Why, six years ago, did the CIA give the Iranians blueprints to build a bomb?

[Emit]

This might be old news to some here, but Operation Merlin was the subject of the 60 Minutes/Couric interview with Valerie Plame that got scrubbed from their program last week. It's worth a re-visit:

George Bush insists that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. So why, six years ago, did the CIA give the Iranians blueprints to build a bomb?


In an extract from his explosive new book, New York Times reporter James Risen reveals the bungles and miscalculations that led to a spectacular intelligence fiasco

Thursday January 5, 2006
The Guardian

She had probably done this a dozen times before. Modern digital technology had made clandestine communications with overseas agents seem routine. Back in the cold war, contacting a secret agent in Moscow or Beijing was a dangerous, labour-intensive process that could take days or even weeks. But by 2004, it was possible to send high-speed, encrypted messages directly and instantaneously from CIA headquarters to agents in the field who were equipped with small, covert personal communications devices. So the officer at CIA headquarters assigned to handle communications with the agency's spies in Iran probably didn't think twice when she began her latest download. With a few simple commands, she sent a secret data flow to one of the Iranian agents in the CIA's spy network. Just as she had done so many times before.

But this time, the ease and speed of the technology betrayed her. The CIA officer had made a disastrous mistake. She had sent information to one Iranian agent that exposed an entire spy network; the data could be used to identify virtually every spy the CIA had inside Iran.

Mistake piled on mistake. As the CIA later learned, the Iranian who received the download was a double agent. The agent quickly turned the data over to Iranian security officials, and it enabled them to "roll up" the CIA's network throughout Iran. CIA sources say that several of the Iranian agents were arrested and jailed, while the fates of some of the others is still unknown.


~snip~

The code name for this operation was Merlin; to the officer, that seemed like a wry tip-off that nothing about this programme was what it appeared to be. ... On paper, Merlin was supposed to stunt the development of Tehran's nuclear programme by sending Iran's weapons experts down the wrong technical path. The CIA believed that once the Iranians had the blueprints and studied them, they would believe the designs were usable and so would start to build an atom bomb based on the flawed designs. But Tehran would get a big surprise when its scientists tried to explode their new bomb. Instead of a mushroom cloud, the Iranian scientists would witness a disappointing fizzle. The Iranian nuclear programme would suffer a humiliating setback, and Tehran's goal of becoming a nuclear power would have been delayed by several years. In the meantime, the CIA, by watching Iran's reaction to the blueprints, would have gained a wealth of information about the status of Iran's weapons programme, which has been shrouded in secrecy.

~snip~

http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,12858,1678220,00.html

[LakeSamish706]

1. The problem with this whole thing is it has nothing what so ever to do...

with weather or not Iran gets Nukes.... Bush, Cheney, et all are using that for an excuse to attack someone, and anyone will do so they can declare there Martial law and hence a Dictatorship that Bush so badly wants.

[sicksicksick_N_tired]

5. I have to agree. Cheney was trying to "set up" justification to expand the war.

PNAC.

This isn't the only exercise (setting up conditions to advance the expansion of war) Cheney et al have utilized. It must be very frustrating for them: their failures to incite or justify expansion). Heh heh.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

9. yes it's not going very well for them these days

[leftchick]

10. hillary must know all of this

therefore her warmongering for Iran exposes her complicity with the neo-con agenda.

[wicket]

2. K & R

:kick:

[liberal N proud]

3. That is what America does. Creates it's own enemies

We give this stuff, or sell it to these regimes so we can later have something to accuse them of being an enemy of the US.

[Hydra]

4. We simply do what works for us at the time

and when we aren't getting what we want anymore, then we step on them as you would an annoying bug.

So much for the illusion of moral goodness we had for so long.

[robinlynne]

6. wow.

[Joanne98]

7. And remember this one....CHALABI SPILLED IRAN CODES

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/000942.html

Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader and former ally of the Bush administration, disclosed to an Iranian official that the United States had broken the secret communications code of Iran's intelligence service, betraying one of Washington's most valuable sources of information about Iran," the New York Times reports.

June 2, 2004 11:24 AM |

I think this is called.. Creating an enemy..

[sicksicksick_N_tired]

8. Well, the neocons recruited a damn crook. That news wasn't surprising to me.

It's amazing, though, how the reckless disregard of OUR national security just doesn't seem to reach the threshhold of treason.

Pfft.

[Emit]

13. I do! Thanks for the reminder. n/t

[leftchick]

11. what I find puzzling is why Plame does not address this as the reason

for the treason. I think payback for Joe was just the icing on the cake.

[Duppers]

12. BUT...but....but

the CIA under Clinton....

To be accurate and real:

"Operation Merlin has been one of the most closely guarded secrets in the Clinton and Bush administrations. It's not clear who originally came up with the idea, but the plan was first approved by Clinton. After the Russian scientist's fateful trip to Vienna, however, the Merlin operation was endorsed by the Bush administration, possibly with an eye toward repeating it against North Korea or other dangerous states....

...Tehran also obtained nuclear blueprints from the network of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, and so already had workable blueprints against which to compare the designs obtained from the CIA. Nuclear experts say that they would thus be able to extract valuable information from the blueprints while ignoring the flaws.

"If is bad enough," warned a nuclear weapons expert with the IAEA, "they will find it quite quickly. That would be my fear"



What else are we going to discover that happened then that we didn't know and don't like? Gsssssh!

[Wilms]

14. .

[Old and In the Way]

15. Incompetence....by design.

This whole administration's efforts have been to destroy the social fabric and create the conditions that will usher in martial law.