Scores are still being settled from the Iran Iraq War in the 1980s. It is no wonder. If anyone has any doubt about Iran’s ruthless use of all its human resources at the Mullahs’ disposal, let me describe for you what I witnessed on the marshes in the swamps along the Shatt Al Arab near Al Qurna, Iraq, in February 1984 when CNN sent me to cover the Iran Iraq War. As I approached the front on an old Soviet helicopter, I saw what I thought was a huge sandstorm. But, as I got closer, I realized I was witnessing a human wave attack from Iran. What unfolded was a huge and furious battle.

After transferring to another, smaller helicopter, used to find targets for Iraqi artillery, I got a closer view of how poison gas and every other lethal tool available to Saddam Hussein – all with American approval – were being employed. Hussein’s U.S.-provided arms supplier, Sarkis Soghanalian, had done his job well. As I landed in an abandoned schoolyard at the front a few miles from al-Qurna, where the Garden of Eden supposedly once existed, and crossed by flatboat in the canals Saddam’s army had dug to flood the marshes, I witnessed the endless line of corpses of very old men and adolescents, some children, in tattered Iranian uniforms. The Iranian Mullahs’ defense of the 1979 Revolution and Saddam’s invasion ended festering in Iraqi mud. A million people died in the Iran Iraq War. Almost no one in the United States paid any attention.

More than two decades and two Gulf Wars later, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel face the same Hobson’s choice ­– this time with an insular and defensive Iran. By removing Saddam Hussein, we created a more powerful and ambitious Iran. The 1979 Revolution has turned into a military dictatorship. Internal opposition and other pressures have forced the Mullahs to play the nuclear card to survive domestically. Last month’s International Atomic Energy Commission report on Iran’s nuclear weapons program has American and Israeli defense planners trying to figure out how the Iranian nuclear program can be stopped if Iran does not succumb to international pressure and continues to reprocess uranium until it reaches weapons-grade levels.

While the Obama administration prepares for a military conflict with Iran, it is important for us to understand some of the secret history between Iran and the United States that complicates the planning and unnecessarily puts our soldiers and sailors in harm’s way. What follows is one story about how that happened.

Iran has been preparing for an attack since 1988, after a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Vincennes, illegally operating inside Iran’s territorial waters, accidentally shot down Iran Air Flight 655. (See DCBureau’s 10-part series on the United States and Iran’s secret history) After the shoot down, the Iranian leadership began a weapons buying spree to counter the threat posed by the powerful American fleet in the Persian Gulf that threatened them and could attack at will.

Sometimes reporters end up in the middle of a story. That is what happened to me. I was in France in June 1997 to attend the Paris Air Show. One of my sources, arms dealer Sarkis Soghanalian, had shifted his operations to Paris after being sent to jail by the George H.W. Bush administration for doing the United States’ bidding in Iraq and serving as the Reagan administration’s arms dealer of choice to Saddam Hussein. He was released after helping the Clinton administration combat Hezbollah’s counterfeiting operations in Lebanon.

During my visit to Paris, a representative of the China Precision Machinery Import and Export Corporation (CPMEIC), the Chinese Army-owned company and the manufacturer of the C-802, an anti-ship missile, showed up at Soghanalian’s luxurious apartment at Rond-point. Soghanalian introduced me to M. Ping, the CPMEIC representative, who was, in fact, a Chinese intelligence official. Soghanalian told Ping that I was a Canadian who was repairing his assistant, Veronique Paquier’s, computer. As Veronique and I pretended to repair an antiquated electric typewriter, Ping ignored his host’s awkward lie and, instead, talked business with Soghanalian. I grabbed a nearby, small video camera and turned it on, hoping to capture Ping’s pitch to the arms dealer.

Ping enthusiastically described the new missiles he wanted Soghanalian to peddle. The missiles were cheap ($60,000) and so were the launch and support equipment. The missiles were as good as any in the U.S. arsenal and could be equipped with nuclear, chemical, biological or conventional warheads. Ping told Soghanalian that components for hundreds of the missiles had been shipped to Iran and, within weeks, would be operational against all shipping in the Gulf. The Chinese wanted Soghanalian to sell the systems throughout the world. (This meeting took place after China had promised the Clinton administration that it would cease construction of these systems.)

Understanding that these missiles represented a real threat to our own Navy—and seeing the potential for a great story—I quickly grabbed Ping’s files and missile brochures when Soghanalian and Ping left the apartment for lunch. I then urged Veronique to help me copy the material. Reluctantly, she agreed. While we were in a back office making copies, we heard the front door open down the hall. The arms dealer and Ping had returned because Soghanalian had forgotten his wallet. I quickly went to the kitchen and reached for a bottled water. I followed Soghanalian and Ping out, raced to my hotel the Mermoz, and called a U.S. weapons expert who was a longtime source. I asked him, “How many C-802s does the U.S. think Iran has?” The source called back a few minutes later with the answer: “Less than a dozen.” I told him that the Chinese had told Soghanalian, in my presence, that China had shipped key parts for just under 200 missiles. There was silence at the other end of the phone. My source asked: “Can you leave Paris for Washington?” I said that I had another few days of work.

Late that night I received a call from the front desk with a message to meet Veronique at a café around the corner from the Israeli Embassy in Paris. Over a drink, she handed me Ping’s file and said: “The French are involved in this missile deal. You need to be very careful. They are China’s hidden partner.”

My Pentagon weapons-expert source had suggested that I have no more conversations about this matter on French telephones. The source said the missiles represented a very serious situation that was “previously unknown to us.”

I did not open the envelope from Veronique until I was on the plane for Washington. It was the C-802 file and more. The file contained the information I needed to uncover a vortex of lies going back to the Reagan/Bush era.

In Washington, I set up a place for a secure meeting with my Pentagon source and began calling several longtime CIA sources. All the sources had spent years on Persian and Middle Eastern issues and were shaken by what I had learned. I asked one CIA official what the United States knew about the C-802. The answer was not reassuring: “The U.S. doesn’t have one. We don’t know how to defend [against] it.”

The next day, I had a meeting scheduled with Don Thasher, an ABC 20/20 producer, who had asked me for help with what I thought was an unrelated defense story. Over lunch Thrasher said he was working on a story about how secret Army computer research done on the Army Research Laboratory supercomputers ended up in the hands of Saddam Hussein to improve the accuracy and extend the range of his Scud missiles. Don wanted to know if I had a source who could talk about that. I said that Soghanalian might be able to help. I told him that, coincidentally, I had run into a more current and important story and laid out the details for him. Thrasher said, “Let’s leave for France and get Sarkis on camera.”

I returned to Paris, armed with details of everything the government then knew about the C-802, which was not much. Over the next five days, I would learn that in the early 1980s Sarkis had arranged for Iraq to use the U.S. Army’s supercomputers at Aberdeen, Maryland to redesign its Scud missiles. Sarkis had hired the renowned weapons designer Gerald Bull on behalf of Iraq. Bull, who had long before worked at the Army Research Laboratory prior to stints in prison, had close relations with the bureaucrats in charge of the laboratory. Coincidentally, Aberdeen had done the work on an early Israeli cruise missile called the Sampson. Information from that project, along with other sensitive material, was now in the hands of the Chinese and had gone into the improved C-802.

Soghanalian had fired Bull for not producing after Iraq had paid him millions of dollars. But after Sarkis broke with Saddam in 1988, the Iraqis brought Bull back. Bull worked on the infamous Iraqi “supergun” until he was murdered in Brussels in 1990. Soghanalian said that Bull was not killed by the Israelis, as many suspected, but by the Iraqis who realized Bull had swindled them.

Soghanalian told ABC that Bull had free access to the Army computer lab and had even placed visiting Chinese scientists in the secret laboratory over the years. During the week Thrasher and I spent with Soghanalian, the arms dealer met again with M. Ping. This time Ping had a new enticement for Soghanalian. Ping brought with him plans for a yacht that had been built for the president of China for the ceremony celebrating the handover of Hong Kong. It was bigger than Queen Elizabeth’s yacht, Britannia. Ping explained that the Chinese were offering the yacht to Soghanalian at a “special price” as an inducement to represent its new line of Chinese artillery and cruise missiles.

Veronique Pacquier, Soghanalian’s French intelligence-supplied assistant, was not getting along with the arms dealer. He ordered her not to speak to me or Thrasher any further. Two days before we were scheduled to fly back to the United States, she called me at the Mermoz for another late night meeting. We met at a café where she gave me a list of all the Chinese officials with whom the arms dealer had done business, including the woman who ran Chinese intelligence in Paris.

The Sunday before I was to fly home to Washington, Soghanalian asked me to stop by his apartment. When I arrived, I found the rotund arms dealer in a pensive mood. He wanted to talk on the noisy balcony, which had amazing views of Paris, obviously worried about electronic listening devices.

“This missile you expressed concern about is worse than you know,” Sarkis said. “The Chinese have put a greater range on it than they have claimed. They are getting over-horizon capability for the weapon. . . . I am in a bad position here. I have to do what I am doing. There are things I can’t tell you, but tell the Navy that I can still get them an 802 through Jordan. All I need is the cost. $60,000. They can take it apart, study it, and then I will deliver it to the king.”

I brought the offer back to my sources in Washington. They, in turn, took the offer to the Pentagon’s non-proliferation office. That office quickly went to the Office of Naval Intelligence but got no response. They then went to the Directorate of Operations at the CIA. The CIA said that because Soghanalian was a convicted felon, they did not want to deal with him. My source was puzzled when the CIA officer called him back a few days later and said that the CIA believed that Soghanalian was retired and living in Miami. Not surprisingly, their intelligence was neither up to date nor accurate.

Independently, I obtained documents from sources in and out of the United States that indicated that the DOD and CIA had little knowledge of the C-802’s design. With this information I began to put together a picture of what had happened.

Not long after the Vincennes incident in 1988, the Iranian Revolutionary Council turned to terrorism through Libya and Hezbollah for retaliation. Simultaneously, they began to explore ways to increase Iranian defenses against U.S. ships. The first efforts included increased purchases of advanced Chinese Silkworm missiles.

China proposed to Iran that they enter into a contract for a new defense, an anti-ship cruise missile. I was not surprised that China and Iran, both embargoed countries, would work together on such a project. But two components for the missile involved technologies beyond China’s capability. A more technologically advanced nation had to be recruited to obtain these crucial elements. That nation was France. Message traffic intercepted by the United States and Britain through the ECHELON eavesdropping system proved that China began working with France in the late 1980s to supply parts for Chinese weapons systems. Subsequently, French companies agreed to supply precision parts that China could not produce on its own. China also enjoyed a relationship with Israel that gave both countries great advantages in weapons development. After Beijing crushed the pro-democracy movement in 1989, the United States and Europe embargoed arms shipments and technology to China. France ignored the embargo. So did Israel.

Israel and Iraq had two things in common. Both had a close relationship with China and both had exclusive access to the U.S. Army Laboratory at Aderdeen, home to our main weapons supercomputers at the time. Because China was working closely with the Iraqis (and Gerald Bull who had close connections to the laboratory), technology from the lab got into the hands of the Chinese.

By 2001 the Chinese had stopped shipping C-802s to Iran, but Iran had, by then, reversed engineered the missile and was successfully building a much more advanced version than China had in its own arsenal. The anti-ship missile can travel about 60 kilometers, has over-the-horizon radar capability and can carry a conventional, nuclear or chemical warhead. The C-802 can accelerate from zero to mach one in seconds. What gives Navy defenders against the missile problems is that a few kilometers before it encounters the target, the C-802 descends from an altitude of between 75 to 100 feet down to wave top, about nine feet above sea level before it punctures the hull of a ship. It is that kind of maneuverability that makes the C-802 so difficult to defend against, according to Navy weapons experts.

I learned that the Iranians felt cheated by the Chinese on the C-802 deal and had hired a notorious Syrian arms dealer to represent them against the Chinese. I obtained the official CIA biography of the arms dealer Monzer al-Kassar, who had been brought into the deal before Soghanalian. French intelligence, distrustful of al-Kassar, instructed Soghanalian to work with the Chinese after their falling out with Iran.

On October 12, 2000, Soghanalian called from Jordon. The USS Cole had been attacked by terrorists in Yemen. Seventeen sailors had been killed, and the ship nearly sank. The Navy was providing no close-up pictures of the extensive 40-foot hole in the middle of the ship near the waterline. Mysteriously, a series of close-up Cole pictures came to me by e-mail. They were low resolution, but the damage was extensive. By the time I received the pictures and made them available to the media, the U.S. government had blamed Al Qaeda for the attack, saying they had used high explosives.

Navy sources said the explosive pattern looked like another kind of shaped explosive had caused the damage. I called Soghanalian and asked him to see what he could learn from his own sources in Yemen, where he had done many arms deals. I also asked him if he had supplied the mysterious pictures of the Cole. He said he had not.

A few days later Soghanalian called me back and said the Yemeni authorities said “the explosives used were a warhead from a C-802 missile.” The C-802 can be launched from patrol boats, trucks or helicopters. Soghanalian insisted the explosives the terrorists detonated against the hull of the USS Cole were not, as widely believed, some bundled plastic explosives but a C-802 warhead.

It seemed unlikely to me that Iran would sell such a valuable asset so easily traced back to them to Al Qaeda. Sarkis insisted the “Iranians are not that stupid and neither are the Chinese.” I asked him who had access to a C-802 warhead with ties to Al Qaeda. “The Israelis and French think it is Monzer.” Soghanalian said al-Kassar “has a history of selling to Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, especially in Latin America.” I called al-Kassar in Marbella, Spain, and asked him for an interview about his work on the C-802. He refused to talk to me and said, “I do not discuss customer business.” One of his best customers had close relations with Iran and Hezbollah.

Al- Kassar’s role may now be known to the U.S. government. He was arrested in Spain with his arms dealing partner during a Drug Enforcement Agency sting in 2008. He was extradited to the United States on the condition that he not be given a life sentence and on February 8, 2009, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison for selling missiles to FARC rebels in Colombia so they could shoot down U.S. helicopters.

In 2006, the U.S. Navy claimed it had a defense against the Iranian C-802 cruise missiles. But Iran, once again, put U.S. credibility to the test. During the war between Hezbollah and Israel, on July 14, 2006, Iranian-trained Hezbollah elite forces, operating with undercover Iranian commandos in Lebanon, fired two radar-guided C-802 missiles at the Israeli warship INS Hanit stationed 10 miles off the coast of Lebanon. The attack was timed to coincide with a speech being aired in the region by Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, who promised to deliver a series of “surprises” to Israel at the time the rocket was fired. In that missile attack, launched from Iranian-manned launchers smuggled into Beirut, four Israeli sailors died, and the Hanit suffered severe damage. The ship’s cruise missile detection system was not turned on. According to Israeli navy sources, these defensive systems are only turned on if the ship’s captain feels his ship is threatened by a cruise missile attack. If there is a small boat attack, that would be handled by the ship’s guns, a different system.

The Israeli military claimed that elite Iranian Revolutionary Guards assisted Hezbollah in launching the C-802 missiles. Nasrallah denied it. Iran insisted the Israeli claim was an attempt "to escape reality with the aim of covering up [Israel's] inability to confront the Lebanese nation and resistance." I have my own sources inside Hezbollah, and they say Nasrallah is dissembling and the C-802 units remained under the full control of Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who smuggled the launchers and missiles through Syria into Lebanon.

In 2006, the U.S. Navy claimed it had a defense against the Iranian C-802 cruise missiles. But Iran, once again, put U.S. credibility to the test. During the war between Hezbollah and Israel, on July 14, 2006, Iranian-trained Hezbollah elite forces, operating with undercover Iranian commandos in Lebanon, fired two radar-guided C-802 missiles at the Israeli warship INS Hanit stationed 10 miles off the coast of Lebanon. The attack was timed to coincide with a speech being aired in the region by Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, who promised to deliver a series of “surprises” to Israel at the time the rocket was fired. In that missile attack, launched from Iranian-manned launchers smuggled into Beirut, four Israeli sailors died, and the Hanit suffered severe damage. The ship’s cruise missile detection system was not turned on. According to Israeli navy sources, these defensive systems are only turned on if the ship’s captain feels his ship is threatened by a cruise missile attack. If there is a small boat attack, that would be handled by the ship’s guns, a different system.

The Israeli military claimed that elite Iranian Revolutionary Guards assisted Hezbollah in launching the C-802 missiles. Nasrallah denied it. Iran insisted the Israeli claim was an attempt "to escape reality with the aim of covering up [Israel's] inability to confront the Lebanese nation and resistance." I have my own sources inside Hezbollah, and they say Nasrallah is dissembling and the C-802 units remained under the full control of Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who smuggled the launchers and missiles through Syria into Lebanon.

Only one of the two C-802 missiles fired actually hit the Hanit. Still, the ship almost sank. Had the second missile hit, the Hanit would have sunk, according to Israeli and U.S. Navy authorities. If a defense had been developed by the U.S. Navy, it was one we had not shared with America’s closest ally in the region.

The latest chapter in Iran’s preparation for a U.S. attack emerged publicly last year when small Iranian fast boats swarmed three 5^th Fleet ships in the Persian Gulf on Sunday, January 6, 2009. Few realized that that incident had a historical lineage dating back decades. It reflects the Navy’s continuing problems with the CIA and a growing fear that Iran is testing U.S. Navy defenses.

Iran had no intention of attacking the three U.S. Navy ships. The Revolutionary Guard small boats were “trying to light us up and it worked,” a senior U.S. Navy weapons expert told me.

The Pentagon said that the USS Hopper, the USS Port Royal and the USS Ingraham were passing into the Persian Gulf through the Straits of Hormuz when five Iranian small boats approached them at high speed and swarmed them. The Iranian boats weaved in and out of the three ships and made "threatening" moves – in one case coming within 200 yards of one of the ships. The patrol craft appeared to be dumping boxes into the water at the same time the Navy recorded a threatening radio transmission. The Iranian government called the incident routine.

What 5^th Fleet commanders “had been fearing is that a faux terrorist attack might be used as a diversion to tie up our ships’ defenses while Iran covertly fired a fusillade of radar-guided cruise missiles into U.S. ships,” a Navy weapons expert said. The idea of Iran taking on the U.S Fleet might sound farfetched, but documents I obtained reveal Navy Intelligence has been warning about just such an attack since 1997.

According to these highly classified documents (some of them at the UMBRA classification level), Iran has had weaponry that could destroy U.S. ships since the mid-1990s, and the United States has done little to devise an effective defense against these highly accurate and relatively cheap cruise missiles.

According to secret National Security Agency intercepts, known as ECHELON, the military concluded in a highly classified Power Point presentation prepared by the Joint Staff in 1997 that a newly modified Iranian cruise missile based on a Chinese design gave Tehran “effective naval control of the Persian Gulf.”

Last year’s incident takes on additional significance because secret files of the Clinton and Bush administrations show that even though the U.S. government has known since 1997 that Iran had the ability to sink even the most sophisticated U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf, our government took little action to prevent it. More startling, the CIA turned down a chance to obtain one of the Iranian missiles so a defense could be developed. Instead, the CIA relied on a company called Vector Microwave to obtain the missile even though the CIA was aware that Vector Microwave executives were in business with the Chinese firm controlled by the Chinese Army, which built the airframe for the Chinese cruise missiles that ended up in Iranian hands.

In June 1997, I told U.S. government officials that the scale of Iran’s missile program was much larger than U.S. intelligence realized. The CIA told Navy non-proliferation officials that they did not follow up on the discovery because intelligence coming from a journalist was considered “witting.”

The real reason the CIA did not follow up to get a sample so the Navy could develop a C-802 defense was much more complicated and embarrassing. The CIA was in business with companies that were charging tens of millions of dollars to obtain copies of Chinese weapons, including the C-802. Vector Microwave Research Corporation, the spooky company that had been paid $9 million for an early precursor to the C-802, known as the C8XX series, was being run by a man who had actually gone into business with the China Precision Machinery Import and Export Corporation (CPMIEC), the company that built the C-802s.

A number of U.S. government agencies had concluded that elements of Vector Microwave may have actually provided secret technology to China to improve its systems. The offer from Soghanalian to supply a C-802 to the United States for $60,000 came in the middle of a Justice Department criminal investigation of Vector Microwave.

Government officials quickly dropped the case against Vector Microwave at the CIA’s request. Thomas Green, a lawyer for Vector Microwave’s founder, Donald Mayes, said “there were too many worms in the can” to continue prosecution. Government investigators became suspicious that Mayes had helped the Chinese perfect a Chinese version of the American Stinger shoulder-fired missile. The Agency was more concerned about losing Mayes as an intelligence asset and tipping off the Chinese than they were about the potential danger to our ships and sailors. As a result, the CIA told their cruise missile expert to let the Pentagon know that the Agency’s Directorate of Operations would not deal with a reporter who had an alternate source for procuring the missile. Unfortunately, Vector Microwave never got the CIA a copy of the missile, despite the fact that its top executive was in business with CPMIEC.

As the Israelis learned, no effective defense for the advanced C-802 has been developed despite U.S. Naval officials being warned about the missiles in a Joint Staff power point presentation in 1997.

Iran’s efforts in the 1990s to circumvent an arms embargo to purchase and improve missiles that could destroy U.S. ships reveal embarrassing gaps in U.S. intelligence. The CIA relied on less than honorable contractors to get samples of these weapons so they could develop a response to the new threats. Later, they were more interested in covering up their colossal bungling than making sure the Navy could defend its ships against Iranian threats. Feckless Clinton and Bush officials let China and France supply Iran key designs and components that originated in the United States.

The secret files obtained by DCBureau reveal that France, China and Israel supplied Iran the upgrades for the C-802. This was not an isolated incident of Tel Aviv helping Tehran. The Israelis brokered arms to Iran during the bloody Iran Iraq War in the 1980s. Israel has a long history of cooperating with China in arms deals. Unfortunately, the seeker head technology for the C-802 came from an earlier Israeli missile called the Sampson and was leaked to China from a top secret U.S. Army computer laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland. Unlike Israel’s earlier help to Iran, this technology transfer was from the United States to China, through representatives China actually had in the Army computer lab. The help from France came through the French company Labinal in the form of an improved turbo pump for the C-802 missile. The turbo pump, that was far superior to anything the Chinese had, was built for Iran by a Labinal subsidiary called Microturbo that operates in Texas.

The help from China and France came when Iran was under a UN arms embargo. Contained in the files of U.S. intelligence is an embarrassing trove of weak responses to our allies’ actions. The U.S. reaction was to issue what one former Clinton official described as “démarche-mallows” – timid complaints sent off to allies who broke the arms embargo to make money off of Iran.

Secret documents obtained by DCBureau show that, beginning in 1988, China, France and Israel engaged in secret arms sales to Iran that would, by 2006, fundamentally shift the balance of naval power in the Persian Gulf. The decision by Iran to procure missiles that could offset American naval power was detected by the National Security Agency. But the CIA dismissed the significance of the missile deals with North Korea and China and ignored them for years, despite having access to copies of contracts through NSA, that proved involvement in the deals.

More significantly, the CIA failed to detect that two U.S. allies, France and Israel, were working with the Chinese on an advanced anti-ship cruise missile being built for the Iranians. These events also show how poorly the CIA performed when it relied on allies that were transferring key technology to Iran at the same time their intelligence services were assuring the CIA that Iran was making little progress in its missile program.

According to these highly classified NSA documents, repeated opportunities to correct the intelligence failures were not undertaken by the CIA because officials did not want it to become known that their source for foreign advanced weapons procurement had become a fugitive and had gone into business with the Chinese-Army-operated company that made the new Iranian version of the missile’s airframe.

The consequences of this decade-long intelligence cover-up fell first, not on the United States, but on the Israeli ship that was attacked in 2006.

The Iranian government has had 15 years to perfect the C-802 and its follow on missiles. Ironically, in 1997 the US Joint Staff concluded the missile program provided “Iran effective control of the Persian Gulf.”

Officially, the Navy claims it has a defense against the Chinese-designed Iranian missile. Defense Department sources tell me that an integral part of planning naval operations is how to deal with a massive C-802 cruise missile attack against our fleet. “The reality is half a dozen of these missiles could take out a super carrier,” said one officer, deeply involved in current war planning.

Still wondering about the sailors killed on the USS Cole and who really was responsible, I pressed my sources in the Navy about what was learned from al-Kassar. While he would not admit that he provided the warhead to Hezbollah, he urged his debriefers to focus on the USS Cole as a target.

“Why was it picked?” my Navy source asked me.

The answer is obvious. The USS Cole is an Aegis cruiser, just like the USS Vincennes that had shot down Iran Air Flight 655. The Clinton administration was never convinced Al Qaeda had attacked the USS Cole; the same was true with the Bush administration prior to 9/11. “Had Hezbollah and not Osama bin Laden ordered the attack?” I asked my source. “It looks that way,” he said.

We may never know the real answers, but we do know this: Iran has C-802 missiles, and China is about to deploy its first anti-ship ballistic missile. With a range of around 900 miles, it can be fired from mobile, land-based launchers. It is designed specially as a countermeasure to U.S. carrier strike groups, especially U.S. Navy carriers assigned to defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack.

Decisions made years ago comes back to haunt us years later. U.S. taxpayers foot the bill for advanced military technologies that we later spend billions of dollars to defend against. In the meantime, arms dealers make billions of dollars.