Ahmad Chalabi died earlier today. Here’s my favorite story about this con man who helped talk a weak and stupid political establishment into a disastrous war, from 2004.
Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader and former ally of the Bush administration, disclosed to an Iranian official that the United States had broken the secret communications code of Iran’s intelligence service, betraying one of Washington’s most valuable sources of information about Iran, according to United States intelligence officials.
His ol’ buddy Hitch, another person I’m not sorry is feet under, had his own version of the story:
Hitchens then turned the subject back to Chalabi, his good friend. I asked him if he thought Chalabi had been passing American intelligence to the Iranians. “No,” he insisted. “It’s possible that with his training, you know, at [The University of] Chicago that with his own ability he was able to crack the codes. He is a mathematical genius. His expertise is cryptology. It is possible that he broke the codes himself.”
I’m not a professional cryptographer, but many of my friends are, and I can tell you that Chalabi would probably have a better chance of putting together his own H-bomb than of breaking these codes himself in his spare time. This commenter on Michael Totten’s blog (of all places) may have put it best:
To anyone with just a little technical knowledge, the idea that someone with could break strong cryptography, or was a genius no less because they published a couple of abstract algebra papers, is really out-loud laughable.