How Operation Merlin Tainted U.S. Intelligence on Iran
Mike Holmes / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Jeffrey Sterling, the case officer for the CIAs covert Operation Merlin,
who was convicted in May 2015 for allegedly revealing details of that
operation to James Risen of the New York Times, was released from prison in
January after serving more than two years of a 42-month sentence. He had
been tried and convicted on the premise that the revelation of the operation
had harmed U.S. security.
The entire case against him assumed a solid intelligence case that Iran had
indeed been working on a nuclear weapon that justified that covert
operation.
But the accumulate evidence shows that the intelligence not only did not
support the need for Operation Merlin, but that the existence of the CIAs
planned covert operation itself had a profound distorting impact on
intelligence assessment of the issue. The very first U.S. national
intelligence estimate on the subject in 2001 that Iran had a nuclear weapons
program was the result of a heavy-handed intervention by Deputy Director for
Operations James L. Pavitt that was arguably more serious than the efforts
by Vice-President Dick Cheney to influence the CIAs 2002 estimate on WMD in
Iraq.
The full story the interaction between the CIA operation and intelligence
analysis, shows, moreover, that Pavitt had previously fabricated an alarmist
intelligence analysis for the Clinton White House on Irans nuclear program
in late 1999 in order to get Clintons approval for Operation Merlin.
Pavitt Plans Operation Merlin
The story of Operation Merlin and the suppression of crucial intelligence on
Irans nuclear intentions cannot be understood apart from the close
friendship between T Pavitt and CIA Director George Tenet. Pavitts rise in
the Operations Directorate had been so closely linked to his friendship with
Tenet that the day after Tenet announced his retirement from the CIA on June
3, 2004, Pavitt announced his own retirement.
Soon after he was assigned to the CIAs Non-Proliferation Center (NPC) in
1993 Pavitt got the idea of creating a new component within the Directorate
of Operations to work solely on proliferation, as former CIA officials
recounted for Valerie Plame Wilsons memoir, Fair Game. Pavitt proposed
that the new proliferation division would have the authority not only to
collect intelligence but also to carry out covert operations related to
proliferation, using its own clandestine case officers working under
non-official cover.
Immediately after Tenet was named Deputy Director of the CIA in 1995, Pavitt
got the new organization within the operations directorate called the
Counter-Proliferation Division, or CPD. Pavitt immediately began the
planning for a major operation targeting Iran. According to a CIA cable
declassified for the Sterling trial, as early as March 1996 CPDs Office of
Special Projects had already devised a scheme to convey to the Iranians a
copy of the Russian TBA-486 fireset a system for multiple simultaneous
high explosive detonations to set off a nuclear explosion. The trick was
that it had built-in flaws that would make it unworkable.
A January 1997 declassified cable described a plan for using a Russian
émigré former Soviet nuclear weapons engineer recruited in 1996 to gain
operational access to an Iranian target. The cable suggested that it
would be for the purpose of intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program, in
the light of the fact that the agency had not issued a finding that Iran was
working on nuclear weapons.
But in mid-March 1997 the language used by CPD to describe its proposed
covert operation suddenly changed. Another declassified CPD cable from May
1997 said the ultimate goal was to plant this substantial piece of
deception information on the Iranian nuclear weapons program. That shift
in language apparently reflected Tenets realization that the CIA would need
justify the proposed covert operation to the White House, as required by
legislation.
With his ambitious plan for a covert operation against Iran in his pocket,
Pavitt was promoted to Associate Deputy Director of Operations in July 1997.
On February 2, 1998, CPD announced to other CIA offices, according to the
declassified cable, to announce that a technical team from one of the
national laboratories had finished building the detonation device that would
include multiple nested flaws, including a final fatal flaw ensuring
that it will not detonate a nuclear weapon.
An official statement from the national lab certifying that fact was a legal
requirement for the CIA to obtain the official Presidential finding for
any covert operation required by legislation passed in the wake of the
Iran-Contra affair.
Pavitt obtained the letter from the national laboratory in mid-1999 a few
weeks after it was announced he would be named Deputy Director of the CIA
for Operations.
But that left a final political obstacle to a presidential finding: the
official position of the CIA s Intelligence Directorate remained that Iran
did not have a nuclear weapons program. The language of the CIAs report to
Congress for the first half of 1999, which was delivered to Congress in
early 2000, contained formulations that showed signs of having been
negotiated between those who believed Iran just have a nuclear weapons
program and those who did not.
The report referred to nuclear-related projects that will help Iran augment
its nuclear technology infrastructure, which in turn would be useful in
supporting nuclear weapons research and development. The shift from will
to would clearly suggested that nuclear weapons work was not yet an
established fact.
A second sentence said, expertise and technology gained, along with the
commercial channels and contacts established-even from cooperation that
appears strictly civilian in nature-could be used to advance Irans nuclear
weapons research and developmental program. That seemed to hint that maybe
Iran already had such a nuclear weapons program.
That was not sufficient for Tenet and Pavitt to justify a covert nuclear
weapons program involving handing over a fake nuclear detonation device. So
the dynamic duo came up with another way around that obstacle. A new
intelligence assessment, reported in a front page article by James Risen and
Judith Miller in the New York Times on January 17, 2000, said the CIA could
no longer rule out the possibility that Iran now had the capability to build
a bomb or even that it may have actually succeeded in building one.
Risen and Miller reported that Tenet had begun briefings for Clinton
administration officials on the new CIA assessment in December 1999 shortly
after the document was completed, citing several U.S. officials familiar
with it. The Tenet briefings made no mention of any evidence of a
bomb-making program, according to the sources cited by the Times. It was
based instead on the alleged inability of U.S. intelligence to track
adequately Irans acquisition of nuclear technology and materials from the
black market.
But the new assessment had evidently not come from the Intelligence
Directorate. John McLaughlin, then Deputy Director for Intelligence, said in
e-mail response to a query that he did not recall the assessment. And when
this writer asked him whether it was possible that he would not remember or
would not have known about an intelligence assessment on such a high profile
issue, McLaughlin did not respond. Pavitt and Tenet had obviously gone
outside the normal procedure for an intelligence assessment in order to get
around the problem of lack of support for their thesis from the analysts.
A declassified CIA cable dated November 18, 1999 instructed the Russian
émigré to prepare for a possible trip to Vienna in early 2000, indicating
that Tenet hoped to get the finding within a few weeks. Clinton apparently
did give the necessary finding in early 2000; in the first days of March
2000 the Russian émigré dropped the falsified fireset plans into the mail
chute of the Iranian mission to the United Nations in Vienna.
Pavitt Suppresses Unwelcome Iran Nuclear Intelligence
Pavitts CPD was also managing a group of covert operatives who recruited
spies to provide information on weapons of mass destruction in Iran and
Iraq. CPD not only controlled the targeting of the operatives working on
those accounts but the distribution of their reports. CPDs dual role thus
represented a serious conflict of interest, because the CPD had a vested
interest in an intelligence estimate that showed Iran had an active nuclear
weapons program, and it could prevent intelligence analysts from getting
information that conflicted with that interest.
That is exactly what happened in 2001. One especially valuable CPD
operative, who was fluent in both Farsi and Arabic, had begun recruiting
agents to provide intelligence on both Iran and Iraq since 1995. His talents
had been recognized by the CPD and by higher levels of the Operations
Directorate: by 2001 he had been promised an intelligence medal and a
promotion to GS14 the second highest grade level in the civil service.
But that same year the operative reported very important intelligence on the
Iran nuclear issue that would have caused serious problems for Pavitt and
CPD and led ultimately to his being taken out of the field and being fired.
In a November 2005 court filing in a lawsuit against Pavitt, the unnamed
head of CPD and then CIA Director Porter Goss, the operative, identified
only as Doe in court records, said that one of his most highly valued
human assets the CIA term for recruited spies had given him very
important intelligence in 2001. That information was the subject of three
crucial lines of the key paragraph in the operatives complaint that were
redacted at the demand of the CIA. For years Doe sought to declassify the
language of that had been redacted, but the CIA had fought it.
It was assumed in press accounts at the time that the redacted lines were
related to Iraq. But the lawyer who handled the lawsuit for Doe, Roy
Krieger, revealed to this writer in interviews that the redacted lines
revealed that the CIA human asset in question was an Iranian, and that he
had told Doe that the Iranian government had no intention of weaponizing
the uranium that it was planning to enrich.
It was the first intelligence from a highly-valued U.S. spy one who was
known to be in a position to know he claimed to know on Irans intentions
regarding nuclear weapons to become available to the U.S. intelligence
community. Doe reported what the spy had said to his supervisor at CPD,
according to the court filing, and the supervisor immediately met with
Pavitt and the head of CPD. After that meeting the CPD supervisor ordered
Doe not to prepare any written report on the matter and assured him that
Pavitt and the head of the CPD would personally brief President Bush on the
intelligence.
But Doe soon learned from his own contacts at CIA headquarters that no
such briefing ever took place. And Doe was soon instructed to terminate
his relationship with the asset. After another incident involving
intelligence he had reported on WMD in Iraq that had also conflicted with
the line desired by the Bush administration, CIA management took Doe out
of the field, put him in a headquarters job and denied him the intelligence
medal and promotion to GS-14 that he had been promised, according to his
court filing. The CIA fired Doe without specifying a reason in 2005.
Pavitt did not respond to requests for an interview for this story both at
the Scowcroft Group and, after he retired, at his home in McLean, Virginia.
The intervention by Pavitt to prevent the intelligence from Does Iranian
asset from circulating within the U.S. government came as the intelligence
community was working on the 2001 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on
the Iranian nuclear program. That NIE concluded that Iran was working on a
nuclear weapon, but the finding was far from being clear-cut. Paul Pillar,
the CIAs National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East and North
Africa, who was involved in the 2001 NIE, recalled that the intelligence
community had no direct evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Were talking about things that are a matter of inference, not direct
evidence, Pillar said in an interview with this writer.
Furthermore he recalls that there was a deep divide in the intelligence
community between the technical analysts, who tended to believe that
evidence of uranium enrichment was evidence of a weapons program, and the
Iran specialists, including Pillar himself, who believed Iran had adopted a
hedging strategy and had made no decision in favor or a nuclear weapon.
The technical analysts at the CIAs Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation
and Arms Control (WINPAC), were given the advantage of writing the first
draft not only on Iranian technical capabilities but on Iranian intentions
a subject on which it had no real expertise as well, according to Pillar.
The introduction of the intelligence from a highly credible Iranian
intelligence asset indicating no intention to convert its enriched uranium
into nuclear weapons would arguably have changed the dynamic of the estimate
dramatically. It would have meant that one side could cite hard
intelligence from a valued source in support of its position, while the
other side could cite only their own predisposition.
Pillar confirmed that no such intelligence report was made available to the
analysts for the 2001 NIE. He noted just how rarely the kind of intelligence
that had been obtained by Doe was available for an intelligence estimate.
Analysts deal with a range of stuff, he said, from a tidbit from
technical intelligence to the goldmine well-placed source with an absolutely
credible account, but the latter kind of intelligence almost never comes
up.
After reading this account of the intelligence obtained by the CPD
operative, Pillar said he is not in a position to judge the value of the
intelligence from the Iranian asset, but that the information from the CPD
Iranian asset should have been considered by the NIE team in conjunction
with other sources of information.
That lead to a series of estimates that assumed Iran had a nuclear weapons
program.
In 2004, a large cache of purported Iranian documents showing alleged
Iranian research related to nuclear weapons was turned over to German
intelligence, which the Bush administration claimed came from the laptop of
an Iranian scientist or engineer. But former senior German Foreign Official
Karsten Voigt later revealed to this writer that the whole story was a
fabrication, because the documents had been given those documents by the
Mujahedin-E Khalq, the Iranian opposition group that was known to have
publicized anti-Iran information fed to it by Israels Mossad.
Those documents led directly to another CIA estimate in 2005 asserting the
existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, which in turn paved the way
for all the subsequent estimates all of which were adopted despite the
absence of new evidence of such a program. The CIA swallowed the ruse
repeatedly, because it had already been manipulated by Pavitt.
Operation Merlin is the perfect example of powerful bureaucratic interests
running amok and creating the intelligence necessary to justify their
operations. The net result is that Jeffrey Sterling was unjustly imprisoned
and that the United States has gone down a path of Iran policy that poses
serious and unnecessary threats to American security.
Gareth Porter / Consortium News
Gareth Porter
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist, historian and
author who has covered U.S. wars and interventions in Iraq, Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen and Syria since 2004 and was the 2012
Gareth Porter