CIA and Iran - Nuke Nightmare Scenario ...

Oh, my Gawd !

Good grief. It's almost beyond belief.

Who the hell in their wildest dreams and/or worst nightmares would have thought they would ever read such a headline as follows here ?

Quick -- go get a load of this from today's Guardian - 5th January 2006.

But first be sure you're seated, with your seat belt firmly fastened. And be sure to button up your overcoat because this could chill you to the bone.

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.

And here's a taste of what to expect from this 'bungle' of absolutely, bloody unimaginable importance and probably unparalleled significance. Not to mention the completely catastrophic possible consequences.

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.

This espionage disaster, of course, was not reported. It left the CIA virtually blind in Iran, unable to provide any significant intelligence on one of the most critical issues facing the US - whether Tehran was about to go nuclear.

In fact, just as President Bush and his aides were making the case in 2004 and 2005 that Iran was moving rapidly to develop nuclear weapons, the American intelligence community found itself unable to provide the evidence to back up the administration's public arguments.

On the heels of the CIA's failure to provide accurate pre-war intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, the agency was once again clueless in the Middle East.

In the spring of 2005, in the wake of the CIA's Iranian disaster, Porter Goss, its new director, told President Bush in a White House briefing that the CIA really didn't know how close Iran was to becoming a nuclear power.

Okay. Right here & now is where the teasing stops. Prolonging the suspense any longer under such serious circumstances as this, could quite easily be classed as cruel and unusual punishment.

So here's your last lifted excerpt to look at.

But in previous cases, such Trojan horse operations involved conventional weapons; none of the former officials had ever heard of the CIA attempting to conduct this kind of high-risk operation with designs for a nuclear bomb.

The former officials also said these kind of programmes must be closely monitored by senior CIA managers in order to control the flow of information to the adversary. If mishandled, they could easily help an enemy accelerate its weapons development.

That may be what happened with Merlin.

Iran has spent nearly 20 years trying to develop nuclear weapons, and in the process has created a strong base of sophisticated scientists knowledgeable enough to spot flaws in nuclear blueprints.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 [the flaw] is bad enough," warned a nuclear weapons expert with the IAEA, "they will find it quite quickly. That would be my fear".

Run right on over now, via the link at the bottom, to read the rest.

Then when you have, ask yourself the question; Who's going to carry this can ? And maybe even more importantly, who should ?

Or to put it another way, where does the buck stop these days ?

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