As Newsday reports,
The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources.
“Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein,” said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency’s conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.
When the history books are written, this may well turn out to be one of the greatest deceptions of all time. How ironic that they chose this moment to release the film Troy, which centres around one of the Barbara Tuchman’s quintessential follies. More from Newsday:
Patrick Lang, former director of the intelligence agency’s Middle East branch, said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence community that Chalabi’s U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. “They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to,” he said.
He described it as “one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history.”
“I’m a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work,” he said.
Your tax dollars at work, funding an Iranian disinformation and agit-prop campaign, manipulating a U.S. president into finishing up the Iran-Iraq war. (Didn’t we used to be on the other side of that one – supplying Saddam with intelligence and WMD materials?) This has been a bit like those incidents in Afghanistan where one tribal warlord would tell the US that his rival was “Taliban”, calling down an air strike in furtherance of his vendetta. Instead of calling in an AC-130 gunship, Iran was able to “call in” the entire Imperial might of the U.S. military. Just amazing. When the smoke clears, and the U.S. has been forced out of Iraq, will we find that Iran has won?