Jan. 13, 2015, 6:39 AM
For the past seven years, New York Times journalist James Risen has been
embroiled in a legal battle with two presidential administrations over
his refusal to reveal an inside government source.
The story that almost sent the two-time Pulitzer winner to jail for
not identifying confidential sources is one of the most spectacular CIA
screwups in the history of the agency.
In February 2000, the CIA went forward with a covert operation called
Operation Merlin to stunt the nuclear development of Iran by gifting
them a flawed blueprint of an actual nuclear weapon.
It all started when the CIA persuaded a defected Russian nuclear
engineer (who was granted citizenship and a $5,000-per-month income) to
hand over technical designs for a TBA 480 high-voltage block or "firing
set" for a Russian-designed nuclear weapon. The designs would allow the
holder to build the mechanism that triggers a nuclear chain reaction,
one of the most significant hurdles to successfully building a nuclear
weapon.
The plan was for the Russian to pose as a greedy scientist trying to
sell the designs to the highest bidder, which was to be Iran. The
Russian was sent to Vienna to sell the designs to the Iranian
representative of the International Atomic Energy Agency (that is, the
UN body created to regulate nuclear technology).
The
key to the plan was that the designs supposedly carried a serious
design flaw the Iranians would be unable to recognize until they had
already tried building the design.
When the Iranians tested the design, the bomb would fizzle, and Iran
would have been set back years in its nuclear quest. At the same time,
the US would be able to watch what the Iranians did with the blueprints
and learn more about what they knew of nuclear technology.
It all sounded like a fine plan, except that it was wildly reckless
and included huge missteps. The first was that, within minutes of
looking at the plans, the Russian identified the design flaw. Granted he
was more versed in nuclear designs than the Iranians to whom he was
giving the designs, but CIA officers were shocked — they didn't expect
him to be able to find it.
The CIA went forward with the plan anyway, handing the Russian a
sealed envelope with the blueprints and instructing him to deliver them
without opening the envelope. The Russian got cold feet and, of course,
opened the envelope. Not wanting to be caught in the crossfire between
the CIA and Iran, the Russian included a letter noting that the designs
contained a flaw and that he could help them identify it.
The Russian dropped off the blueprints at the agreed location,
without even meeting the officials from Iran, and fled back to the US.
Within days, the Iranian official in Vienna headed home, most likely
with the blueprint.
What
makes the operation so reckless is that, according to former CIA
officials to whom Risen spoke, the "Trojan horse" plan had been used
before with America's enemies but never with a nuclear weapon. Handing
over any weapons designs is a delicate operation, and any additional
information could result in the country's accelerating its weapons
program, not stunting it.
Between Iran's stable of knowledgeable nuclear scientists, and the
fact the country had already obtained nuclear blueprints from a
Pakistani scientist, giving them even flawed designs was extremely
reckless. According to Risen, nuclear experts say Iran could compare the
two blueprints to identify the flaw and then glean dangerous
information from the blueprints anyway.
Operation Merlin failed on all accounts. Add in the fact that four
years later, the CIA screwed up again, revealing its entire Iran spy
network to a double agent, and the US was flying blind on Iran during a
period in which the country was most likely making serious inroads on
its nuclear program.
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"
© James Risen 2006
· This is an edited extract from State of War, by James Risen, published by The Free Press