Defining Deviousness Down

I have to wonder why Chalabi has yet to be decared an unlawful combatant and shipped to Gitmo… actually, no I don’t.

_American officials said that about six weeks ago, Mr. Chalabi told the Baghdad station chief of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security that the United States was reading the communications traffic of the Iranian spy service, one of the most sophisticated in the Middle East. According to American officials, the Iranian official in Baghdad, possibly not believing Mr. Chalabi’s account, sent a cable to Tehran detailing his conversation with Mr. Chalabi, using the broken code._

Maybe Mr-Iranian-official-in-Baghdad is being paid by the CIA already.
Maybe Mr-Iranian-official-in-Baghdad doesn’t exist.
Maybe the US can only work out the codes if the Iranians reset their codes, which they will now that this story has been released.
Maybe the Iranians set Chalabi up to prevent him becoming President of Iraq.
Maybe the US set Chalabi up by telling him of the reading of the communications traffic of the Iranian spy service.

Sounds like a job for James Bond, a beautiful Ukranian Spy and a rogue Angel in a variation of the three envelopes problem.

If by “high reputation,” you mean that they’re a group of uncommonly murderous thugs who nearly got themselves and a large number of their countrymen eradicated (Richard Clarke’s book details the apparently quite serious war-planning the U.S. was doing after the Khobar Towers bombing, and I hope you don’t really think the Libyans blew up that plane), then I’d have to, as a committed egaliatarian leftist thinker, agree with you.

Vide supra “nearly got themselves and countrymen eradicated…”

And here’s a question for committed leftist egalitarian intellectuals: would you have supported a U.S. invasion of Iran in 1996 or 1997?

I always find media stories about code-breaking pretty hard to take.

Anyone, including the world’s intelligence services, has access to ‘unbreakable’ codes in the form of public-key encryption.

Now it’s either true that public-key encryption (with keys of large enough length) is, to all practical intents and purposes, unbreakable in which case any intelligence agency NOT using a system of equal or better strength is grossly incompetent. OR, public-key encryption is not as safe as believed and it seems that is implausible given current state-of-the-art mathematics.

If it were true that the NSA was able to break public-key encrypted messages in a useful time frame I hardly think that is the sort of information they’d want to get out.

Matt McGrattan,

The Times story suggests that the keys were stolen not broken.

Just like the good old cold war days. The Iranians could be saying that they know that we know because they know that if we know, we will think that they know, but then they may not so we don’t really know, you know? Thank god we have Condi there to figure all this out, I knew those Politburo watching skills would be needed somewhere!

And of course, this is the spread of the ‘we aren’t as bad as Saddam’ meme. Hey, our spycraft isn’t as incompetent as the Iranians! Some other up and coming candidates.
-Hey, we have a better energy policy than Khazakistan!
-Hey, less problem with voter intimidation than Myanmar
-You may have us beat in missles, but we make more refrigerators (whoops, already used that)

Enigma. Ha. Well, I wish I could laugh.

Being credulous I’m commonly at a loss in those seemingly paradoxical moments when presented with the Theban or Cretan who always tells the lie and the Theban or Cretan who always tells the truth at some junction in the road, and then asked to form the proper question to elicit the desired direction from both of them at once.

All the spy game wrappings of enigma riddle mystery so familiar to the casual reader of genre fiction make me stumble back over the truth motive of Thebans or Cretans and whatever it was I was supposed to ask them all over again.

It is apparent now that the US unlocked Iranian diplomatic code and found a message there sent back from Baghdad to Tehran.

It’s not customary for such knowledge to become widely shared. Isn’t it best practice never to verify such truths at all, even when the facts in a particular case are rubbed in by all the usual media? As a general rule, a CIA spokesman, reached for comment, declines.

Of course it’s acknowledged that, being an agency of spies, the CIA must preserve a certain institutional level of enigma in its dealings, so the formality of the spokesman’s officially phrased silence on the matter is of no great moment.

Even Iran, linchpin of a famously imagined axis of evil, using all the faulty powers at its disposal to analyze the shape of the world, might come to suspect in time that the US, using the well-funded resources and technologies of the CIA for its own good reason, might move to intercept reserved Iranian communications. This is certainly not a bad guess, considering the tendency of any spy agency to be engaged in just such activities by charter.

Little help the Iranians will get from CIA spokesmen in seeking a definitive confirming answer to this question, although there are all the time-honored countervailing methodologies of double-dealing at their disposal to elicit a good guess.

One way, borrowed metaphorically from the ancient waterworks, is to introduce some stain or taint into the presumably closed container of the pipe, and look for its appearance outside. Thus, as a formality, an equivocal message might be sent from time to time by diplomats to see if the duplicity inserted into their reserved communications is reacted to by suspected eavesdroppers.

In the example, the CIA intercepts the Iranian message this message is being read by the CIA. This message may be what the Iranians know directly, or may cleverly represent what they hope to discover by its revealed reception.

The CIA in turn, presumed eavesdroppers on Iranian messages, is sufficiently advanced as an agency, from what little I can make of it in the conventions of genre fiction, to understand the uses of duplicity as well, and in a perfect world, has the acuity and staff necessary to recognize the possibly false knowledge contained in the communication for what it is. As a matter of routine the agency may go so far as to check out such a message in some detail before recommending any action that may substantiate the (perhaps only cleverly proposed) truth of it.

The message at hand refers to a drunken American, surely a likely enough detail from the soured perspective of Iranians, and a nicely verifiable fact from the perspective of the CIA, who using the usual procedures might be expected to rule out the vast majority of drunken Americans from their investigation and focus on the relatively few of them remaining who may have spoken far too freely to the controversial scoundrel Ahmed Chalabi. Of course, even then, considering the squad of them Mr. Chalabi has had access to over time, it may prove difficult solve the mystery of the truth value of the message this message is being read by the CIA by pinning the revealed secret on the proper drunken one of them.

Often, in a bold stoke of overriding policy, the riddling out of such questions may prove irrelevant to the real world designs of the US, and a full examination of the issue put aside, as the recent matter of the famously inexistent WMD’s of Iraq so forcefully demonstrated, the truth value mooted in that case by a policy favoring the quick move for the jugular instead, whatever the evidence. Truth is never the sole arbiter of policy, whatever people may say.

So if policy dictates that Mr. Chalabi is seen off the stage at this particular juncture (Mr. Chalabi whose own antic uses of the truth value of messages has become such a byword recently) then no matter how protestingly he may rush back out to command his space there, it will be a necessary complement of policy to offer up to him progressively more convincing raiments announcing the completion of his role, much as James Brown might find himself bedecked by those conniving to see him off stage on a good night, and under the influential direction of those responsible for carrying out such policy, to usher him firmly and finally away.

As for the truth, well, whatever, as the Thebans or Cretans or even I (as a matter of policy credulous as ever) agree.

I think this must be a clue, although I’m still not sure how to interpret it: The two guys who were first quoted, by name, as supporting the idea that the INC was an Iranian front, and that the Iraq war was the fruit of Iranian disinformation, were retired intelligence officials Larry Johnson and Patrick Lang. They have also supported Oklahoma journalist Jayna Davis in her attempt to establish the proximity of a former Iraqi Republican Guardsman to Timothy McVeigh on the morning of the bombing. Their theory seems to be that there were Iraqis involved, but that the overall operation was directed from Iran.

• Lang vs Chalabi, Johnson vs Chalabi
• Lang versus the neocons (long, detailed, very interesting)
• Johnson on the ‘declining terrorist threat’
• Lang and Johnson in support of Jayna Davis
• The theory they have foisted upon Davis: “an Iraqi hit squad operating under state sponsorship by Iran and Syria”

Scott Martens, that’s an interesting theory that the message implicating Chalabi could have been Iranian disinformation. Mike Rappaport seems to have come to the same conclusion in the Update to his post.

I hope America’s spies know that internal Iranian messages they intercept may not mean what they seem to say. It would be patriotic for you to contact the NSA and run your disinformation theory past them before this gets out of hand.

I have my own theory — totally unproven — that not everyone in the US government is interested in giving the public the straight scoop on matters like this. That is, they might “spin” the story to achieve results they consider favorable, the truth be damned. Remember, you heard it here first!

Whoops, Tenet just resigned. I’d like to see the silver lining in that too?