You may or may not have noticed some play being given, via the
LA Times, to the story of Dale Stoffel, an American contractor in Iraq who was assassinated last December, just days after he blew the whistle on financial shenanigans related to the outfitting of a show-pony tank division for Iyad Allawi. (At least
one dKos diary earlier summarized the story. A right-wing blogger has
a good compendium of information from back in January, when the LA Times first broke the story.) But there's a great deal more to this—even as sordid as the story is, and the possibility opening now of some form of American military complicity in Stoffel's murder—than meets the eye.
Without seeming to realize it, the LAT reporters uncovered evidence, in the form of the name of a Lebanese "businessman" who appears in the murky background of the affair, that offers a tantalizing pointer to the possibility that money from the Iraq occupation is being siphoned off by American intelligence to fund political agitation in Lebanon ...
[
The information below is offered at greater length in a couple of posts on my blog, Reading A1. Links to various information sources used to prepare this account are available there.]
First, a quick recap: Dale Stoffel was an American arms broker with apparent intelligence ties (he had a long history of working with the government to procure Eastern European weapons) hired to acquire tanks for a militarily useless armored division that was to be outfitted by the Jan. 30 elections, as a show of PM Iyad Allawi's political strength. Stoffel was required, by the Iraqi Defense Minister, to work through a Lebanese middleman (Raymond Zayna) in all financial transactions with the Defense Ministry. Stoffel came quickly to believe that Zayna was raking off the top of those transactions and kicking back, and he was assassinated (the truck he and a partner were riding in was rammed and fired upon) less than a week after he made charges, to Pentagon officials and to aides to his Senator, Rick Santorum, that a $25 million payment to him from the Defense Ministry had gone missing. (The money is still nowhere to be found.) It now turns out that the Army general assigned to oversee the outfitting of the armored division, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, has been lying to the press about the extent of his involvement with the project: possibly because, by having alerted Zayna to the charges, they unwittingly signed Stoffel's death warrant.
Standing behind Zayna, though, is another Lebanese businessman, Mohammad abu Darwish. (Zayna may have served as a cutout, because Darwish had been banned in an unrelated matter from direct dealings with the Pentagon.) Darwish, it turns out, is one seriously connected guy—and this is the significant bit of the story that the LA Times report doesn't make available. As a security officer in the Baghdad airport, he has ties (as a principal in an affiliated Lebanese company) to the firm of Custer Battles, one of whose two chiefs is a former CIA officer, the other a former Army Ranger. (Custer Battles stands accused, among other things, of skimming money from its Baghdad airport security contract by means of a series of sham companies through which it artifically inflated its charges.) In January 2003, Darwish was arrested in a strange incident in which he was found attempting to smuggle almost $13 million in new Iraqi dinars on a flight from Baghdad to Lebanon. His partners in this scheme (for which no one was ever punished) were wealthy, politically connected Lebanese, including the son-in-law of Amin Gemayel, the former Christian president of Lebanon.
Now, obviously this information doesn't prove a damn thing. But it sure looks skanky, doesn't it? Darwish appears to be a node linking ex-CIA types with the right-wing Lebanese Christian establishment. I suspect we're seeing the trace here of a program to funnel cash from the Iraq occupation to some old friends of the American intelligence services in the Lebanese anti-Syria opposition. I've seen no serious discussion so far of this possibility, nor of the larger issue this episode raises. It's easy to imagine that the endemic corruption in the business of the Iraq occupation is just some combination of typical neocon fecklessness and typical GOP self-dealing: stupidity married to a golden opportunity for unscrupulous people and corporations to line their pockets. But the no-oversight regime in Iraq is, self-evidently, almost tailor-made for the CIA and others to skim off black-ops funds that can be directed to clients throughout the region. It's not like they don't have a history of doing this sort of thing. Having seen this, I wonder if in fact the Iraq occupation is an accountability mess precisely to afford just such an opening to intelligence shenanigans.