Gareth Porter, an award-winning investigative journalist and historian, discusses the suspicious death of an Argentinian prosecutor who claimed Iran was involved in the 1994 Jewish community center bombing in Buenos Aires; and what the trial of CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling has revealed about Operation Merlin and the CIA’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear program.
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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Hey, check it out.
I got Gareth Porter on the line.
He's an independent historian and journalist, among my very favorite.
He's the author of Perils of Dominance about Vietnam and Manufactured Crisis about the Iranian civilian nuclear program, despite what you may have heard to the contrary.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
First of all, let me ask you about the news out of Argentina.
You've done some very important work in the past, at least two or three different articles for Interpret Service.
I think pretty significant, pretty definitively debunking the story that Iran and Hezbollah were behind the bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina back in 1994 and that really it was local Nazis and the cops helped cover it up and this and that.
And yet, all the news is saying that the prosecutor, who heroically tried to defy the wishes of the bureaucracy to tell the real truth that Iran and Hezbollah were behind it, was recently shot in the head and nobody really believes it was a suicide and it's a Washington Post, a conspiracy theory everybody at the Washington Post can love.
And so I wonder what you think about these recent developments.
That's a good question.
I mean, the answer is I do not know what to make of this, except for the reality that I think everyone agrees to, that the justice system in Argentina is so horribly corrupt and politicized that no one will ever believe what comes out of this process.
And that's why, you know, even my closest contact in Buenos Aires, who I just spoke with this morning, who was really a key source for my investigation of the Buenos Aires bombing because he was a part of the team, the legal team that was working on the case for the Jewish Community Center.
He is just as skeptical about the story of suicide as people in the streets.
And so, you know, I take that as a very serious indication that the credibility of the government's apparatus for handling these sorts of cases is so low that it's going to be very difficult to figure out what actually happened.
And you know, honestly, I mean, you know, it's supposed to be a locked bathroom.
You know, how that could be faked, I don't know.
But, you know, the point is that no one believes the official case in Argentina.
That's easy.
You just lock the door and close it behind you, right?
That's not hard.
But, you know, I mean, the point is that except for the political hacks who are, you know, supporters of the present government, basically nobody from left to right, you know, tends to believe the official story about this.
And that's so I want to detach that question from the issue of, you know, the accuracy and the authenticity and integrity of the work that Nisman, that is, the prosecutor Alberto Nisman, you know, did with regard to the investigation and the indictment of the Buenos Aires bombing, which, you know, genuinely was it was a political hack job.
I mean, it was simply not a serious work of a of a prosecutor.
It was extremely political and there was no real evidence cited.
I read the entire 800 page indictment in English and I can tell you that it didn't hold up at all.
It was just there was nothing there.
All right.
Well, speaking of judicial processes, who's Jeffrey Sterling?
Jeffrey Sterling is the former CIA control officer for the CIA asset called who they called Merlin, or they have decided to call Merlin for the purpose of this case, at least.
And and he is, of course, on trial for having allegedly leaked the story, revealed the story of Operation Merlin to James Risen of The New York Times.
And so he's been on trial for how many days now?
Well, this is the second week of the trial.
I believe this is the fifth day, if I remember accurately.
And you've been attending all the I have not attended all of them.
I've attended three of them out of the five this morning.
I stayed home and I'm trying to finish two articles on the on the case.
But but it's but the articles are really less about Jeffrey Sterling than about Operation Merlin.
Well, so I think probably a good part of our audience is familiar, at least with the background of this story.
But again, you know, I guess as you just explained it, funneling some blueprints there and didn't all work out.
Rising from The New York Times got a hold of it.
So what's new?
What have you learned about Operation Merlin from attending the trial?
There's a great deal that's new.
In fact, you know what we learn from the evidence that's been introduced at the trial, what I've learned from the evidence introduced at the trial is that Risen's account of the critical moment, if you will, in the in the operation, when the asset they call Merlin for the first time saw the actual plans for this device, they call a fire set or and there are other names for it.
But but that's the term that was most often used in the trial and in the CIA cables that have been introduced into evidence.
When he saw those those plans, according to Risen, he he said, oh, no, you know, this is this is not right.
They're going to know that he spotted a flaw and that the Iranians would be able to therefore spot the flaw as well and and use the device to create a nuclear weapon.
That's really not the way it happened.
And this is corroborated by not just the CIA cables, but by the testimony of both Merlin and his handlers.
That what actually happened was that he spotted a discrepancy between the so-called schematics or the actual physical plan of of the device and the list of parts that was accompanying it.
In other words, there were parts listed that were not shown in the schematic and he immediately spotted that.
And he what he was afraid of was not that the Iranians were going to be able to use this device necessarily, you know, to to create a nuclear weapon, but rather that he was going to be found out that that his cover story would be become obvious that he was really not, you know, somebody who was representing a bunch of Russian emigres or former Russian scientists who who were the ones who designed this.
And he was trying to peddle this to make some money.
So, you know, that's a that's a bit of a different storyline than than the way it was presented by Risen.
And and I'm not in a position to try to explain how that happened, but but he clearly got a misimpression that he was he was misinformed.
He did not have enough information to to get that detail right.
But but the story that's actually told in the in the in the declassified CIA cables, which are an extraordinary new source for CIA covert, a major CIA covert operation.
Well, I don't want to call it a major operation because there wasn't that much to it, but a significant politically significant CIA covert operation.
You know, what we learn from from these cables tells a story that is, in my view, just as damaging or really more damaging than the story that Risen told.
All right.
Now, hold it right there, because the music's about to start playing and we've got to take this break.
But it's Gareth Porter, everybody, from Interpress Service.
That's IPS News Dotnet, author of Manufactured Crisis on the Iran nuclear program.
And he's talking about the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, who's accused of leaking the Merlin story to James Risen about the U.S. government, the CIA giving nuclear weapons blueprints to the Iranians.
Sorta.
Back in just a sec.
Hey, Al Scott here.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
And I'm sorry, I screw that up.
Jeopardy music playing on me and everything.
That's the whole point.
No, it wasn't nuclear bomb blueprints.
It was just a fire set.
It was just one small part of the thing.
Anyway, I didn't mean to overstate that on the way out to the break.
But the point is, you're saying that the new narrative that you've picked up from this trial quite differently are quite different from James Risen story of the Merlin plot is just as instructive.
How's that?
Well, it's hardly it's difficult to know where to begin because there's so many things about this operation that are so outrageous.
But I want to begin with what seems to me to be the biggest implication of the story.
What I learned from reading the CIA cables and putting together that information with the work that I've already done on the faulty intelligence that has been put out about the Iranian nuclear program almost from the beginning is that this operation actually had the effect of distorting the the official assessment of the CIA and the intelligence community about the Iranian nuclear program, not just once, but actually twice.
The first time that it happened was towards the beginning of not the beginning of the planning for the operation.
But when the the counterproliferation division, which was the office of the CIA that actually dreamed this scheme up, first got the CIA to really sponsor the operation with the White House, with the Clinton administration.
And bear in mind that this operation could not take place without a presidential finding, according to legislation which was passed in 1991, which formalized a practice that had begun even before that after Iran-Contra.
No covert operation can take place without a presidential finding.
And in order to get the finding, you have to go through a rather elaborate process.
And so, of course, the CPD needed the CIA brass to support it politically with the White House and with the Clinton administration.
When that happened, when they finally got that support, of course, that meant that the CIA was in a position where it had to be telling the Clinton administration that it believed that that Iran had a nuclear weapons program, because otherwise there was no rationale for this operation.
That was the key rationale for carrying out this phony, this effort to sell the Iranians on a phony fire set.
And the fact is that until that moment in 1999, the the CIA was not saying that Iran had a nuclear weapons program.
It was saying, well, we we suspect they intend to do that, but but they could not say and they would not say that Iran had a nuclear weapons program.
But the moment they embraced the covert operation and supported it with the White House, that changed.
And I've been able to pin that down now.
And that's one of the stories that I'm going to be writing about this.
I mean, that's part of one of the stories.
So so that's the first time that the that this operation became the reason for the CIA to actually change its assessment, its official assessment of the Iranian nuclear program.
The second time actually was after the operation was carried out, but refused to die because even after this fiasco of Merlin going to Vienna and being so afraid to encounter an Iranian official that he never actually entered the Iranian mission.
And there's more to be said about that.
But but after that was all finished in March of 2000, the program continued.
And they were they were hoping, of course, that Iran was going to somehow want to to to contact Merlin.
And they never did.
But they were even talking about extending the program to another country, which has been unnamed.
But but it's recounted in one of the CIA cables.
And so by 2001, I mean, apparently this this whole Operation Merlin was still going on.
And so when the CIA undertook its 2001 national intelligence estimate on the Iranian nuclear program, it was still in the situation of justifying this Operation Merlin.
So guess what happened?
They not only came out with an NIE that said that that Iran had a nuclear nuclear weapons program.
They also suppressed in 2001 very important human intelligence that had been acquired by a very talented undercover operative for the CIA.
And I tell the story in my book about this.
They suppressed the intelligence that Iran never intended to weaponize, had no intention of weaponizing.
And of course, that would have completely scotched the rationale for Operation Merlin.
And they couldn't let that happen.
So wait, wait, let me make sure I understand you right here, Garrett.
You're telling me that they started the program in the first place to see what they could find out about the Iranian nuclear program, kind of infiltrate it, build that up so they could know whether or not the Iranians were making nuclear weapons.
But in order to justify the program, they had to claim they were making that.
They already knew they were making nuclear weapons in order to justify doing going to these lengths to infiltrate it.
And then they ended up pretending that they didn't know, outright pretending and denying information that said that they don't have a nuclear weapons program just in order to continue the operation to find out whether they do or not.
To continue it and to justify the fact that it was carried out, of course, but let me just even though it never did work.
Exactly, exactly.
But there's just one one point here that I want to clarify.
OK, and that is that the initial objective of the of Operation Merlin was twofold.
And I mean, this was always from the very beginning.
There were two purposes.
The first one was precisely what you said.
It was to try to find out what the Iranians knew and what they were doing in regard to their nuclear program.
I mean, in other words, it was in a way a backhanded admission that they really didn't know what they were doing.
But the second part of it, which was always, you know, the the the thing that they were most interested in was was this fire set that they that they thought they were so clever about getting a national laboratory to create.
And it was this it was this technology that really drove Operation Merlin from the very beginning.
This was the big thing.
This is what they really wanted.
And of course, that what we know in order to to actually justify to the White House that they were going to turn over a fire set that supposedly the Iranians couldn't make work.
And it took a long time for them to get all the official confirmation and official document that said, no, the Iranians could never make this work.
They had then to to be able to say, yes, we believe that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.
So that that's why, you know, it was it was the technology that was at the center of Operation Merlin that really drove the CIA for the first time to say that Iran does indeed have a nuclear weapons program.
Garrett, let me ask one more question into the break here, if that's all right.
And that is that Risen has said that I believe I'm paraphrasing him correctly here.
Part of the reason he thought it was so important to go ahead with this story, even though Connelly's rice and everybody came down on The New York Times and had them not print it.
But the reason he wanted to put it in his book anyway was because he had seen the administration build a case for war against Iraq and he didn't want to see them do that again.
And it looked like they were building a case for a nuclear weapons program in Iran in order to justify the next stage in the, you know, boiling cauldron plan there.
And that he decided that, you know, if they were going to do it, it would be important to point out that the information isn't accurate.
If, in fact, he can, which, in fact, he writes.
And I don't know Risen's record on this, but he claims at least that he was really good on Iraq's WMD in the back pages of The New York Times back then.
Well, I assume that that's correct.
And of course, it's as I'm sure you have countless times on your show discussed.
It is absolutely true that the neoconservatives in the Bush administration precisely had the intention of using false intelligence, the false idea that Iran had a nuclear program to justify the use of military force against Iran.
And in 2006, when Risen published his book, that was still very much a live issue.
It was only as we've discussed in the past to 2007, 2008, that that the plan to somehow engage Iran militarily finally fell apart and was never was never revived.
All right.
Well, with that, I'll leave you.
But thanks so much for coming on the show.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Thanks.
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