Plame, Chalabi and Iran

With all of the talk about Dick Cheney's shooting spree this important post from Juan Cole seems to have fallen through the cracks. Valerie Plame and her team at the CIA that were outed by the Bush administration were working on Iran's attempts to develop a nuclear weapon.

Valerie Plame Wilson and her team at the CIA were working on Iran counter-prolifetation efforts, according to Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story. It has been known for some time that she was involved in anti-proliferation activities, but that her main concern was Iran is new.

Plame Wilson was outed to the US press by Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney, his staffer Irving Lewis Libby, and George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove.

There has for some time been speculation among bloggers that Cheney et al. wanted to shoot down :-) Plame Wilson for reasons other than that she is the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, who blew the whistle on intelligence failures concerning alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

If she was working specifically on Iran, this theory becomes more plausible. We know that Cheney, the Neocons and other factions in the Bush administration desperately wanted to get up a war against Iran so as to overthrow its government.

And then there is the neocons favorite double agent, Ahmad Chalabi.

We know that someone among the Neoconservatives also let Ahmad Chalabi know that the US had broken Iranian codes and could read that country's secret diplomatic correspondence. As anyone could have expected, Chalabi immediately told the Iranians about the US spying. The Iranians will have immediately changed their codes.

Note: The crime here was letting the Iranians know we could listen in on them at will. As a third world country, Iran was presumably using fairly primitive encryption then, which our NSA had broken. Once the Iranians were tipped by Chalabi that we were listening, it would have been easy for them either to feed us some disinformation or to just close us out all together.

So while Cheney and the administration were still tinkering with Iraqi intelligence they were already looking ahead to Iran and actually interfering with intelligence collection on Iran that might not go their way. These people are the ultimate evil.