Roger Simon - This is not a blog scoop...
... but it is interesting. Someone just emailed me anonymously an article from the Jerusalem Post from March 3, 2004. As most will recall, the nefarious Ahmad Chalabi stands accused of having "leaked" the information to the Iranians that their code had been broken by US intelligence. Now read this from early last March (I quote in entirety since the link to the JP archive is pay only at this point):
BYLINE: Yaakov Katz
A secret intelligence unit, known as Unit 8200, broke a sophisticated Iranian code enabling Israel to monitor communications, including contacts with Pakistan regarding the development of Iranian nuclear weapons, The New Yorker reported on Tuesday.
"On a trip to the Middle East last month, I was told that a number of years ago the Israeli signals-intelligence agency, known as Unit 8200, broke a sophisticated Iranian code and began monitoring communications that included talk between Iran and Pakistan about Iran's burgeoning nuclear weapons program," investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh wrote.
According to the report, Israeli intelligence has created strong ties in Iran over the year, some of which still exist. Hersh writes that the investigation by the International Atomic Energy Agency into Iranian nuclear capability was spurred by Israeli intelligence findings which were relayed to the agency via the National Council of Resistance of Iran.
According to the report, the findings, which showed that senior officials in Teheran and Islamabad had frequent conversations regarding the IAEA investigations, were also shared with US intelligence services. [bolds mine]
Well, fancy that... Seymour Hersh of all people. Could this be true? So I Googled it and there it was. Obviously, it wouldn't have taken Chalabi to tell the Iranians their codes were endangered. They could have read about in The New Yorker. Maybe they dropped their subscription. Well, it did get a tad duller under David Remnick and, yes, maybe it was a different code, but still... 'curiouser' and 'curiouser'.
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