This article
appears in the Nov. 4,
2005 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
THE
VERY UGLY TRUTH ABOUT MICHAEL LEDEEN
The 'Universal
Fascism' Behind the Cheney Cabal
by Jeffrey Steinberg
The
awesome power of a free society committed to a single mission is something
[our enemies] cannot imagine.... Our unexpectedly quick and impressive
victory in Afghanistan is a prelude to a much broader war, which will in
all likelihood transform the Middle East for at least a generation, and
reshape the politics of many older countries around the
world.
From
Michael Ledeen's book, War Against the Terror
Masters
On
March 10, 2003, in a revealing profile of President George Bush's
political svengali, Karl Rove, the Washington Post reported that
when the President's man needs advice on the war on terrorism or other
national security matters, he turns to one man in particular: Michael
Ledeen.
Ledeen
told the Post that the two men met shortly after Bush's 2000
election. "He said, 'Anytime you have a good idea, tell me.' " Ledeen
obliged, passing on faxes to Rove on a regular basis. According to the
Post, "More than once, Ledeen has seen his ideas, faxed to Rove,
become official policy or rhetoric."
Now, as
Karl Rove sweats out the possibility of indictment in the Valerie Plame
leak investigation, his Ledeen ties may come back to haunt him. And Rove
is not alone. Ledeen, according to a wide range of American and Italian
sources, has emerged as a central player in the intrigue of the century:
the forging of Niger government documents and the use of those shoddy
fakes by Vice President Dick Cheney and others, to shove the unjustified
and disastrous Iraq War down the throats of the U.S. Congress, the
American people, and the United Nations, on the basis of the bogus claim
that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of having a nuclear bomb.
In the
wake of the Oct. 28 criminal indictment and resignation of Vice President
Cheney's chief of staff and alter ego, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for his
role in the Plame leak, sources report that the Special Counsel probe will
now enter an expanded new phase, focussed on more underlying issues of how
the United States came into the Iraq War, and the specific role the Niger
forgeries hoax played in that process. According to a variety of sources,
confidential documents from an Italian parliamentary probe into the Niger
hoax, have been recently provided to prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Those
documents reportedly name a number of American spooks, including Ledeen,
as suspects in the hoax: former CIA "Iran-Contra" figure Duane Clarridge;
former CIA Rome station chief Allan Wolfe; and Gen. Wayne Downing
(USA-ret.), a longtime mentor of the Iraqi National Congress's leader
Ahmed Chalabi.
The
surfacing of Ledeen's name in the Niger affair sheds important light on
the entire nature of what has been labeled "the Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal,"
the network of permanent-war fanatics inside the Vice President's Office,
the Pentagon, and other corners of the Bush Administration, and in a
cluster of neo-conservative think-tanks in Washington, who brought the
United States into war with Iraq, and who still, to this day, scheme for
other perpetual wars in Southwest Asia, targetting Syria, Iran, Saudi
Arabia, and Egyptand in other parts of the world, as well.
A 'Universal
Fascist'
Michael
Ledeen is not your garden variety neo-conservative, who is typically a
former Trotskyist-turned-right-wing "chicken-hawk." While he certainly
deserves the "chicken-hawk" label, his pedigree is that of a
self-professed "universal fascist," who preaches permanent revolution and
counts early-20th-Century fascist Gabriele D'Annunzio, the subject of his
doctoral dissertation, as one of his personal idols. As Lyndon LaRouche
emphasized, it is Ledeen's open embrace of "universal fascism" that
provides a deeper insight into the true character of the Cheney Cabal as a
whole.
Echoing
the rhetoric of Mussolini and Hitler, Ledeen has written: "D'Annunzian
political stylethe politics of mass manipulation, the politics of myth
and symbolhave become the norm in the modern world."
In his
book Machiavelli on Modern Leadership, Ledeen wrote: "To be an
effective leader, the most prudent method is to ensure that your people
are afraid of you. To instill that fear, you must demonstrate that those
who attack you will not survive."
In an
insightful Oct. 10, 2004 profile in the Boston Globe, writers Jeet
Heer and David Wagner quoted Ledeen from a 1999 Society magazine
rant. Ledeen was then demanding the impeachment of President Bill Clinton:
"New leaders with an iron will are required to root out the corruption and
either reestablish a virtuous state, or to institute a new one.... If we
bask in false security and drop our guard, the rot spreads, corrupting the
entire society. Once that happens, only violent and extremenly unpleasant
methods can bring us back to virtue."
Ledeen's mentor in his late 1960s studies, Renzo de Felice, made
the explicit link between Jacobinism and Fascism in his book The
Illuminati and Revolutionary Mysticism, 1789-1900, writing, "There is
something in common between my Jacobins and a certain kind of Fascism....
Fascism wanted to achieve the transformation of society and the individual
... [toward] a new phase in the history of civilization."
Ledeen
launched his own career in neo-Fascist politics in Rome in 1975-77, when
he taught history at the University of Rome, served as the Rome
correspondent of The New Republic, and became involved with the
secret Propaganda Two (P-2) Freemasonic Lodge, of wartime Nazi Licio
Gelli. P-2 was behind a string of right-wing terrorist attacks and Fascist
coup plots in Italy throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, known
collectively as the "strategy of tension."
When
the Reagan Administration came into office in January 1981, Ledeen was
brought on by Secretary of State Alexander Haig as his special advisor.
When Haig was dumped from the Reagan Cabinet in 1982, Ledeen was brought
into the National Security Council and the Department of Defense (1982-86)
as a consultant. He played a central role in the great political scandal
of that decadethe Iran-Contra affair. It was Ledeen who made the initial
contact with Iranian arms dealer and swindler, Manucher Ghorbanifar, which
launched the arms-for-hostages scheme that nearly brought down the Reagan
Presidency.
All the
while, according to several former senior U.S. intelligence officials,
Ledeen was on the payroll of the Italian military intelligence service,
SISMI. Back in the late 1970s and early 80s, the SISMI boss was Gen.
Giuseppi Santovito, a member of P-2.
Rome
Revisited
It was
ostensibly his longstanding ties to Ghorbanifar that brought Ledeen back
to Rome in December 2001. Ledeen, once again a Pentagon "consultant," this
time to Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, was
aggressively promoting regime change in Iraq and Iran. He claimed that his
old colleague Ghorbanifar had vital intelligence to assist the United
States in the high-priority "war on terrorism." Ledeen spent three days in
Rome, accompanied by two full-time Pentagon civiliansHarold Rhode of the
Office of Net Assessments and Lawrence Franklin, the Iran desk officer in
the Near East and South Asia policy shop. Franklin worked for Feith, and
his immediate boss was William Luti, who had just arrived at the Pentagon
from the Office of Vice President Cheney. Luti frequently boasted that he
really worked for "Scooter," a reference to the now fallen Lewis "Scooter"
Libby.
Ledeen's meetings with his two Pentagon colleagues and Ghorbanifar
reportedly also involved SISMI head Nicolo Pollari and Italy's Minister of
Defense Antonio Martino. Ledeen and Martino were longtime associates,
through the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
(JINSA).
A
different version of the meetings has appeared in the Italian daily
newspaper La Repubblica recently. In a three-part series on the
Niger hoax, published Oct. 24-26, 2005, reporters Carlo Bonnini and
Giuseppe D'Avanzo reported that Ledeen's meetings with Pollari centered on
the Niger-Iraq allegations, which had first surfaced in mid-October 2001.
According to this account, after being rebuffed by the Rome CIA Station
Chief, Pollari, on the advice of Defense Minister Martino, sought to
establish an intelligence channel between Rome and Washington via the
"longtime friend of Italy," Ledeen. The backdrop to the whole affair was
the desire of Italy's new Prime Minister, and alleged former P-2 Lodge
member, Silvio Berlusconi, to build a "special relationship" with the new
U.S. President, George W. Bush. Ledeen reportedly became a conduit of the
Niger hoax into the White House Iraq Group, the Pentagon's office of
Special Plans, and Vice President Cheney.
With
Special Counsel Fitzgerald now reportedly probing the Niger hoax, the
truth about the whole Niger forgery affair could be unearthed. In the
meantime, the more important task at hand is to unmask the true character
of the Cheney Cabal, and the in-depth profile of the intriguer Michael
Ledeen that follows is the best starting point for that understanding.
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