{"id":351438,"date":"2018-03-09T12:07:00","date_gmt":"2018-03-09T11:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/how-operation-merlin-poisoned-u-s-intelligence-on-iran\/"},"modified":"2018-03-09T12:07:00","modified_gmt":"2018-03-09T11:07:00","slug":"how-operation-merlin-poisoned-u-s-intelligence-on-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/how-operation-merlin-poisoned-u-s-intelligence-on-iran\/","title":{"rendered":"How \u201cOperation Merlin\u201d Poisoned U.S. Intelligence on Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p><em>The CIA\u2019s \u201cOperation Merlin,\u201d 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, reports Gareth Porter.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*****<\/p>\n<p>Jeffrey Sterling, the case officer for the CIA\u2019s covert \u201cOperation Merlin,\u201d who was convicted in May 2015 for allegedly revealing details of that operation to James Risen of the\u00a0<em>New York Times<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s 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\u2019s 2002 estimate on WMD in Iraq.<\/p>\n<p>The full story the interaction between the CIA&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/2018\/03\/how-operation-merlin-poisoned-u-s-intelligence-on-iran\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The CIA\u2019s \u201cOperation Merlin,\u201d 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, reports Gareth Porter. ***** Jeffrey Sterling, the case officer for the CIA\u2019s covert \u201cOperation Merlin,\u201d who was convicted [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2525,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-351438","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2525"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351438\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}