WHAT DID AHMED CHALABI TELL THE IRANIANS?….Ahmed Chalabi is supposedly on the outs with official Washington because he leaked some super sensitive intel to the Iranians. But what was it? Michael Ledeen, in the middle of a very peculiar column, tells us what happened:
….some intel officials in town are saying two things to the journalists: 1) We broke the Iranians’ communication codes, so we were reading their mail. Chalabi found out about this, and told the Iranian intelligence chief in Baghdad. 2) The Iranian immediately contacted Tehran to tell them that we had broken the code.
Ledeen then goes on to say that this is ridiculous and couldn’t have happened, although I don’t really understand his argument. (It’s based on the idea that the Iranian intelligence chief used the broken code to tell Tehran that their code had been broken ? which does indeed seem rather careless ? but it’s not clear to me why he thinks this. There’s some other stuff I can’t make sense of either, but I’ll let it pass for now.)
But even though I don’t really understand Ledeen’s point, this was the first time I’ve seen an explanation of what Chalabi is alleged to have done, so I thought I’d pass it along.
