Spies In The Pentagon

How could you tell the difference between an Israeli spy on Doug Feith's staff and everyone else on Doug Feith's staff? A joke, yes, but only sort of. For that reason, I find these details more interesting:

The Pentagon analyst who officials said was under suspicion was one of two department officials who traveled to Paris for secret meetings with Iranian dissidents, including Manucher Ghorbanifar, an arms dealer. Mr. Ghorbanifar was a central figure in the Iran-contra affair in the 1980's, in which the United States government secretly sold arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages in Lebanon and to finance the fighters, known as contras, opposing the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

The secret meetings were first held in Rome in December 2001, were approved by senior Pentagon officials and were originally brokered by Michael Ledeen, a conservative analyst at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute who has a longstanding interest in Iranian affairs. It was not clear whether the espionage investigation was directly related to the meetings with Mr. Ghorbanifar. Nor was there immediate evidence of whether money had changed hands in exchange for classified information.

Now that is interesting. Israel, Iran, Rome, Michael Ledeen, the whole cast of characters reminds me of nothing so much as the Niger forgery and its accompanying Grand Islamic Alliance of Bad Guys forgery that tipped the CIA off. Proof that there's a connection? No. But if I weren't going to be on a train tomorrow, I'd be keeping close tabs on Marshall and Rozen who've been reporting out these forgeries for quite some time and apparently making headway, though evidently whatever they've got isn't fully ready for publication just yet.

UPDATE: Perhaps I should have just looked at Laura's site myself, which appears to confirm that this investigation is related to the Niger forgeries, since she stumbled onto the relevant sources while investigating that caper, but it's not clear from her reporting what the connection is. Knight-Ridder has the target of the investigation being looked into not only for dealings with Israel which apparently pertain to his status as a leading Iran hawk, and for his dealings with Ahmed Chalabi, who seems to be an Iranian spy. This cognitive dissonance among the neocons is, as readers will recall, something I've pointed to many times and something that Ledeen is at the center of.