In his last year of office, President Clinton approved of an unusual scheme to transfer classified data that likely helped Iran advance its nuclear weapons program, according to New York Times reporter James Risen in his new book "State of War."
Risen says the CIA used a double-agent Russian scientist to hand over a blueprint for a nuclear bomb to Iran.
The White House plan actually was to derail the Iranian program by passing on fatal flaws, says Risen, but the deliberate errors were so rudimentary they would have been easily fixed by Russian nuclear scientists, reported the online Post Chronicle, which said the story was recounted last night by radio host and former Justice official Mark Levin.
The Clinton operation, in early 2000, was code named Operation Merlin and "may have been one of the most reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA," Risen writes.
A defector from Russia was to offer Tehran the blueprint for a "firing set," the sophisticated mechanism that triggers a nuclear explosion.
CIA officers told the Russian the Iranians already had that technology and the scheme was to find out the full extent of Tehran's nuclear capability.
But the Russian inserted a note in the package indicating he could help fix the flaws if he were paid the right price.
1 comment:
The more you hear about what the Clinton Administration did in regards to National Security, the more you realize why we are in the prediciments that exist today. Clinton was an absolute failure on foreign policy issues and national security.
If Bush had done this and it failed he would be labled incompetent.
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