Iranian exile's info useless, officials say

Detroit Free Press:

House intelligence committee chairman Rep. Peter Hoekstra and Rep. Curt Weldon met secretly in Europe last week with an Iranian exile who CIA officials charge has passed worthless or bogus intelligence to the United States, current and former U.S. government officials said.

The Paris meeting appears to be the latest incident in which players outside the intelligence community try to affect U.S. foreign policy by highlighting threats that the CIA and other agencies find dubious. READ MORE

In some ways, it echoes the claims by Iraqi exiles that President Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction, claims proven to be false after the U.S.-led invasion.

Weldon, R-Pa., says in a new book that the Iranian exile, whom he calls "Ali," told him of Iranian-sponsored terrorist plots against the United States.

But the CIA says it has wasted hundreds of hours checking the claims of Ali -- whose real name is Fereidoun Mahdavi -- and that they're a mix of fabrications and embellishments of news reports, according to a letter from the CIA to Weldon.

The meeting was disclosed by current and former officials who requested anonymity because they said they didn't want to anger Weldon or Hoekstra.

Mahdavi is a longtime associate of Iranian arms merchant Manucher Ghorbanifar, the officials say. Ghorbanifar, a key figure in the 1980s Iran-contra scandal, has had two CIA "burn notices" issued on him, meaning agency officers are not to deal with him. The Senate intelligence committee also looked at the information provided via Mahdavi and deemed it unworthy of follow-up.

Jamal Ware, a spokesman for Hoekstra, R-Mich., said the congressman wouldn't comment, and it's unclear whether Hoekstra shares Weldon's assessment of Mahdavi. Weldon's office didn't reply to e-mailed questions.

The controversy over Mahdavi, a former minister in the late Shah of Iran's regime, is the latest chapter in the intelligence battles that have roiled the Bush administration.

Weldon, the No. 2 Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, and other critics accuse the CIA and other intelligence agencies of missing or ignoring dire threats to the United States.

Weldon's book, "Countdown to Terror," claims Iran is planning a calamitous terrorist strike against the United States known as "the 12th Imam operation," that it's close to having a nuclear weapon and that Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was or is hiding in Iran.

But to intelligence professionals, the Mahdavi saga is an example of bogus intelligence being forced into the system.

They also see a hidden motive: the overthrow of the theocratic government in Tehran.

"It is ... likely that, as a former official during the shah's era," Mahdavi "seeks to influence the U.S. government to overthrow the current Iranian government," the CIA said in a letter to Weldon last year. In the letter, partially declassified at Weldon's request, Mahdavi's name is blacked out.

The letter says the CIA has "devoted hundreds of man-hours" to examining the claims. "His information is consistent with, but does not add to, what is available from press sources, without providing significant new or credible details not already available elsewhere," it says.

Bill Murray, the CIA's former Paris station chief, told American Prospect magazine last month that he met with Mahdavi four times and set up a secure phone line for him to communicate with the agency. He provided no valuable information, Murray told the magazine.

"Mahdavi works for Ghorbanifar," Murray was quoted as saying. "The two are inseparable. Ghorbanifar put Mahdavi out to meet with Weldon."

Weldon said last week he will ask the CIA to investigate whether Murray divulged Ali's real name -- an echo of the current controversy over the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, the wife of Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson.

Among the reports apparently generated by Mahdavi and Ghorbanifar, and reluctantly chased down by the CIA, was one that Iraq had allegedly transferred highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons to Iran in an effort to hide the material. That report never checked out.

Ghorbanifar met with Pentagon officials Harold Rhode and Lawrence Franklin in late 2001. The meetings were protested by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. But a second meeting, which Pentagon officials say was unplanned, took place in Paris in June 2003.

Mahdavi, said former CIA counter-terrorism official Vincent Cannistraro, "is just part and parcel of the longest-running, ongoing fabrication in U.S. history."