Sources familiar with the U.S. effort against Iran tell CBS News that U.S. intelligence agencies have run several programs in recent years, employing different techniques, including modifying components in hard-to-detect ways and making subtle changes to technical documents and drawings, rendering them useless.

as well as:

It’s impossible to say the extent to which Iran has discovered any industrial espionage. Any technical problems that Iran experiences in its program, some of which were the result of its own speed-up effort, Iran may attribute to foreign espionage.

Well, I guess it’s a good thing that Iranian Intelligence personnel don’t read CBS News or else, gosh, I guess they’d know what’s up. I am somewhat dumbfounded by the strange sense of — for lack of a better term — “observer disconnect” represented here, when in fact the observer is not disconnected. Does anyone else share my bewilderment at the paradox of an American news source saying point blank “America is sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program, but Iran doesn’t really know that yet.”?? It’s things like this that make me say, “dude, wtf?”

1) Said Iranian official gives Hollywood waaaay too much credit if he thinks there is some conspiracy with the U.S. government to defame the Iranian culture. One would not exactly describe Hollywood’s relationship with our government leaders as a love affair. Besides, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is doing a way better job of defaming Iran than Hollywood ever possibly could.

2) Nearly the entire film is the story of the Battle of Thermopylae being told as a rallying speech (after the fact) by Dilios, and thus is a legendary representation of the battle. It’s fair to say the Spartans would have had a biased view of the Persians, and thus the film is accurate to how a military captain would tell the tale to invigorate his troops. Evidently it worked well enough to invigorate some Iranians too.

3) It might have been wise for said Iranian official to choose his own battles more wisely, seeing as how 98% of the population would otherwise have never even known that modern day Iran is descended from the Persian Empire, and thus the “comprehensive U.S. psychological war aimed at Persian Iranian culture” would have been a dismal failure. Fool! Traitor! Ephialtes!