CIA Gave Iran Bomb Plans, Book Says

By Josh Meyer
The Los Angeles Times
Wednesday 04 January 2006

The nuclear designs were intentionally flawed, but Tehran was tipped off and could have made use of them, the writer contends.

Washington - In a clumsy effort to sabotage Iran's nuclear program, the CIA in 2004 intentionally handed Tehran some top-secret bomb designs laced with a hidden flaw that U.S. officials hoped would doom any weapon made from them, according to a new book about the U.S. intelligence agency.

But the Iranians were tipped to the scheme by the Russian defector hired by the CIA to deliver the plans and may have gleaned scientific information useful for designing a bomb, writes New York Times reporter James Risen in "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration."

The clandestine CIA effort was just one of many alleged intelligence failures during the Bush administration, according to the book.

Risen also cites intelligence gaffes that fueled the Bush administration's case for war against Saddam Hussein, spawned a culture of torture throughout the U.S. military and encouraged the rise of heroin cultivation and trafficking in postwar Afghanistan.

Even before the book's release Tuesday, its main revelation - that President Bush authorized a secret effort by another intelligence outfit, the National Security Agency, to eavesdrop on unsuspecting Americans without court-approved warrants - had created a storm of controversy when it was reported last month in the New York Times in an article coauthored by Risen.

In the book, Risen says he based his accounts on interviews with dozens of intelligence officials who, while unnamed, had proved reliable in the past.

Bush has confirmed the existence of the program, but condemned the newspaper for the December report and for its use of confidential sources.

The CIA added its own criticism Tuesday, saying the book contains "serious inaccuracies."

full story at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-intel4jan04,1,4817832.story?coll=la-headlines-world&ctrack=1&cset=true
or
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010406K.shtml

ok so am i getting this right....
we give them plans for building a nuke but it has flaws in the design...
now we are going to attack them for building one...
does anyone see these actions kind of strange?
sort of like a set up... a planed action for the future...
"go seed this info... they will use it .. then we can use the WMD story again since it worked so well the last time."