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U.S. blunder aided Iran's atomic aims, says book

Julian Borger

Washington: The CIA may have helped Iran to design a nuclear bomb through a botched attempt to channel flawed blueprints to Teheran's weapon designers, according to a new book on the U.S. ``war on terror''.

In an excerpt from State of War, printed on Thursday in the London-based Guardian newspaper, the author and New York Times intelligence correspondent, James Risen, writes that the abortive operation misfired when a Russian defector on the CIA payroll, chosen to deliver the deliberately flawed nuclear warhead blueprints to Iranian officials in February 2000, tipped them off about the defects.

The operation, codenamed Merlin and approved by the Clinton administration, was intended to send Iranian scientists down a technological dead end, according to this account. They would spend years building a warhead which would fail to detonate.

Important information

Instead, Mr. Risen writes, the operation may have helped Iran to ``accelerate its weapons development'' by extracting important information from the blueprints and ignoring the flaws.

Asked for comment on Wednesday, a U.S. intelligence official said the account was ``inaccurate'', but gave no more details.

The CIA's public affairs director, Jennifer Millerwise Dyke, issued a written statement saying, ``every chapter of State of War contains serious inaccuracies ... The author's reliance on anonymous sources begs the reader to trust that these are knowledgeable people.

As this book demonstrates, anonymous sources are often unreliable''. The statement added that the operational details revealed in the book showed ``an unfathomable and sad disregard for U.S. national security''.

A former CIA official said there had been other attempts to set back Iran's suspected nuclear weapons programme. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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