Marc Grossman, his wife Malek Can, the ATA, Sibel Edmonds, Brewster-Jennings, and various blown investigations and cover ups

Wayne Madsen:

Sep. 28, 2006 -- SPECIAL REPORT. CIA counter-proliferation front company's cover blown by State Department official two years before White House leak to media.

U.S. intelligence sources, speaking on conditions of strict anonymity, have told WMR that the cover status of Brewster Jennings & Associates, the counter-proliferation front company that Valerie Plame Wilson and her CIA counter-proliferation non-official cover (NOC) colleagues used as a front for their operations, was blown in two phone calls placed in June 2001 to two foreign intelligence agents in Washington, DC by then-Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman. The calls were intercepted by the FBI, which had targeted the communications of Grossman and the two foreign intelligence agents as part of a counter-intelligence investigation, according to the sources.

The FBI counter-intelligence operation was investigating a weapons smuggling and influence-peddling ring that was centered on the activities of the American Turkish Council (ATC). a major Turkish lobbying organization in Washington, DC headed up by George H. W. Bush National Security Adviser, retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft. According to U.S. intelligence sources, a principal player in the ring was Grossman, a career foreign service officer who served as U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 1994 to 1997 and then moved back to Washington where he served as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs.

At the end of June 2001, the FBI learned, through its surveillance of the ring, Beyaz Enerji (White Energy), a Turkish energy firm, told its ATC interlocutors in Washington that it was sending a high-level team to the United States to negotiate the procurement of nuclear materials for Turkey's nuclear power program (the term "white" or "beyaz" in the name of the firm refers to "clean" energy). In turn, the ATC contacted four individuals who had access to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico and asked them to arrange a three month visit to the labs by the Turkish nuclear specialists (October through December 2001) to ascertain Turkish requirements.

The Beyaz Energy group also made known its desire to purchase U.S. nuclear energy consulting firms that maintained access to facilities like Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore in California. However, at the same time Beyaz Energy was making its play for access into U.S. nuclear labs, Brewster Jennings and Associates, the CIA cover company of Valerie Plame Wilson, was very close to penetrating the Beyaz Energy ring, known to the CIA as part of a major nuclear black market operation involving key players in Turkey, Pakistan, Israel, Iran, and the former Soviet Central Asian states. According to CIA sources, the ring also involved a key ATC ally in Washington -- the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a group that provided important access to top U.S. political leaders for Turkish military and industrial chiefs.

When Beyaz Energy began to encounter "consultants" with Brewster Jennings, they expressed an interest to their ATC interlocutors in buying the firm along with other energy consulting companies.

According to U.S. intelligence sources, at the end of June 2001, the FBI intercepted two phone calls from Grossman in which he told the called parties to "stay away from Brewster Jennings . . . they're the government . . . they're nothing but a cover." One of the calls was to a Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) top agent in Washington. The other call, bearing an almost identical message, was made to a Northrop Grumman official who was a key player with the ATC. The Northrop Grumman official made a phone call to his ATC handler, stating, "Our guy warned us off Brewster Jennings." A U.S. intelligence source stated that "Grossman's name was all over the FBI wiretaps in 2001" and the name "Brewster Jennings" first became known to the FBI counter-intelligence agents from these intercepts.

According to CIA sources, Brewster Jennings and Associates was "finished" in the Summer of 2001. Plame was transferred to the CIA's Counter-proliferation Division's Joint Task Force on Iraq (JTFI), where she and her colleagues were pressured to come up with "evidence" of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

Grossman, who now works for the Cohen Group of former Defense Secretary William Cohen, was, according to U.S. intelligence sources, a subject of interest to counter-intelligence agents since his stint as U.S. ambassador in Ankara. One of Grossman's embassy officials was U.S. Air Force Major Douglas Dickerson, who worked in the embassy's military attaché office and was responsible for logistics matters with the Turkish military. While in Ankara, Dickerson met and later married Melek Can Harputlu, who U.S. intelligence sources claim was on the payroll of the MIT (Mýllý Ýstýhbarat Teskýlati) -- the Turkish Intelligence Agency. U.S. intelligence sources confirmed that Grossman ordered Dickerson to assist International Advisors, Inc. (IAI), a lobbying firm registered in 1989 by Douglas Feith under the stewardship of Richard Perle. The main task of IAI was to represent the government of Turkey in the United States and "promote the objective of U.S.-Turkey defense industrial cooperation."

IAI, for which Feith was CEO and sole stockholder, also steered hundreds of thousands of dollars to Feith's law firm, Feith and Zell (FANZ), which, along with Perle, was involved in setting up the Bosnia Defense Fund and amassed millions of dollars of contributions from Muslim countries for Bosnia. A Riggs Bank source confirmed that Perle was not concerned when it was discovered that Bosnian funds were being used to buy arms that were falling into the hands of Iranian and Al Qaeda units in Bosnia and that when confronted with these problems, shouted to the Riggs interlocutor, "just make it fucking happen!"

Soon, Dickerson, under Grossman's aegis, was promoted to handle all U.S. weapons procurement for Turkey, Azerbaijan (where Richard Armitage was heading up the U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce), Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan. In 1996, the Defense Department's Inspector General's office launched an investigation of a U.S. military officer at the Ankara embassy who was caught receiving a bribe from MIT agents. Shortly after the investigation started, Dickerson was transferred to a U.S. Air Force base in Germany. Dickerson's wife, Melek Can worked for the German-Turkish Business and Cultural Association, known to be a cover for MIT activities in Germany. In 1997, Grossman left Ankara to head up the State Department's European Bureau.

In 1998, Dickerson was transferred from Germany to Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. In 2001, after George W. Bush became president, Dickerson was promoted and placed in charge of weapons procurement for Turkey, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington. Melek Can obtained positions with the ATC and Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA).

Following the 911 attacks, Melek Can applied for a translator job at the FBI's Washington Field Office. In a Justice Department Inspector General report, it is stated that Melek Can failed to list on her application her prior jobs with ATA, ATAA, and the German-Turkish Business and Cultural Association. When FBI translator Sibel Edmonds (a Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani translator who worked with Melek Can) complained publicly about MIT's penetration of the FBI, Senators Patrick Leahy and Charles Grassley pointedly asked the FBI why no Special Background Investigation (SBI) was conducted on Melek Can. The FBI's responded that Melek Can entered the FBI "through the backdoor" with her husband's Top Secret/SBI being sufficient grounds to grant Melek Can access to FBI classified information. At the same time, the Dickersons were, according to U.S. intelligence sources, working closely with the ATC.

Edmonds' charges against the Dickersons were highlighted in a June 2002 Washington Post article. On September 9, 2002, the Dickersons left Washington for Belgium, where Major Dickerson was assigned to the U.S. Air Force NATO office. Soon, there were three separate investigations of Edmonds' espionage charges against the Dickersons: the Justice Department IG probe, a similar probe by the Department of Defense IG led by Joseph Schmitz, and a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee investigation led by Leahy and Grassley.

Two weeks after the Dickerons arrived in Belgium, Schmitz sent a letter stating that Major Dickerson's relationship with the ATC while at DIA was "within the scope of his duties." The DOD IG terminated the investigation.

Two weeks after the DoD shut down its investigation of Major Dickerson, Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the State Secrets Privilege and imposed a "gag order" on Edmonds' making any further comments to the media about her wrongful termination suit against the FBI, which was prompted by her raising concerns about the Dickersons. The invocation of the State Secrets Privilege by Ashcroft was specifically requested by the Defense and State Departments.

Upon publication of a Vanity Fair article in August 2005 about the Edmonds case and those of other national security whistleblowers, the Department of Defense and U.S. Air Force opened a joint IG investigation of Major Dickerson and Edmonds' charges, who was still safely ensconced at the NATO office in Belgium. When the DoD invited Edmonds to be interviewed without her lawyer present at a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) at Fort Myer, Virginia, she declined, citing the potential threats inherent in such a solo appearance. Schmitz (the son of racist California Republican Rep. John Schmitz and brother of pedophile schoolteacher Mary Kay Letourneau) resigned on Sept. 9, 2005 to take the general counsel job with the Prince Group, the holding company for Blackwater USA, the private military contractor that was amassing lucrative Pentagon contracts.

When the DoD/USAF IG investigators asked Major Dickerson once again about the allegations that had re-surfaced against him, U.S. intelligence sources report he told them that he would "start talking" if the investigation proceeded. The DoD/USAF IG investigation of Dickerson was once again quickly terminated. In January 2006, Dickerson was promoted in rank to Lieutenant Colonel and transferred to the U.S. Air Force base in Yokota, Japan, where he was assigned as the 374th Logistics Readiness Squadron’s acting commander.

U.S. intelligence sources stated that the "same people" who have continually protected Perle and Feith since the 1980s were also protecting Dickerson and Grossman. CIA sources, including those who served in Istanbul tracking nuclear smuggling in the late 1980s, also confirm that the Turkish-U.S. nuclear black marketeering ring was directly tied to the Abdul Qadeer Khan nuclear smuggling ring in Pakistan, an operation that sold sensitive nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea, and Libya. The ATC and ATAA in Washington is directly tied to and supported by AIPAC and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) reported a U.S. counter-intelligence source. In fact, JINSA is an "Aegean" member of the ATC. The source said that Valerie Plame Wilson was targeting the ATC and Turkey at the height of her counter-proliferation work in 2001, but special interests associated with AIPAC and JINSA, which the source claims control ATC, scuttled Plame Wilson's operation by exposing Brewster Jennings as a CIA front company.

The CIA's counter-narcotics division is also keenly interested in ATC and its connections to NATO. A Turkish hashish kingpin, Huseyin Baybasin, now jailed in the Netherlands for narcotics smuggling, stated that the Turkish military and its NATO interlocutors are totally involved in the drug trade in Turkey. He said the Turkish military uses MIT and Turkish embassies, consulates, military missions (particularly the Turkish military attaché offices in London and Amsterdam) as drug smuggling facilitators. The Turkish military also reportedly uses its hated Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) enemies to help transport drugs throughout Western Asia, especially heroin now being produced in Afghanistan at record high levels.

On June 10, 2003, Grossman, who was trusted by the Cheney neocon cabal in the White House, received a memo drafted by an analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR's) on INR's skepticism about President Bush's State of the Union charge that Iraq had tried to procure uranium from Niger. The memo described a February 2002 CIA meeting at which Joseph Wilson was mentioned as the best candidate to undertake a mission to Niger to check on the uranium allegations. The memo also reportedly identified Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA counter-proliferation officer and associated her with the Brewster Jennings & Associates cover company (keep in mind that Grossman had already compromised the company's covert status in June 2001).

Since Grossman joined the Cohen Group as Vice Chairman in January 2005, the firm has become a top client for the ATC. In October 2005, Grossman was appointed a board member of Ihlas Holding, a media corporation that recently sold its TGRT Television network to Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp. U.S. law enforcement sources confirm that Feith remains under a DoD IG investigation that is being spurred by North Carolina Republican Rep. Walter Jones.

August 13, 2002

Hon. John Ashcroft
Attorney General
United States Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20530

Dear General Ashcroft:

We are writing jointly in order that you might allay our concern about the status of the investigation into allegations made by Sibel Edmonds, a former contract linguist in the Washington Field Office of the FBI. Although we understand that the matter is currently under investigation by the Inspector General, we are troubled that the Department of Justice, including the FBI, may not be acting quickly enough to address the issues raised by Ms. Edmonds' complaints or cooperating fully with the Inspector General's office.

By way of background, Ms. Edmonds first raised concerns about security problems and the integrity of important translations earlier this year. Unfortunately, nearly every person at the FBI who was notified of the situation reacted by questioning why Ms. Edmonds was "causing trouble." Indeed, the FBI's first internal security action in this case focused on Ms. Edmonds, instead of the allegations that she raised in good faith as a whistleblower and which bore on national security and the war against terrorism.

Ms. Edmonds has made a number of serious allegations, some of which the FBI verified during an unclassified briefing for Judiciary Committee staff on June 17. First, Ms. Edmonds has alleged that a contract monitor in her unit ("monitor") chose not to translate important, intelligence-related information, instead limiting her translation to unimportant and innocuous information. The FBI has verified that this monitor indeed failed to translate intelligence-related information, but has attributed the failure to a lack of training as opposed to a malicious act.

That conclusion is directly related to Ms. Edmond's second allegation. Ms. Edmonds alleged that the same contract monitor once worked for an organization associated with the target of a counter-intelligence investigation and that the monitor had unreported contacts with a foreign national who was a member of the target institution. Additionally, Ms. Edmonds states that some of the mistranslated recordings on which the monitor actually worked contained conversations by this same foreign national with whom the monitor had such contacts. Finally, the foreign national disclosed in recorded conversations that he handled intelligence matters. This fact was among the information that was not translated or summarized by the monitor.

Even after verifying these allegations, the FBI downplayed the importance of this matter and seemed to imply that it had ceased looking into the complaints as a security matter until after the Inspector General Office finishes its investigation. Anyone who remembers the long-time treachery of former FBI Agent Robert Hanssen would be concerned at this reaction. For years, Hanssen's bizarre actions were also written off as minor security breaches and unworthy of serious consideration. If even routine diligence had been exercised earlier, Hanssen could have been stopped from doing untold damage. The FBI needs to learn from its mistakes.

In addition to general concerns raised by this case, we have several specific concerns we wish to raise for your review. First, we have learned that a person central to the investigation -- the monitor referred to earlier -- will be leaving the country in early September, which most likely will be before the investigation is resolved. If you or your staff would like to know the identity of the monitor, please contact Inspector General Fine's office, with whom Senator Grassley's staff has been in touch. The monitor may hold dual citizenship with the United States and a foreign country and may possess a valid passport issued by that foreign country. Thus, there will be little or no assurance that the monitor will return or cooperate with an investigation in the future. Based on these facts, we would like your assurance that you are satisfied that there has been and will be no delay that will prejudice, in any way, the outcome of this investigation.

Furthermore, we would like your assurance that the Department of Justice, including the FBI, will fully cooperate in all aspects of the inquiry. For instance, we draw your attention to the fact that the FBI currently opposes depositions of the monitor and her husband as part of the investigation into this case. The FBI takes this position despite the fact that the monitor is no longer employed by the FBI, that the monitor's husband never worked at the FBI and even though the military agency that employs the monitor's husband does not oppose a deposition. Moreover, we understand that the monitor and her husband have signed a letter stating they will make themselves available for depositions. It is unclear, then, why the FBI is taking this position in the wake of such important allegations bearing on national security. We hope that you will ensure that the FBI is fully compliant with the Inspector General's inquiry as it proceeds.

Finally, we are concerned about the most crucial evidence in the case -- the recordings that were allegedly improperly translated. Because these bear directly on the veracity of Ms. Edmonds' allegations, we seek your assurance that the recordings will be properly maintained, turned over to the Inspector General's Office and promptly translated by a competent and independent authority. That way the validity of the complaint can be quickly evaluated.

We know that you share our concern that the FBI address issues bearing on national security in a prompt manner, regardless of whether or not they cast the FBI in a positive light. Only by honest evaluation can the FBI learn from its past mistakes. We thank you in advance for your cooperation in this matter. We request a reply in writing by Wednesday, August 28, 2002.

Sincerely,

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy

Sen. Chuck Grassley
Chairman, Ranking Member
Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs