Michael Ledeen: Man of Mystery

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By Claudia Wright
The mystery that Michael Ledeen has presented to investigators looking into the role he played in the Iranian arms affair is not likely to last for much longer. But it is characteristic of the man who has made a business of trading on his political connections that a reputation for mysterious links to the US, Israeli, and European governments has helped to attract corporate clients seeking inside knowledge of Reagan administration decision-making. The identity and extent of those private interests, and whether Ledeen complied with US law in disclosing them, have become a new focus of investigation into the arms scandal.

Ledeen has been playing cat and mouse with the US press, contriving offers of exclusive information to favored journalists, and slamming the telephone down on those he suspects may be unsympathetic. He has refused to speak with Washington reporters of one New York newspaper because it had published an article calling into question the motives behind Ledeen's involvement in the negotiations with Iran.

Ambiguities concerning Ledeen abound. He is the crux of Israel's cover story that it became the go-between in the US-Iranian arms-for-hostages deal at the behest of the US, represented by Michael Ledeen. Former White House national security adviser Robert McFarlane reported at that time, however, that Ledeen had gone to Israel in May 1985 "on his own hook." On that visit, according to Ledeen's own testimony, he met with Prime Minister Shimon Peres. McFarlane reported at the time that Ledeen returned with a proposal from Peres. Further, the preliminary report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence makes it clear that it was Ledeen who twice helped keep the initiative alive, telling McFarlane that he could make contact with Manucher Ghorbanifar because he would be in Israel on vacation and, another time, in Europe on other business anyway. Perhaps Ledeen's most astounding statement, in a recentWashington Post interview, was: "I have never been particularly active in Jewish affairs and I don't have particularly close ties with Israel."

Ledeen, in fact, is a founding director of the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs (JINSA), a cornerstone of Israel's ongoing campaign to obtain the latest and best of US weapons in the largest possible quantities. And his lack of "close ties" with Israel did not preclude him from ready access to Israel's Prime Minister. Nor did it prevent him from taking his family twice to Israel for month-long stays in quarters provided at special rates by the Jerusalem Foundation, an Israeli private fund. He also toured Lebanon as a guest of the Israeli armed forces after the 1982 invasion by Israel.

At the time the arms scandal broke in late 1986, the 45-year-old Michael Ledeen was appearing with increasing frequency on US television news shows as an expert on terrorism. It was a far cry from his departure 15 years earlier from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, when he was denied tenure after teaching history there. He went from St. Louis to Rome in 1974 and returned to the US in 1977 to edit the Washington Quarterly, a publication of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which generally takes a strongly pro-Israel stance.

While at CSIS, Ledeen apparently drew on contacts with the Italian intelligence service (for which he was a paid consultant in 1980) to develop, in collaboration with journalist Arnaud De Borchgrave, an article exposing Billy Carter's relationship with the Libyans. Publication of the story was designed to embarrass President Carter in his re-election campaign and to force prosecution of Billy Carter for failing to comply with the Foreign Agents Registration Act. It is ironic that, seven years later, Ledeen's activities should raise the question of whether he too should be prosecuted for failing to register as a foreign agent.

When the Reagan administration took office, Ledeen was hired by Secretary of State Alexander Haig as a full-time assistant. This lasted until Haig's departure from State in mid-1982. At the time, State Department officials say, Ledeen's GS-15 rank was so modest he was not obliged to file the public financial disclosure form required by US law. Ledeen was then hired by the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Lawrence Eagleburger, as a consultant. State Department records show that Ledeen was paid for a total of 135 days over a period of two and a half years. In May of 1984, Eagleburger left State to join Kissinger Associates, the New York consulting firm. Eagleburger's successor as Under Secretary, Michael Armacost, did not use Ledeen and State Department records show that he received no payment for consulting in 1985 or early 1986. For that reason, Armacost says, he removed Ledeen's name from the State Department's roster of consultants.

At the same time, however, Ledeen was serving both the Pentagon and the White House. Pentagon records show that starting in 1983, and continuing to August 1985, Ledeen was paid a consulting rate of $221 per day for a maximum of 90 days per year—the exact number of days he was paid has not been confirmed. At first, Ledeen reported to Richard Armitage, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, and then to Armitage's principal deputy, Noel Koch. Koch had been the Washington lobbyist for the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) until he joined the Pentagon in 1981. He was in charge of counter-terrorism planning for the Pentagon, and he and Armitage are both identified in the Senate Intelligence Committee report as having participated in high-level decisions on shipping US arms to Iran. Pentagon records show that Ledeen's name was removed from its consultants' roster in December 1986, and that he did no paid work as a consultant after August 1985.

Pentagon records also reveal that in 1984 Ledeen secured a research contract over initial objections by some officials. The contract proposal to write a report on European attitudes towards Central American defense was originally submitted by Ledeen in late 1983 in conjunction with the CSIS. When it was turned down, he produced a new proposal, at a substantially reduced price, under the auspices of his own consulting firm, ISI. This was approved by the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Fred Ikle. For a period of six months, Ledeen was paid a total of $67,000. According to Simon Serfaty, an old academic friend of Ledeen's who worked with him on the project, the two traveled to Europe in 1984 to interview European officials. Ledeen has received no further contract award since then.

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Ledeen has told journalists that "as part of my work as a part-time consultant to the National Security Council on issues relating to terrorism, I was interested in getting a better picture of the true state of affairs in Iran." It was this interest, he has indicated, that led him on his own to Israel in May of 1985.

Ledeen claims he first heard about Iranian arms merchant Manucher Ghorbanifar in "early July 1985," and did not meet him until near the end of that month. He claims the initiative for negotiations between the US and Iran "started in Iran and extended through Jerusalem to Washington." This is flatly contradicted, however, by Israeli government terrorism adviser Amiram Nir's statement to Vice President George Bush on July 29, 1986: "We activated the channel; we gave a front to the operation, provided a physical base, provided aircraft." What Nir apparently meant was that Ghorbanifar's role was part of an Israeli "front" designed, according to Nir's remark to Bush, to "make sure the US will not be involved in logistical aspects."

How much Ledeen was also part of the Israeli "front," or alternatively, how much he knew about Israeli control of Ghorbanifar, remains to be seen. Did Ledeen know, for example, that Ghorbanifar was not the "self-made businessman" Ledeen described in his "insider's account," published in the Washington Post on January 25, 1987? What did Ledeen know about Ghorbanifar's start in a shipping line, set up by the Israelis in the early 1970's to transport cargo between Israel and Iran, and used to transport arms to Iran after the fall of the Shah? Was the White House persuaded to continue dealing with Ghorbanifar, despite the CIA's negative assessments, because Nir and Ledeen assured US officials that Ghorbanifar was under the control of Israel's Mossad?

Ledeen's testimony also conflicts with reports, considered reliable by Congressional investigators, that originate with Iranian sources in Europe and with Ghorbanifar himself. According to these sources, Ledeen was present at a meeting in West Germany in October 1984, at which Ghorbanifar and two other Iranians were present. One was an official of the Iranian procurement office in London. The other was the brother of Hojatoleslam Mahdi Karrubi, head of the Iranian Martyrs Foundation. This meeting reportedly led to a second one in West Germany, six months later, in April 1985. This time the participants were Ledeen, Ghorbanifar, and Mahdi Karrubi.

Ledeen will not answer questions about these reports. If they can be corroborated, however, the reports of the October 1984 and April 1985 meetings are significant because they undercut Ledeen's claim not to have met Ghorbanifar until later.

Also, a meeting with Karrubi would be significant because it preceded the hijacking of the TWA flight from Athens on June 14, 1985—an operation US government sources believe was aided and abetted by the Iranian government and by Karrubi's Martyrs Foundation. Karrubi himself was in Lebanon in May and June of 1985, as the Ayatollah Khomeini's special envoy. His organization is believed to have paid for the trip to Iran of one of the four men accused by the US of hijacking the aircraft, murdering one of the US passengers, and holding the others hostage. That man, Ali Atwa, was arrested by Greek police immediately after the hijacking, and is named in US court documents recently unsealed in the case. A detailed account of Atwa's connection with the Martyrs Foundation and Karrubi's involvement in the events surrounding the TWA hijacking was provided by Senator Jesse Helms in the Congressional Record of June 27, 1985. The wealth of circumstantial evidence undermines Ledeen's frequent assertion that ever since he opened negotiations with Ghorbanifar, "Iranian sponsored acts of terrorism against the United States ceased."

Ledeen claims that in November 1985, his direct involvement with the Iranian initiative ceased because he was asked "to direct my energies to other aspects of the terrorism issue." However, the Senate Intelligence Committee has established that he met with Ghorbanifar again in December of 1985, and arranged for Ghorbanifar to visit Washington in late December and then again in mid-January for polygraph testing at CIA headquarters. When the tests reinforced earlier assessments that Ghorbanifar was unreliable, Ledeen tried to persuade CIA and other senior officials to continue dealing with him. Ledeen's role as Ghorbanifar's defender in Washington was reinforced by Amiram Nir, adviser on terrorism to Israel's Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

Ledeen told the Washington Post, "I'll confess to you I kibitzed...From time to time over the next year I'd stick my nose into someone's office—I felt all along the arms-for-hostages was wrong—and say, 'You're making a big mistake. The tail is wagging the dog.'"

US government officials believe that Ledeen's private consulting business became more important as his consulting opportunities at State and the Pentagon dwindled. These officials confirm that Ledeen actively offered his services to foreign military contractors seeking advice about US government decision-making and access to key officials. Ledeen is believed to have been engaged on retainer by a British company and an Italian company; official sources confirm that one of Ledeen's non-US clients was engaged in classified contract work for the Pentagon. Whatever the nature of Ledeen's activities on behalf of these firms, he had a legal obligation to report them in financial disclosure forms which he filed each year at the Pentagon between 1983 and 1986.

White House lawyers have a different interpretation of the disclosure law from the one applied by the State Department and Pentagon. They claim that as a consultant in 1985 and 1986, Ledeen did not work long enough to warrant filing financial disclosure forms. Thus, the Pentagon records remain the only ones for investigators to determine whether, during the period of Ledeen's involvement in the Iranian arms negotiations, his non-government consulting relationships were fully disclosed; and whether these relationships indicate any evidence of a conflict of interest with Ledeen's duties on behalf of the US government.

Ledeen's involvement on behalf of foreign companies also raises the question of whether his advice to them, or his advice to the White House and the Pentagon, resulted in material benefits for his private clients, and would require him to have registered as a foreign agent. A spokesman for the Justice Department has said "We have no record" of registration by Ledeen or ISI.

Whatever the ambiguities about his roles inside or outside the US government, two facts stand out clearly. For a man without "close ties with Israel," Michael Ledeen had remarkable access to its leaders; and for a man "never particularly active in Jewish affairs" he was very, very, close to those who are.

Claudia Wright is the Washington correspondent for a number of European newspapers and is the author of the recently published Spy, Steal and Smuggle: Israel's Special Relationship with the US.