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Current and former officials said the Pentagon's Iranian directorate has been headed by Abram Shulsky. Shulsky also was the head of the now-defunct Office of Special Plans, whose role in allegedly manipulating Iraq intelligence is under investigation by the Pentagon's inspector general.
Some officials say they fear the office, whose existence was first reported by the Los Angeles Times, is being used to funnel intelligence from Ghorbanifar, the arms dealer, and an Iranian exile group known as the Mujahedeen Khalq.
A Pentagon spokeswoman didn't return two phone calls seeking comment about the office.
Bill Murray, a retired CIA station chief in Paris who met with a Ghorbanifar associate and found his claims about Iran to be bogus, called the office's establishment "a big bell ringer."
"That is outright manipulation of information to suggest a predetermined policy," Murray said.
<http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003544462> Krugman Warns About Hyping Iran Threat -- That His Own Paper Pushed By E&P Staff Published: February 11, 2007 10:45 PM ET
NEW YORK In a Monday column for The New York Times, Paul Krugman warns of the dangers of hyping the use of weapons from Iran against U.S. soldiers in Iraq -- stories based on anonymous sources that his own paper had featured prominently on its front page and the top of its Web site all weekend.
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Excerpts from Krugman's column follows. The entire piece can be found online for subscribers at www.nytimes.com.
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Now, let's do an O. J. Simpson: if you were determined to start a war with Iran, how would you do it?
First, you'd set up a special intelligence unit to cook up rationales for war. A good model would be the Pentagon's now-infamous Office of Special Plans, led by Abram Shulsky, that helped sell the Iraq war with false claims about links to Al Qaeda.
Sure enough, last year Donald Rumsfeld set up a new "Iranian directorate" inside the Pentagon's policy shop.... -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>