http://newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/1/7/120534.shtml
With Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff
For the story behind the story...
Saturday, Jan. 7, 2006 12:03 p.m. EST
Clinton Scheme Gave Iran Nuke Blueprints
In a hairbrained scheme that was personally approved by then-President Clinton, the CIA deliberately gave Iranian physicists blueprints for part of a nuclear bomb that likely helped Tehran advance its nuclear weapons development program.
The allegation, detailed in the new book "State of War," by New York Times reporter James Risen, comes as the Iranian nuclear crisis appears to be coming to a head, with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad urging that Israel be "wiped off the map" and his government announcing last week that it will resume uranium enrichment on Monday.
Reports Risen: "It's not clear who originally came up with the idea, but the plan [to give Tehran nuclear blueprints] was first approved by Clinton."
Beginning in February 2000, the CIA recruited a Russian scientist who had defected to the US years earlier. His mission: Take the nuclear blueprints to Vienna to sell them - or simply give them - to the Iranian representatives for the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Dubbed "Operation Merlin," the plan was supposed to steer Iranian physicists off track by incorporating design flaws in the blueprints that would render the information worthless.
But in what may turn out to be one of the greatest foreign policy blunders of all time, Operation Merlin backfired when the Russian scientist spotted the design flaws immediately - and even offered to help Iran fix the problems.
Risen said the Clinton-approved plan ended up handing Tehran "one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world, providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers such as the United States and Russia from rogue countries such as Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short."
He noted that thanks to the bizarre operation, Iran could now "leapfrog one of the last remaining engineering hurdles blocking its path to a nuclear weapon."
Ironically, Risen's New York Times has declined to cover Mr. Clinton's Iranian nuclear debacle - concentrating instead on his book's dubious claims that the National Security Agency was first authorized to commence domestic wiretapping by President Bush.
Still, with Operation Merlin going so badly off track, "State of War's" revelations certainly warrant the kind of full blown congressional investigation now planned for the wiretap pseudo-scandal.
Risen's report could also have a serious implications for Sen. Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. Mrs. Clinton has been sharply critical of President Bush's handling of the Iranian nuclear crisis, complaining that a nuclear-armed Tehran would be a much more serious threat to the U.S. than Iraq.
FYI
Merlin is a bird.
Remember all the birds in the Jihadi messages?
Yes, I remember seeing this when it came out last April, but of course it was not covered in front page headlines by the NY Times (or any of the MSM so far as I know).
Gee, do you think the NY Times was saving this explosive info for their October surprise to sink the Demagogues???? Of course not, only Republicans win the highly selective, deeply biased, thoroughly depraved concern of the NY Slimes editors when it comes to national security issues.
Well that's kind of weird because the part of the Operation Merlin story often missed in all this is the part where Risen reveals that the NSA was eavesdropping on the telephone lines of the Iranian mission in Vienna and that it had broken the codes of Iran's intelligence agency and so was able to determine when they blueprints were handed over. Why is this a big deal? Well, it's because as soon as Risen's story came out you can bet the Iranians reworked their codes. And they did it at precisely the time we needed to be monitoring their progress in their nuclear program - we needed that sort of backdoor access into what the Iranians were talking about in their coded transmissions. But it was shut down and who knows how long it would take to break their new codes? Meanwhile their program could proceed in silence.