I mentioned yesterday in a quick post an article about the liberal press leaking details of classified and covert activities to public and jeopardizing our efforts to stop the mad mullahs from obtaining nuclear weapons. Here is the key section again:

The Bush administration is prolonging the hunting season against journalists. The latest victim is James Risen, The New York Times reporter for national security and intelligence affairs. About three months ago, a federal grand jury issued a subpoena against him, ordering Risen to give evidence in court. A heavy blackout has been imposed on the affair, with the only hint being that it has to do with sensitive matters of “national security.”

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In the book, he discusses a number of ideas which he says were thought up jointly by CIA and Mossad operatives to sabotage Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

Apparently someone in the CIA who dealt with nuclear issues was talking to the media – just like Joe and Valerie Wilson did with the Plame Game on falsified documents (which turned out to be false lies from the Wilsons). And just like the FIS Court judge who did not agree with the use of NSA leads as part of the evidence (cannot be the only evidence) for considering probable to gain a warrant from the Court, and who ran to the media to expose the process and lie about it (recall he resigned because the court had been ‘tainted’ with NSA leads), someone is leaking to Risen because they don’t like the policy. They are committing a form of stealth mutiny because so they can stop the lawful orders of this President.

So while that is part of the story, I missed pointing out the other big part of this story which repeats the claim that Bill Clinton’s administration gave workable designs of nuclear triggers to the Iranians, enabling them to tackle the hardest challenge of making a nuclear bomb:

Another of the book’s important revelations, which made the administration’s blood boil about James Risen, appeared in a chapter describing what was known as Operation Merlin, the code name for another CIA operation supposed to penetrate the heart of Iran’s nuclear activity, collect information about it and eventually disrupt it.

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The CIA counter proliferation department hired a Soviet nuclear engineer who had previously, in the 1990s, defected to the United States and revealed secrets from the Soviet Union’s nuclear program. His speciality was in the field of what is called weaponization, the final stage of assembling a nuclear bomb.

The scientist was equipped with blueprints for assembling a nuclear bomb in which, without his knowledge, false drawings and information blueprints were planted about a nuclear warhead that was supposedly manufactured in the Soviet Union. The plan’s details had been fabricated by CIA experts, and so while they appeared authentic, they had no engineering or technological value.

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However, Operation Merlin, which was so creative and original, failed because of CIA bungled planning. The false information inserted into the blueprints were too obvious and too easily detected and the Russian engineer discovered them. As planned, he made contact with the Iranian delegation to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and handed over to them, also as planned, the blueprints.

But contrary to the CIA’s intention, he added a letter to the blueprints in which he pointed out the mistakes.

I first posted on this matter back in April 2006, and I have often noted it is probably one reason Iran does not need a large nuclear weapon design program since much of the hard work was bungled over to Iran by the Clinton administration. One option in the Syria-Iran axis of evil is Iran will process the uranium and Syria will assemble the warheads.

But moreover it shows how the Clintons bungled more than their private lives. It shows how their poor judgement, along with the career dead wood at the CIA who have clearly lost the touch, basically armed one of the most dangerous countries on the planet with the know-how to build the most dangerous weapon in history. Wonder how that will play out in this year’s election?