Clinton Scheme Gave Iran Nuke Blueprints

[DrMaddVibe]

Reprinted from NewsMax.com

Saturday, Jan. 7, 2006 12:03 p.m. EST


In a hairbrained scheme that was personally approved by then-President Clinton, the CIA deliberately gave Iranian physicists blueprints for part of a nuclear bomb that likely helped Tehran advance its nuclear weapons development program.

The allegation, detailed in the new book "State of War," by New York Times reporter James Risen, comes as the Iranian nuclear crisis appears to be coming to a head, with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad urging that Israel be "wiped off the map" and his government announcing last week that it will resume uranium enrichment on Monday.

Reports Risen: "It's not clear who originally came up with the idea, but the plan [to give Tehran nuclear blueprints] was first approved by Clinton."

Beginning in February 2000, the CIA recruited a Russian scientist who had defected to the US years earlier. His mission: Take the nuclear blueprints to Vienna to sell them - or simply give them - to the Iranian representatives for the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Dubbed "Operation Merlin," the plan was supposed to steer Iranian physicists off track by incorporating design flaws in the blueprints that would render the information worthless.

But in what may turn out to be one of the greatest foreign policy blunders of all time, Operation Merlin backfired when the Russian scientist spotted the design flaws immediately - and even offered to help Iran fix the problems.

Risen said the Clinton-approved plan ended up handing Tehran "one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world, providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers such as the United States and Russia from rogue countries such as Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short."

He noted that thanks to the bizarre operation, Iran could now "leapfrog one of the last remaining engineering hurdles blocking its path to a nuclear weapon."

Ironically, Risen's New York Times has declined to cover Mr. Clinton's Iranian nuclear debacle - concentrating instead on his book's dubious claims that the National Security Agency was first authorized to commence domestic wiretapping by President Bush.

Still, with Operation Merlin going so badly off track, "State of War's" revelations certainly warrant the kind of full blown congressional investigation now planned for the wiretap pseudo-scandal.

Risen's report could also have a serious implications for Sen. Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. Mrs. Clinton has been sharply critical of President Bush's handling of the Iranian nuclear crisis, complaining that a nuclear-armed Tehran would be a much more serious threat to the U.S. than Iraq.









Yeah, and from them we get "but Clinton".

I suppose he was getting his dick sucked when he authorized that! :cool:

[Jerry Falwell]

This is scary. I was reading a news report yesterday that had a bunch of quotes from Irans president. He really seems to believe that he is paving the way for a future coming of a prophet that will rule in Israel for 7 years. He is going to be the one to push, I don't really see him backing down at all. Especially, if he is really doing all of this to speed up this expected return that will "Solidify Islamic rule" in the world (supposedly). :(

[Nickdfresh]

Yeah, right, they have "nuclear blueprints" from at least six or seven years ago, and they still have a ways to go to build a nuke? Extremely doubtful, especially coming from NewsMaxiPad©....

[Warham]

This coming from a book written by a New York Times writer?

It must be true, as they love Clinton.

[Nickdfresh]

Yup, as usual, NEWSMAXI never let's me down on their light weight days...

CLINTON was in office in 2004?

It was Bush Administration that apparantly fucked up?:D

Morons...

You need a new source for the news flow AssVIBE....

CIA Gave Iran Bomb Plans, Book Says
The nuclear designs were intentionally flawed, but Tehran was tipped off and could have made use of them, the writer contends.

By Josh Meyer, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — In a clumsy effort to sabotage Iran's nuclear program, the CIA in 2004

intentionally handed Tehran some top-secret bomb designs laced with a hidden flaw that U.S. officials hoped would doom any weapon made from them, according to a new book about the U.S. intelligence agency.

But the Iranians were tipped to the scheme by the Russian defector hired by the CIA to deliver the plans and may have gleaned scientific information useful for designing a bomb, writes New York Times reporter James Risen in "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration."


FOR THE RECORD: (from the CIA)
Book on CIA —An article in Wednesday's Section A about the book "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration" by New York Times reporter James Risen reported that the CIA had said the book contained "serious inaccuracies," but a portion of the statement by the agency was omitted. The book reported that the CIA in 2004 had attempted to slip nuclear weapons plans to Iran that contained a crucial flaw. CIA Director of Public Affairs Jennifer Millerwise Dyck in the statement questioned the book's reliance on anonymous sources and said additionally: "It is most alarming that the author discloses information that he believes to be ongoing intelligence operations, including actions as critical as stopping dangerous nations from acquiring nuclear weapons. Setting aside whether what he wrote is accurate or inaccurate, it demonstrates an unfathomable and sad disregard for U.S. national security and those who take life-threatening risks! to ensure it."

The clandestine CIA effort was just one of many alleged intelligence failures during the Bush administration, according to the book.

Risen also cites intelligence gaffes that fueled the Bush administration's case for war against Saddam Hussein, spawned a culture of torture throughout the U.S. military and encouraged the rise of heroin cultivation and trafficking in postwar Afghanistan.

Even before the book's release Tuesday, its main revelation — that President Bush authorized a secret effort by another intelligence outfit, the National Security Agency, to eavesdrop on unsuspecting Americans without court-approved warrants — had created a storm of controversy when it was reported last month in the New York Times in an article coauthored by Risen.

In the book, Risen says he based his accounts on interviews with dozens of intelligence officials who, while unnamed, had proved reliable in the past.

Bush has confirmed the existence of the program, but condemned the newspaper for the December report and for its use of confidential sources.

The CIA added its own criticism Tuesday, saying the book contains "serious inaccuracies."

The NSA domestic spying controversy is at the heart of an intensifying debate over whether the president has overstepped his authority in fighting the U.S.-declared war on terrorism by not adequately consulting or allowing oversight from Congress and the courts.

The Justice Department disclosed Friday that it was conducting a criminal investigation to find out who leaked classified details of the domestic spying program.

The book's release date was moved up in the wake of the NSA controversy, and it provides additional details of that domestic spying effort, in which Bush did not seek permission for domestic wiretaps from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The New York Times delayed for a year publication of its article on the NSA's domestic spying, in part because of personal requests from the president. Critics have questioned whether the paper could have published the information before last year's presidential election if it had decided against a delay. Newspaper officials have refused to comment on reasons for the delay or on the exact timing.

Top New York Times officials also refused to publish a news article about the reported CIA plot to give intentionally flawed nuclear plans to Iran, according to a person briefed on the newspaper's conversations by one of the participants. That person said the New York Times withheld publication at the request of the White House and former CIA Director George J. Tenet.

U.S. officials have long maintained that Iran's rulers want to develop nuclear weapons, but Tehran has insisted that it seeks to develop only a civilian nuclear energy program. Whatever the case, the CIA was desperate to counter what it believed was a clandestine nuclear program, and turned to a Russian defector who had once been a nuclear scientist in the former Soviet republics, according to the book.

The book says the CIA worked with the U.S.-based defector to concoct a story about how he was destitute, but in possession of valuable nuclear weapons blueprints that had been secreted out of Russia.

CIA officials had concerns about the man's temperament, Risen says, but sent the defector and the blueprints to Vienna anyway, with orders to hand-deliver them to someone at Tehran's diplomatic mission to the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, the U.N. nuclear watchdog.

His CIA handlers never imagined that the Russian defector would tip off the Iranians to the fatal flaw that they had hidden deep within the blueprints. But that, the book adds, is exactly what the Russian did, in part because the CIA failed to send anybody to accompany him out of fear that it might make the Iranians suspicious.

The book does not say whether Iran used the plans, but reports that a senior Iranian official visiting Vienna appears to have taken them immediately to Tehran after the defector dropped them off.

"He [the Russian] was the front man for what may have been one of the most reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA, one that may have helped put nuclear weapons in the hands of a charter member of what President George W. Bush has called the axis of evil," the book contends.

Two nuclear weapons experts who say that they have no knowledge about whether the covert effort described in the book occurred added that a deliberate flaw in the plans could have been easily found by the Iranians.

"Iran has excellent scientists and any information related to weapons designs could move its program ahead," said a European nuclear weapons expert, who refused to allow his name to be used because his government prohibits comments on nuclear weapons or designs.

David Albright, a former weapons inspector for the IAEA, agreed with the other expert that the plans could have shaved many years off Iran's nuclear effort.

"I wouldn't call it a colossal failure" by the CIA, said Albright, now president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. "But I don't quite understand the purpose of it, why you would want to hand something like this to the Iranians. It's unlikely to work."

According to the book, the CIA effort to sabotage Iran's nuclear effort came on the heels of another massive intelligence failure, in which a CIA officer mistakenly sent an Iranian agent a trove of information that could help identify nearly every one of the spy agency's undercover operatives in Iran.

The Iranian was a double agent who turned over the data to Iranian authorities. They used it to dismantle the CIA's spy network inside the country and arrest or possibly kill an unknown number of U.S. agents, the book says.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-intel4jan04,0,6972451.story?coll=la-home-world

[FORD]

It's been well established that the CIA, a wholly owned subsidiary of Bush Criminal Empire LTD since 1946, was hostile to Clinton's administration, so that renders this NewsHax crap even less reliable than they usually are.

[Warham]

How could the CIA be owned by the BCE? They've tried everything in their power to undermine him since he's been in office.

[Warham]

January 06, 2006, 7:08 a.m.
The Great Counterintelligence Fiasco
Why should anyone believe anything the CIA has to say about Iran?

Like everyone else in Washington, I’ve been reading excerpts from James Risen’s new book, the one that "exposes" the "crimes" of the Bush administration with regard to the war on terrorism. The most recent excerpt deals with the CIA’s activities vis-à-vis Iran, and Risen says some very shocking things, things which a serious city would find far more troublesome than the legalities about NSA’s intercepts of conversations involving terrorists. Since I’m just an amateur at these arcane subjects, I thought it best to get some real expertise, and so I dusted off the old Ouija board for the first time this year, and got it up and running. After about 20 minutes of searching, I finally got my old friend James Jesus Angleton, once upon a time the head of counterintelligence at Langley.
JJA: Happy New Year! Hope everyone’s doing well.

ML: Thanks, dittos. We’re okay down here, hoping for a terrific 2006. And you?

JJA: Kind of you to ask. I’m doing fine, it’s just that the puritans who run this place won’t let me smoke. They say it’s totally contrary to the milieu, and that if I want to smoke I can put in for a transfer to the other place...

ML: Probably not what you’re looking for?

JJA: Not at all. But enough about me, what’s on your mind?

ML: Have you read that excerpt from the Risen book, State of War, that was in Thursday’s Guardian?

JJA: Indeed I have. I was hoping that’s why you called. It’s simply amazing. Unbelievable.

ML: You mean the buffoonery by the CIA operations directorate that Risen talks about?

JJA: Well, obviously. But the really amazing part is that Risen doesn’t even notice the truly horrible aspects of his own story. He doesn’t have the wit or the energy to think half a step beyond the tale he’s been told.

ML: Okay, let’s take them in order. The first one dates back to Clinton. It’s about an operation called "Merlin," and consisted of feeding doctored information about the design of nuclear weapons to the mullahs via a Soviet scientist who had defected "years earlier" to the United States. The concept was to get the Iranians to use the snafued version in their bombs so that they would fizzle instead of explode.

JJA: Right. We’ve been doing such things for years, and for good reason. If you know that your enemies are trying to steal your blueprints, or buy good weapons on the clandestine market, you’re well-advised to try to get them to steal or buy things that won’t work, instead of running around trying to plug all the cracks in the dyke. Nothing wrong with the concept.
\
ML: Except that we never did it with nuclear stuff before, did we? And Risen’s got expert testimony that the Iranians could easily have sorted out the good parts of the blueprints from the disinformation, so that in the end we would have actually helped them.

JJA: Yes, I saw that. You can always get somebody to say that any given idea is idiotic. But you’d need to know a lot more than Risen knows to be able to judge it, in this specific case. And that points us to the really interesting question, the one that Risen doesn’t bother to ask, let alone answer.

ML: I’m following you. If we knew enough — in 2000, mind you — to be able to design an effective disinformation program, then...

JJA: Then (he started shouting in that gravelly voice of his) THEY KNEW THE IRANIANS HAD A NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM SIX YEARS AGO.

ML: But they were forever testifying, in those years, that they really didn’t know.

JJA: The damn fools.

ML: Well, maybe they had a political problem. They certainly knew that Clinton wasn’t going to do anything about it, so why should they make the case? There’s a long history of this, including the CIA’s failure to sufficiently warn about al Qaeda, etc. etc...

JJA: Nononono! They did make the case — that’s Risen’s real scoop, and he doesn’t even know it. They had to make the case in order to justify the operation. You couldn’t have "Merlin" unless you knew there was an Iranian nuclear-weapons program. Remember that Risen makes a big deal about the fact that the Russian defector was carrying "a technical design for...a 'firing set' for a Russian-designed nuclear weapon."

ML: You’re right. Good heavens!

JJA: Damn right. And that takes us to the true idiocy of "Merlin." It’s not, as Risen has it, that we might have inadvertently helped the mullahs design a better weapon; they had all the help they needed on that one. That was a component of a Soviet bomb. The true idiocy was the apparent failure to realize that the Iranians could find out all about the defector, because their nuclear program was being helped by the Russians, who had to know all about this guy. And the Russians also knew all about that "firing set," because they’d designed it in the first place. So the buffoons in the DO should have known — I mean, five minutes’ deep concentration would have gotten them there — that this particular deception could not possibly work.

ML: They didn’t think about the counterintelligence angle.

JJA: To put it mildly. Nor did any of the policymakers; they should have seen through it right away. But they didn’t, because counterintelligence is a lost art out at Langley, as Risen’s other story proves quite effectively.

ML: That’s the one about the lady at CIA who mistakenly sent information to the "wrong spy" — an agent inside Iran.

JJA: Ha! Wrong spy indeed! Risen says "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."

ML: All three of them...

JJA: Chortle.

ML: And Risen continues, "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..."

JJA: There you go. We had fallen for a classic deception, just as we did during the Cold War with Cubans and East Germans (remember that it turned out that most all the presumed "spies" in those countries were double agents). So much for "spycraft." It’s a replay of an earlier catastrophe, in the Nineties, when scores of Iranians were rounded up and killed because the CIA had made a hash of the operation and exposed their identities. All that should raise some serious questions in the minds of the policymakers, don’t you think?

ML: Yeah, like: if we are constantly tricked by the mullahs, why should anyone believe anything the CIA has to say about Iran?

JJA: Pfui. Risen says that "in the spring of 2005, in the wake of the CIA’s Iranian disaster, Porter Goss...told President Bush...that the CIA really didn’t know how close Iran was to becoming a nuclear power."

ML: But that doesn’t parse! They had known enough, years before, to launch "Merlin."

JJA: Or they didn’t, in which case there’s no excuse at all for "Merlin." In fact, it looks like the real disinformation program was running the other way. If I were in charge of counterintelligence (his voice got a bit dreamy here, as the static was starting up on the Ouija board), I’d run some operations to see if the so-called "agents" in Iran were ours, or the mullahs’. And (the board was now sparking and it was hard to make out his voice) find out...if...some bastard at the DO...working....the other side.

At least that’s what it sounded like. Anyway, you know how he thought: Anything could be its own opposite. He loved to tell the story of the "Trust," the Soviet disinformation operation that tricked the West into supporting a bogus army of presumed anti-Communists who were working for Soviet intelligence all along. We thought we had penetrated the Soviet Union, but it was the other way around; they had penetrated our intelligence services. They found out what we were up to, and they deceived us into striking at their strongest link. So it’s inevitable that he would wonder if Risen’s stories were much more important than Risen realized. Maybe they show that the Iranians have done something similar. They’re certainly up to it.

A few days ago President Ahmadinejad said "we must prepare ourselves to rule the world." And he cheerfully commented on Sharon’s stroke, "The Butcher of Sabra and Shatila has joined his ancestors and others will soon follow suit."

A regime with such ambitions is capable of anything.

http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen200601060708.asp

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by Warham
How could the CIA be owned by the BCE? They've tried everything in their power to undermine him since he's been in office.

Good point actually...

I've tried to explain to FORD that the CIA thinks that BUSH is a smarmy, stupid asshole that uses them as a mere political tool...

But he won't listen.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by DrMaddVibe


Yeah, and from them we get "but Clinton".

I suppose he was getting his dick sucked when he authorized that! :cool:

You're such a genius..:D

How is CLINTON responsible for a Russian defector recruited in 2000, four months after Bush took office, and an operation (assuming this is wholly true, which I doubt) and took place in 2004, the final year of BUSH's first term?

Fucking classic.:D LMFAO!!!

[FORD]

Originally posted by Warham
How could the CIA be owned by the BCE? They've tried everything in their power to undermine him since he's been in office.

They're old guard BCE. Poppy's division of the family business. And like Poppy himself, they think Chimpy has fucked up several times.

[Nickdfresh]

Risen's report could also have a serious implications for Sen. Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. Mrs. Clinton has been sharply critical of President Bush's handling of the Iranian nuclear crisis, complaining that a nuclear-armed Tehran would be a much more serious threat to the U.S. than Iraq.


Oh, it will have "serious consequences" on Hillary's presumed campaign eh? What about the idiot who was pResident four years when this supposedly happened? Are you guys really this stupid?:D

[Nickdfresh]

Delving into war secrets of the Bush administration

By Michael D. Langan, Globe Correspondent | January 7, 2006

In his new book, ''State of War," New York Times reporter James Risen has made a persuasive but not compelling case against the Bush administration and what he calls its ''secret history" of activity that he claims has torn the fabric of the executive branch's checks and balances.

Risen, whose reporting was the basis of the Times's Dec. 16, 2005, revelation about President Bush's secret domestic spying program, argues that Bush has thrown out the ''cautious pragmatism" of presidents since World War II in the areas of foreign policy and national security. Instead, the president ''has taken an enormous gamble with American policy in the Arab world -- and with the lives of American soldiers."

At this point, no one can tell whether democracy will succeed in Iraq. If it does, it may be of a far different political stripe than its neoconservative progenitors expected. Right now, Bush's Iraq policy may be interpreted as a bold stroke of genius, or a disastrous stumbling in foreign policy.

The author argues that a pattern of oversight avoidance in the executive branch came close to being the norm. ''After 9/11, the moderating influences of the slow-moving bureaucracy were stripped away. The president and his principals -- Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and a handful of others -- held almost constant, crisis-atmosphere meetings, making decisions on the fly." Rice comes in for major criticism. According to Risen, she was no match for the political infighting abilities of Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney while she was director of the National Security Council.

The substratum of this strategy, according to Risen, is the thesis of plausible deniability for Bush. The author explains: ''It features a president who created a sphere of deniability in which his top aides were briefed on matters of utmost sensitivity -- but the president was carefully kept in ignorance."

If true, I think critics have cause to question the legitimacy of a sphere of deniability that senior officials are alleged to have set up for the president. In Washington, however, ''deniability" has always been hard to prove. Senior officials don't get to perches of power by divulging state secrets. Or, if they do, they don't stay there long. Sometimes a nod, a shrug, or silence can give consent to ''deniability." Those intent on such a policy know, from long years of experience, how to convey agreement without getting burned.

Risen gives evidence for what he calls ''an explosive chain of events" in the secret history of the Bush presidency. It includes sponsoring a questionable domestic spying operation by the National Security Agency, creating ''a zone of deniability" for issues of torture, giving nuclear bomb designs to Iran, the CIA's keeping from the president the fact that Iraq had no nuclear weapons, and allowing Afghanistan to continue as a narco state.

In ''State of War" Risen adds that ''the technical wizards of the National Security Agency have been engaged in a program of domestic data mining that is so vast, and so unprecedented, that it makes a mockery of long-standing privacy rules."

Concerning the torture of prisoners, Risen notes that ''Cheney and senior White House officials knew that Bush was not being briefed and that the CIA was not being given written presidential authorization for its tactics."

In a chapter titled ''Casus Belli," or the case for war, former CIA director George Tenet comes in for criticism. Risen states that ''just as Tenet failed to stand up to Rumsfeld, he and his management team failed to act as a buffer against the pressure being brought to bear by the administration's hard-liners."

CIA leaders acted as if they had information about weapons of mass destruction and about how close Saddam Hussein was to building nuclear weapons. But, Risen reports, some at the agency weren't so sure. In fact, the author says that evidence for Iraq's WMDs was so thin as to be transparent. ''The United States did not have the proof to back up what the president was saying publicly about Iraq," he writes.

''Merlin" was the CIA's code name for an operation that would pass on to Iran flawed nuclear blueprints via a Russian scientist on the CIA's payroll. It was a dangerous plan involving giving plenty of accurate information to Tehran, but with some misinformation. The idea was to find out what stage the Iranians were at in developing a nuclear weapon, and then send them down the ''wrong technical path." For reasons of spycraft amateurism, it went awry.

A final example of Bush administration bungling: It arrested Haji Bashir Noorzai, a major player in Afghanistan's drug trade as well as an Al Qaeda financier. But the administration became so distracted with the Iraq war that it cooled in its efforts to diminish the Afghani drug trade and never took advantage of its ability to turn Noorzai.

The Times held the Dec. 16 story for a year. Protection of sources, more in-depth reporting, and national security considerations were given as explanations for the delay by executive editor Bill Keller. Questions about holding the article that long continue to be asked by readers of the paper and others.

One wonders if the eavesdropping story was published in the paper when it became evident that the Risen book, originally scheduled for Jan. 16, was moved up to Jan. 3. The paper's embarrassment of being scooped by its own reporter's book would have been worse than the criticism it received for waiting a year at the request of senior administration officials.

After the publication of the story, the Department of Justice announced in late December that it would launch an investigation into the disclosure of classified information about the NSA program.

Risen acknowledges in his note on sources that some information he cites in his book was given to him ''on the condition of anonymity." It may be true, as he says, that ''the very best stories" rely on such sourcing. This approach is a heavy burden for the reader. Trusting a reporter with a record for honesty is sometimes the only way to get a story, but objective verification of the facts is better.

Risen has written a useful summary of the state of Iraq policy in the midst of the Bush administration's turmoil. Critics on both sides will have something to say about the arguments Risen lays out in ''State of War." But there isn't enough negative material in the book to knock George W. Bush off course. The president gives every indication of carrying on what began as the war on terrorism to America's increasing number of enemies -- and critics -- around the world.

State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration
By James Risen, Free Press, 240 pp., $26

© Copyright 2006 Globe
Newspaper Company. (http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2006/01/07/delving_into_war_secrets_of_the_bush_administratio n/?page=1)

Michael D. Langan is a retired Treasury enforcement official. He served as a senior expert with the UN Monitoring Group on the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

[Baby's On Fire]

Originally posted by Jerry Falwell
This is scary. I was reading a news report yesterday that had a bunch of quotes from Irans president. He really seems to believe that he is paving the way for a future coming of a prophet that will rule in Israel for 7 years. He is going to be the one to push, I don't really see him backing down at all. Especially, if he is really doing all of this to speed up this expected return that will "Solidify Islamic rule" in the world (supposedly). :(

Nothing to worry about. Israel WILL wipe Iran off the map first.