I was going to mention that it is foolish to look back in history at a bit of information and yell "aha! we had the information all along!" Intelligence doesn't work that way. At the time, reports from scientists inside Iraq where they were subject to every depravity that Saddam's lads could conceive were not credible in the face of information from the UN and every major intelligence agency in the world that Saddam had some type of nuclear program in place.
But then this leaped out at me:
In another chapter on a "rogue operation," the book said a CIA officer mistakenly sent one of its Iranian agents information that could be used to identify virtually every spy the agency had in Iran. The book said the Iranian was a double agent who turned over the data to Iranian security officials.
The book said the information severely damaged the CIA's Iranian network, and quoted CIA sources as saying several of the U.S. agents were arrested and jailed.
Excuse me? Shouldn't this afterthought be the lead? That our network of agents in Iran was compromised by a CIA blunder? That given the impossibility of invading Iran (even if we were not fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan we'd have too few troops to occupy a country this size), our network to organize a coup or revolution was wrecked? Could this not explain some of our dithering over strategy to keep Iran from going nuclear?
I know the press wants to bolster the long-discredited "Bush lied us into war" story, but isn't this angle just a little bit more important than a non-story from more than three years ago about a threat we've eliminated? Isn't the status of our ability to deal with a pre-nuclear certifiably crazy Iranian regime more important now?
And isn't it just a little amazing that the CIA could screw this up this badly? What did Langley do? Mail the guy the CIA directory? Send Joe Wilson to sip tea with the agent? Arrange for a Vanity Fair photo shoot of the guys?
I sure hope the Army has its own network built in Iran. Once again, we see that the modern CIA is more capable of hurting our president than our enemies.
