THE MEMO, obtained by NEWSWEEK, suggests that the INC last year was directly feeding intelligence reports about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and purported ties to terrorism to one of Cheney\ufffds top foreign- policy aides. Cheney staffers later pushed INC info\ufffdincluding defectors\ufffd claims about WMD and terror ties\ufffdto bolster the case that Saddam\ufffds government posed a direct threat to America. But the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have strongly questioned the reliability of defectors supplied by the INC.
For months, Cheney\ufffds office has denied that the veep bypassed U.S. intelligence agencies to get intel reports from the INC. But a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney\ufffds staff, as one of two \ufffdU.S. governmental recipients\ufffd for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, \ufffddefectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed\ufffd; the info was then reported to, among others, \ufffdappropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.\ufffd The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a \ufffdprincipal point of contact\ufffd for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number. The only other U.S. official named as directly receiving the INC intel is William Luti, a former military adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who, after working on Cheney\ufffds staff early in the Bush administration, shifted to the Pentagon, where he oversaw a secretive Iraq war-planning unit called the Office of Special Plans.