The CIA couldn't throw a beer party in a brewery...

LATimes:

In a clumsy effort to sabotage Iran's nuclear program, the CIA in 2004 intentionally handed Tehran some top-secret bomb designs laced with a hidden flaw that U.S. officials hoped would doom any weapon made from them, according to a new book about the U.S. intelligence agency.

But the Iranians were tipped to the scheme by the Russian defector hired by the CIA to deliver the plans and may have gleaned scientific information useful for designing a bomb, writes New York Times reporter James Risen in "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration."

And just to be fair (chortle!):

The CIA added its own criticism Tuesday, saying the book contains "serious inaccuracies."

And then:

David Albright, a former weapons inspector for the IAEA, agreed with the other expert that the plans could have shaved many years off Iran's nuclear effort.

"I wouldn't call it a colossal failure" by the CIA, said Albright, now president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. "But I don't quite understand the purpose of it, why you would want to hand something like this to the Iranians. It's unlikely to work."

According to the book, the CIA effort to sabotage Iran's nuclear effort came on the heels of another massive intelligence failure, in which a CIA officer mistakenly sent an Iranian agent a trove of information that could help identify nearly every one of the spy agency's undercover operatives in Iran.

The Iranian was a double agent who turned over the data to Iranian authorities. They used it to dismantle the CIA's spy network inside the country and arrest or possibly kill an unknown number of U.S. agents, the book says.

Lemme see if I get the gist of this. They gave Iran bomb plans, flawed ones to be sure, but bomb plans. They hired one of those oh-so-trustworthy Russians to deliver them who then snitched them off, and then they gave away the names of our agents to an Iranian double agent. That about cover it?

I think if Fixer had come up with a plot line like that, he would have thrown it out as being too unbelievably far fetched. If truth is stranger than fiction, I think the CIA is stranger than truth.

It seems the CIA's best qualities are stupidity and incompetence. Throw in a little high-level obsequiousness to Bush and Cheney and you've got a real witches' brew of national disaster.

I think it's high time to can Goss and upper management, and promote some mid-level guys who can kick some ass restructure the Agency just a little, you know, so it doesn't step on its dick all the time. Or disband it.

Update:

BuzzFlash has more on Mr. Risen's book.

Well, this is a book that is causing an enormous stir, even though the public and reviewers haven't even seen it yet. The right wing is already trashing it from here to eternity on the Internet -- and these bimbos haven't seen a copy, not a one! So you know it's hot.

It's a testament to how far the NYT has sunk that it was forced to pop a story about criminal behavior in the White House because a book by one of its own reporters was going to beat it to the punch. That's pathetic.

I betcha it'll sell like hotcakes.