In the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan Administration, Iranian theocratic hardliners conned the American government into selling arms to Iran to use in their war against Iraq, who the US was backing, even giving satellite intelligence to Iraq.
Now this article reports that the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which Rummy and the Iraq hawks by-passed to promote their scam about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has concluded that the hardline tough guys in the Bush II Administration were conned by Iranian intelligence into taking out Iran's longtime foe, Saddam Hussein and his secular but Sunni-dominated regime.
Agency: Chalabi group was front for Iran Newsday 05/21/04
The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources.
"Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein," said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency's conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents. ...
Patrick Lang, former director of the intelligence agency's Middle East branch, said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence community that Chalabi's U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. "They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to," he said.
He described it as "one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history."
"I'm a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work," he said.
As I asked back in October, will the Iran-Contra crowd ever go away?
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