TYB
OPS still underway…
How ‘Operation Merlin’ Poisoned U.S. Intelligence on Iran
Gareth Porter: The CIA’s “Operation Merlin,” which involved providing Iran with a flawed design for a nuclear weapon and resulted in an alleged whistleblower going to prison, was the perfect example of creating intelligence in order to justify operations.
GARETH PORTERMAR 4, 2018
Jeffrey Sterling, the case officer for the CIA’s covert “Operation Merlin,” who was convicted in May 2015 for allegedly revealing details of that operation to James Risen of the New York Times, was released from prison in January after serving more than two years of a 42-month sentence. He had been tried and convicted on the premise that the revelation of the operation had harmed U.S. security.
The entire case against him assumed a solid intelligence case that Iran had indeed been working on a nuclear weapon that justified that covert operation.
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But the accumulate evidence shows that the intelligence not only did not support the need for Operation Merlin, but that the existence of the CIA’s planned covert operation itself had a profound distorting impact on intelligence assessment of the issue. The very first U.S. national intelligence estimate on the subject in 2001 that Iran had a nuclear weapons program was the result of a heavy-handed intervention by Deputy Director for Operations James L. Pavitt that was arguably more serious than the efforts by Vice-President Dick Cheney to influence the CIA’s 2002 estimate on WMD in Iraq.
The full story the interaction between the CIA operation and intelligence analysis, shows, moreover, that Pavitt had previously fabricated an alarmist intelligence analysis for the Clinton White House on Iran’s nuclear program in late 1999 in order to get Clinton’s approval for Operation Merlin.
Pavitt Plans Operation Merlin
The story of Operation Merlin and the suppression of crucial intelligence on Iran’s nuclear intentions cannot be understood apart from the close friendship between T Pavitt and CIA Director George Tenet. Pavitt’s rise in the Operations Directorate had been so closely linked to his friendship with Tenet that the day after Tenet announced his retirement from the CIA on June 3, 2004, Pavitt announced his own retirement.
Soon after he was assigned to the CIA’s Non-Proliferation Center (NPC) in 1993 Pavitt got the idea of creating a new component within the Directorate of Operations to work solely on proliferation, as former CIA officials recounted for Valerie Plame Wilson’s memoir, Fair Game. Pavitt proposed that the new proliferation division would have the authority not only to collect intelligence but also to carry out covert operations related to proliferation, using its own clandestine case officers working under non-official cover.
The CIA’s “Operation Merlin,” which involved providing Iran with a flawed design for a nuclear weapon and resulted in an alleged whistleblower going to prison, was the perfect example of creating intelligence in order to justify operations.
Immediately after Tenet was named Deputy Director of the CIA in 1995, Pavitt got the new organization within the operations directorate called the Counter-Proliferation Division, or CPD. Pavitt immediately began the planning for a major operation targeting Iran. According to a CIA cable declassified for the Sterling trial, as early as March 1996 CPD’s “Office of Special Projects” had already devised a scheme to convey to the Iranians a copy of the Russian TBA-486 “fireset” – a system for multiple simultaneous high explosive detonations to set off a nuclear explosion. The trick was that it had built-in flaws that would make it unworkable.
A January 1997 declassified cable described a plan for using a Russian émigré’ former Soviet nuclear weapons engineer recruited in 1996 to gain “operational access” to an Iranian “target.” The cable suggested that it would be for the purpose of intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program, in the light of the fact that the agency had not issued a finding that Iran was working on nuclear weapons.
But in mid-March 1997 the language used by CPD to describe its proposed covert operation suddenly changed. Another declassified CPD cable from May 1997 said the ultimate goal was “to plant this substantial piece of deception information on the Iranian nuclear weapons program.” That shift in language apparently reflected Tenet’s realization that the CIA would need justify the proposed covert operation to the White House, as required by legislation.
https://www.laprogressive.com/war-and-peace/operation-merlin
HMMM, court filing missing from document. Any anon got the details?
https://www.expose-the-war-profiteers.org/archive/legal/2005/20051115.pdf
FF UK incoming?
Job offer?
Anon is too busy with life to sell soul.
Foundations are being exposed, anon assumes. Anon has been waiting for this.
God speed… let anon know which head is about to roll…
EXCLUSIVE: FOIA Documents Reveal Secret 2020 Election Day Meeting With CISA, Dominion, ES&S, ERIC, FBI, Leftist Organizations, State Officials, and Others – Only Recently Discovered
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/02/exclusive-foia-documents-reveal-secret-2020-election-day/
Recently, investigative journalist Yehuda Miller received several FOIA documents that completely reshaped what we were told to believe about the 2020 US presidential election.
We will be publishing several of these explosive documents in the coming days.
The election was billed by the Democrat Party, Joe Biden, the mainstream media, and former CISA Chief Chris Krebs as the most secure election in US history.
In the coming days, Yehuda Miller and The Gateway Pundit will release a series of FOIA documents that prove that the statements by Chris Krebs under oath were most certainly false and that he clearly knew these statements were not accurate.
Today, we are releasing information on a secret 2020 Election Day phone call organized by The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
CISA describes itself as the operational lead for federal cybersecurity and the national coordinator for critical infrastructure security and resilience. However, since its founding, CISA has morphed into a much more sinister and politicized organization.
Founded in 2018, CISA was originally intended to be an ancillary agency designed to protect “critical infrastructure” and guard against cybersecurity threats. In the years since its creation, however, CISA metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/wp-content/plugins/pdfjs-viewer-shortcode/pdfjs/web/viewer.php?file=https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CISA-ELECTION-CALL-.pdf&attachment_id=1098501&dButton=true&pButton=true&oButton=false&sButton=true#zoom=auto&pagemode=none&_wpnonce=aa8b0bd5e5
There are mercenaries travelling to Ukraine for promise of big dollars.
Anon met a guy a few weeks ago, who went there to fight. Anon asked mercenary, why he's doing it. He just wanted to war, and the money was part of it, but more than anything else, he just wanted to go to war, fight, kill…
Anon suspects this is a worldwide cleansing of the violent. Putin is tasked with the clean up.
IN 5, 4, 3, 2…
Yep, so far he's just as impeached as trump ever was.
3rd vote underway, FFS, then it has to pass the senate. We will see.
Looks like Joe's social media dude is certain Joe will win by cheating again.
Shadow of Ezra
@ShadowofEzra
Former U.S. Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo danced in celebration with Israeli soldiers near the Gaza border today.
Pompeo has claimed that the Rothschild State of Israel has biblical claim to Palestine and is ‘not an occupying nation’
This is the man who wanted to assassinate Julian Assange.
This man supports funding for both Ukraine and Israel.
This man will not be in Trump's next cabinet.
https://twitter.com/ShadowofEzra/status/1757540888354390281
They were already on the inside. Just out of view. Trump let you see who they are. Just examples, many more, but exposure gets the public optics ball rolling.
It's not their fault nobody wants them… or is it?
Regardless, they think Jerusalem is most important, but they don't realize the New Jerusalem is not a place, but a time.
That's right, shills have been done for a long time. It's just a slow painful roll to the end from here boys.
Better start getting your affairs in order… or, you can flip and tell us everything you know.
Don't say you never had a choice.
Oh come on, where's your sense of adventure anon.
We make it look like you can win, then we pull the rug. Sike, you get excited, then you fall to the endless abyss.
What could be more fun than that?
Then put the ball down and don't play.
In fact everyone should. Stop paying taxes and defund the fuckers who fuck us.