t r u t h o u t - Philippe Gelie | The CIA's Dangerous Failures in Iran

The CIA's Dangerous Failures in Iran: "Watertight Zone around Bush

The Langley agency is not responding to the book's essence, contenting itself with denouncing its 'serious inaccuracies.' But it contains other embarrassing revelations. Bad handling by a communications official gave away the entire CIA network in Iran to an Iranian double agent, leading to the network's complete elimination. With regard to Iraq, about thirty immigrants to the US who were related to Saddam Hussein's engineers were mobilized, in September 2002, to visit their families and propose defection in exchange for information about weapons of mass destruction. All of them returned asserting that WMD programs had been abandoned since 1991. One month later, the CIA nonetheless produced a sales pitch to justify starting a war on account of the presence of biological and chemical weapons and 'the re-launching of Saddam's nuclear program.'

James Risen also relates how Afghanistan has returned to the status of 'Narco-State,' producer of 87% of the heroin produced in the world, under the indifferent noses of American soldiers and spies. And he explains how the ambiguity over the torture inflicted on certain prisoners of the war against terror was maintained by a watertight 'zone of confidentiality' around George W. Bush: the president has never signed anything and has never even been officially 'briefed' on the subject. He therefore retains plausible deniability."


The story is revealed in James Risen's book State of War, The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, (Free Press). It comes on top of the affair - already uncovered by the same reporter in the New York Times - of the NSA's warrantless eavesdropping and an embarrassing series of clarifications about what the CIA really knew about Saddam Hussein's arsenal before the Iraq invasion. What emerges is a charged portrait of an agency disoriented since the end of the Cold War that had not seen the September 11 attacks coming and which regularly trips over the carpet. "No other institution failed its mission so completely during the Bush administration," the author deems.

Operation "Merlin"

One of the most telling examples is an operation conducted in 2004 under the code name "Merlin." In the great tradition of the Keystone Cops, the CIA conceived a plan for transmitting ultra-sensitive documents to the Iranians by intentionally introducing an error that should lead them in the wrong direction, thereby causing them to lose time in their race for the atom bomb. To effect their plan, they turned to a former Russian defector, an atomic engineer in one of the most secret complexes of the Soviet era who had been paid $5,000 a month by the CIA for years to do nothing. The man had a reputation for being greedy for money and having a difficult personality, but the CIA decided to trust him.

Plans were handed over to him that allowed the construction of an atomic TBA 480 detonator system, "one of the best-guarded secrets in the world," James Risen declares. The problem: it took the naturalized Russian-American only a few minutes to see the flaw in it. That wasn't enough to stop the Operation Merlin geniuses: the man was sent to Vienna to "give or sell" his precious secret to the Iranian representatives at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who were supposed to be fighting against proliferation ... He opted to make a gracious offer in line with a letter that warned his clients in covered language: "If you decide to make such a thing, you will have to pose some practical questions. No problem. You'll get the answers, but I expect to be paid for that."

The keen bloodhounds at the CIA had not imagined they would be double-crossed by someone more cunning than themselves. They had also not imagined that the Iranians would speedily discover the plan's defect and that by correcting it, they could make a precious leap towards producing the bomb. Teheran had already obtained secret documents from the head of the Pakistani atomic program, A.Q. Khan, and could no doubt compare those to the ones from the Russian defector. "[That] may have been one of the most reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA," Risen writes, "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.'" Former IAEA Inspector David Albright wonders in the Los Angeles Times: "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."