Schneier on Security

At A Mall • January 6, 2018 7:44 PM

@Name

“the CIA operation that inadvertently turned nuclear blueprints over to Iran as well as”

Interestingly enough, the CIA, perhaps, planned to turn over nuclear blueprints, with flaws, to Iran. From your link and with ‘I’ being James Risen. At 15,000 words a few, among many, interesting sections are posted here.

“That spring, just as the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began, I called the CIA for comment on a story about a harebrained CIA operation to turn over nuclear blueprints to Iran. The idea was that the CIA would give the Iranians flawed blueprints, and Tehran would use them to build a bomb that would turn out to be a dud.

The problem was with the execution of the secret plan. The CIA had taken Russian nuclear blueprints it had obtained from a defector and then had American scientists riddle them with flaws. The CIA then asked another Russian to approach the Iranians. He was supposed to pretend to be trying to sell the documents to the highest bidder.

But the design flaws in the blueprints were obvious. The Russian who was supposed to hand them over feared that the Iranians would quickly recognize the errors, and that he would be in trouble. To protect himself when he dropped off the documents at an Iranian mission in Vienna, he included a letter warning that the designs had problems. So the Iranians received the nuclear blueprints and were also warned to look for the embedded flaws.

Several CIA officials believed that the operation had either been mismanaged or at least failed to achieve its goals. By May 2003, I confirmed the story through a number of sources, wrote up a draft, and called the CIA public affairs office for comment.

Instead of responding to me, the White House immediately called Washington Bureau Chief Jill Abramson and demanded a meeting.

Condoleezza Rice stared straight at me. I had received information so sensitive that I had an obligation to forget about the story, she said.

The next day, Abramson and I went to the West Wing of the White House to meet with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. In her office, just down the hall from the Oval Office, we sat across from Rice and George Tenet, the CIA director, along with two of their aides.

Rice stared straight at me. I had received information so sensitive that I had an obligation to forget about the story, destroy my notes, and never make another phone call to discuss the matter with anyone, she said. She told Abramson and me that the New York Times should never publish the story.

I tried to turn the tables. I asked Tenet a few questions about the Iranian program and got him to confirm the story, and also provide some details I hadn’t heard before. The only point he disputed was that the operation had been mismanaged.

Rice argued that the operation was an alternative to a full-scale invasion of Iran, like the war that President George W. Bush had just launched in Iraq. “You criticize us for going to war for weapons of mass destruction,” I recall her saying. “Well, this is what we can do instead.” (Years later, when Rice testified in the Sterling trial, a copy of the “talking points” she had prepared for our meeting was entered into evidence, though I don’t remember her actually saying many of these things.)

Abramson told Rice and Tenet that the decision on whether to run the story was up to Times Executive Editor Howell Raines. After the meeting, Abramson and I stopped for lunch. We were both stunned by the full-court press we had just endured. But I also recognized that I had just gotten high-level confirmation for the story — better confirmation than I could ever have imagined.

Just after Abramson and I met with Tenet and Rice, the Jayson Blair scandal erupted, forcing Raines into an intense battle to save his job. Blair may have been the immediate cause of the crisis, but among the staff at the Times, Blair was merely the trigger that allowed resentment that had built up against Raines over his management style to come out into the open.

Abramson recalls that after our meeting with Rice, she took the Iran story to both Raines and then-Managing Editor Gerald Boyd. “They gave me a swift no” about publishing the story, Abramson told me recently. She said that she told Raines and Boyd that Rice was willing to discuss the story with them on a secure phone line that they could use from a facility on Manhattan’s East Side, but she says they never asked to take that step, and she didn’t push them to do so. Raines disputes this. “I was not informed of this meeting [with Rice and Tenet], nor do I recall being involved with your story in any way,” he said in an email. (Boyd died in 2006.)

Raines left the paper in early June 2003. Joe Lelyveld, the retired executive editor, briefly came back to run the Times on an interim basis. I talked to him by phone about the Iran story, but he didn’t really have time to deal with it.

When Bill Keller was named executive editor in the summer of 2003, he agreed to discuss the story with Abramson and me. Abramson, meanwhile, had been promoted to managing editor, Keller’s No. 2. After I went over the story with him, Keller decided not to publish it. I tried over the next year to get him to change his mind, but I couldn’t.

The spiking of the Iran story, coming so soon after the internal fights over WMD coverage, left me depressed. I began to think about whether to write a book that would include the Iran story and document the war on terror more broadly in a way I didn’t believe I had been able to do in the Times.”

[…]

“… now the outcry grew far more intense. Right-wing groups organized hate mail campaigns against us and staged small but noisy protests outside the Washington bureau and the Times building in New York.

Conservative pundits and members of Congress went on television calling for Keller, Lichtblau, and me to be punished. Tom Cotton, then an Army officer in Iraq, wrote a letter to the Times saying that Lichtblau, Keller, and I should be jailed for harming national security. The Times didn’t publish the letter, but it was picked up in the right-wing online universe of the time, and Cotton shot to fame in conservative circles as a result. He was later elected to the Senate as a Republican from Arkansas and soon may be named director of the CIA.”

( about Senator Cotton https://theintercept.com/2017/10/18/is-there-a-more-dangerous-member-of-congress-than-tom-cotton/ )

[…]

“Sterling was indicted in December 2010 and arrested in January 2011. The Justice Department subpoenaed me again, this time to testify at his trial.

Brinkema quashed that subpoena, too; once again, I thought I was off the hook. But just days before the trial was to begin, the Justice Department appealed. Obama administration prosecutors told the appeals court that Brinkema’s ruling should be overturned because there was no such thing as a reporter’s privilege in a criminal case. The appeals court accepted that argument, reversing Brinkema and ordering me to testify.

The government’s rationale transformed my case into a showdown over press freedom in the United States. I felt that I had no choice but to appeal to the Supreme Court. Some outside media lawyers made it clear that they didn’t want me to do that because it might lead to a bad ruling from a conservative majority.

That debate became moot in 2014, when the Supreme Court refused to take up the case. That allowed the appeals court ruling to stand, leaving the legal destruction of a reporter’s privilege in the 4th Circuit as Obama’s First Amendment legacy.

But the government’s landmark legal victory came at a cost to the administration and particularly to Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder. For years, my lawyers and I had waged our legal campaign mostly alone with little fanfare, but as the case barreled toward a climax, the news coverage and publicity reached a fever pitch.

With the surge in media attention came added pressure on Holder, and he finally began to back down. He said that as long as he was attorney general, no reporter would go to jail for doing their job. He also modified the Justice Department guidelines that defined when the government would seek to compel the testimony of journalists in leak investigations. (Donald Trump’s Justice Department is now widely expected to weaken those guidelines, making it easier to go after reporters.)

But even though Holder was making conciliatory public statements, the federal prosecutors directly involved in my case kept fighting hard. At one point, Holder hinted that the Justice Department and I were about to strike a deal, when in fact the prosecutors and my lawyers hadn’t negotiated any deal at all. Behind the scenes, there seemed to be a war going on between Holder and the prosecutors, who were angry at what they perceived as Holder undercutting them. The prosecutors had repeatedly told the court that they needed my testimony to make their case against Sterling. Holder, after supporting their aggressive approach for years, had suddenly reversed direction under public pressure. I was caught in the middle.”

[…]

“I believe my willingness to fight the government for seven years may make prosecutors less eager to force other reporters to testify about their sources. At the same time, the Obama administration used my case to destroy the legal underpinnings of the reporter’s privilege in the 4th Circuit, which means that if the government does decide to go after more reporters, those reporters will have fewer legal protections in Virginia and Maryland, home to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, and thus the jurisdiction where many national security leak investigations will be conducted. That will make it easier for Donald Trump and the presidents who come after him to conduct an even more draconian assault on press freedom in the United States.

The battles over national security reporting in the years after 9/11 have yielded mixed results. In my view, the mainstream media has missed some key lessons from the debacle over WMD reporting before the war in Iraq. Times reporter Judy Miller became an easy scapegoat, perhaps because she was a woman in the male-dominated field of national security reporting. Focusing on her made it easier for everyone to forget how widespread the flawed pre-war reporting really was at almost every major media outlet. “They wanted a convenient target, someone to blame,” Miller told me recently. The anti-female bias “was part of it.” She notes that one chapter in her 2015 memoir, “The Story: A Reporter’s Journey,” is titled “Scapegoat.”

Since then, I believe the Times, the Washington Post and other national news organizations have sometimes hyped threats from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. The exaggerated reporting on terrorism, in particular, has had a major political impact in the United States and helped close off debate in Washington over whether to significantly roll back some of the most draconian counterterrorism programs, like NSA spying.

But overall, I do believe that the fight inside the Times over the NSA story helped usher in a new era of more aggressive national security reporting at the paper. Since then, the Times has been much more willing to stand up to the government and refuse to go along with White House demands to hold or kill stories.

The greatest shame of all is that Jeffrey Sterling was convicted and sentenced to 42 months in prison.”