{"id":439,"date":"2004-06-02T12:12:35","date_gmt":"2004-06-02T16:12:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/benadida\/2004\/06\/02\/if-you-know-that-i-know-that-chalabi"},"modified":"2004-06-02T12:12:35","modified_gmt":"2004-06-02T16:12:35","slug":"if-you-know-that-i-know-that-chalabi-knows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/2004\/06\/02\/if-you-know-that-i-know-that-chalabi-knows\/","title":{"rendered":"If you know that I know that Chalabi knows&#8230;."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a100'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>CNN <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2004\/US\/06\/02\/us.chalabi.ap\/index.html\">reports that<\/a> Ahmed Chalabi told the Iranians that the US had broken its codes. Read the article more carefully, and you get the feeling that either Iranian intelligence needs an upgrade, or CNN (well, Associated Press) does:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nChalabi told the Baghdad chief of the Iranian spy service that the United States was reading its communications and [&#8230;] the Iranian spy described the conversation in a message to Tehran, which was intercepted by U.S. intelligence.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As John Stewart would say &#8220;so the Iranian spy hears that the US broke his codes, and he immediately reports this news to headquarters&#8230; <b>using those codes!<\/b>&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nIranians in Tehran then sent a bogus message to Baghdad purportedly disclosing the location of an important weapons site, in an apparent attempt to test whether what they were hearing from Chalabi was true.<\/p>\n<p>The idea was that if the United States was able to intercept such transmissions, Americans would react by going to the weapons site. They intercepted the message [&#8230;] but did not take the bait by going to the weapons site.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Umm, so after using the codes to discuss how they suspected the codes were compromised, the Iranians try to bait the US to check if the codes were really compromised? But if the codes were compromised, the US would know that Iran knows, thanks to the Iranian spy&#8217;s first mistake. The US would know it&#8217;s a bait. And Iranian intelligence surely understands this.<\/p>\n<p>But of course, the real kicker is this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nChalabi reportedly told the Iranian he had gotten the information from an American who had been drunk.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Note to US intelligence: make sure your agents have some kind of alcohol tolerance before giving them security clearance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>CNN reports that Ahmed Chalabi told the Iranians that the US had broken its codes. Read the article more carefully, and you get the feeling that either Iranian intelligence needs an upgrade, or CNN (well, Associated Press) does: Chalabi told the Baghdad chief of the Iranian spy service that the United States was reading its [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[129],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security-crypto"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/93"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}