Plame leak damaged a major CIA investigation linking senior Bush
administration officials to WMD proliferation. U.S. intelligence
insiders have pointed out that the White House is using "Rovegate" and
"Who in the White House said what to whom?" as a smoke screen to divert
attention away from the actual counter-proliferation work Mrs. Wilson
and her Brewster Jennings & Associates team were engaged in. The
arrival of Timothy Flanigan as Patrick J. Fitzgerald's boss is likely
related to the mountains of evidence Fitzgerald has now collected to
indict senior White House officials, particularly, Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, for criminal conspiracy in exposing a sensitive U.S.
intelligence operation that was targeting some of their closest
political and business associates. Libby, it will be recalled, was the
attorney for fugitive global smuggler and multi-bilionaire Marc Rich,
someone who has close ties to the Sharon government and Israeli
intelligence. It is no coincidence that FBI
translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds uncovered nuclear
material and narcotics trafficking involving Turkish intermediaries
with ties to Israel at the same time Brewster Jennings and the CIA's
Counter Proliferation Division was hot on the trail of nuclear
proliferators tied to the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon and the A.
Q. Khan network of Pakistan.



Feith and Libby: Ultimate targets of CIA counter-proliferation team?

An arrest in early 2004 points to the links between Israeli agents and
Islamist groups bent on producing weapons of mass destruction,
including nuclear weapons. According to intelligence sources, this was
a network that was a major focus of Edmonds' and Valerie Plame Wilson's
work. In January 2004, FBI and U.S. Customs agents arrested Asher
Karni, a Hungarian-born Orthodox Jew, Israeli citizen, and resident of
Cape Town, South Africa, at Denver International Airport for illegally
exporting 200 electrically triggered spark gaps -- devices that send
synchronized electrical pulses and are used in nuclear weapons -- to
Pakistan via a New Jersey export company named Giza Technologies of
Secaucus (owned by Zeki Bilmen -- whom the FBI has identified as a
Turkish Jew who was already under surveillance by the CIA team). The
cargo manifest listed the equipment as electronics gear [lithotripters
used to break up kidney stones] for the Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto,
South Africa. However, the initial shipment of 66 triggers did not go
to the hospital but to Karni?s Top-Cape Technology of Cape Town, South
Africa. Top Cape, in turn, sent the triggers to AJKMC Lithography Aid
Society in Islamabad, Pakistan through Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Top-Cape "officially" traded in military and aviation electronics
equipment. It was during the summer of 2003, when Valerie Plame and her
team -- at a critical stage of their investigation of the A. Q. Khan
network -- were outed by White House officials Karl Rove, Scooter
Libby, and at least one other individual (possibly Elliot Abrams), that
Karni received an e-mail from his long time Pakistani associate Humayun
Khan (no relation to A. Q. Khan) asking for 200 triggers to be sent to
his Islamabad-based company, Pakland PME.

After initially attempting to purchase the devices from a sale agent in
France -- an attempt that proved unsuccessful when the French agent
demanded a U.S. export license for the triggers because the end
destination was Pakistan -- Karni managed to obtain the triggers from
Perkin-Elmer's manufacturing plant in Massachusetts through Giza
Technologies. Karni's e-mail traffic to and from Khan was being
intercepted by a covert agent in South Africa and being forwarded to
U.S. authorities. It is not known whether the covert agent was a
Brewster Jennings' asset but it would not be surprising considering
Karni was an important link in the A. Q. Khan nuclear smuggling
network. By the time the initital shipment of 66 triggers were sent to
Karni's Cape Town office, U.S. and South African intelligence were
already closely monitoring the transaction and the key players
involved. It is also noteworthy that Karni previously worked for a Cape
Town electronic import firm called Eagle Technology but was fired after
it was discovered by his boss that he was making secret deals to ship
nuclear components to Israel, India, Pakistan, and possibly, North
Korea. Karni had been in South Africa for 20 years after arriving from
Israel. His time in South Africa coincided with the apartheid
government's rapid development of its own (since disestablished)
nuclear weapons program and very close military ties between South
Africa and Israel.



A.Q. Khan link to Israeli smuggler: Designed to speed up Iranian
nuclear development to justify U.S./Israeli attack on Iran.

As for Humayun Khan, the Los Angeles Times discovered that the
Pakistani "businessman" had been involved in nuclear weapons smuggling
since 1975 when he was engaged in business with a former Nazi named
Alfred Hempel, who was the kingpin in a global nuclear smuggling
network active throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Hempel died in 1989. In
an interview aired by PBS's Frontline on July 26, Humayun Khan said he
never realized Karni was Jewish, stating that the Israeli masqueraded
as a Muslim. However, what is clear is that an Israeli-based network,
involving key neo-conservatives in the Bush adminstration, were
attempting to speed up the clock on the delivery by the A. Q. Khan
network of prohibited nuclear material to countries like Iran, thereby
justifying a pre-emptive U.S. (and Israeli-supported) attack on Iranian
nuclear installations. It was this network that attracted the attention
of the CIA and when it realized some of the "men behind the curtain"
were in the Pentagon, they had their smoking gun evidence of double
dealing by Bush administration officials and their compatriots in the
Sharon government.

Although AJKMC, the Pakistani company, said it merely printed copies of
the Koran, U.S. investigators pointed out the initials also stand for
the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference, an Islamist opposition
party that supports groups allied to Al Qaeda in Kashmir. Some
anti-terrorism experts believe that Osama Bin laden may be hiding in
Kashmir.

According to FBI insiders, wiretaps of phone calls in the
Giza-Bilmen-Karni smuggling ring yielded the name Douglas Feith, the
Undersecretary of Defense for Plans and Policy and one of Donald
Rumsfeld?s chief advisers, and Turkish MIT intelligence members of the
Turkish American Council. A Malaysian link was also discovered in
Karni?s network.



Israeli nuclear arms smuggler Asher Karni: His links to Bush
administration and Israeli officials may have been the real reason
Valerie Plame and Brewster Jennings & Associates operations were
exposed.

A Federal Judge in Denver said Karni could be released on $75,000 bail
but the government appealed the decision to Judge Thomas Hogan of the
U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, DC. Hogan is the judge who ordered
New York Times reporter Judith Miller to prison for her failure to
testify before the Grand Jury. The federal prosecutors? appeal failed
and Karni was released on bail into the custody of Rabbi Herzel Kranz.
Karni was ordered to wear an electronic monitor and was ordered to
remain at the Hebrew Sheltering Home in Maryland.

July 26, 2005 -- CIA agents concerned about counter-intelligence "hits"
masked as terrorist attacks. In the aftermath of the outing by the
White House of the identities of covert CIA agents, CIA professionals
are concerned about past and future terrorist bombings being used by
foreign counter-intelligence agencies and terrorist organizations to
selectively assassinate CIA agents and assets identified as being
involved in America's counter-WMD proliferation operations. Of
particular concern are small scale terrorist attacks directed against
restaurants, cafes, hotels, and bars where agents and their assets
meet. They point to the July 23 bomb blast at an Istanbul cafe near the
Galata Bridge which is frequented by Turks and foreigners. The
relatively low yield blast injured two people, a Dutchman and a Turk.
Turkey remains a central focus by U.S. intelligence agencies on WMD
proliferation because of its close links to the former Soviet Central
Asian states, Pakistan, Israel, and former Warsaw Pact eastern European
nations. The Marriott Hotel in Jakarta was car bombed on August 5,
2003, just a few weeks after the White House leaked Valerie Plame's
name and her NOC firm, Brewster Jennings & Associates, to several
reporters, including columnist Robert Novak. Some 14 people were killed
and 148 injured in the Marriott bombing. According to intelligence
sources, a covert team of CIA agents on a classified mission were due
to stay and meet at the hotel the day the bombing occurred but they
canceled their reservations at the last minute when they were tipped
off that they were targets for an attack. The CIA team was reportedly
involved in the capture in Thailand of Al Qaeda terrorist chief
Hambali, thought to have been involved, in addition to the Bali
nightclub and other bombings, in trying to procure radioactive material
(cesium-137 and cobalt-60) smuggled from the former Soviet Union via
Laos to Thailand. It is not known whether any Brewster Jennings NOCs or
assets were members of the CIA team that captured Hambali but the
terrorist's connections to an international network of radioactive
material smugglers would suggest CIA Counter Proliferation Division
(CPD) involvement at a minimum. Plame and her Brewster Jennings
colleagues reported to the CPD. The Jakarta bombing was blamed on Al
Qaeda's Indonesian affiliate, Jemaah Islamiya.

link ?

Wow- this shows the tip of the iceberg as to the damage that was done by the Plame leak.
We may never know the full extent of it.

Repercussions for political "gain" ? Sounds like high treason to me.

Plame leak damaged a major CIA investigation linking senior Bush administration officials to WMD proliferation. U.S. intelligence
insiders have pointed out that the White House is using "Rovegate" and
"Who in the White House said what to whom?" as a smoke screen to divert
attention away from the actual counter-proliferation work Mrs. Wilson
and her Brewster Jennings & Associates team were engaged in.

The plot thickens!

Is it not obvious that Rove and Libby wouldn't blow the CIA agent,
Mrs. Wilson's, cover without John Bolton and Condi Rice's knowledge
and support?

Inside info or not, it's on the 'Net:

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

Presumably the media know about this
but do not believe it or have not confirmed it

Political cartoon

Flip-Flops
Sunday, July 31, 2005

http://www.post-gazette.com/robrogers/

August 1, 2005
Taking Down the Neocons
Federal probes will be their downfall
by Justin Raimondo
The War Party is facing disaster on a number of fronts, both foreign and domestic: in Iraq, the stubborn defiance of the insurgency and squabbling political factions underscores the failure of the occupation and its unraveling into an all-out civil war. Under the guise of "federalism," the split-up of Iraq into three separate states – the Shi'ite south, the Kurdish enclave, and the no-man's-land of the Sunni Triangle – proceeds apace. Iranian influence is growing, and the government of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari is already calling for an American withdrawal, albeit not a precipitous one.

In Europe, the price of our Iraqi "victory" is being extracted from the English, as evidenced by the London terror bombings, and even former Prime Minister John Major concedes that this is blowback from the Iraq invasion.

It is in the United States, however, that the neoconservatives – the vanguard of the War Party – have suffered the biggest reverses and are in the greatest danger. It is one thing to have your policies discredited – and quite another to wind up behind bars because of them. The outcome of multiple investigations into their activities on the home front in the run-up to war may very well result in the latter. As I wrote last summer:

"Oh, some of the neocons have a future, alright – wearing one of those cute little orange jumpsuits and making some tattooed bruiser named Butch very happy. It's not legal to out CIA agents, feed forgeries to U.S. intelligence, and employ methods that, if used by any other nation on earth, would certainly be judged as war crimes."

We're still working on the war crimes charges, but the others – outing CIA agent Valerie Plame and passing off the Niger uranium forgeries as credible intelligence – are now the subjects of at least two legal proceedings that could very well end just as I predicted last year. Or perhaps I wasn't so much predicting as hoping that the truth would come out. In the case of the Plame investigation, my keeping hope alive, as the Rev. Jackson would say, paid off in the end, and it appears that yet another one of my great expectrations has been at least partially fulfilled, one expressed in December 2001, as I was writing about Carl Cameron's famous exposé of Israeli covert activities in the U.S.:

"In the months preceding 9/11, a secret war was being waged on American soil, a silent struggle from coast to coast – not an undercover battle between us and Muslim terrorists, but one pitting U.S. law enforcement agencies against one of our closest allies. Make of that what you will. For until the U.S. government comes clean, and Congress investigates, we'll never even have a chance to start asking the right questions."

Now it appears that someone is starting to ask the right questions, and, indeed, has been doing so all along. Israeli spying in the Pentagon has become the subject of an investigation by the office of U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty, in the Eastern District of Virginia, which led to the indictment [.pdf] of Pentagon Iran analyst Larry Franklin. Two other defendants – Steve Rosen, a longtime top official of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and his aide, foreign policy director Keith Weissman – are expected to be indicted shortly. The charges involve passing top-secret information to the government of Israel: word is out that American law enforcement wants to talk to any Israeli diplomats who may have been involved with these transactions or may have knowledge of them. It's no secret that the Israeli diplomat directly involved is Naor Gilon, chief political officer at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, who has been mysteriously recalled just in time to avoid having to claim diplomatic immunity.

The original thread of the Franklin investigation predated 9/11, as Richard Sale of UPI reported in December 2004:

"Franklin was caught quite by accident last summer as part of a larger investigation, these sources said.

"In 2001, the FBI discovered new, 'massive' Israeli spying operations in the East Coast, including New York and New Jersey, said one former senior U.S. government official. The FBI began intensive surveillance on certain Israeli diplomats and other suspects and was videotaping Naor Gilon, chief of political affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, who was having lunch at a Washington hotel with two lobbyists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobby group. Federal law enforcement officials said they were floored when Franklin came up to their table and sat down."

They were videotaping Gilon in the course of an investigation – for what purpose? The original subject of this inquiry, apparently undertaken by the FBI's counterintelligence unit, is not at all clear, but Sale's wouldn't be the first reference to "massive Israeli spying operations" on the East Coast, including New York and New Jersey. Longtime readers of Antiwar.com read about these activities as they were reported in the foreign and domestic media at the time. The Franklin investigation and subsequent indictment clearly branched off from the original probe into a much broader, overarching matter.

The FBI is now taking a fresh interest in Franklin's other extracurricular activities, paramount among them his interactions with a group of neocons actively trying to push America into a confrontation with Iran. As Joshua Marshall, Laura Rozen, and Paul Glastris report in The Washington Monthly:

"The investigation of Franklin is now shining a bright light on a shadowy struggle within the Bush administration over the direction of U.S. policy toward Iran. In particular, the FBI is looking with renewed interest at an unauthorized back-channel between Iranian dissidents and advisers in Feith's office, which more senior administration officials first tried in vain to shut down and then later attempted to cover up.

"Franklin, along with another colleague from Feith's office, a polyglot Middle East expert named Harold Rhode, were the two officials involved in the back-channel, which involved on-going meetings and contacts with Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and other Iranian exiles, dissidents and government officials. Ghorbanifar is a storied figure who played a key role in embroiling the Reagan administration in the Iran-Contra affair. The meetings were both a conduit for intelligence about Iran and Iraq and part of a bitter administration power-struggle pitting officials at DoD who have been pushing for a hard-line policy of 'regime change' in Iran, against other officials at the State Department and the CIA who have been counseling a more cautious approach."

Present at the first meeting, which took place in Rome, in December 2001: Franklin, the spy for Israel; Rhode, the administration's liaison with Ahmad Chalabi and his noble band of "heroes in error" who fed us a steady diet of fabrications via Judy Miller and various Iraqi "defectors"; and Michael Ledeen, of Iran-Contra fame, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a neoconservative guru. On the Iranian side: Ghorbanifar and a former senior leader of the Revolutionary Guards proffering information about support for regime change in Iran from within the security services. Also present: Nicolo Pollari, head of Italian military intelligence, and Italian Defense Minister Antonio Martino, who, among other honors, is vice-president of the Italian Friends of Israel. Ledeen, according to Rozen, was the chief organizer of the meeting.

Ledeen's role as the go-between in the arms-for-hostages scheme, serving as the middle-man or broker in coordinating the transfer of the arms via Israel, with links to Ghorbanifar, has gone down in the annals of American political scandals as one of the big ones of the modern era, right up there with Watergate. Yet he may have outdone himself in the current instance.

The Plame investigation, as I have asserted in the past, involves more than merely the outing of a CIA officer operating under deep cover. Regular readers of Antiwar.com and watchers of this space will not be surprised at the recent news that the investigation is widening:

"The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a wider range of administration officials than was previously known, part of an effort to determine whether anyone broke laws during a White House effort two years ago to discredit allegations that President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, according to several officials familiar with the case.

"Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street.

"In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed."

Standing behind the investigation into who outed Valerie Plame there has always been the much larger specter of treason. Much of the "evidence" of Iraqi "weapons of mass destuction" that figured prominently in the decision to take us to war turned out to be bogus, but surely the smoking gun was the Niger uranium documents. These phony letters and memos, purporting to be the record of a transaction between Iraq and the African nation of Niger, where much of the world's uranium is mined and refined into "yellowcake," turned out to be forgeries – and crude ones, to boot, which it took IAEA personnel all of a few hours using Google to unmask as fraudulent. Yet these incompetently produced fakes wound up in the president's 2003 State of the Union speech, in the form of those now infamous "16 words" in the course of which the Niger uranium claim was made.

The clear import of the Niger uranium forgeries is that, far from being a "mistake," the intelligence was fixed.

Who fixed it? Who coordinated the effort to lie us into war? These questions are being raised by multiple investigations into illegal activities at the highest reaches of this administration.

The cruel debunking of the president's assertion about African uranium, and the way critics took out after the White House shortly afterward, stung the administration to the quick – and launched an investigation into the Niger uranium forgeries that appears to be ongoing, and getting hotter. The people in the administration who were out to get Plame – and her husband, Joseph C. Wilson, former ambassador to Gabon who blew the whistle on the Niger uranium claims in a New York Times op-ed piece – were furious that Wilson had exposed the intramural fight that preceded the Niger uranium fiasco. The outing of Wilson's wife as a CIA agent, who supposedly got him his mission to Niger as an act of nepotism, was their revenge. At the root of their fury, however, was a real need to cover their trail, because it leads directly to the root question in all this tangled thicket of plots and counterplots: Who forged the Niger uranium documents?

The effort to smear Wilson and exact vengeance on him via his wife was and is an effort to cover up something a lot more serious than violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a silly law that should never have been enacted and has only been successfully prosecuted on a single occasion. If Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald is now making inquiries into how those 16 words got into Bush's speech, and is now busy tying this effort into those who planted information about Plame in the media through journalistic "cutouts," then he is also homing in on the essence of the matter – who were the forgers?

I don't claim to know the answer to that question, but I do have my suspicions, and these were given at least some corroboration in a recent radio interview [.mp3] by Antiwar.com's own Scott Horton with Philip Giraldi, a former military intelligence and CIA counterterrorism official now with Cannistraro Associates. In the course of a general discussion about the interconnections between various espionage investigations and the prosecution of Plame-gate, Horton asked Giraldi the same question I've been asking ever since the Niger uranium hoax was debunked, barely a month after the President's address: Who forged the Niger uranium documents? Giraldi's answer:

"A couple of former CIA officers who are familiar with that part of the world who are associated with a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy."

The forged documents, students of the Niger uranium mystery will recall, first surfaced in Italy, via the enigmatic Rocco Martino and an Italian journalist who works for the Berlusconi-owned Panorama magazine.

Scott then named Ledeen as the aforementioned "well-known neoconservative" with Italian connections, and Giraldi did not deny it, while averring that "there are issues involved in raising someone's name." Giraldi went on to say that the forgers

"Also had some equity interests, shall we say, with the operation. A lot of these people are in consulting positions, and they get various, shall we say, emoluments in overseas accounts, and that kind of thing."

According to The Washington Monthly, Ledeen worked as a consultant to Feith's Pentagon policy shop – the same department that, as the Franklin investigation shows, has been penetrated by Israeli intelligence. In addition, Laura Rozen reports that Ghorbanifar told her

"He has had fifty meetings with Michael Ledeen since September 11th, and that he has given Ledeen '4,000 to 5,000 pages of sensitive documents' concerning Iran, Iraq, and the Middle East, 'material no one else has received.'"

Of the thousands of pages of "sensitive documents" that passed from Ghorbanifar to Ledeen, how many wound up in the files of the Office of Special Plans, where Ledeen protégé Harold Rhode and others of that circle labored mightily to provide "talking points" for the administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq? Were the Niger uranium forgeries among them? I don't know, but surely investigators will want to be asking these questions of "a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy," and other less well-known neocons who have close connections with him.

If we look at the pattern of methods and sources utilized by some in this administration to deceive Congress, the American people, and even the president (on one memorable occasion) with bogus "intelligence," this practice of subcontracting out seems to have served the neocons well. When they couldn't get the professionals to go along with doctoring the intelligence, they simply did an end-run around the mainline agencies – the CIA, the DIA, and the State Department's INR – and set up their own rogue operations, just as they did in Contra-gate. That some of the same lawless ideologues who played a key role in that scandal are now embroiled in the current incarnation of the same sort of shenanigans ought to surprise no one.

What is needed is a congressional investigation into the Niger uranium forgeries, the purpose of which would be to determine how and why they managed to go undetected, and it is one that Republicans should be in the forefront of. After all, this is nothing less than a serious breach of U.S. national security involving the corruption of the U.S. intelligence-gathering process. Failure to plug up what is apparently a gaping hole in our security fence could prove fatal in an era when having the right intelligence can make the difference between preventing another 9/11 or failing to do so. Just as it made the difference between war and peace in the case of Iraq's fabled WMD.

This administration is facing a crisis of confidence, as far as the public is concerned, and that is in large part due to growing alarm at the gathering clouds of scandal currently hanging over Washington. A surprising proportion of the American people are paying attention to Plame-gate, and it has gone from being a story mainly of interest to Washington insiders and bloggers to a major and growing embarrassment – and all because of rising public awareness.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...1088709,00.html


MARK WILSON / GETTYRove is in the hot seat along with Powell
From the Magazine | Notebook
When They Knew

By MASSIMO CALABRESI

Posted Sunday, Jul. 31, 2005
As the investigation tightens into the leak of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, sources tell TIME some White House officials may have learned she was married to former ambassador Joseph Wilson weeks before his July 6, 2003, Op-Ed piece criticizing the Administration. That prospect increases the chances that White House official Karl Rove and others learned about Plame from within the Administration rather than from media contacts. Rove has told investigators he believes he learned of her directly or indirectly from reporters, according to his lawyer.

The previously undisclosed fact gathering began in the first week of June 2003 at the CIA, when its public-affairs office received an inquiry about Wilson's trip to Africa from veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus. That office then contacted Plame's unit, which had sent Wilson to Niger, but stopped short of drafting an internal report. The same week, Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman asked for and received a memo on the Wilson trip from Carl Ford, head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Sources familiar with the memo, which disclosed Plame's relationship to Wilson, say Secretary of State Colin Powell read it in mid-June. Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage may have received a copy then too.

When Pincus' article ran on June 12, the circle of senior officials who knew about the identity of Wilson's wife expanded. "After Pincus," a former intelligence officer says, "there was general discussion with the National Security Council and the White House and State Department and others" about Wilson's trip and its origins. A source familiar with the memo says neither Powell nor Armitage spoke to the White House about it until after July 6. John McLaughlin, then deputy head of the CIA, confirms that the White House asked about the Wilson trip, but can't remember exactly when. One thing he's sure of, says McLaughlin, who has been interviewed by prosecutors, is that "we looked into it and found the facts of it, and passed it on." --By Massimo Calabresi. With reporting by Timothy J. Burger, Michael Duffy and Viveca Novak

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/01/politics...yv+CSUr5t+LWZbA

Spy's Notes on Iraqi Aims Were Shelved, Suit Says

By JAMES RISEN
Published: August 1, 2005
WASHINGTON, July 31 - The Central Intelligence Agency was told by an informant in the spring of 2001 that Iraq had abandoned a major element of its nuclear weapons program, but the agency did not share the information with other agencies or with senior policy makers, a former C.I.A. officer has charged.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court here in December, the former C.I.A. officer, whose name remains secret, said that the informant told him that Iraq's uranium enrichment program had ended years earlier and that centrifuge components from the scuttled program were available for examination and even purchase.

The officer, an employee at the agency for more than 20 years, including several years in a clandestine unit assigned to gather intelligence related to illicit weapons, was fired in 2004.

In his lawsuit, he says his dismissal was punishment for his reports questioning the agency's assumptions on a series of weapons-related matters. Among other things, he charged that he had been the target of retaliation for his refusal to go along with the agency's intelligence conclusions.

Michelle Neff, a C.I.A. spokeswoman, said the agency would not comment on the lawsuit.

It was not possible to verify independently the former officer's allegations concerning his reporting on illicit weapons.

His information on the Iraqi nuclear program, described as coming from a significant source, would have arrived at a time when the C.I.A. was starting to reconsider whether Iraq had revived its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. The agency's conclusion that this was happening, eventually made public by the Bush administration in 2002 as part of its rationale for war, has since been found to be incorrect.

While the existence of the lawsuit has previously been reported, details of the case have not been made public because the documents in his suit have been heavily censored by the government and the substance of the claims are classified. The officer's name remains secret, in part because disclosing it might jeopardize the agency's sources or operations.

Several people with detailed knowledge of the case provided information to The New York Times about his allegations, but insisted on anonymity because the matter is classified.

The former officer's lawyer, Roy W. Krieger, said he could not discuss his client's claims. He likened his client's situation to that of Valerie Wilson, also known as Valerie Plame, the clandestine C.I.A. officer whose role was leaked to the press after her husband publicly challenged some administration conclusions about Iraq's nuclear ambitions. (The former officer and Ms. Wilson worked in the same unit of the agency.)

"In both cases, officials brought unwelcome information on W.M.D. in the period prior to the Iraq invasion, and retribution followed," said Mr. Krieger, referring to weapons of mass destruction.

In court documents, the former officer says that he learned in 2003 that he was the subject of a counterintelligence investigation and accused of having sex with a female contact, a charge he denies. Eight months after learning of the investigation, he said in the court documents, the agency's inspector general's office informed him that he was under investigation for diverting to his own use money earmarked for payments to informants. He denies that, too.

The former officer's claims concerning his reporting on the Iraqi nuclear weapons program were not addressed in a report issued in March by the presidential commission that examined intelligence regarding such weapons in Iraq. He did not testify before the commission, Mr. Krieger said.

A former senior staff member of the commission said the panel was not aware of the officer's allegations. The claims were also not included in the 2004 report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on prewar intelligence. He and his lawyer met with staff members of that Senate committee in a closed-door session last December, months after the report was issued.

In his lawsuit, the former officer said that in the spring of 2001, he met with a valuable informant who had examined and purchased parts of Iraqi centrifuges. Centrifuges are used to turn uranium into fuel for nuclear weapons. The informant reported that the Iraqi government had long since canceled its uranium enrichment program and that the C.I.A. could buy centrifuge components if it wanted to.

The officer filed his reports with the Counter Proliferation Division in the agency's clandestine espionage arm. The reports were never disseminated to other American intelligence agencies or to policy makers, as is typically done, he charged.

According to his suit, he was told that the agency already had detailed information about continuing Iraqi nuclear weapons efforts, and that his informant should focus on other countries.

He said his reports about Iraq came just as the agency was fundamentally shifting its view of Iraq's nuclear ambitions.

Throughout much of the 1990's, the C.I.A. and other United States intelligence agencies believed that Iraq had largely abandoned its nuclear weapons program. In December 2000, the intelligence agencies issued a classified assessment stating that Iraq did not appear to have taken significant steps toward the reconstitution of the program, according to the presidential commission report concerning illicit weapons.

But that assessment changed in early 2001 - a critical period in the intelligence community's handling of the Iraqi nuclear issue, the commission concluded. In March 2001, intelligence indicating that Iraq was seeking high-strength aluminum tubes from China greatly influenced the agency's thinking. Analysts soon came to believe that the only possible explanation for Iraq's purchase of the tubes was to develop high-tech centrifuges for a new uranium enrichment program.

By the following year, the agency's view had hardened, despite differing interpretations of the tubes' purposes by other intelligence experts. In October 2002, the National Intelligence Estimate, produced by the intelligence community under pressure from Congress, stated that most of the nation's intelligence agencies believed that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, based in large part on the aluminum tubes.

The commission concluded that intelligence failures on the Iraqi nuclear issue were as serious and damaging as any other during the prelude to the Iraqi war. The nation's intelligence community was wrong "on what many would view as the single most important judgment it made" before the Iraq invasion in March 2003, the commission report said.

Mr. Krieger said he had asked the court handling the case to declassify his client's suit, but the C.I.A. had moved to classify most of his motion seeking declassification. He added that he recently sent a letter to the director of the F.B.I. requesting an investigation of his client's complaints, but that the C.I.A. had classified that letter, as well.

Most of the details of the case, he said, "were classified by the C.I.A., not to protect national security but to conceal politically embarrassing facts from public scrutiny."