Explosive Claims

Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.

She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.

Of course this particular government official denies the claims. It's word against word, and without corroborating evidence, that's all it would be. Edmonds claims that this official was passing secrets from not only the State Department but the Pentagon.

That suggests someone who had the means and access to do so. As the CIA and FBI have repeatedly shown, counterintelligence isn't exactly a strong suit to weed out moles and spies, so it certainly could be plausible. Throw in the claim by the Times that investigations have been thwarted to preserve diplomatic relations, and you begin to understand just how dysfunctional the intel and diplomatic corps are in the US.

This is precisely the kind of issue that should not be politicized. It's the kind that should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. It threatens US national security and regional stability, not to mention poses an extreme risk that such technologies could fall into the wrong hands.

It's also curious as to the timeline. It appears that such transactions occurred during the late 1990s, which puts it squarely within the Clinton Administration and coincides with Pakistan's nuclear declarations and these interactions continued through the Bush Administration. While it has long been believed that the Pakistanis received much of their support and technologies from Chinese sources, this could change the calculus.

Further, Edmonds claims that the Turkish intel agencies provided a conduit for these transfers because they wouldn't attract as much attention.

Edmonds says packages containing nuclear secrets were delivered by Turkish operatives, using their cover as members of the diplomatic and military community, to contacts at the Pakistani embassy in Washington.

Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks.

Edmonds said the State Department official once again proved useful. “A primary target would call the official and point to names on the list and say, ‘We need to get them out of the US because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans’,” she said. “The official said that he would ‘take care of it’.”

The four suspects on the list were released from interrogation and extradited.

Edmonds also claims that a number of senior officials in the Pentagon had helped Israeli and Turkish agents.

“The people provided lists of potential moles from Pentagon-related institutions who had access to databases concerning this information,” she said.

“The handlers, who were part of the diplomatic community, would then try to recruit those people to become moles for the network. The lists contained all their ‘hooking points’, which could be financial or sexual pressure points, their exact job in the Pentagon and what stuff they had access to.”

One of the Pentagon figures under investigation was Lawrence Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst, who was jailed in 2006 for passing US defence information to lobbyists and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat.

UPDATE:
Brad Friedman [ed: thanks to John Thacker for the correction (I posted it as Brad DeLong)] goes where the Times of London wouldn't, and names the State Department official who appears at the heart of Edmonds claims.

I too echo Friedman's comments that these claims need to be seriously investigated by journalists and the government itself to weed out those who threaten US national security. This has gone on for far too long.

UPDATE:
Clarified the timeline above to note that the transfers began during the Clinton Administration but carried through into the Bush Administration as well.