Alexis Debat

Alexis Debat, a French terrorism expert, left the Nixon Center under a cloud last week after being accused of publishing a bogus interview with Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, in Politique Internationale, a French journal.

It emerged that other interviews were fabricated with people including Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, and Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives.

The Sunday Times quoted Debat prominently this month in an article about the Pentagon’s plans for a three-day blitz on Iran. He claimed at a meeting organised by the Nixon Center that the Pentagon had plans to annihilate the Iranian military by striking 1,200 targets. The thrust of his story was corroborated by Pentagon sources.

Debat has long been held in high regard in Washington government circles. He continued to be consulted by senior Pentagon officials after The Sunday Times’s article on Iran appeared.

Debat was hired as a terrorism consultant by ABC News shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, but it fired him in June after it was unable to verify his PhD from the Sorbonne. ABC News claimed his information was always “spot on” but is now re-examining his stories.

Further Reading, Notes

Further Reading

• Sarah Baxter US terror guru ‘put name to fake articles’ From The Sunday Times September 16, 2007