Death of Michael Ledeen, maker of the phony case for the invasion of Iraq

Summary

Michael Ledeen (2018, Formiche.net)Michael Ledeen, the controversial national security journalist, scholar and schemer who died at age 83 on May 17 from complications following a stroke, played a significant covert role leading up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, as well as other productions of false intelligence for political ends.Ledeen was featured prominently in The Italian Letter, a 2007 book by SpyTalk Contributing Editor Peter Eisner and Knut Royce, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at Newsday. Obituaries published this week gave scant attention to the key role Ledeen played in fabricating intelligence to justify the eventually disastrous military campaign to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from power. The main goal of toppling the regime was achieved but the succeeding occupation, at a cost of an estimated $2 trillion, has been judged a military and diplomatic disaster resulting in 37,000 U.S. casualties, at least 200,000 and possibly a million Iraqi civilians dead due to war-related action, and the creation of a virtual Iranian client state in Baghdad. It was hardly Ledeen’s first foray into skullduggery. In 1980, according to an investigation five years later by the Wall Street Journal, he was involved in a “disinformation campaign” to discredit President Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy to the benefit of Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. He also published discredited theories that Soviet Bulgaria was behind the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. "With Ronald Reagan newly installed in the White House,” journalist Craig Unger wrote in Vanity Fair, “the so-called Bulgarian Connection made perfect Cold War propaganda. Michael Ledeen was one of its most vocal proponents, promoting it on TV and in newspapers all over the world." Ledeen’s role in the Iraq tragedy is a case study of the manipulation of secret—and blatantly dishonest—intelligence relationships for political aims. The Italian Letter found that Ledeen, a behind-the-scenes, ...