[NYTr] CIA Gave Iran Nuclear Weapon Blueprints

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[The full story in Risen's book (almost an entire chapter is devoted to
this hare-brained scheme) is really quite astonishing It makes
Jimmy Carter's comical secret hostage negotiations by Hamilton Jordan
and Jody Powell look professional by comparison. -NYTr].

reposted by anon @mouse.com (activ-l)

The Guardian - Jan 5, 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0%2c12271%2c1678219%2c00.html

CIA Gave Iran Nuclear Weapon Blueprints

George Bush insists that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear
weapons. So why, six years ago, did the CIA give the Iranians
blueprints to build a bomb?

In an extract from his explosive new book, New York Times reporter
James Risen reveals the bungles and miscalculations that led to a
spectacular intelligence fiasco

"State of War," by James Risen
 
She had probably done this a dozen times before. Modern digital
technology had made clandestine communications with overseas agents
seem routine. Back in the cold war, contacting a secret agent in
Moscow or Beijing was a dangerous, labour-intensive process that
could take days or even weeks. But by 2004, it was possible to send
high-speed, encrypted messages directly and instantaneously from
CIA headquarters to agents in the field who were equipped with
small, covert personal communications devices. So the officer at
CIA headquarters assigned to handle communications with the agency's
spies in Iran probably didn't think twice when she began her latest
download. With a few simple commands, she sent a secret data flow
to one of the Iranian agents in the CIA's spy network. Just as she
had done so many times before.

But this time, the ease and speed of the technology betrayed her.
The CIA officer had made a disastrous mistake. She had sent information
to one Iranian agent that exposed an entire spy network; the data
could be used to identify virtually every spy the CIA had inside
Iran.

Mistake piled on mistake. As the CIA later learned, the Iranian who
received the download was a double agent. The agent quickly turned
the data over to Iranian security officials, and it enabled them
to "roll up" the CIA's network throughout Iran. CIA sources say
that several of the Iranian agents were arrested and jailed, while
the fates of some of the others is still unknown.

This espionage disaster, of course, was not reported. It left the
CIA virtually blind in Iran, unable to provide any significant
intelligence on one of the most critical issues facing the US -
whether Tehran was about to go nuclear.

In fact, just as President Bush and his aides were making the case
in 2004 and 2005 that Iran was moving rapidly to develop nuclear
weapons, the American intelligence community found itself unable
to provide the evidence to back up the administration's public
arguments. On the heels of the CIA's failure to provide accurate
pre-war intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction,
the agency was once again clueless in the Middle East. In the spring
of 2005, in the wake of the CIA's Iranian disaster, Porter Goss,
its new director, told President Bush in a White House briefing
that the CIA really didn't know how close Iran was to becoming a
nuclear power.

But it's worse than that. Deep in the bowels of the CIA, someone
must be nervously, but very privately, wondering: "Whatever happened
to those nuclear blueprints we gave to the Iranians?"

The story dates back to the Clinton administration and February
2000, when one frightened Russian scientist walked Vienna's winter
streets. The Russian had good reason to be afraid. He was walking
around Vienna with blueprints for a nuclear bomb.

To be precise, he was carrying technical designs for a TBA 480
high-voltage block, otherwise known as a "firing set", for a
Russian-designed nuclear weapon. He held in his hands the knowledge
needed to create a perfect implosion that could trigger a nuclear
chain reaction inside a small spherical core. It was one of the
greatest engineering secrets in the world, providing the solution
to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers such
as the United States and Russia from rogue countries such as Iran
that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen
short.

The Russian, who had defected to the US years earlier, still couldn't
believe the orders he had received from CIA headquarters. The CIA
had given him the nuclear blueprints and then sent him to Vienna
to sell them - or simply give them - to the Iranian representatives
to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). With the Russian
doing its bidding, the CIA appeared to be about to help Iran leapfrog
one of the last remaining engineering hurdles blocking its path to
a nuclear weapon. The dangerous irony was not lost on the Russian
- the IAEA was an international organisation created to restrict
the spread of nuclear technology.

The Russian was a nuclear engineer in the pay of the CIA, which had
arranged for him to become an American citizen and funded him to
the tune of $5,000 a month. It seemed like easy money, with few
strings attached.

Until now. The CIA was placing him on the front line of a plan that
seemed to be completely at odds with the interests of the US, and
it had taken a lot of persuading by his CIA case officer to convince
him to go through with what appeared to be a rogue operation.

The case officer worked hard to convince him - even though he had
doubts about the plan as well. As he was sweet-talking the Russian
into flying to Vienna, the case officer wondered whether he was
involved in an illegal covert action. Should he expect to be hauled
before a congressional committee and grilled because he was the
officer who helped give nuclear blueprints to Iran? The code name
for this operation was Merlin; to the officer, that seemed like a
wry tip-off that nothing about this programme was what it appeared
to be. He did his best to hide his concerns from his Russian agent.

The Russian's assignment from the CIA was to pose as an unemployed
and greedy scientist who was willing to sell his soul - and the
secrets of the atomic bomb - to the highest bidder. By hook or by
crook, the CIA told him, he was to get the nuclear blueprints to
the Iranians. They would quickly recognise their value and rush
them back to their superiors in Tehran.

The plan had been laid out for the defector during a CIA-financed
trip to San Francisco, where he had meetings with CIA officers and
nuclear experts mixed in with leisurely wine-tasting trips to Sonoma
County. In a luxurious San Francisco hotel room, a senior CIA
official involved in the operation talked the Russian through the
details of the plan. He brought in experts from one of the national
laboratories to go over the blueprints that he was supposed to give
the Iranians.

The senior CIA officer could see that the Russian was nervous, and
so he tried to downplay the significance of what they were asking
him to do. He said the CIA was mounting the operation simply to
find out where the Iranians were with their nuclear programme. This
was just an intelligence-gathering effort, the CIA officer said,
not an illegal attempt to give Iran the bomb. He suggested that the
Iranians already had the technology he was going to hand over to
them. It was all a game. Nothing too serious.

On paper, Merlin was supposed to stunt the development of Tehran's
nuclear programme by sending Iran's weapons experts down the wrong
technical path. The CIA believed that once the Iranians had the
blueprints and studied them, they would believe the designs were
usable and so would start to build an atom bomb based on the flawed
designs. But Tehran would get a big surprise when its scientists
tried to explode their new bomb. Instead of a mushroom cloud, the
Iranian scientists would witness a disappointing fizzle. The Iranian
nuclear programme would suffer a humiliating setback, and Tehran's
goal of becoming a nuclear power would have been delayed by several
years. In the meantime, the CIA, by watching Iran's reaction to the
blueprints, would have gained a wealth of information about the
status of Iran's weapons programme, which has been shrouded in
secrecy.

The Russian studied the blueprints the CIA had given him. Within
minutes of being handed the designs, he had identified a flaw. "This
isn't right," he told the CIA officers gathered around the hotel
room. "There is something wrong." His comments prompted stony looks,
but no straight answers from the CIA men. No one in the meeting
seemed surprised by the Russian's assertion that the blueprints
didn't look quite right, but no one wanted to enlighten him further
on the matter, either.

In fact, the CIA case officer who was the Russian's personal handler
had been stunned by his statement. During a break, he took the
senior CIA officer aside. "He wasn't supposed to know that," the
CIA case officer told his superior. "He wasn't supposed to find a
flaw."

"Don't worry," the senior CIA officer calmly replied. "It doesn't
matter."

The CIA case officer couldn't believe the senior CIA officer's
answer, but he managed to keep his fears from the Russian, and
continued to train him for his mission.

After their trip to San Francisco, the case officer handed the
Russian a sealed envelope with the nuclear blueprints inside. He
was told not to open the envelope under any circumstances. He was
to follow the CIA's instructions to find the Iranians and give them
the envelope with the documents inside. Keep it simple, and get out
of Vienna safe and alive, the Russian was told. But the defector
had his own ideas about how he might play that game.

The CIA had discovered that a high-ranking Iranian official would
be travelling to Vienna and visiting the Iranian mission to the
IAEA, and so the agency decided to send the Russian to Vienna at
the same time. It was hoped that he could make contact with either
the Iranian representative to the IAEA or the visitor from Tehran.

In Vienna, however, the Russian unsealed the envelope with the
nuclear blueprints and included a personal letter of his own to the
Iranians. No matter what the CIA told him, he was going to hedge
his bets. There was obviously something wrong with the blueprints
- so he decided to mention that fact to the Iranians in his letter.
They would certainly find flaws for themselves, and if he didn't
tell them first, they would never want to deal with him again.

The Russian was thus warning the Iranians as carefully as he could
that there was a flaw somewhere in the nuclear blueprints, and he
could help them find it. At the same time, he was still going through
with the CIA's operation in the only way he thought would work.

The Russian soon found 19 Heinstrasse, a five-storey office and
apartment building with a flat, pale green and beige facade in a
quiet, slightly down-at-heel neighbourhood in Vienna's north end.
Amid the list of Austrian tenants, there was one simple line:
"PM/Iran." The Iranians clearly didn't want publicity. An Austrian
postman helped him. As the Russian stood by, the postman opened the
building door and dropped off the mail. The Russian followed suit;
he realised that he could leave his package without actually having
to talk to anyone. He slipped through the front door, and hurriedly
shoved his envelope through the inner-door slot at the Iranian
office.

The Russian fled the mission without being seen. He was deeply
relieved that he had made the hand-off without having to come face
to face with a real live Iranian. He flew back to the US without
being detected by either Austrian security or, more importantly,
Iranian intelligence.

Just days after the Russian dropped off his package at the Iranian
mission, the National Security Agency reported that an Iranian
official in Vienna abruptly changed his schedule, making airline
reservations to fly home to Iran. The odds were that the nuclear
blueprints were now in Tehran.

The Russian scientist's fears about the operation seemed well
founded. He was the front man for what may have been one of the
most reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA, one that
may have helped put nuclear weapons in the hands of a charter member
of what President George W Bush has called the "axis of evil".

Operation Merlin has been one of the most closely guarded secrets
in the Clinton and Bush administrations. It's not clear who originally
came up with the idea, but the plan was first approved by Clinton.
After the Russian scientist's fateful trip to Vienna, however, the
Merlin operation was endorsed by the Bush administration, possibly
with an eye toward repeating it against North Korea or other dangerous
states.

Several former CIA officials say that the theory behind Merlin -
handing over tainted weapon designs to confound one of America's
adversaries - is a trick that has been used many times in past
operations, stretching back to the cold war. But in previous cases,
such Trojan horse operations involved conventional weapons; none
of the former officials had ever heard of the CIA attempting to
conduct this kind of high-risk operation with designs for a nuclear
bomb. The former officials also said these kind of programmes must
be closely monitored by senior CIA managers in order to control the
flow of information to the adversary. If mishandled, they could
easily help an enemy accelerate its weapons development. That may
be what happened with Merlin.

Iran has spent nearly 20 years trying to develop nuclear weapons,
and in the process has created a strong base of sophisticated
scientists knowledgeable enough to spot flaws in nuclear blueprints.
Tehran also obtained nuclear blueprints from the network of Pakistani
scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, and so already had workable blueprints
against which to compare the designs obtained from the CIA. Nuclear
experts say that they would thus be able to extract valuable
information from the blueprints while ignoring the flaws.

"If [the flaw] is bad enough," warned a nuclear weapons expert with
the IAEA, "they will find it quite quickly. That would be my fear"

(c) James Risen 2006

[This is an edited extract from State of War, by James Risen,
 published by The Free Press (2006) ]