Philip Giraldi

Philip Giraldi (born c. 1946 ) is a former counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a columnist and television commentator who is the Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a group that advocates for more even handed policies by the U.S. government in the Middle East.

Education
He gained a Bachelor of Arts with Honors from the University of Chicago and a MA and a Ph.D from the University of London in European History.

Career
Giraldi was employed by the CIA for eighteen years working in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain and is fluent in Turkish, Italian, German, and Spanish.

Since 1992 Giraldi has consulted for several Fortune 500 corporate clients. President of San Marco International, an international security management and risk assessment consulting firm and a partner in Cannistraro Associates, another security consultancy. Giraldi has written columns on terrorism, intelligence, and security issues for The American Conservative magazine, Huffington Post, and Antiwar.com and op-ed pieces for the Hearst Newspaper chain. He has been interviewed by Good Morning America, 60 Minutes, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya and other outlets. During the 2008 presidential primaries, Giraldi served as a foreign policy adviser to Ron Paul.

Assertions
In 2004 Giraldi, with his partner Vincent Cannistraro, a retired CIA counterterrorism chief, wrote that Turkish sources had reported that Turkey was concerned by Israel's alleged encouragement of Kurdish ambitions to create an independent state and that Israeli intelligence operations in the area included anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian activity by Kurds. They predicted this might lead to a new alliance among Iran, Syria, and Turkey which have Kurdish minorities.

In August 2005, Giraldi wrote that US Vice President Dick Cheney had instructed STRATCOM to prepare "a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States... [including] a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons... not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States." The reason cited for the attack to use mini-nukes is that the targets are hardened or are deep underground and would not be destroyed by non-nuclear warheads.

In 2005 Giraldi also wrote that the Italian Niger/yellowcake documents claiming an Iraqi interest in purchasing uranium from Niger were forgeries created by former CIA officers and Michael Ledeen. (See Niger uranium forgeries.) Giraldi also wrote that officials in the Office of Special Plans working for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith had forged the "Habbush letter" allegedly written by Saddam Hussein's intelligence director regarding shipping the uranium.

In 2009 Giraldi wrote that unnamed intelligence sources had told him that a document published by The Times, which allegedly described an Iranian plan to experiment on a "neutron initiator" for an atomic weapon, was in fact a fabrication, which Giraldi speculated was created by the state of Israel. He claimed that Rupert Murdoch publications regularly published false intelligence from the Israeli and sometimes the British government. Further disclosures by The Times undermined the document's veracity.

In August, 2010 Giraldi wrote that unnamed “sources in the counterintelligence community” had told him that agents of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency were posing as intelligence agents and visiting Arabs and Muslims in New York and New Jersey. This was allegedly done to help agents gain information about Iran, which they believed would not be forthcoming to known Israeli agents. The Israeli embassy, the United States Department of Justice, and Giraldi all declined to comment for an article on the allegations in the biweekly New York Arab-community newspaper Aramica.