A week ago the Neue Züricher Zeitung, a major Swiss newspaper, published a piece (in German) on how Iran allegedly financed a Syrian nuclear reactor program. The Associated Press and many others echo-chambered the report:

GENEVA (AP) — An Iranian defector told the West that Iran was financing North Korean moves to transform Syria into a nuclear weapons power, leading to the Israeli airstrike that destroyed a secret reactor, a report said Thursday.

The report, written by Hans Ruehle, former chief of the planning staff of the German Defense Ministry, details an Iranian connection and fills in gaps about Israel's Sept. 6, 2007, raid that knocked out Syria's nearly completed Al Kibar reactor.

Ali Reza Asghari, a retired general in Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards and a former deputy defense minister, "changed sides" in February 2007 and provided considerable information to the West on Iran's own nuclear program, Ruehle said in his article in the Swiss daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung.

I ignored the piece as Rühle has not been in official government service since 1988 and is known to be a publishing tool for far right-wing and often U.S. interests. Whatever he writes on Russia or the Middle East is usually bunkum this or that secret service fed to him.

But this time Rühle did even worse. As Jeffrey Lewis at the Arm Control Wonks finds:

Whatever “inside” information Rühle had dates back more than two
decades. His information about Al Kibar, therefore, is second hand.
Second, by “second hand,” I mean plagiarized.

Most of Rühle’s article comes straight from Ronen Bergman’s book The Secret War with Iran, mainly the chapter “Ghost Raid.”

The blurb of the Ronen Bergman book Rühle copied from says: "Bergman, one of Israel's top investigative reporters, gained
unprecedented access to extra-ordinary sources from top to bottom in
the Mossad and intelligence agencies around the world." Bergman is know for other wild assertions like "Iran and Hizballah worked closely with al-Qaeda and other Sunni terrorist groups…" Sure …

So a German known propagandist plagiarizes from an Israeli journalist who's writing is dictated by the Mossad and other dubious sources. What a poor attempt of misleading the public.

The allege Iranian financing for the Syrian pencil factory so wild that even the U.S. government felt obliged to deny it:

A US Counterproliferation official denied a report saying Iran had funded a Syrian reactor that was bombed by Israel in 2007.

"There is strong reason to believe that only two countries were involved in building the Syrian covert nuclear reactor at Al Kibar – Syria and North Korea," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.