A general rule of thumb: The more feared the enemy nation, the bigger the lies. Lies told courtesy of the fearsome enemy and lies about the enemy. Read the old US Pentagon reports about alleged Vietcong casualty figures, if you don’t believe me.

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Now that (a) Iran is in the process of developing nuclear weapon technology and (b) an American spycraft has unaccountably landed in almost pristine condition in that country, the mcwhoppers on both sides are proliferating a lot faster than the stockpile at Isfahan.

Here are just a few:

• Last Thursday, US officials informed Martha Raddatz of ABC News that the unmanned drone photos flaunted by Tehran didn’t seem to be those of the highly prized RQ-170 Sentinel in which the CIA had placed great hopes, but was instead likely a “model” concocted by Iran’s propaganda experts. Why? Because the Sentinel looked so good in those pictures that the evidence was very probably “inconclusive.” (Translation: In Pentagon-speak, the definition of “inconclusive” is actually “absolutely conclusive.” As in, “The results were absolutely conclusive: that is indeed a Sentinel and it’s sitting there in Iran looking perfectly fabulous after its crash—but why the hell did it crash? Why is it looking so gorgeous? Whom can we blame?”)

• Officers of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard reply to US government disbelief by claiming (a) the Sentinel looks so damn good on TV because it was brought down by electronic ambush and (b) the Iranians are not going to return their prize; instead, Iranian officials strongly suggest, they will use it as a template for their own military drones. “The technology gap between Iran and the US is not much,” declares General Hossein Salami, deputy general of the Revolutionary Guard.

• US officials reply to Iran’s victory lap by finally acknowledging publicly that (a) yes, that is—conclusively—an unmanned US Sentinel in Iran but (b) Iran couldn’t possibly have brought it down either electronically or otherwise because (c) actually, the US never does really explain why either possibility is impossible, but implies strongly it’s because Iran is technologically too backward to be accountable for the Sentinel’s demise.

• Late in November, weirdly, there’s yet another untoward incident in Isfahan: it turns out to be, yet again, an explosion right near Iran’s main nuclear fuel plant, which produces uranium pellets. Mohammed-Mehdi Ismaeli, the region’s deputy governor, immediately told news agencies that that was no act of sabotage perpetrated by those worried about his nation’s nuclear intentions. “Maybe someone’s water heater exploded,” he suggested.

• A few days before that, 17 Revolutionary Guards, in the process of moving ammunition, were killed in an explosion at a military base not far from Tehran. Among those killed? General Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, architect of Iran’s missile program. Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani assured the country that this earlier blast had absolutely nothing to do with international concerns about his nation’s nuclear intentions, and that any rumors to the contrary were simply “stories” concocted by “the enemies,” which is Iranian-speak for “Israel.”

• A year ago, a busy computer worm called Stuxnet affected some of Iran’s computer systems and also some of its cascading centrifuges. Interestingly, the program contains digital code strings such as “b:\myrtus\”—a reference to certain Old Testament passages that, according to cyber defense analyst Panayotis A. Yannakogeorgos, are “important to Israeli identity.” Israel, like the US, isn’t altogether happy about a nuclear Iran. Nonetheless, Yannakogeorgos claims in an online article for the Diplomat, the culprit could just as likely be Russia. “After all,” he writes, “Russian scientists and engineers are familiar with the cascading centrifuges.” Hey, maybe Russia just “plant[ed] a worm with digital U.S.-Israeli fingerprints,” suggests Yannakogeorgos, an analyst with the US Air Force Research Institute.

Or hey, maybe—and this is just my take on all the variants—the Stuxnet worm crawled out of that faulty water heater?