A spooked-up ABC journalist...?

Laura Rozen is covering the strange case of Alexis Debat, the rather young ABC News journalist, "terror expert" and business consultant from France, whose background and bona fides have come into question.

The main questioner is Pascal Riché, who writes here about a Debat "interview" with Barack Obama, with whom Debat never actually spoke. Debat later claimed, weakly, to have conducted the interview through an intermediary, although the go-between remains unidentified.

The Riché piece notes that Debat has made some very large claims about his background:

Once he claimed to our colleague Guillemette Faure, a reporter for Le Figaro, that he got his PhD in political science from Edenvale University, in Great Britain, a university which proved to be a fraud.

His resume at the Nixon Center (where Debat is a "Senior Fellow") claims that Debat received a PhD from the Sorbonne in 1999. But according to Riché,

"He manufactured his doctorate. I had the document which he manufactured in my hands," says André Kaspi, a professor of North American history at the Sorbonne. Debat does not deny a "conflict" with the Sorbonne, but refuses to elaborate.

Also:

During the 2005 civil unrest in French suburbs, Debat appeared on television with the title "ex-social worker." He said he worked for the foundation "Agir contre l'exclusion." Other times, he claimed to have served as a French commando, tracking Serb soldiers in the former Yugoslavia.

Debat's resume states that "Alexis occupied various positions in the French government, first as an analyst on the Counter-Terrorism Coordinating Committee, then as a senior desk officer for the Ministry of Defense." According to Riché, the French government will confirm only that "he did hold a desk job for a few months."

Debat has launched a counterattack. Regarding the Edenvale University claim, he writes that he never asserted a connection with that institution, and that "None of the biographies accessible online mention this." His wording sidesteps the question of whether he made such a claim to a reporter for Le Figaro.

In his response, Debat does not really address the dispute over his claimed work for the French government. However, he does insist that he received a doctorate from the Sorbonne and that his thesis is listed here. A check of that site reveals that the thesis director was the afore-mentioned André Kaspi, who now claims that Debat concocted his doctorate. Debat, for his part, insists that Kaspi was not his thesis director. At this time, I have no idea what to make of these claims and counter-claims.

But I do note with great interest the title of that thesis: C.I.A. et perceptions de sécurité aux Etats-Unis, 1947-1962.

Alexis Debat does not appear to be a mere fake journalist of the Stephen Glass variety, and he's not just another neocon bullshit spewer. The neocons despise the CIA, while Debat is clearly enamored of the Agency. For the clearest view of his mind-set, see his piece here, written in response to the release of the congressional report on 9/11.

His main proposal: The CIA should be given far more authority and power within the American intelligence community.

The CIA has been compelled to perform its duties without the full authority it needed, against the will of its rivals (the military, the FBI, the State Department), and, most importantly, beyond the dialectic that made the agency both the protector (by its mission) and the destructor (by its institutional status) of the American republic.

Despite dozens of "intelligence failures", every President since Harry S Truman has consciously chosen to back down from efforts to centralize the intelligence community, to the detriment of the nation's security. Instead of being empowered with its original functions of "lead integrator", the CIA has been kept as an anomaly and left to compete with-and duplicate the work of-the FBI, the State Department and the various intelligence arms of the Department of Defense.

The biography attached to this piece reveals that "Dr. Debat is at work on the largest manuscript ever written on the history of the Central Intelligence Agency, to be published next year in Europe and the United States." I doubt that Debat would have access to the materials necessary for such a work unless the Agency considered him "on the square."

(Incidentally, the same short bio also avers that Debat was "Director of the Scientific Committee for the Institut Montaigne (Paris)," even though he tells a rather different story in his response to the accusations against him.)

So who is Alexis Debat? His apparent institutional allegiance to the CIA naturally leads the observer to suspect a long-standing relationship with the Company. While researching this story, my thoughts drifted back to Philippe de Vosjoli, the French spook who was more-or-less "recruited" for American intelligence by the CIA's infamous James Jesus Angleton. Alfred Hitchchock's worst movie, Topaz, tells a fictionalized version of this story; John Forsythe plays Angleton.

I don't know who Debat really is. But I'd like to learn more. The positioning of spooks within the journalistic community is a very serious matter.

Note: If you came here via Reddit or Buzzflash, you'll want to read the update, which continues to explore this thesis. Go here.