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Operation Merlin was a United States covert operation under the Clinton Administration to provide Iran with a flawed design for a component of a nuclear weapon ostensibly in order to delay the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program, or to frame Iran. [1]
In his book State of War , author and intelligence correspondent for The New York Times James Risen relates that the CIA chose a defected Russian nuclear scientist to provide deliberately flawed nuclear warhead blueprints to Iranian officials in February 2000. [2] According to CIA documents, the search for a suitable Russian emigre with an engineering background in nuclear physics and production began in September 1996. The Russian emigre selected was first contacted by the CIA in August 1994, and received a monthly salary of US$5,000 (plus travel expenses) in 1997 and 1998, which was raised to US$6,000 beginning in February 1999. The weapon component selected was based on the Russian TBA-480 Fire Set (High Voltage Automatic Block), which was modified in an attempt to make it "fatally flawed". The CIA estimated that the TBA-480 Fire Set, which had been developed at Arzamas-16, was 20 years more advanced than anything required to get a first generation nuclear weapon operational. After the delivery of the designs to Iran on March 3, 2000, the CIA extended the employment of the Russian emigre to at least March 2003, with the intention of conveying the flawed TBA-480 plans to another country suspected of interest in developing nuclear weapons. [1]
Risen wrote in his book that President Clinton had approved the operation and that the Bush administration later endorsed the plan. [2] [3] Earlier publication of details on Operation Merlin by the New York Times in 2003 was prevented by the intervention of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice with the NYT's Executive Editor Howell Raines. [4]
Operation Merlin backfired when the CIA's Russian contact/messenger noticed flaws in the schematics and told the Iranian nuclear scientists. [5] Instead of crippling Iran's nuclear program, the book alleges, Operation Merlin may have accelerated it by providing useful information: once the flaws were identified, the plans could be compared with other sources, such as those presumed to have been provided to the Iranians by A. Q. Khan. [5]
In late 2010, former CIA officer Jeffrey Alexander Sterling was indicted for allegedly being the source of some of the information in Risen's book, and was convicted of espionage in January 2015. [6] He was convicted and sentenced to 3 1⁄2 years in prison. [7]
Hans Martin Blix is a Swedish diplomat and politician for the Liberal People's Party. He was Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs (1978–1979) and later became the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. As such, Blix was the first Western representative to inspect the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union on site, and led the agency response to them. Blix was also the head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission from March 2000 to June 2003, when he was succeeded by Dimitris Perrikos. In 2002, the commission began searching Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, ultimately finding none. On 17 March 2003, U.S. President George W. Bush delivered an address from the White House announcing that within 48 hours, the United States would invade Iraq unless Saddam Hussein would leave Iraq. Bush then ordered all of the weapons inspectors, including Blix's team, to leave Iraq so that America and its allies could invade Iraq on March 20th. In February 2010, Blix became head of the United Arab Emirates' advisory board for its nuclear power program. He is the former president of the World Federation of United Nations Associations.
Iraq actively researched and later employed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) from 1962 to 1991, when it destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile and halted its biological and nuclear weapon programs as required by the United Nations Security Council. The fifth President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was internationally condemned for his use of chemical weapons during the 1980s campaign against Iranian and Kurdish civilians during and after the Iran–Iraq War. In the 1980s, Saddam pursued an extensive biological weapons program and a nuclear weapons program, though no nuclear bomb was built. After the Persian Gulf War (1990–1991), the United Nations located and destroyed large quantities of Iraqi chemical weapons and related equipment and materials; Iraq ceased its chemical, biological and nuclear programs.
George John Tenet is a former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) for the United States Central Intelligence Agency as well as a Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.
Iran and the United States have had no formal diplomatic relations since April 1980. Pakistan serves as Iran's protecting power in the United States, while Switzerland serves as the United States' protecting power in Iran. Contacts are carried out through the Iranian Interests Section of the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, D.C., and the US Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Tehran. In August 2018, Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khamenei banned direct talks with the United States.
Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He was a longtime contributor to The New Yorker magazine on national security matters and has also written for the London Review of Books since 2013.
William Scott Ritter Jr. is a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He later became a critic of United States foreign policy in the Middle East. Prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Ritter stated that Iraq possessed no significant weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities, becoming according to The New York Times "the loudest and most credible skeptic of the Bush administration’s contention that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction."
The Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) was the head of the American Central Intelligence Agency from 1946 to 2005, acting as the principal intelligence advisor to the President of the United States and the United States National Security Council, as well as the coordinator of intelligence activities among and between the various U.S. intelligence agencies.
Joseph Cofer Black is a former CIA official who was appointed Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator for Counterterrorism by President George W. Bush and led the Office of Counterterrorism in the U.S. State Department until his resignation in 2004. Previously Black served in the Directorate of Operations at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center (CTC).
Blowback is a term originating from within the Central Intelligence Agency, explaining the unintended consequence and unwanted side-effects of a covert operation. To the civilians suffering the blowback of covert operations, the effect typically manifests itself as "random" acts of political violence without a discernible, direct cause; because the public—in whose name the intelligence agency acted—are unaware of the effected secret attacks that provoked revenge (counter-attack) against them.
James Risen is an American journalist for The Intercept. He previously worked for The New York Times and before that for Los Angeles Times. He has written or co-written many articles concerning U.S. government activities and is the author or co-author of two books about the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a book about the American public debate about abortion. Risen is a Pulitzer Prize winner.
A dispute exists over the legitimacy of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The debate centers around the question whether the invasion was an unprovoked assault on an independent country that may have breached international law, or if the United Nations Security Council authorized the invasion. Those arguing for its legitimacy often point to Congressional Joint Resolution 114 and UN Security Council resolutions, such as Resolution 1441 and Resolution 678. Those arguing against its legitimacy also cite some of the same sources, stating they do not actually permit war but instead lay out conditions that must be met before war can be declared. Furthermore, the Security Council may only authorise the use of force against an "aggressor" in the interests of preserving peace, whereas the 2003 invasion of Iraq was not provoked by any aggressive military action.
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT). As a principal member of the United States Intelligence Community (IC), the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence and is primarily focused on providing intelligence for the President and Cabinet of the United States.
The One Percent Doctrine (ISBN 0-7432-7109-2) is a nonfiction book by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Ron Suskind about America's hunt for terrorists since September 11th, 2001. On July 24, 2006, it reached number 3 on the New York Times Best Seller list.
David Albright, M.Sc., is the founder of the non-governmental Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), its current president, and author of several books on proliferation of atomic weapons. Albright holds a Master of Science in physics from Indiana University and an MSc in mathematics from Wright State University. He has taught physics at George Mason University in Virginia.
This is the timeline of the nuclear program of Iran.
John Chris Kiriakou is a Greek American author, journalist and retired intelligence officer. Kiriakou is a columnist with Reader Supported News and co-host of Loud and Clear on Sputnik Radio.
There have been many claims of repeated U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) intervention in the internal affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran (Persia), from the 1953 Mosaddeq coup to present. The CIA collaborated with the last Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq and install General Fazlollah Zahedi. Later, the 1979 hostage crisis at the American embassy in Tehran, lasting 444 days until January 21, 1981, stemmed from past CIA affairs in Iran, and involvement and collaboration between the two countries requires further analysis to understand the 1979 hostage crisis. CIA personnel proved instrumental in the Iran-Contra affair of the mid-1980s involving a triangulation of arms-dealing and arms-smuggling between the United States military, Iran, and right-wing Contra groups waging a civil war in Nicaragua. More recently in 2007–08, the CIA claimed to be supporting the Sunni terrorist group Jundallah against Iran, but these claims were refuted by a later investigation. It is widely believed the CIA was directly involved with the Mosaddeq coup as declassified documents from 2011 have revealed. The declassified documents explicitly state the CIA objective to replace the Iranian government in the early 1950s with a "pro-western government under the Shah's leadership." The U.S. and Iran have maintained a strained relationship for a long time as claims of CIA involvement kept surfacing. These claims included such that the U.S. Officials were committing acts of violence and rape against the eastern locals. However, these accusations were never brought to justice despite United States validation on the acts. In response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2013, the CIA confirmed its role in the coup as various documents outlining its involvement have been released to the public, most of which were previously unknown. The evidence followed by violent protests and strikes. Ultimately, the United States promised to refrain from interfering with Iranian internal affairs. The U.S. government coup was eventually discovered as the United States was providing services to both Iran and Iraq.
State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration is documentary review written by Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist for The New York Times James Risen. The book was released on January 3, 2006.
Jeffrey Alexander Sterling is an American lawyer and former CIA employee who was arrested, charged, and convicted of violating the Espionage Act for revealing details about Operation Merlin to journalist James Risen. The case was based on what the judge called "very powerful circumstantial evidence." In May 2015, Sterling was sentenced to 3½ years in prison. In 2016 and 2017, he filed complaints and wrote letters regarding mistreatment, lack of medical treatment for life-threatening conditions, and false allegations against him by corrections officers leading to further punitive measures. He was released from prison in January 2018.
Operation Olympic Games was a covert and still unacknowledged campaign of sabotage by means of cyber disruption, directed at Iranian nuclear facilities by the United States and likely Israel. As reported, it is one of the first known uses of offensive cyber weapons. Started under the administration of George W. Bush in 2006, Olympic Games was accelerated under President Obama, who heeded Bush's advice to continue cyber attacks on the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz. Bush believed that the strategy was the only way to prevent an Israeli conventional strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.
