The Ghorbanifar affair.

• Author: Feith, Douglas
• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

"Iran-Contra II?" by Joshua Micah Marshall, Laura Rozen and Paul Glastris (October) misstates key facts. Indeed, the chief premise of their story is wrong. The December 2001 meeting in Rome between some Iranians and Defense Department officials was not "an unauthorized backchannel." The real story of that meeting is as follows: Department of Defense learned from the White House that there were some Iranians who had information about terrorist threats to U.S. forces in Afghanistan and who wanted to defect. (It turned out that the Iranians did not want to defect, but they did want to share information directly with the U.S. government.) The Iranians did not, however, want to deal with the CIA. DoD was asked to handle the contact. The National Security Council staff notified in advance senior officials of the CIA and State Department, who did not object to having DoD employees make the initial contact. As a result of interagency consultations after the December 2001 meeting, it was decided not to pursue the matter further. One factor in that decision was the involvement of Ghorbanifar, whose participation in the Rome meeting surprised the senior officials at DoD who authorized the trip.

Aside from getting the major premise of their argument wrong, the authors made...