Wayne Madsen Report

October 6, 2005 -- After it was reported that Karl Rove had agreed to give further testimony to the Grand Jury investigating the CIA leak, Rove's attorney Robert Luskin denied his client had received a target letter from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, a formal "heads up" sent to individuals who are about to be indicted. However, it is being reported from well-informed sources throughout Washington that 1) target letters have been sent to Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and Ari Fleischer; 2) Rove has agreed to testify and possibly agree to a plea bargain agreement in return for his testimony against other targets of the criminal probe; 3) Cheney and Bush may be named as unindicted co-conspirators; 4) Bush's "war speech" before the National Endowment for Democracy and a late Thursday afternoon report that "19 operatives" have arrived in New York City to place bombs on subway trains are blatant attempts by the White House to divert attention from the impending indictments against the Bush White House. The main stream media is just beginning to take notice that a "Watergate-level event" is about to occur in Washington.

October 6, 2005 -- Espionage and spy scandals mushroom in Washington. Yesterday was a busy day for Federal investigators involved in pursuing espionage cases and the compromise of classified information. First there was the guilty plea entered by Larry Franklin, an Air Force Reserve Colonel and former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst assigned to the now-defunct neo-con policy mill and alternative intelligence and special operations office, the Office of Special Plans. Franklin, who acceded to a plea agreement with U.S. Attorney for Eastern Virginia Paul McNulty, for the first time admitted that he passed classified information to Naor Gilon, the political officer at the Israeli embassy in Washington who was quickly recalled by Jerusalem after the espionage story surfaced. Gilon is reported to have been the Mossad station chief in Washington.

McNulty has charged two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) with illegally receiving classified information, including information on Iran, from Franklin. The indictment against former AIPAC director Steve Rosen alleges that he passed classified information obtained from Franklin to "a senior fellow at a Washington, D.C., think tank." Informed sources report that McNulty's espionage investigation continues to focus on the "senior fellow," as well as other Israeli government officials. With Franklin's cooperation, it is expected that further indictments may be forthcoming.



Espionage diversions in Washington to take attention away from AIPACgate and the CIA leak case?

Franklin also implicated Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Franklin said he kept 83 classified documents, including Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI), at his West Virginia home to be prepared to answer "point blank" questions from senior Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld.

Israel has long maintained that as a "close U.S. ally," it does not spy on the United States. That stance makes the story that ABC News broke late yesterday all the more bizarre. It was revealed that a Philippine spy ring was operating in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. The Philippines is also a U.S. ally. The espionage case surrounded Leandro Aragoncillo, a naturalized U.S. citizen from the Philippines who was assigned to the Vice President's staff in 1999 while a member of the U.S. Marine Corps. Al Gore was Vice President when Aragoncillo was first assigned to the White House. Aragoncillo was charged with stealing classified information in Cheney's office that dealt with detrimental information on Philippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Aragoncillo was accused of passing the information to opposition politicians in the Philippines who were trying to oust Arroyo.

Aragoncillo went to work for the FBI at an intelligence office at Fort Monmouth, NJ. It was there the FBI began its espionage investigation of the FBI employee after it was discovered he was downloading and transmitting by e-mail classified documents, including some 36 secret documents, from the FBI computer system. The documents reportedly contained information on the Philippines. It would have been unusual for the FBI to have held so many classified documents on the Philippines, a country that is not considered to be a hostile intelligence nation and is not placed by the FBI in the same category as such nations as China, Israel, Russia, Taiwan, India, North Korea, and South Korea. A former Philippine National Police deputy director, Michael Ray Aquino, was accused of receiving the documents from Aquino. Last March, Aquino was arrested by Federal authorities on unrelated immigration charges.

It is also suspicious that ABC News ran a photo taken of Aragoncillo with Vice President Gore. There was also a suggestion that Aragoncillo worked with then-President Bill Clinton.

On October 4, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents announced they had arrested three foreign nationals, two Indonesians and one Senegalese, at the Joint Special Operations Command Center in Fort Bragg for visa violations. The three were contract language instructors hired by B.I.B. Consultants of Orlando, Florida to provide language instruction in Indonesian and Wolof to U.S. Special Operations personnel. The Special Operations Command stressed the three did not have access to classified information. However, courses offered at Fort Bragg range from unclassified to top secret.

Some informed intelligence specialists have speculated the White House and Fort Bragg cases were announced to divert media attention away from imminent indictments in the CIA leak case, as well as the widening case against Israel for espionage at the Pentagon.