US won’t talk of this Iran N-chapter

Even before the book’s release on Tuesday, its main revelation—that President Bush authorised a secret effort by another intelligence outfit, the National Security Agency, to eavesdrop on unsuspecting Americans without a court-approved warrant—had created a storm of controversy when it was reported last month in The New York Times in an article co-authored by Risen.

But top New York Times officials refused to publish a news article about the reported CIA plot to give intentionally flawed nuclear plans to Iran, according to a person briefed on the newspaper’s conversations by one of the participants. That person said The New York Times withheld publication at the request of the White House and former CIA director George J Tenet.

The book says the CIA turned to a Russian defector who had once been a nuclear scientist in the former Soviet republics in desperation to counter what it believed was a clandestine nuclear programme. The CIA worked with the US-based defector to concoct a story about how he was destitute but in possession of valuable nuclear weapons blueprints that had been secreted out of Russia. CIA officials had concerns about the man’s reliability, according to Risen, but sent him and the blueprints to Vienna, Austria, anyway, with orders to hand-deliver them to someone at Tehran’s diplomatic mission to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog.

His CIA handlers never imagined that the Russian defector would tip off the Iranians to the fatal flaw that they had hidden deep within the blueprints. But that, the book adds, is exactly what the Russian did, in part because the CIA failed to send anybody to accompany him out of fear that it might make the Iranians suspicious. —LAT-WP