Cupcake Jihad

Some recent dispatches from the can’t-hardly-believe-it world of national intelligence:

In the June 6 issue of The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh describes American efforts to monitor Iran’s nuclear progress in “Iran and the Bomb.” (Unfortunately, the full article is behind the paywall.)

Street signs were surreptitiously removed in heavily populated areas of Tehran — say, near a university suspected of conducting nuclear enrichment — and replaced with similar-looking signs implanted with radiation sensors. American operatives, working undercover, also removed bricks from a building or two in central Tehran that they thought housed nuclear enrichment activities and replaced them with bricks embedded with radiation-monitoring devices.

From a Washington Post blog on June 3:

Hackers working for U.K. intelligence agency MI6 recently modified an online al-Qaeda magazine and replaced the bomb recipes inside with cake recipes.

When followers went to download 67 pages of instructions for how to “Make a bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” from Inspire Magazine, al-Qaeda’s first English-language magazine, the terrorists were instead greeted with garbled code that was a page of recipes from the Ellen Degeneres Show’s Best Cupcakes in America. MI6 dubbed the cyberattack operation “Operation Cupcake”

Don’t ever accuse the government of lacking creativity in its use of tax dollars.