Three Days in Rome Redux: The Cocktail Napkin Plan for an Iran Coup

Some top officials in the State Department and CIA became indignant when they discovered the plans of the two veterans of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal. That led to repeated efforts by the White House’s Hadley to curtail the meetings. But Ghorbanifar’s pipeline to the U.S. government remained open, the report documents, because of persistent efforts by Ledeen and many current and former US officials he enlisted to champion his plan. Among them: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former assistant secretary of defense for low intensity conflict Thomas O’Connell, and even then Senate Intelligence committee chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS), who stalled the Senate committee’s investigation of pre-war intelligence issues for years.

U.S. officials became concerned that the Ledeen-Ghorbanifar pipeline amounted to an illegal covert action that would require a finding signed by the President and that Congress be notified. The Ledeen plan ran into concerns about the legality of meetings between unpaid private consultants, Pentagon bureaucrats and members of foreign intelligence agencies and the requirements for reporting them to intelligence agencies.

‘“Once again, the Pentagon didn’t understand any of the rules: about country clearance, interagency coordination, the need to do name traces on the supposed Iranians Ghorbanifar brought to the meeting.” the former CIA official said. He pointed out that one of the figures Ghorbanifar brought to a second June 2003 meeting in Paris with Pentagon civilian Harold Rhode, Ayatollah Maliki "does not exist." He said of Ledeen and the Pentagon officials' refusal to do name traces on the other supposed Iranians Ghorbanifar brought to the Rome meeting: "How do you know who you are dealing with? How do we know that these guys have not walked into 15 other embassies? They probably have."

"It's always the same with Ghorbanifar," the former intelligence official added. "The napkin. He makes some dramatic presentation. I'm telling you, for three days those guys talked about that Iran regime change plan. And they talked about money. Ghorbanifar is lying through his teeth. That is obvious to anybody."

The report chastised several officials for their role in authorizing the meetings and keeping them secret. “Deputy National Security Advisor Hadley failed to inform [Director of Central Intelligence] Tenet and Deputy Secretary of State Armitage of the full nature of the planned contact with the Iranians in Rome, to include the involvement of Mr. Ledeen and Mr. Ghorbanifar in proposing and facilitating the meeting,” the report stated.

“The role Mr. Ledeen played as interlocutor for Mr. Ghorbanifar and in setting up the Rome meeting, and potentially the Paris meeting, was inappropriate,” the report further said.

In 1984, during Iran-Contra scandal, the CIA had issued a “burn notice” on Ghorbanifar. The Iranian exile, the report quotes the CIA, “should be regarded as an intelligence fabricator and a nuisance.” The agency’s distrust of Ghorbanifar appeared to extend to Ledeen and led to a protracted war of polemics by Ledeen against the intelligence agency.

Ledeen repeatedly told U.S. officials that the two unidentified Iranians would refuse to talk to the CIA. But the Iranians apparently expressed no such reservations at the Rome meeting, according to Senate committee interviews. “It is likely that this allegation was used by Mr. Ledeen, Mr. Ghorbanifar or others as a means of circumventing the Intelligence Community’s knowledge of and involvement in the meeting given the CIA’s fabrication notice against Ghorbanifar,” the report concluded.

(Illustration of Iran contra figure Manucher Ghorbanifar by Steve Brodner, for Mother Jones.)