Voltaire

Ledeen had been in Italy in the late 1970s, when he consulted for Italian military intelligence, and cultivated strong connections to the right-wing in Italy, including to the notorious P2 Masonic Lodge. When P2 had come under increasing scrutiny in 1979, grandmaster Licio Gelli had reportedly made his base of operations the Montecarlo Comite. Reported members of the Montecarlo Comite were Gelli, Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, former Supreme Commander of NATO, and Michael Ledeen.

According to Jim Lobe, Ledeen then returned to Washington in 1981 as “anti-terrorism” advisor to Haig, now new secretary of state. Over the next several years, Ledeen used his position as consultant to Haig, the Pentagon and the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, to boost the notion of a global terrorist conspiracy based in the Kremlin, whose KGB pulled the strings of all of the world’s key terrorist groups, especially in the Middle East.

Ledeen was a major figure in the Iran-Contra Affair, which was designed to fund the “Mujahideen” of Afghanistan through an illicit drug trade. As a consultant of National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane, Ledeen vouched for Iranian intermediary Manucher Ghorbanifar, and met with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, and officials of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the CIA to arrange meetings with high-ranking Iranian officials and the much-criticized weapons-for-hostages deal with Iran, that would become known as the Iran-Contra scandal.

Ledeen had, along with Arnaud de Borchgrave, in The New Republic, “exposed” some details of Billy Carter’s dealings with the Muammar Gaddafi regime in Libya, which deligitimized his brother’s presidency. Ledeen seems to be again involved in the fabrication of evidence, this time in the instance of the forged documents “uncovered” by Italian intelligence. These depicted an attempt by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein regime to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger, which formed the basis of President Bush’s support for the invasion of Iraq, and which subsequently unraveled into the “Plamegate” scandal.

In Ledeen’s own words, on a leadership trait he admires, from his book Universal Fascism:

“In order to achieve the most noble accomplishments, the leader may have to ‘enter into evil.’ This is the chilling insight that has made Machiavelli so feared, admired and challenging… we are rotten…. It’s true that we can achieve greatness if, and only if, we are properly led.”