What we do know is that Chalibi; who opened a Teheran office and cultivated Iranian contacts with Pentagon approval and encouragement; let the Iranians know that someone in Washington was a talkative drunk. What we do know is that the Iranians started slipping test messages designed to discover whether their codes had been compromised into their coded diplomatic transmissions. One such message falsely claimed that a secret cache of weapons had been discovered at a specific site in Iraq. What we now know is that the CIA is working on a short list of people who both had contact with Chalibi and knew that the code had been broken. The list includes Wolfowits, Feith, Perle and Rumsfeld himself at the Pentagon and the Vice-President and his staff, all of whom have been stalwart Chalibi champions and who had access to the information that Chalibi passed on to the Iranians. We have a big problem when somebody high in the administration with access to the folder of our deepest national security secrets has a tongue too easily loosened with alcohol and a less than circumspect selection of drinking partners.

This isn’t the first time someone, or perhaps more than one someone, has played fast and loose with national security secrets for reasons that have nothing to do with national security. Last year someone intentionally leaked the role of Valerie Plame as a clandestine operator for the FBI. A grand jury is looking in to that compromise of CIA’s intelligence operations. It isn’t as though official Washington wasn’t aware that Chalibi was less than reliable. The now discredited WMD information on which the President based his decision to go to war almost exclusively originated with Chalibi and his organization. It was public knowledge that the exiled Iraqi had been convicted of embezzlement in Jordan, One other thing we do know is that Ahmed Chalibi knows the identity of the high administration who got drunk and spilled the beans and we can be sure that he will use that information to his best advantage.

Perhaps Chalibi should have a talk with Bob Novak. They seem to know the same people. They could compare notes. But on second thought that might compromise their individual sources and methods.