Hi. My name is Mike Rappaport, and I normally write for the Right Coast. My day job is being a Law Professor at the University of San Diego, where I write about and teach public law, especially structural issues concerning the Constitution. Over the years, though, I have taught and written on a variety of subjects. I want to thank Eugene and the rest of the Conspiracy for giving me the chance to guest-blog here.

In what is sure to be an important story, the New York Times reports that Ahmad Chalabi disclosed to Iran that the United States had broken the secret communications code of Iran's intelligence service. If it is true, there are many fascinating aspects to this story. One is that the US had Iran's secret code. Nonetheless, what is most striking from the Time's report is the apparent gross incompetence of the Iranian official who received the information from Chalabi:

American officials said that about six weeks ago, Mr. Chalabi told the Baghdad station chief of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security that the United States was reading the communications traffic of the Iranian spy service, one of the most sophisticated in the Middle East.

According to American officials, the Iranian official in Baghdad, possibly not believing Mr. Chalabi's account, sent a cable to Tehran detailing his conversation with Mr. Chalabi, using the broken code. That encrypted cable, intercepted and read by the United States, tipped off American officials to the fact that Mr. Chalabi had betrayed the code-breaking operation, the American officials said.

If the intelligence agencies of other countries are committing mistakes of this magnitude, then perhaps it becomes a little easier to forgive our own intelligence agencies for their mistakes. Perhaps. In any event, that the United States had Iran's secret code, at least for a while, gives me more confidence in our intelligence agencies than I have had for some time.

Update:

Several readers wrote in to say that one should not necessarily take the information in the Times story at face value, because there are many strategic reasons why the US and/or Iran might have taken these actions (or at least claimed to have taken them). Clayton Kramer also makes this point. I entirely agree, although once one attempts to look beyond the face value of the information in the story, the possibilities seem endless. Michael Ledeen offers some speculations of his own at NRO. Other readers wrote that the US has long excelled at signals intelligence. American skills in this area were certainly evident in the past, such as in World War II. It is good to know we're still good at it, although it is sad to find out this way. (Note: sorry not to supply the links to Kramer and NRO, but I am still figuring out how the Powerblog software works.)