Free Republic

It took me seven years to track down General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former chief of Romanian Intelligence, after he defected to the United States in the late 1970s. He was the highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence officer to come to the West, and his defection produced the total dismantling of the Romanian service, as well as the identification of a considerable number of KGB “sleepers,” intelligence agents operating without official cover or diplomatic immunity. He has lived in secret ever since, as befits a man who is the object of two death sentences that remain in effect.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said. The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator. Iran, which was a mortal...