Did Michael Ledeen Help Start the Iraq War?
As America confronts the very real prospect of fascism, let's look back at a man who was both an expert on the subject--and a purveyor of it.
Michael Ledeen’s death last month has occasioned a number of critiques of him(notably, Jeet Heer’s piece in The Nation and John Ganz’s “The Last True Fascist” on Substack) and, having interviewed him years ago for my book, The Fall of the House of Bush (from which this piece is adapted), I figured I should put in my two cents.
Quite apart from any qualms I had about speaking ill of the dead, I was painfully aware America is in crisis so it is important to understand some of the people who helped bring us to this pass. And that means paying close attention to Michael Ledeen, who was both an expert on fascism—and a proponent.
A fellow at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, Ledeen wrote a number of books on fascism including The First Duce: D’Annunzio at Fiume, his paean to Italian fascist Gabriele d’Annunzio, the poet-warrior who was Benito Mussolini’s mentor. As one of the instigators of Iran-Contra in the Eighties, Ledeen played a key role in covert operations that violated the Congressional ban on arming right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua. I’ve now written six books on the Republican Party’s assault on democracy, and in the second one, The Fall of the House of Bush, I encountered Ledeen as a pioneer in the disinformation operations that so pollute our national discourse, and at the time, were designed to exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq and start a war. Michael Ledeen knew how to evade the checks and balances. He knew out to work outside of established channels and work around constitutional constraints. And he loved it.
In fact, he loved it so much that “Faster, please” became Ledeen’s mantra, often used in reference to bombing Iran or other Middle East adversaries back to the Stone Age. Rhapsodizing about war week after week, seemingly intoxicated by the grandiosity of his fury, he became chief rhetorician for neoconservatives who wanted to remake the Middle East. And his hostility to democracy reached a fever pitch in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack that took down the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001.
“Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad,” Ledeen wrote, just nine days after the attacks. “We must destroy [our enemies] to advance our historic mission. One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please.”
The U.S. must be “imperious, ruthless, and relentless,” he argued, until there has been “total surrender” by the Muslim world. “We must keep our fangs bared,” Ledeen wrote. “We must remind them daily that we Americans are in a rage, and we will not rest until we have avenged our dead, we will not be sated until we have had the blood of every miserable little tyrant in the Middle East, until every leader of every cell of the terror network is dead or locked securely away, and every last drooling anti-Semitic and anti-American mullah, imam, sheikh, and ayatollah is either singing the praises of the United States of America, or pumping gasoline, for a dime a gallon, on an American military base near the Arctic Circle.”
As for what that meant in terms of foreign policy, the Ledeen Doctrine, as his colleague Jonah Goldberg put it, was “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
You get the idea. All this, long before Trump.
In any case, what interested me most about Ledeen was his putative role in disseminating the so-called Niger documents, a set of papers that were later proven to be fraudulent but that appeared to show that Saddam Hussein had a sophisticated nuclear weapons program. As a result, this “revelation” was used to trigger the Iraq War.
It began with a break-in on New Year’s Eve 2000 at the unprepossessing embassy of the Republic of Niger in Rome. Evidence suggested that the thieves may have rummaged through desks and files. But little of value appeared to be missing—a wristwatch, perfume, worthless bureaucratic documents, embassy stationery, and some official stamps bearing the seal of the Republic of Niger.
Everything about it seemed entirely forgettable. Nevertheless, the consequences of the robbery were so great that the Watergate break-in pales by comparison. After all, this was a disinformation operation that launched the Iraq War, which resulted in more than 300,000 deaths, cost trillions of dollars, led to the ascent of ISIS, and completely backfired in terms of its stated goal of creating more stability in the Middle East.
Later, we discovered, Saddam had no WMDs.
After the break-in took place, information from documents that had been stolen and, later, the documents themselves made their way to people with ties to Italian military intelligence, SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare). From there, the documents were dispersed, at various times, to the CIA, other Western intelligence agencies, the U.S. embassy in Rome, the State Department, and the White House, as well as several media outlets. Soon, Western intelligence analysts began to draw conclusions from the documents that were startling—namely, that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had sought 500 tons of yellowcake—a concentrated form of uranium that, if enriched, could be used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons—from Niger. Finally, in his January 2003 State of the Union address, George W. Bush told the world, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
When it came to making the case for the Iraq War, no single piece of information—rather, disinformation—was more important than the documents which purportedly showed that the Republic of Niger was selling and shipping huge amounts of yellowcake uranium to Iraq for Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program.
The documents in question originated from Italian intelligence(SISMI) which had provided them to the CIA before 9/11. But, to the dismay of the Italians, the CIA wouldn’t legitimize the documents. Initially, at least, the agency deliberately omitted the Niger claims from the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), the intel updates that were given to the president each morning because they didn’t believe them.
The CIA had good reason to think the documents were fake. They were filled with errors suggesting they were the products of sloppy forgeries. A letter dated October 10, 2000, was signed by Minister of Foreign Affairs Allele Elhadj Habibou—even though he had been out of office for more than a decade. Its September 28 postmark indicated that somehow the letter had been received nearly two weeks before it was sent. In another letter, President Tandja Mamadou’s signature appeared to be phony. The accord signed by him referred to the Niger constitution of May 12, 1965, when a new constitution had been enacted in 1999. One of the letters was dated July 30, 1999, but referred to agreements that were not made until a year later. Finally, the agreement called for the five hundred tons of uranium to be transferred from one ship to another in international waters.
Think about it. That’s an insanely difficult feat. Just try it.
Finally, the premise behind the report made absolutely no sense. “Most of us knew the Iraqis already had yellowcake,” said veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern. “It is a sophisticated process to change it into a very refined state and they(the Iraqis) didn’t have the technology.”
There was more. Rocco Martino, a freelance intelligence operative who sometimes worked with SISMI, had been paid to break into the Niger embassy where he stole the documents, and he openly said so. “It was the Italians and Americans together who were behind it. It was all a disinformation operation,” said Martino, according to The Guardian. He also said that he was “a tool used by someone for games much bigger than me,” noting that it was “the Italian and Americans together who were behind it.”
In February 2002, when ambassador Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger by the Bush administration to ascertain the validity of the documents, he concluded that “the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat,” as he later wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times.
In all, I found at least 14 instances in which government analysts challenged the legitimacy of the Niger documents—only to be rebuffed by Bush administration officials who wanted to use the material. “They were just relentless,” said Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who later prepared Colin Powell’s presentation before the United Nations General Assembly. “You would take it out and they would stick it back in. That was their favorite bureaucratic technique—ruthless relentlessness.”
Even though the Niger documents were repeatedly exposed as counterfeit, attempts to legitimize them continued. The documents made at least three journeys to the CIA. They made it to the U.S. embassy in Rome, to the White House, to British intelligence, to French intelligence, and to Panorama, the Italian newsmagazine. Each of these recipients in turn shared the documents or their contents with others, in effect creating an echo chamber that gave the illusion that several independent sources had corroborated the existence of a secret Iraq-Niger uranium deal.
But it wasn’t true.
Then, finally, in September 2002, British intelligence came to the rescue of neocons and other hawkish Bush officials with a 50-page, 14-point report on Iraq's pursuit of weapons that said, "There is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Ultimately, it was this report, which was based on the fraudulent Niger documents, that became the basis for sixteen words in George W. Bush’s 2003 State of the Unioin address that proved to be the casus belli for America’s war on Iraq. “The British government has learned,” Bush said, “that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
So who was the mastermind directing these phony reports to American intelligence officials? And why did they keep coming even after they had been discredited? The answer to some of these questions may never be known, but many knowledgeable observers suspected Michael Ledeen, wh, after all, o had a history of orchestrating disinformation operations as well as ties both to Italian intelligence and the top neocons in the Bush administration.
When I interviewed Ledeen than 20 years ago, he propped his feet up on his desk next to an icon of villainy—a mask of Darth Vader—and explained, “I’m tired of being described as someone who likes fascism and is a warmonger. I’ve said it over and over again. I’m not the person you think you are looking for.”
Waving an unlit cigar in his eleventh-floor office at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington on a December afternoon in 2005, Ledeen insisted he had nothing to do with the Niger affair. “I think it’s obvious I have no clout in the administration. I haven’t had a role. I don’t have a role,” he told me.
But that wasn’t true. According to U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the Pentagon during the run-up to the Iraq War, Ledeen “was in and out of [the Pentagon]. . . all the time.” Similarly, Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli-American neocon, told me that Ledeen was a close friend of her husband David Wurmser who held key posts in the Pentagon and the State Department and was Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser. Moreover, through his ties to Bush adviser Karl Rove and Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Ledeen was also had a direct line to the White House.
To the extent that Ledeen had clout in the administration, it was because he had mastered the dark side of the bureaucratic arts. That became vividly apparent in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people and brought down World Trade Center in 2001.
At the time, the Niger documents reporting had already been circulating in Washington for more than nine months without gaining traction. But within hours of the attack, Secretary of State Don Rumsfeld began issuing orders to find evidence tying the attack to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
As I wrote in The Fall of the House of Bush:
The neocon propaganda machine went into action nearly as quickly as the Pentagon did. By 1:15 p.m., just four hours after the attacks, Michael Ledeen, the neocon operative who had won notoriety in the Iran-contra scandal, filed a dispatch on the National Review’s website attacking the remaining realists in the administration and urging someone to remind Bush that “we are still living with the consequences of Desert Shame, when his father and his father’s advisers—most notably Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft—advised against finishing the job and liberating Iraq.”
At 2:40 p.m., Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered the military to put together retaliatory plans to go after not just bin Laden, but Saddam Hussein as well. According to notes taken by a Rumsfeld aide, the secretary of defense wanted “best info fast, judge whether good enough to hit SH [Saddam Hussein] at the same time, not only UBL,” the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden.
If Ledeen seems like too marginal a figure to have pulled it off, it is important to understand that he had close ties to a group of ultra conservative Cold Warriors known as Propaganda Due(P-2) within the Italian secret service, SISMI.
As I described it in The Fall of the House of Bush:
Led by a neo-fascist named Licio Gelli, Propaganda Due, or P-2, with its penchant for secret rituals and exotic covert operations, was the stuff of conspiracy fantasies—except that it was real. According to the Sunday Times of London, until 1986 members agreed to have their throats slit and tongues cut out if they broke their oaths. Subversive, authoritarian, and right wing, the group was sometimes referred to as the P-2 Masonic Lodge because of its ties to the secret society of Masons, and it served as the covert intelligence agency for militant anticommunists. It was also linked to Operation Gladio, a secret paramilitary wing of NATO that supported far-right military coups in Greece and Turkey during the Cold War.
In 1981, the Italian Parliament banned Propaganda Due after it infiltrated the highest levels of Italy’s judiciary, parliament, military, and press, and was tied to assassinations, kidnappings, and arms deals around the world. But before it was banned, P-2 members and their allies participated in two ideologically driven international black-propaganda schemes that foreshadowed the Niger embassy job twenty years later. The first took place in 1980, when Francesco Pazienza, a charming and sophisticated Propaganda Due operative in SISMI, allegedly teamed up with Michael Ledeen, who was then the Rome correspondent for The New Republic.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Pazienza said he first met Ledeen that summer, through a SISMI agent in New York who was working under the cover of a U.N. job. Ultimately, the investigation in The Wall Street Journal, articles in The Nation, and a book by Frank Brodhead, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection, linked Ledeen and SISMI to two major international disinformation scams. One of the operations targeted Billy Carter, President Jimmy Carter’s hard-drinking younger brother, for having financial ties to Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi in what became known as the Billygate scandal. According to The Journal, Ledeen’s Billygate articles were part of a SISMI disinformation operation to tilt the election in Reagan’s favor.
The second one, which was known as the Bulgarian Connection, involved a series of articles by Ledeen and others that falsely tied the 1981 attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II to the Russian operatives in the KGB. As I wrote in Vanity Fair, "With Ronald Reagan newly installed in the White House, the so-called Bulgarian Connection made perfect Cold War propaganda. Michael Ledeen was one of its most vocal proponents, promoting it on TV and in newspapers all over the world."
According to Pazienza, Michael Ledeen had received at least $120,000 ($467,177 in 2025 dollars) from SISMI for his work on Billygate and other projects. Ledeen even had a coded identity, Z-3, and allegedy was paid via a Bermuda bank account. Ledeen told the Journal that a consulting firm he owned, ISI, worked for SISMI and may have received the money. He said he did not recall whether or not he had a coded identity.
Ledeen’s ties to SISMI became more significant in 1994 when billionaire media mogul Silvio Berlusconi was elected prime minister and appointed two men to powerful national security positions who knew Ledeen. A founding member of Forza Italia, Berlusconi’s right-wing political party, Minister of Defense Antonio Martino was a well-known figure in Washington neocon circles and had been close friends with Ledeen since the 1970s. Ledeen also occasionally played bridge with the head of SISMI under Berlusconi, Nicolò Pollari.
According to La Repubblica, at an unspecified date after 9/11, Pollari discussed the Niger documents with Antonio Martino, who told him to expect a visit from “an old friend of Italy,” namely Ledeen. Soon afterward, Pollari allegedly took up the Niger matter with Ledeen when he was in Rome.
Ledeen denied having had any such conversations with Pollari, but it is notable that, with the approval of then deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, Ledeen set up a series of secret meetings with two Bush officials, Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode, who were supplying the Bush administration with raw intelligence regarding Iraq that had not been vetted by veteran intelligence analysts. Also present was Ledeen associate Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer and former SAVAK agent who served as a middle man in the Iran-Contra scandal, and had won a reputation as a disseminator of disinformation.
According to an article in the Washington Monthly by Joshua Micah Marshall, Laura Rozen, and Paul Gastris, the first meeting took place in Rome, in December 2001, and raised the possibility “that a rogue faction at the Pentagon was trying to work outside normal U.S. foreign policy channels to advance a ‘regime-change’ agenda.”
The article said that the meeting was also attended by two of Ledeen’s Italian associates, Nicolo Pollari and Antonio Martino. It added that both the American ambassador to Italy and the CIA station chief had been left in the dark about the meeting.
This was an era in which official protocols were still rigorously observed in Washington, so the birth of this rogue operation set off alarm bells all over the nation’s capital.
This was not how America’s national security apparatus was supposed to work.
Ultimately, there are still significant unanswered questions about Ledeen’s role in the Niger documents, but his rhetoric speaks for itself. Rhapsodizing about war week after week, in the aftermath of 9/11, seemingly intoxicated by the grandiosity of his fury, Ledeen became chief rhetorician for neoconservative visionaries who wanted to remake the Middle East.
“Faster, please” became his mantra, repeated incessantly in his National Review columns. The U.S. must be “imperious, ruthless, and relentless,” he argued, until there has been “total surrender” by the Muslim world. “We must keep our fangs bared,” he wrote, “we must remind them daily that we Americans are in a rage, and we will not rest until we have avenged our dead, we will not be sated until we have had the blood of every miserable little tyrant in the Middle East, until every leader of every cell of the terror network is dead or locked securely away, and every last drooling anti-Semitic and anti-American mullah, imam, sheikh, and ayatollah is either singing the praises of the United States of America, or pumping gasoline, for a dime a gallon, on an American military base near the Arctic Circle.”
Such a pity he won’t be around to help out in the Trump administration.
If you have tips, leads, or insights, please reach out—I am always looking for new information. And don’t forget to comment and share your thoughts!
For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin and/or American Kompromat.
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House of Trump, House of Putin
The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia
American Kompromat
How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery
Den of Spies
Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House
yes
Embarrassed to say, how have I never heard of this guy?