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# Posted 11:05 AM by Patrick Belton

SOMETHING NOT QUITE ADDING UP HERE: I don't really feel any particular need either to defend or to villify Ahmad Chalabi here, but there's one bit to the story as it now stands that I don't quite understand.

So as CNN and other news outlets are now reporting, Chalabi becomes aware that the United States has cracked the codes by which Iran encrypts its secret transmissions. Chalabi gives this information to the Iranian intelligence chief in Baghdad, who relays it to Tehran - but using one of the codes which he'd just become aware that the Americans had cracked. The Americans, reading this transmission (as they had cracked the Iranian codes - see previous sentence), then become aware that Chalabi had passed this information on to the Iranian intelligence station in Baghdad.

This doesn't quite seem to add up - which doesn't mean that Chalabi didn't betray us, is indeed our friend, or is even a nice guy - but why wouldn't the Iranians, who are apparently good at this game, relay the information to Tehran via a courier, instead of using a compromised channel? It seems they'd only act they way they did if: (1) their station chief in Baghdad was phenomenally stupid (which is, I suppose, always a possibility), or (2) if they had a grievance against Chalabi, and/or (3) believed that souring his relations with Washington was more in their nation's interests than, say, using the cracked code to send misleading information to the Americans. I suppose there's also one remaining possibility, (4) that they assumed in error that they had a safe code they could rely upon - but such a calculation is bound to be risky, once you know that the Americans have broken at least some of your codes - and why risk losing a valuable means for misdirecting one of your major adversaries, when you could test the safety of your different channels by (as they indeed did) transmitting test messages to see whether the Americans would act in such a way to indicate they'd read them?

Again, this isn't to say that Chalabi is a nice guy, or that I'd want to open a joint banking account with him in Jordan - but I'll still be curious to see if some of these incongruencies become settled as the story unfolds.

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