Saturday, May 22, 2004

Iran wins the Nobel Prize of Spycraft

New York City - World News
... Chalabi had long been the favorite of the Pentagon's civilian leadership. Intelligence sources say Chalabi himself has passed on sensitive U.S. intelligence to the Iranians.

Patrick Lang, former director of the intelligence agency's Middle East branch, said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence community that Chalabi's U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. 'They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to,' he said.

He described it [Iran's black op] as 'one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history.'

'I'm a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work,' he said.

An intelligence agency spokesman would not discuss questions about his agency's internal conclusions about the alleged Iranian operation. But he said some of its information had been helpful to the U.S. 'Some of the information was great, especially as it pertained to arresting high value targets and on force protection issues,' he said. 'And some of the information wasn't so great.

...n 1995, for instance, Khidhir Hamza, who had once worked in Iraq's nuclear program and whose claims that Iraq had continued a massive bomb program in the 1990s are now largely discredited, gave UN nuclear inspectors what appeared to be explosive documents about Iraq's program. Hamza, who fled Iraq in 1994, teamed up with Chalabi after his escape.

The documents, which referred to results of experiments on enriched uranium in the bomb's core, were almost flawless, according to Andrew Cockburn's recent account of the event in the political newsletter CounterPunch.

But the inspectors were troubled by one minor matter: Some of the techinical descriptions used terms that would only be used by an Iranian. They determined that the original copy had been written in Farsi by an Iranian scientist and then translated into Arabic.

And the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded the documents were fraudulent.'

I'm sure Iran provided great Intel on the individuals they needed to eliminate. Old, old civilizations are very good at the great game, and Persia is among the very oldest. Americans, it appears, are naifs.

Next we'll realize that Syria also excels at spycraft.

Eventually someone will chase down France's involvement. Did they try to warn the US that Iran was playing us for a fool? I suspect they might have, and that they were ignored. Same goes for the AEA -- I bet they were concerned about what Chalabi was up to.

Does Rumsfeld ever wonder where he went wrong? Nyah.

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