Plame Wilson Had worked on Iran Anti-Proliferation
Valerie Plame Wilson and her team at the CIA were working on Iran counter-prolifetation efforts, according to Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story. It has been known for some time that she was involved in anti-proliferation activities, but that her main concern was Iran is new.
Plame Wilson was outed to the US press by Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney, his staffer Irving Lewis Libby, and George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove.
There has for some time been speculation among bloggers that Cheney et al. wanted to shoot down :-) Plame Wilson for reasons other than that she is the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, who blew the whistle on intelligence failures concerning alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
If she was working specifically on Iran, this theory becomes more plausible. We know that Cheney, the Neocons and other factions in the Bush administration desperately wanted to get up a war against Iran so as to overthrow its government.
If the CIA was successful in a measurable way in preventing proliferation to Iran of technology required for making a nuclear weapon, and could certify as much to Congress, that very success would make it harder to justify a war on Iran.
We know that someone among the Neoconservatives also let Ahmad Chalabi know that the US had broken Iranian codes and could read that country's secret diplomatic correspondence. As anyone could have expected, Chalabi immediately told the Iranians about the US spying. The Iranians will have immediately changed their codes.
Note: The crime here was letting the Iranians know we could listen in on them at will. As a third world country, Iran was presumably using fairly primitive encryption then, which our NSA had broken. Once the Iranians were tipped by Chalabi that we were listening, it would have been easy for them either to feed us some disinformation or to just close us out all together. More on the case is in this CBS report from 2004.
So between disrupting the work of Plame Wilson's unit at the CIA and letting the Iranians know about the broken codes, the pro-war party managed to make Iran's actual progress on nuclear research opaque to the US government. It was necessary that it be opaque if there was to be a war. Iran is actually a decade or two away from having a bomb even if everything went well. But US intelligence agencies must be less confident they know what is going on in Iran now than before the Neocons destroyed so much of the effort against Iranian proliferation. It was the US withdrawal of inspectors from Ira[q] in 1998 that created the uncertainties that allowed Bush to invade Iraq. For warmongers, good intelligence on the enemy's capabilities is undesirable if that intelligence would get in the way of launching a war.
Still, it is just speculation.
If the speculation were true, the scale of treason emanating from Rove and Cheney and his staff is scarcely imaginable.
Even if they did not set out to create a more plausible cause for war, Rove, Cheney, Libby and the others have either through duplicity or cupidity or stupidity set the stage for even more loss of life and violent conflict.
posted by Juan Cole @ 2/14/2006 12:33:00 AM
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9 Comments:
I think it is plausible that these maniacs would try to stop any intelligence gathering that would show that Iran didn't have nuclear weapons capabilities. It would certainly explain the obsession with Plame, which always seemed hard to understand.
Glad you are back to breathing fire and brimstone.
Your Dianne Farrel Link leads to this. I am not totally convinced it is a great idea.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113987680406772930-aCOEjal46Zq_UqXNDX4mktxXt_I_20060316.html?mod=tff_article
Iran War Preps March On
Whatever "preparation of the intelligence battlefield" may mean, this probably qualifies:
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/13814730.htm
Who says this administration doesn't learn from their mistakes?
If Iran Can't Crack Gasoline, Can It Smash the Atom?
Since the Neocons are well on their way to smashing our government's few functional intelligence agencies in their haste to force a military "solution" to the Iran "nuclear crisis," it may be time to pose the question:
Does Iran have the capability to build an atomic weapon? Intention is one thing, but "if wishes were horses, beggers would ride."
Yet Iran, a major oil producer, is evidently nowhere close to self-sufficiency even in oil refining. A little blogging will turn up quite a bit on this point, but Iran depends quite heavily on imports for gasoline, among other products.
Thus the question poses itself: If Iran does not have the capacity to crack petroleum molecules in a reasonably efficient way, what are the chances it can develop in a finite time the very different technology to crack much smaller and trickier atoms into any form reasonably resembling a militarily useful weapon?
Now, if W. wants to impose "democracy" in Iran via bombs and heaps of corpses, that's another question; it's just that then it should be proposed in those terms, not bait-and-switch after.
Ditto for whether we should invade Iran because they have oil, and the price would be higher if it were taken off the market.
Of course neither of these strategies would strike most Americans as all that urgent.
"It was the US withdrawal of inspectors from Iran in 1998...". Iran should be: Iraq.
Yours is my speculation, too. Plame was also monitoring Turkey and Israel (from the CIA frontstore in Istanbul). So there may have been other motives than Iran to put an end to her activities.
I am as outraged as the next person by the apparent misconduct of the Bush Administration, but I feel strongly that we must be careful not to fall victim to the same "jump-conclusionitis" that seemingly affects Bush, Cheney et al.
The charge that Ahmad Chalabi a) was tipped off by neoconservatives about codes, and b) leaked said secrets to the Iranians is very serious indeed and I am appalled at how little coverage this story has received. Nevertheless, to my knowledge they are still allegations, ones that have been denied by both Chalabi and the Iranians as per the Guardian article for which you provide a link (thank you, by the way... very informative)
In that spirit, I believe the following statement, at least in the way it is stated, presupposes an unsubstantiated guilt:
We know that someone among the Neoconservatives also let Ahmad Chalabi know that the US had broken Iranian codes and could read that country's secret diplomatic correspondence. As anyone could have expected, Chalabi immediately told the Iranians about the US spying...
Indeed, as you state later on in your piece, "Still, it is just speculation... If the speculation were true, the scale of treason emanating from Rove and Cheney and his staff is scarcely imaginable."
With that I could not agree more. although, again, I beieve it is a jump to go straight from "neocons leaking" to involvement on the part of Cheney or Rove.
I, for one, hope it is not true, both that neocons leaked the information and that the Administration was involved in that leak, but would not be surprised if both were true.
Suffice it to say that, if true, talk of criminal charges for treason may turn the current mountain of impeachment chatter into a relative molehill.
I doubt Neocons tipped off Chalabi for the purpose of ruining or clouding US intelligence about Iranian nukes. More likely, Chalabi oiled his way into circles where US intelligence was discussed. Encryption is not his mathematical expertise, but he would have been able to ferret that the US had broken the Iranian codes.
If Chalabi did share the knowledge with Iran, it was at a time when his political capital was in sharp decline. It had become evident the US would not, as Perle originally proposed, install him as Iraqi president pro vitae. He also needed Iranian protection to offset political and legal attacks underway at the time. US Neocons could do nothing about this. Chalabi's revenge would have been to go public about all the shenanigans and hype about pre-war intelligence on Iraq.
Preservation of the secret about US knowledge of the Iranian codes may not have made the nuke intelligence much better. First, it's not the sort of information wired around. Second, it might not be actionable, omit key pieces of informatio, or it might be mixed with disinformation.
Intelligence has its limits. Allen Dulles did not predict Sputnik. India watched Pakistan for decades. Pakistan had openly vowed to get nukes, "even if we have to eat grass," in the words of Ali Bhutto. India had every reason to track the paths of Pak scientists and engineers everywhere. But India was unable to derail or pre-empt Pakistan's program.
Iran's main incentive to acquire a nuke weapon would be to serve as a doomsday defense against US actions to invade or destabilize the country. They see the delicate US treatment of N. Korea and know it has nothing to do with affection for its regime. If, you wonder, why would Iran want this weapon if it only assured massive retaliation, then ask why the US needs so many 1,000s of the dreadful things--which are useless to protect us against terrorists or oil cartels.
I've just discovered your site and this is excellent reportage; factual in its intended tone and plausible in its larger context. I have a very humble blog myself and as someone who writes columns, I'm always inspired by other's work (and yes I notate where inspiration derives). Keep up the great work and log on if you are compelled: http://onpoliticsandmedia.blogspot.com/
I think your speculation is a little over the top. I think you are under estimating the power of sheer stupidity and its attendant hubris. I firmly believe that bad things happen in the world more often as a result from individual acts of sheer stupidity or ignorance than complex conspiracies.
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