CIA fights claims of missing danger signs on Tehran

Financial Times:

Two new books in the US, Countdown to Terror and Countdown to Crisis, accuse an incompetent Central Intelligence Agency of failing to recognise the potentially catastrophic threat posed by Iran through its allegedly intimate ties with the fugitive Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. READ MORE

Serialised in the conservative media and popularised on talk shows, the books have arrived in the midst of a rightwing campaign to demonise Iran and expose the CIA at the same time as the Bush administration is exploring ways of funding and backing Iranian opposition groups.

In Countdown to Terror, Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican congressman and vice-chairman of the House armed services committee, charges that Iran will carry out the next terror strike on the US, has a bomb that can kill more than 100,000 people and is giving refuge to Mr bin Laden.

Mr Weldon's information comes from “Ali”, said to be a former senior official during the monarchy whom he first met in Paris in April last year. The congressman says he was driven to write his book after the CIA dismissed Ali as a fraud even though, Mr Weldon claims, many of his predictions came true.

Mr Weldon's secondary target is George Tenet, the former CIA boss, and what he calls the old intelligence community elite. Mr Weldon accuses this elite of waging a propaganda war against George W. Bush in the run-up to last year's presidential election. Mr Weldon strongly defends his old friend Porter Goss, who replaced Mr Tenet last year, and his efforts to purge the agency. He concludes that the US would be justified in launching a pre-emptive war against Iran. But since that is not feasible, Mr Weldon argues that the US should give financial support to Iranian groups preparing for “regime change”.

The ferocity of Mr Weldon's accusations have driven Bill Murray, the former CIA station chief in Paris, to go public with his side of the story that Ali was a fraudster well known to the agency.

The CIA has responded by declassifying a letter to Mr Weldon, in which it says Ali was a fabricator who embellished press reports. “He has provided no information to date worthy of follow-up,” it said, adding that it spent hundreds of hours evaluating his claims.

Mr Murray told the Financial Times that he had informed Mr Weldon that Mr Ali was a known fabricator who wanted money. He said Ali was “totally dependent” on Manouchehr Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer discredited by the CIA for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s.

James Woolsey, a friend of Mr Weldon and former CIA director, praises the book as “a case study of an intelligence failure in the process of happening, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the US”.

Mr Goss has not commented on it in public.

The CIA has not commented either on Countdown To Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown With Iran, by Kenneth Timmerman, a journalist and author with close ties to exiled Iranian opposition groups. A CIA spokesman said they were too busy to read it.

Mr Timmerman, quoting alleged high-level defectors from Iranian intelligence, says Iran plotted the September 11 2001 attacks on the US together with al-Qaeda.