the cessation of the world body. At least he's consistent in his perversity.

On Oct. 27, on the eve of the Libby indictment, Richard Sale reported that according to "several former and serving U.S. intelligence officials," Libby was told of Plame's CIA identity via a phone call that "definitely came from the State Department office of John Bolton, then the arms control chief of the department."

More specifically, says Sale, Bolton assistants David Wurmser and Frederick Fleitz were part of the relay team responsible for leaking Plame's identity to Libby and then to Novak and Miller. "These same sources alleged that Wurmser, as Bolton's special assistant, got his knowledge of Plame's classified identity from a colleague in his office, Frederick Fleitz, a CIA officer detailed to Bolton's office from the agency who worked in the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center (WINIPAC)." Gary Leupp's Nigergate timeline of Nov. 9, 2005, gives further details on their involvement.

David Wurmser: A Blowhard Empowered

Bolton's attack dogs come from the very heart of the neocon establishment. It was Wurmser, after all, who largely wrote the now-infamous 1996 policy paper urging an invasion of Iraq for the sake of Israel: "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." Among the signers were Doug Feith and Richard Perle. Another was Wurmser's wife, Israeli-born Meyrav Wurmser, director of Middle East studies at the neocon-friendly Hudson Institute.

Out of power but continuing to skulk around the AEI with his neocon comrades, Wurmser handed out yet more free advice in a similar study published in 2000 by neocon Daniel Pipe's Middle East Forum and Ziad Abdelnour's U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon; it "advocated a wider U.S. role in Lebanon":

"The study, 'Ending Syria's Occupation of Lebanon: The U.S. Role?' called for the United States to force Syria from Lebanon and to disarm it of its alleged weapons of mass destruction. It also argued that 'Syrian rule in Lebanon stands in direct opposition to American ideals' and criticized the United States for engaging rather than confronting the regime. Among the documents signers were several soon-to-be Bush administration figures, including Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, Michael Rubin, and Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky. Other signers included Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Ledeen, and Frank Gaffney."

When the neocons started feeling their oats with the return to power of a Republican administration later that year, hawks like Wurmser were locked and loaded to put these ideas into practice. With 9/11 came their ultimate opportunity. As Raw Story reports:

"[S]hortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Wurmser was handpicked by Harold Rhode, a Foreign Affairs Specialist in the Office of Net Assessment, a Pentagon 'think tank,' and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith to head a top secret Pentagon 'cell' whose job was to comb through CIA intelligence documents and find evidence that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States and its neighbors in the Middle East so a case could be made to launch a preemptive military strike. Wurmser largely invented evidence that Iraq had close ties to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden."

Wurmser's two-man "cell" was officially known as the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group, and was based in "a windowless, cipher-locked room at the Pentagon." In order to expedite Wurmser's "research," Feith and Rhode had to perform some "softening-up" operations on the professional intelligence community. A Jan. 26, 2004, report from Mother Jones explains their methods like this:

"[A]ccording to insiders, Rhode worked with Feith to purge career Defense officials who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz and Feith wanted. Rhode appeared to be 'pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with,' says a former analyst. 'They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the f*ck out of there.'

Frederick Fleitz: Dual-Use Technology Personified

For his part, Fleitz was an old confidante of Bolton's and "on loan" to his office from the CIA. A State Department intelligence analyst on WMD, Greg Thielman, told Seymour Hersh in 2003 that Bolton "surrounded himself with a hand-chosen group of loyalists, and found a way to get CIA information directly." Bolton affirmed for Hersh that he had demanded and received "direct electronic access to sensitive intelligence, such as foreign agent reports and electronic intercepts. In previous administrations, such data had been made available to undersecretaries only after it was analyzed, usually in the specific secured offices of the INR [the State Department intelligence branch]."

That Bolton's boys would betray Valerie Plame should come as no surprise, considering their consistently vicious previous tactics with intelligence officers who resisted their orders to make the intelligence fit their case. In April 2005, the New York Times reported on several antagonistic e-mails sent during 2002 by Fleitz to Christian Westermann, "the State Department's top expert on biological weapons," who also worked under Thielman.

Apparently, John Bolton could not tolerate the "wimpy" language that the INR recommended he use in a speech about Cuba. The always bellicose Bolton sought to accuse Cuba of developing biological weapons – a prospect even more fanciful than Iraq's alleged ambitions in the field. In any case, the war of attrition had its effect on Westermann, who on Sept. 23, 2002, wrote a high-ranking INR official, Thomas Fingar, stating that the incessant attacks from Bolton/Fleitz were "affecting my work, my health, and [my] dedication to public service."

Westermann, a career naval officer, was moved in 2000 to the State Department's Bureau of Nonproliferation. In 2005, he testified in a Senate hearing [.pdf] that "Mr. Bolton was very unhappy that a working level analyst [i.e., himself] had the temerity to alter language that he wanted to say." Regarding Fleitz, Westermann revealed that "Fred was a conduit for Mr. Bolton to receive other information [from the CIA] … there were times that material flowed from other agencies to Undersecretary Bolton not through INR." Frank affirmations of Bolton's abusive nature while in the State Department were made at his April 2005 UN confirmation hearings by Carl W. Ford Jr., Westermann's ultimate boss at the INR.

Marc Grossman: A Dark Horse Candidate?

It's clear that Cheney assistant Libby thought to ask John Bolton about the identity of the CIA's "secret envoy" to Niger (i.e., Wilson) because he recognized that the WMD-focused brief of Bolton and Fleitz meant they had a good chance of finding out who was behind Joe Wilson's trip to Africa. They also shared Libby's neocon ideology. In short, they were people he could count on.

But why, then, did Libby also ask a non-WMD specialist like Marc Grossman? How was he in a position to help, and why did Libby believe he could be trusted with the mission?

Although Grossman "has not been as high profile in the press" FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds cryptically told me the other day, "don't overlook him – he is very important."

She was not speaking about the Plame affair, though Grossman did indeed have a key role there, as we will see. According to her, Grossman was one of three officials – the other two, she says, are Richard Perle and Douglas Feith – who had been watched by both Valerie Plame's Brewster Jennings & Associates CIA team, and by the major FBI investigation of organized crime and governmental corruption on which she herself was working until being terminated in April 2002.

Marc Grossman has served in a number of interesting countries and positions over the past 29 years. From 1976-1983, at a pivotal point in the Cold War, he was employed at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan – America's key regional ally, through which millions of dollars in weapons and other "aid" were delivered by Pakistan's ISI intelligence service to the mujahedin following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

At the same time, Pakistan was actively seeking to become a nuclear power following another humiliating military defeat at the hands of India in 1971. This pursuit necessarily involved clandestine, black-market transactions, and it in fact led Pakistan to spawn the world's biggest eventual nuclear proliferator – A.Q. Khan, father of the country's nuclear program and supplier to numerous sketchy regimes and underworld characters. The U.S., as Seymour Hersh recounted in 1993, looked the other way as Pakistan developed nuclear technologies throughout the 1980s: "protecting the Afghanistan war had emerged as a major policy of the State Department's Bureau of Near East and South Asia Affairs, which was responsible for Pakistani policy."

Grossman's professional ties with Pakistan apparently long outlived his nine-year tenure there. The Guardian, among others, mentioned the fact that in the days immediately preceding Sept. 11, 2001, Pakistani ISI chief Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed – financier of 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta – paid a visit to senior administration officials, including Grossman, then undersecretary of state for political affairs.

A Pakistani article published on Sept. 10, 2001, claimed that Ahmed's

"most important meeting was with Mark Grossman, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs. U.S. sources would not furnish any details beyond saying that the two discussed 'matters of mutual interests.' What those matters could be is a matter of pure conjecture. One can safely guess that the discussions must have centered around Afghanistan, relations with India and China, disarmament of civilian outfits, country's nuclear and missiles program, and, of course, Osama bin Laden."

Following a three-year stint in the private office of NATO Secretary General Lord Carrington in Brussels, Grossman went on to become deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Turkey from 1989-1992. Two years later, he was appointed ambassador, representing U.S. political, commercial, and military interests in Turkey until June 1997. In this position, he would have been well informed of everything in these realms, and worked with leading lobbyists from both America and Turkey, as well as the firms they represented. A comprehensive study shows the staggering scope of American military aid to Turkey during the period in question. This largesse depended and continues to depend on the good offices of influential governmental and near-governmental officials and businessmen.

Examples abound: let's take the other two doubly implicated characters by Sibel Edmonds, Doug Feith and Richard Perle. In 1989, "Feith registered International Advisors Inc. (IAI) as a foreign agent representing the government of Turkey," wrote James Zogby, four months before 9/11. "One of the stated purposes of the work of IAI was to 'promote the objective of U.S.-Turkish defense industrial cooperation.'" In fact, in the ensuing years, the firm – its highest paid "external" consultant being one Richard Perle – was compensated for lobbying services for Turkey at a rate of $600,000 a year. Zogby cites a Wall Street Journal story from the time of IAI's inception stating that Perle "among other things supervised U.S. military assistance to Turkey during his recent seven-year hitch in the Pentagon."

Interestingly enough, at the same time Feith and Perle were greasing Turkish palms and Grossman was presiding over in Ankara, the CIA's Brewster-Jennings network and Valerie Plame were focusing on nuclear proliferation in Turkey. This scrutiny led them to trace private citizens in America as well as lobby groups like the American-Turkish Council – which is precisely where Plame met future husband Joseph Wilson, while "on duty" at a 1997 reception held by then-Turkish ambassador to the U.S. Nuzhet Kandemir.

The FBI also got involved on the domestic front, as the Edmonds case affirms. And there was discussion between successive Turkish and Pakistani governments, during the 1980s and 1990, regarding the idea of making both nuclear-armed Islamic states. At least as far as we know, only the latter has so far succeeded.

After leaving Turkey in 1997, Grossman was promoted by President Clinton to become assistant secretary of state for European affairs (1997-2000), where he helped expedite NATO's illegal war against Yugoslavia. Under George W. Bush, he would become undersecretary of state for political affairs. As the administration was pushing for war in early 2003, Grossman became a mouthpiece for neocon policy. In a March 3, 2003, interview for Dutch television, he made a statement that could have come out of some PNAC policy papers: "[T]he time has come now to make a stand against this kind of connection between weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. And we think Iraq is a place to make that stand first … the great threat today is the nexus between weapons of mass destruction and terrorism."

In June 2005, Grossman left the public sector and became vice chairman at all-powerful lobbying firm The Cohen Group, run by an old Kosovo War colleague, former Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen. Actually, as the Washington Post put it,

"Cohen Group folks don't officially lobby but, according to the group, provide clients 'the insights and intelligence needed to better understand and shape the business, political, legal, regulatory and media environments in which they operate.' The consulting shop has a 'strategic partnership' with DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary, which has a lobbying component."

The Cohen Group, along with major Turkish lobbyist The Livingston Group, is a paying sponsor of the American-Turkish Council. Marc Grossman looks set for a long and comfortable second career well out of the public eye; no doubt, he will cash in handsomely by leveraging for Cohen clients the formidable influence he has gained through a long career of State Department postings under five different presidential administrations.

Grossman as a Key Source in the Plame Leak

Unless, of course, he finds himself tangled up in Plamegate or other related scandals that have as yet not been divulged. Gary Leupp recounts that on May 29, 2003, in addition to Bolton, Libby asked Marc Grossman for information on news reports "about [the] CIA's secret envoy to Africa in 2002." Grossman then requested a classified memo from INR boss Carl Ford (the boss of both Westermann and Fleitz), "and later orally brief[ed] Libby on its contents."

On July 21, 2005, the Washington Post stated that the memo had been written on June 10, 2003, "by an analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) … for Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, who asked to be brought up to date on INR's opposition to the White House view that Hussein was trying to buy uranium in Africa."

A subsequent Washington Post article of Oct. 17 pointed out that at the time, Grossman had actually assumed the role of acting secretary of state "since Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Deputy Secretary Richard L. Armitage were out of the country."

Yes indeed, while the cat is away, the mice will play…

The article also stated that Grossman "wanted the letter (classified 'secret') as background for a meeting at the White House where the discussion was focused on then growing criticism of Bush's inclusion in his January State of the Union speech of the allegation that Hussein had been seeking uranium from Niger." Grossman seems to have been regarded as suitable by Cheney et al. for finding out what the war party wanted to know about Joe Wilson.

The Grossman memo laid out the reasons why the State Department's INR had found the Niger intel not credible. It also described "a meeting at the CIA in February 2002, attended by another INR analyst [emphasis mine], where Plame introduced her husband as the person who was to go to Niger."

The article continues:

"Attached to the letter were the notes from the INR analyst who had attended the session, but they were written well after the event occurred and contained mistakes about who was there and what was said, according to a former intelligence official who reviewed the document in the summer of 2003.

"Grossman has refused to answer questions about the letter, and it is not clear whether he talked about it at the White House meeting he was said to have attended, according to the former State official."

Who could have been the "other INR analyst" sent to the CIA meeting? And was it the same analyst responsible for drafting the memo in the first place? Could the analyst have been Fleitz, the CIA officer "on loan" to Bolton's office in the State Department, but still working for the CIA at the same time? Indeed, how many other people would have had the freedom and relevant security clearances to go back and forth between the two agencies, let alone have direct access to the White House?

These disclosures indicate two things: one, that a covert channel of information through the CIA, State Department, and White House existed; and two, that Grossman definitely was involved throughout, probably enlisting the help of Fleitz and/or Wurmser in expediting the process.

From this it seems pretty clear that Grossman's mission was a key part of the neocon offensives against the intelligence community, as with the Bolton/Fleitz harassment of analysts like Christian Westermann. And, like all career diplomats serving under multiple administrations, Grossman's ideological sympathies were clearly flexible enough for the job.

Eric Edelman: A Witness, or More?

Another low-profile neocon associate who has been swept up in the Plamegate controversy is Eric Edelman, a former Cheney staffer, the previous ambassador to Turkey, and current replacement for Douglas Feith as undersecretary of defense for policy. However, as with John Bolton's appointment to the UN, Edelman was installed via a White House recess appointment.

According to the NY Times on Nov. 5, Edelman has been identified as the "then-principle deputy" of Lewis Libby in the weeks leading up to the outing of Plame, as named in the Fitzgerald indictment [.pdf]. Edelman and his boss spoke on the phone "on or about June 19, 2003, before Mr. Wilson's name became public."

It says that Mr. Edelman asked Mr. Libby in June 2003 whether information about Mr. Wilson's trip could be disclosed to the press to rebut allegations that Vice President Cheney had called for the trip. Reads the indictment:

"LIBBY spoke by telephone with his then Principal Deputy and discussed the article [in The New Republic]. That official asked LIBBY whether information about Wilson's trip could be shared with the press to rebut the allegations that the VP had sent Wilson. LIBBY responded that there would be complications at the CIA in disclosing that information publicly, and that he could not discuss the matter on a non-secure phone line."

What is interesting here, aside from the cloak-and-dagger, almost Franklinesque flair of Libby, is that Edelman was no longer even supposed to be employed with him at the time: as the NYT reminds, "Mr. Edelman ceased work for Mr. Libby on June 6, 2003, to begin language training in preparation for a posting as ambassador to Turkey."

Perhaps the need for a recess appointment had to do with Edelman's dangerous failure at his previous place of employment. A 2003 article from Turkish columnist Ali Aslan remarked on how strongly Edelman, in his new role as ambassador, was disliked by Turks. During his two-year tenure in Ankara, Edelman became a lightning rod for criticism as a meddlesome, bullying diplomat who disrespected Turkish sovereignty on a number of levels. The local media laid into him on numerous occasions. Columnist Ibrahim Karagul writing in "the Islamist daily Yeni Safak, known as the unofficial mouthpiece of the Justice and Development Party (AKP)," said, "if we want to address the reasons for anti-Americanism, Edelman must be issue one. As long as Edelman stays in Turkey, the chill wind disturbing bilateral relations will last." Milliyet writer Can Dsündar added, "[I]f Turkey today is the leader in the race of 'America-hating countries,' Edelman is a major part of it." Yeni Safak's Ahmet Kekeç, reciting a litany of abuses and revenge tactics Edelman used against the newspaper, closed by simply stating, "Edelman must go."

And go he did – straight back into the arms of Dick Cheney and the war party, which he had already served on two occasions, first during the reign of Bush I, and again between 2001-2003 as a special assistant to Cheney. In the first period, he worked under Paul Wolfowitz in the creation of a Defense Policy Guidance that "stipulated that the U.S. should wage preventive war to maintain unchallenged U.S. military supremacy." The second time around, in the run-up to the Iraq war, Edelman played a vital role, along with Lewis Libby, Doug Feith, and other prominent neocons, in crafting the bogus rationale for war in Iraq that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. In August 2005, President Bush "used a constitutional power to bypass the Senate" in confirming Edelman as the new undersecretary of defense for policy, replacing Douglas Feith.

According to the above RightWeb article, "replacing Douglas Feith with Edelman allows the radicals running U.S. foreign policy to leave behind the controversies building around Feith and get a relatively clean start with a new undersecretary of defense for planning." However, that "relatively clean start" now seems in danger of being sullied by Edelman's as yet unknown role in L'Affaire Plame.

Fitzgerald's Announcement and the Woodward Revelations: More to Come?

When all is said and done, how many more "peripheral figures" aside from Fleitz, Wurmser, Grossman, and Edelman are going to be sucked in by the vacuum that is Plamegate? Although I don't have space here to dip into the feeding frenzy of speculation that has ensued following Bob Woodward's testimony that yet another official had informed him of Plame's identity in June 2003, a month before Libby told Bob Novak, it is worth mentioning that things are bound to get more exciting yet: after all, the meticulous and patient Patrick Fitzgerald has announced that a second grand jury will be convened.

So it looks as if the show's not over. Perhaps it hasn't even begun. And if certain business interests and foreign relations are going to be affected by the prosecutor's inquiry into high treason, well, that's just too bad.