Senior Biden administration officials are scrambling to deny any direct Iranian link to the attack on Israel , the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged the deep ties between Iran and Hamas but argued he has seen no evidence of direct Iranian involvement. Biden officials and their congressional and media surrogates also argue that the recent White House ransom agreement to unfreeze and transfer $6 billion in Iranian assets played no role in enabling the attack. This is nonsense, for it ignores the fungibility of money.

It is unbecoming for the White House to act as Iran’s lawyer or to seek to disqualify reams of circumstantial and direct evidence, such as reported meetings in Lebanon between senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders and Hamas leaders, Hamas’s own acknowledgment of Iranian assistance, or recordings catching apparent Farsi commands in the background of kidnappings of Israelis.

Indeed, President Joe Biden, CIA Director Bill Burns, and national security adviser Jake Sullivan should not commit more to covering up their own role in a massive intelligence failure than to truth or justice. To deny Iranian involvement for the sake of shielding a policy of rapprochement is intelligence politicization , plain and simple.

To understand the intelligence failure and identify foreign backers, the Biden administration should drill down on the mechanized paragliders. The Gaza Strip is a flat coastal plain. It is not a destination for paragliding, nor do young Palestinians take up the sport the way they would swimming or soccer. This means the paragliders who opened the first salvo against Israel trained somewhere.

Young Palestinian men paragliding should have raised the same alarm bells that the 9/11 al Qaeda hijackers should have raised when they attended flight schools with no interest in learning to land. The question for Burns, Blinken, and Sullivan now should be: Where did the paragliding training occur?

There are three possible locations: Lebanon, Iran, and Turkey. Frankly, Lebanon or Iran are the likely destinations, as Turkey’s support for Hamas appears limited to safe-haven, financial support, and weapons supply . Lebanon is so penetrated by Israeli human intelligence sources that paragliding Hamas terrorists would be unlikely to fly under the radar, all the more so since Israel previously suffered a paragliding attack originating in Lebanon. That makes Iran the likely culprit. The same Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps bases that have hosted senior al Qaeda operatives are nestled in mountains perfect for paraglider training.

Perhaps the American intelligence community initially failed to pick up the paragliding Palestinians. They received no pings in their system from either the real or fake passports and papers the Palestinians used during travel, let alone any recognition of Palestinians when they reached their destination.

The CIA and/or the National Security Agency may have missed such things when there was still an opportunity to prevent the attack, but a failure to drill down on where paraglider training occurred is now wishful blindness. If Burns does not direct his analysts to get to the bottom of the matter, it is because, deep down, the Biden administration does not want to discover any evidence that would puncture the illusions about Iran upon which it has gambled American and Israeli national security.