CIA Gave Iran Bomb Plans, Book Says
Freeman
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... 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."
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.
-----------------------------------
FOR THE RECORD:
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."
------------------------------------
Freeman
gave the bomb technology, later allegedly used by "Iran-backed
terrorists in Iraq", to the IRA(!) in the early 1990s. See
http://www.geocities.com/libertystrikesback/oct05.html
(under 16 October 05, "Independent" article)
And last September, two Brit SAS soldiers were caught by police in
Basra, disguised as Arabs, with a carload of explosives and a
detonator.
http://www.geocities.com/libertystrikesback/sep05.html#SAS
Evidently, Anglo-Saxon black ops is angling to incriminate the Iranians
as another pretext to invade.
Hank McSpank
weapon (not a dirty bomb one that will go critical). The problem is
getting the fuel for it not building the damned thing.
Freeman
Yeah, my three-year-old made one out of old luminous watches. :-)