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Bibi Lied to UN in 2012, Likely to Lie to US Next Week

February 24, 2015/9 Comments/in Foreign Policy, WMD /by Jim White

Look carefully. Are his lips moving?

Benjamin Netanyahu overstated Iran’s nuclear technology in 2012 when he used his bomb cartoon in an address to the United Nations. The Guardian and Al Jazeera have released a trove of documents relating to Iran’s nuclear program and one of the key documents was prepared by Mossad to brief South Africa just a few short weeks after the famous speech. From The Guardian:

Binyamin Netanyahu’s dramatic declaration to world leaders in 2012 that Iran was about a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by his own secret service, according to a top-secret Mossad document.

/snip/

Brandishing a cartoon of a bomb with a red line to illustrate his point, the Israeli prime minister warned the UN in New York that Iran would be able to build nuclear weapons the following year and called for action to halt the process.

But in a secret report shared with South Africa a few weeks later, Israel’s intelligence agency concluded that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons”. The report highlights the gulf between the public claims and rhetoric of top Israeli politicians and the assessments of Israel’s military and intelligence establishment.

As The Guardian notes, although Bibi’s darling little cartoon makes little to no distinction between the steps of enriching uranium to 20% and enriching it to the 90%+ needed for a bomb, the Mossad document (pdf) states that Iran “is not ready” to enrich to the higher levels needed for a bomb:

Despite that clear information that Mossad surely already had at the time of the UN speech (h/t Andrew Fishman for the link), Netanyahu chose to portray Iran as ready to zip through the final stage of enrichment:

Now they’re well into the second stage. And by next spring, at most by next summer, at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there, it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks, before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.

So Netanyahu described a step that the Mossad described Iran as not even ready to start and turned it into something Iran was eager to accomplish in a few weeks. Simply put, that is a lie.

Of further note in the document is information relating to the heavy water reactor under construction at Arak. Although it doesn’t appear that Netanyahu mentioned it in the UN speech, it often is portrayed as another rapid route to a nuclear weapon for Iran, because, when finally functioning, it could produce plutonium that could be used in a bomb. Mossad found, however, that Iran was still a couple of years away from having the reactor functioning. Further, Mossad realized that Iran needs a fuel reprocessing facility (that it does not have) in order to use the plutonium in a bomb:

It should also be noted that those two years have elapsed and the reactor still has not been powered up. Further, there are proposals that the reactor can be modified to make it produce a dramatically lower amount of plutonium.

These documents have been released with very important timing. As I noted last week, Netanyahu aims to destroy the P5+1 negotiations with Iran. By pointing out his lies two years ago, we should be in a better position to see through whatever obfuscation he delivers next week. But with a new air of bipartisany-ness, to his visit, don’t look for Washington politicians to be the ones to point out his next round of lies.

Postscript: I am significantly behind on my homework. I owe Marcy a careful reading of the technical documents from the Sterling trial and need to follow up more fully on the suggestions that false documents (including the Laptop of Death?) were planted with Iran for the IAEA to discover. Now with this new trove of documents and the looming date of Netanyahu’s visit, I need to get busy (on something other than planting blueberries)!

What Was the CIA Really Doing with Merlin by 2003?

February 21, 2015/8 Comments/in Leak Investigations, WMD /by emptywheel

On June 26, 2003, CIA posted nuclear blueprints written in English on its website, claiming they were Iraqi.

Bloomberg is reporting that the exhibits released in the Jeffrey Sterling case may lead the UN to reassess some of the evidence they’ve been handed about Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors in Vienna will probably review intelligence they received about Iran as a result of the revelations, said the two diplomats who are familiar with the IAEA’s Iran file and asked not to be named because the details are confidential. The CIA passed doctored blueprints for nuclear-weapon components to Iran in February 2000, trial documents have shown.

“This story suggests a possibility that hostile intelligence agencies could decide to plant a ‘smoking gun’ in Iran for the IAEA to find,” said Peter Jenkins, the U.K.’s former envoy to the Vienna-based agency. “That looks like a big problem.”

Importantly, this story comes from two IAEA officials who are familiar with the evidence against Iran, and therefore would know if aspects of the Merlin caper resemble things they’ve been handed by the CIA, almost certainly including the Laptop of Death laundered through MEK to the CIA in 2004.

You’ll recall that immediately upon hearing some of the sketchy details of the Merlin caper I thought of the Laptop of Death and a dubious tale, told by Iraqi nuclear scientist Mahdi Obeidi, involving the blueprints posted above. And I’ve only got more questions about the operation given what we learned since that day.

Here are some of those questions.

Why did CIA immediately turn to dealing Iraq nuclear blueprints after such a clusterfuck on Merlin’s first operation — and why wasn’t Sterling involved?
Why did both Bob S and Merlin tell the FBI in 2006 that Sterling was just a marginal player in the operation?
Did the program get more sensitive over time?
Why is the government claiming this part of James Risen’s State of War is as sensitive than his exposure of a massive illegal wiretap program?
Did the kind of deception involved change?
What was CIA intending with its Iran approach in 2003, and what really happened with it?
What explains the weird reception for Jeffrey Sterling’s complaint at the Senate Intelligence Committee?
Why was Bill Duhnke the top suspect?

Why did CIA immediately turn to dealing Iraq nuclear blueprints after such a clusterfuck on Merlin’s first operation — and why wasn’t Sterling involved?

As I have laid out, less than a month after Bob S deemed Merlin unable “to follow even the simplest and most explicit direction” (Exhibit 44), he and one other case officer who was apparently not Jeffrey Sterling (though Sterling was still nominally Merlin’s handler) approached Merlin about repeating the operation with another country (Exhibit 45). David Swanson has compellingly shown that that country was almost certainly Iraq. That operation, however, would be “rather more adventurous” than the Iranian op that Merlin had already proven so inadequate to.

I think it possible they bypassed Sterling because his Equal Opportunity complaints had already so soured his relationship with the CIA they had it in for him already. But I do find it interesting that the transition to Stephen Y happened right as they moved onto this “more adventurous” operation (and Stephen Y handled Merlin through this 2003 leak).

Why did both Bob S and Merlin tell the FBI in 2006 that Sterling was just a marginal player in the operation?

That Bob S was bypassing Sterling in April 2000, over a month before Merlin got a new case officer, also raises questions about why he and Merlin, in what seems remarkably similar testimony to the FBI in 2006, started saying that Sterling was not a central player in the operation. Bob S was doing 70% of the thinking on the operation, he reportedly told the FBI in an February 28, 2006 interview, Sterling just 30%. Sterling served only as a “middleman” editing his letters, Merlin told the FBI in an interview within a month after Bob S’. “The details of this operation were a wild forest to Sterling,” Merlin told the FBI in the same interview (though when asked on cross, he said he meant Sterling didn’t understand the technical details).

Why were Bob S and Merlin both so intent in the months after Risen’s book first appeared on insisting that Sterling’s understanding of the operation was incomplete?

Did the program get more sensitive over time?

Everything introduced at the trial treats the Merlin operation as a clandestine information collection operation. Yet a heavily redacted filing submitted in support of having Retired Colonel Pat Lang testify and other details from the trial suggest the operation got more sensitive as it went along. Like the contemporaneous cables, the filing suggests the operation was clandestine. “The [redacted] operation was conducted as a [redacted] clandestine intelligence operation.” But it also makes it clear that the government was trying to argue that this clandestine operation was covert. Note, for example, the discussion of CIA “electing” to notify Congress, obtain approval from the CIA Director, and … something redacted. That suggests the government went through some or all of the motions of the same kind of notice required under a Finding, without it being a formally covert operation. Risen may have been trying to get at this question, too, when he asked Bill Harlow’s counterpart somewhere (this wouldn’t have been at NSC, but it might have been at Sandia Lab), “he knew that President Clinton had approved the plan…but wanted to know if it had been reapproved by President Bush” (Exhibit 106; note, this appears to have been a seeded question, and not one that Sterling would have reason to pitch).

But two things suggest the program got, formally, more sensitive, perhaps even escalating to a covert operation that the US would want to deny. First, there are the two “facts” mentioned in the Lang filing that had not been shared with the defense, even though Lang was purportedly read into all the evidence pertaining to the Sterling defense. Then there’s an odd exchange that happened with Condi Rice. Eric Olshan asked “did everyone at the NSC know about this specific classified information?” (remember, within weeks, Bob S would tell the FBI more than 90 people were briefed into this compartment). Defense attorney Barry Pollack objected that the question was beyond the protective order. But Olshan insisted it wasn’t, and Judge Brinkema judged that “the government is very sensitive to the protective order and I doubt they would go beyond it.” The suggestion was that very few people at NSC were read into the precise details of the program when Condi talked NYT out of publishing in 2003.

All of this leads me to believe that the program had gotten much more sensitive between the time Sterling was booted off the program in 2000 and the time Risen was reporting the story in 2003.

If so, why?

Why is the government claiming this part of James Risen’s State of War is as sensitive than his exposure of a massive illegal wiretap program?

The program would have had to have gotten more sensitive over time, if any of the implications about the relative sensitivity of the chapters of Risen’s book — including the series of witnesses claiming Chapter 9 was the only one they read (though jurisdictional issues explain some of this, given that Risen’s NSA chapter came under MD’s purview) are to be believed.

After all, elsewhere in Risen’s book, he exposed a massive illegal wiretapping program that directly contravened FISA. He exposed a program that — we now know –directly implicated the Attorney General and Vice President in criminal wiretapping.

Yet the CIA and DOJ want us to believe that this program — described in contemporaneous CIA cables as an effort to give Iran a blueprint to find out if they wanted it — was more sensitive than that massive illegal program? (Admittedly this may all stem from the CIA thinking it is the center of the universe.)

Did the kind of deception involved change?

Those questions all make me wonder whether the kind of deception — and the audience — changed, if the project got more sensitive.

AP’s Matt Lee: US Officials Say Netanyahu Trying to Destroy Iran Negotiations

February 19, 2015/18 Comments/in Foreign Policy, WMD /by Jim White

I haven’t chimed in yet on the political drama that has been building around the approaching deadline in the P5+1 negotiations with Iran and the massive breach of protocol by John Boehner in inviting Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress just before the deadline (and just before elections in Israel). More recent rumblings on that front had the US already stating Obama would not meet with Netanyahu, along with suggestions that both John Kerry and Joe Biden are likely to be out of the country when Netanyahu is in Washington. Further, hints were coming out that the US is becoming increasingly irritated with Bibi over his leaking of information that the US has shared on how negotiations with Iran are proceeding.

AP’s Matt Lee shed much more light on these issues yesterday. He forced State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki to confirm that the US has now started withholding “classified” parts of the negotiations from Israel. Lee went beyond what he was able to pry out during Psaki’s briefing, producing confirmation that the US now feels that Netanyahu is determined to prevent any final deal between the P5+1 and Iran:

The Obama administration said Wednesday it is withholding from Israel some sensitive details of its nuclear negotiations with Iran because it is worried that Israeli government officials have leaked information to try to scuttle the talks — and will continue to do so.

In extraordinary admissions that reflect increasingly strained ties between the U.S. and Israel, the White House and State Department said they were not sharing everything from the negotiations with the Israelis and complained that Israeli officials had misrepresented what they had been told in the past. Meanwhile, senior U.S. officials privately blamed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself for “changing the dynamic” of previously robust information-sharing by politicizing it.

Working behind the scenes, Lee was able to get unnamed officials to fill in more detail:

But while Earnest and Psaki said the limitations on information sharing were longstanding, U.S. officials more directly involved in the talks said the decision to withhold the most sensitive details of the negotiations dated back only several weeks.

Those officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said the administration believes Netanyahu, who is facing a March 17 election at home, has made a political decision to try to destroy the negotiations rather than merely insist on a good deal. This, they said, had led to politically motivated leaks from Israeli officials and made it impossible to continue to share all details of the talks, particularly as Netanyahu has not backed down on his vow to argue against a nuclear deal when he speaks to Congress.

And here’s where it gets really interesting. Pushing on the issue of just what Israel has been leaking, Lee has this:

Neither Earnest nor Psaki would discuss the details of the leaks, but senior U.S. officials have expressed consternation with reports in the Israeli media as well as by The Associated Press about the number of centrifuges Iran might be able to keep under a potential agreement. Centrifuges are used to enrich uranium and diplomats familiar with the talks have said Iran may be allowed to keep more of them in exchange for other concessions under current proposals that are on the table.

Oh my. There is only one person we could be talking about when it gets to leaks from Israel on anything to do with the Iranian nuclear program. That would be none other than George Jahn, noted transcriber of Israeli leaks since they whole debate began. And just two days ago, Jahn regaled us with a piece titled “Good or bad Iran nuke deal? Israel vs the US administration“. And just look what detailed information about centrifuge numbers Jahn managed to obtain: Read more →

DOJ Doesn’t Want You To Think CIA Doctored Evidence in the Sterling Trial

February 17, 2015/8 Comments/in Leak Investigations, WMD /by emptywheel

On October 4, 2011 (just before Jeffrey Sterling’s trial was originally due to start) the government submitted a motion that, in part, sought to prevent Sterling from presenting “any evidence or any argument that the CIA has manipulated documents.” The motion presented the crazypants idea that the CIA might alter or destroy documents as part of a conspiracy theory that the CIA wanted to blame Sterling for leaks others had made.

There is absolutely no evidence that the CIA was out to get the defendant, or that the CIA orchestrated some grand conspiracy to blame the defendant for the leaks to Risen. Any arguments or comments that the CIA engages in misconduct or has manipulated documents or evidence in order to blame the defendant for the disclosure of national defense information appearing in Chapter 9 lacks any merit and will needlessly send the Court, the parties, and the jury down an endless Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole.

Sterling’s lawyers were nonplussed by this demand. “Documents will be admitted if they are authenticated and otherwise admissible.”

Now, if DOJ were writing about most governmental agencies, you might interpret this request as no more than prosecutorial caution, an effort to exclude any hint of the other things the same motion tried to exclude — things like selective prosecution.

Except the CIA is not most governmental agencies.

Indeed, it is an agency with a long and storied history of serially destroying evidence. The Eastern District of VA US Attorney’s Office knows this, too, because they have so much experience reviewing cases where CIA has destroyed evidence and then deciding they can’t charge anyone for doing so.

And while I don’t expect Judge Leonie Brinkema of CIA’s own judicial district to therefore deny the CIA the presumption of regularity, I confess DOJ’s concern that Sterling might suggest CIA had doctored or destroyed evidence makes me pretty interested in what evidence they might have worried he would claim CIA doctored or destroyed, because with the CIA, I’ve learned, it’s usually a safer bet to assume they have doctored or destroyed evidence.

Especially given the two enormous evidentiary holes in the government’s case:

The letter to the Iranians Merlin included with his newspaper-wrapped nuclear blueprints
A report of Merlin’s activities in Vienna

As I lay out below, CIA’s story about the letter to the Iranians is sketchy enough, though the government’s ultimate story about it is at least plausible. But their story about Merlin’s non-existent trip report is sketchier still. I think the evidence suggests the latter, at least, once did exist. But when it became inconvenient — perhaps because it provided proof that Bob S lied in the cables he wrote boasting of Mission Accomplished — it disappeared.

But not before a version of it got saved — or handed over to — James Risen.

If I’m right, one of the underlying tensions in this whole affair is that a document appeared, verbatim, in Risen’s book that proved the CIA (and Bob S personally) was lying about the success of the mission and also lying about how justifiable it would be to have concerns about the operation.

The CIA and DOJ went to great lengths in this trial to claim that the operation was really very careful. But they never even tried to explain why the biggest evidence that it was anything but has disappeared.

Merlin’s letter to the Iranians

I’ve noted before that the FBI admits it never had a copy of the letter the government convicted Sterling of leaking to James Risen. “You don’t have a copy of the letter” that appears in Risen’s book, Edward MacMahon asked Special Agent Ashley Hunt. “Not in that exact form,” she responded.

Nevertheless, Count 2, Count 3, and Count 5 all pertain to a letter that appears in Risen’s book, the letter FBI never found. The letter appears at ¶¶ 58 to 63 of the exhibit version of the chapter in question.

To be sure, FBI did obtain versions of this letter, as cables introduced at trial reflect. The first iteration appears in Exhibit 30 (a cable describing a November 4, 1999 meeting), and discussions of the revisions process appears in Exhibit 33 (a cable describing a December 14, 1999 meeting). Exhibit 35 — dated January 12, 2000 and describing a January 10 meeting between Sterling and Merlin — provides the closest version to what appears in Risen’s book, in what is called (in Exhibit 36) the fifth iteration of the letter. The only difference (besides the signature line, presumably, according to the CIA’s currently official story) is the January 12, 2000 cable, based on a meeting that took place 7 weeks before Merlin left for Vienna, said this:

So I decided to offer this absolutely real and valuable basic information for [Iranian subject 2], about this possible event.

Whereas in Risen’s book that passage appears this way:

So I decided to offer this absolutely real and valuable basic information for free now and you can evaluate that. Also I sent e-mail to inform [the Iranian professor] about this possible event.

The Merlin Operation: Bob S’ 70% Thinking

February 15, 2015/8 Comments/in Leak Investigations, WMD /by emptywheel

When he cross-examined the Merlin Operation manager Bob S at Jeffrey Sterling’s trial, defense attorney Barry Pollock asked whether Bob S thought he was doing 70% of the thinking on the operation. When Bob S denied that, Pollock reminded Bob S of his February 28, 2006 FBI testimony, where he had said he was doing 70% of the thinking to Sterling’s 30%. “This was shortly after publication of book that revealed the whole operation,” Bob S explained his earlier comment. “I was being ungenerous.”

Similarly, when he cross-examined Merlin himself, defense attorney Edward MacMahon asked whether he had told the FBI in March 2006 that Sterling (whom elsewhere Merlin called “lazy” and “irresponsible” while denying earlier statements he had made about Sterling’s race) was just a middleman between Merlin and Bob S who helped prepare the letters Merlin would send out to Iran.

MacMahon: You, you told the FBI that Sterling merely acted as a middleman — and this is in 2006 — as a middleman between you and Bob to prepare letters to be included in the package of technical documents, right?

Merlin: Some kind of, yes?

MacMahon: So the person that was making the final say as to what went in any letter you sent as far as you knew was Bob, right?

Merlin: I, I don’t know what is hierarchical.

I raise these comments — both apparently made only after the publication of Risen’s book — because of some oddities in the CIA cables documenting the operation.

Bob S’ 70%

To some degree, the cables that cover the period when Sterling handled Merlin do make it clear the degree to which Bob S was running this operation, and Sterling was just holding Merlin’s hand as he tried to reach out to Iranians.

Over the period in question (the first meeting when Sterling met alone with Merlin was January 12, 1999; he handed over Merlin to Stephen Y on May 24, 2000 (though it appears Bob S had already excluded Sterling from at least one meeting, as noted below), most of the cables written by Sterling deal with the tedium of Merlin’s pay and include — always verbatim — Merlin’s correspondence with the Iranians. Sterling’s cables often ask for input from Langley on Merlin’s drafts; he expresses some concern about the lag during spring 1999 when CIA was getting export control approval for the program.

Then, in the May 13, 1999 cable (Exhibit 24), as Merlin seems to be getting more interest from Iranian Institution 4 (in spite of his having sent his resume and business proposition letter separately), Sterling notes that Bob S will need to inform Merlin where the program heads from here. “[M] should expect a visit from Mr. S who will provide an update on the definite direction of the project. [M] understands that there are aspects of the project that require certain approvals beyond the purview of C/O.”

The next cable (Exhibit 25) describes the May 25, 1999 meeting at which Bob S, with Sterling in attendance, told Merlin that the target of this operation would be Iranian Subject 1. This plan actually dated back to December 18, 1998 (Exhibit 16). In that cable, Bob S referenced a November 20, 1998 cable (not included as an exhibit nor apparently turned over to FBI as evidence) that apparently described IS1’s “new public position” for which he would be “arriving in Vienna in Mid-December to assume his new duties” (one of Bob S’ later cables would identify IS1 as the Mission Manager in Vienna). But it wasn’t until May of the following year when Bob S (and not Sterling) instructed Merlin that he should start finding ways to reach out to IS1. Note, one paragraph of that cable — following on a discussion of IS1 — is redacted.

At the next meeting — on June 17, 1999 (Exhibit 27) — Merlin told Sterling that he was having problems locating IS1, though some of this discussion is redacted.

Then, in spite of the indication that Sterling had tentatively scheduled a meeting for July 5, 1999, we see no further meeting reports until November 5, 1999. (Though on July 23, 1999, someone applied for reauthorization to use Merlin as an asset; Exhibit 29.) It appears that only one cable from this period, which would have been numbered C2975-2976, was turned over during the investigation but not entered into evidence, if the Bates numbers on the cables are any indication. Given the report in the 11/5/1999 cable that Merlin had gone AWOL, it’s likely things were already going south between him and Sterling. From that period forward, Bob S either soloed or attended most meetings with Sterling and Merlin, with one very notable exception.

The exception was the January 10, 2000 meeting (Exhibit 35) at which Sterling informed Merlin CIA would withhold money Merlin believed — rightly, it appears — he was owed. Given that Sterling had already (on November 18, 1999) unsuccessfully requested a transfer out of NY, where he believed he was being harassed for his race, it’s hard not to wonder whether they deliberately sent Sterling out to deliver the bad news, anticipating they’d soon be giving Merlin a new case officer within short order anyway.

All of that is to say that, in spite of the several ways that Sterling appears to have managed Merlin with more professionalism than his prior case officer and arguably even than Bob S, Bob S was running the show, which includes making key decisions and at key moments, dictating how the reporting on the operation appeared.

Two versions of November 18, 1999

To see how this manifested, it’s worth comparing the two cables recording (in part or in whole) the November 18, 1999 meeting between Bob S, Sterling, and Merlin.

The first version (Exhibit 31), written on November 24 by Bob S from Langley and addressed to NY and Vienna — Office #5 — for information, appears under the heading “Iranian Subject 1 is in Vienna” and references a cable from Vienna (this cable, too, appears not to have been turned over as evidence). As such, the cable describes the results of the meeting with Merlin in context of the arrival of IS1 in Vienna, using the “good news” offered by Merlin as an opportunity to flesh out the plan for the blueprint hand off in Vienna. Presumably, paragraph 2 of the cable (which is redacted) lays out the news on IS1’s presence in Vienna. Bob S then presents all the good news involving Merlin in that context with a flourish.

During an 18 November Meeting with [M] Officer [Jeffrey Sterling] and HQS CPD Officer [Mr. S.], [M] provided two pieces of good news. The first was that he has obtained a new [Country A] passport (which he showed C/O’s) and will soon apply for an Austrian visa. His possession of a Green Card should facilitate the issuance of the latter. The second and more significant development was an e-mail dated 7 November which [M] had received from [Iranian Institution 1] Professor [Iranian Subject 2 IS2). [IS2] said he had been going through old e-mailsl and found a 1998 message from [M]. He asked [M] to respond and provide more information about himself. [M] did so in a generic fashion. This contact from [IS2] provides an excellent opportunity to ease [M]’s (and his disinformation packet’s) way in to [Iranian Subject 1 (IS1)] who until recently was also [at Iranian Institution 1] and is still featured on its website.

He then goes on to lay out what he presents as a plan crafted with the help of folks at HQ and Sterling (remember, this was written from Langley, not NY). That plan includes recognition that Merlin is “no one’s idea of a clandestine operative;” to compensate for that, Bob S envisions (resources willing) a Sterling trip to Vienna so he can help provide clear instructions to Merlin as well as Mrs. Merlin traveling to Vienna with the scientist because she was instrumental in his cooperation with the CIA in the first place and is a calming influence.

4) Shortly before he prepares to launch in Vienna (see below RE timing and mechanics) we will have [M] advise [IS2] via e-mail that he is going on vacation in Vienna with his wife and will stop by the Iranian IAEA Mission there with a packet of interesting information for [IS2], asking IS2 to alert the mission to expect [M]. When he shows up at the mission, [M] will have the packet containing the [CP1] disinformation in an envelope addressed to [IS2] and will ask to see [IS1] to make sure the package gets delivered to the right man. [IS1] is likely to acknowledge that he too is from [Iranian Institution 1] and that he knows [IS2]. This will let [M] plant his story (of repeated efforts to find a receptive audience in Iran) more firmly and give the Iranians a chance to see that [M] is indeed a Russian and a nuclear weapons veteran. Even if [IS1] does not see [M] presenting a package with a known addressee at a prestigious Iranian [redacted] institution can only help advance our plan to have the information taken seriously.

5) Per discussion at HQS and with [Sterling], we believe it best to send [M] to Vienna with his wife in early January (after the Austrian Christmas pause and the Islamic holiday of Ramadan, which begins on 9 December and ends on 8 January) to make the approach to [IS1]. His wife, [Mrs M], was instrumental in getting him to cooperate with [CIA] in the first place and is a definite calming influence on him. [M] is no one’s idea of a clandestine operative and we believe it wiser to refrain from meeting him while he is in Vienna. That said, he needs to be thoroughly prepared. One option – contingent on available resources – would be for [Mr S] and [Sterling to] visit Vienna during the first week of the New Year [redacted] so he can given the rather differently-oriented [M] as much concrete detail about where he has to go and what he has to do as possible. [1 line redacted]

Spoiler alert: while Mrs. Merlin did travel to Vienna with her husband (and probably had a big role in even getting him to go and — my suspicion is — had a role in the operational security measures Merlin took which helped doom the operation, though neither she nor the CIA would ever admit that), Sterling never did make the trip, and Bob S’ instructions — which Bob S’ habit of flourish aside were probably also deficient because he was too familiar with the city — ended up being one of the problems with the trip. It’s worth mentioning, too, that according to Bob S’ testimony, he made several trips to case out Iran’s IAEA mission in the months leading up to the operation and one of his cables describes having done so too.

Now compare Bob S’ cable with Sterling’s (Exhibit 31), written on December 1, 1999, a week after Bob S’ cable and 12 days after the actual meeting (it’s probably worth noting that on the very same day this meeting took place, Sterling asked for a transfer out of CIA’s New York office, and within 5 days his boss was scolding him for having done so), and addressed to Langley and — like Bob S’ cable — Vienna, for information.

Sterling saves his enthusiasm over the outreach to Merlin from IS2 for his last paragraph.

Feel this is a fortuitous turn of events for the operation, as a preliminary thought, the contact from [IS2] can be exploited to either provide another person to present the material to, or somehow utilize this contact to provide a more definite entree to [IS1] for [M].

Curiously, that paragraph seemed to show little awareness of Bob S’ extensive plans for how to exploit the IS2 contact to provide “a more definite entree to IS1,” even though Sterling references the cable Bob S wrote.

Aside from the first, action, paragraph in Sterling’s cable (which is redacted), the sole apparent explanation for why he wrote a cable after Bob S had already written one reporting all the same news from the meeting as Sterling would seems to be the inclusion of the verbatim content of the outreach from IS2.

During the meeting, [M] mentioned that he had received the following email from [Iranian Subject 2 (IS2)] from [Iranian Institution 1] dated 7 Nov:

Dear [M]

I was reviewing my old mails. I found you last year email. I want to know more about you. Could you let me have more information regarding your work, your hobby, your interest, etc?

Regards,

[Iranian Subject 2]

[IS2]’s email address is [redacted]

It’s not surprising Sterling included the verbatim email — he always did that in cables he wrote solo. It’s just rather curious that Sterling submitted his “preliminary thoughts” — along with the verbatim language — so long after Bob S had rolled out his plan.

Prelude to a clusterfuck

The next cable (Exhibit 33), dated December 16, 1999 and describing the December 14 meeting between Sterling, Merlin, and Bob S, reflects continued uncertainty about how to get Merlin to Vienna in such a way that he didn’t screw up the operation. “[M] has and will be provided with enough information so that any concerns he will have about finding the building should be alleviated,” the cable optimistically predicted. At that point, however, it wasn’t getting lost that had Merlin worried. It was that his wife would find out what he had been up to (though she almost certainly already knew).

When asked, [M] expressed as his main concern actually carrying the documents on his person when he travels to Vienna. [M]’s preference is that his wife ([Mrs. M]) not know any specifics about his work for the CIA. He feels certain that she will discover the package and have many questions that he would prefer not to have to answer.

Note that the action paragraph of this cable is redacted.

Merlin’s Testimony: “It’s Lie,” “I Don’t Remember,” and “I Don’t Know”

February 13, 2015/1 Comment/in Leak Investigations, WMD /by emptywheel

I’ve finally gotten a hold of the transcript for Merlin’s testimony in the Jeffrey Sterling trial (working on getting something I can post; he was apparently difficult to understand, in any case, so not even people present understood all this).

Reading it, it’s clear why the government has claimed, going back to 2011, that Merlin’s imminent death from cancer meant he should not testify. I don’t dismiss the gravity of his health problems (and also note that he is apparently on pain killers, including Oxycontin, which may have affected his testimony here). But he was a terrible witness, and pretty clearly lying on a great number of accounts.

But I’m interested in specifically how he denied things that appear either in James Risen’s book or in CIA cables.

It’s lie

About two things, Merlin was adamant. The first is the same thing that really elicited the Merlins’ ire when they read Risen’s book: the report that they were defectors.

Trump: It says you defected to the United States. Is that accurate?

Merlin: It’s lie.

Note, given the timing and the claim that Merlin might have been involved with the Soviet Union’s 1980s-era nukes, I entertain the possibility that they defected to some other country before moving to the US in the early 1990s. That’s true, especially, because when Merlin got his passport renewed in 1999, he did so from a country the name of which got substituted (meaning it probably wasn’t Russia; the original appears to be 9 characters long, so Ukrainian is a possibility), though it could just be a successor state. Whatever the case, the timing of the Merlins’ arrival in the US and their certainty with which the government repeatedly said they did not defect convince me that Merlin is correct here: they were not defectors.

Similarly, Merlin is equally adamant that the description in Risen’s book that Merlin tried to warn the Iranians of “flaws” in the blueprints he handed them was not true.

Trump: In paragraph 64, the book represents on page 205 that the letter was warning the Iranians as carefully as you could that there was a flaw somewhere in the blueprints. … Was that the purpose of the letter?

Merlin: It’s, it’s lie. [Later] I don’t see flaws here. It was just incomplete information.

While it’s certainly true that Merlin’s and the government’s understanding of the significance of the incomplete information in the blueprints was very different — elsewhere Merlin claimed that a real fireset schematic was “100 times more complicated than it was shown in drawing and the schematics” — it is also true that Merlin appears not to have known about the deliberate flaws US scientists put in the blueprints. So he is correct that the representation in Risen’s book is incorrect on that point.

I don’t remember

Then there are a series of questions about which Merlin likely feels some shame, about which he professed not to remember the correct answer. One of those topics pertained to whether his wife also spied (note, Merlin and the CIA both are almost certainly lying about how much Mrs. Merlin knew about this operation).

Trump: Did your wife at the time also agree to cooperate with the CIA?

Merlin: No.

Trump: Did she eventually?

Merlin: She didn’t know anything about it.

Trump: She didn’t know anything about what you did, is that correct?

Merlin: Yes.

Trump: But she was interviewed from time to time by the CIA as well?

Merlin: I don’t remember. Probably.

Merlin’s wife remained on the CIA payroll after he claims he stopped getting paid. Surely he knows that. But he’d prefer not to admit it.

Another of the topics about which Merlin forgot the correct answer came in response to a defense question about whether he ever used his American PO Box in communications with Iranians.

MacMahon: Did you testify earlier today that in all of your communications with the people, the Iranian institutions or otherwise, that you, you didn’t use any kind of an American address in any of those documents?

Merlin: I don’t remember.

Now, it’s possible Merlin’s earlier answer on whether he had used his PO Box on correspondence with Iran is correct: that is, it may be that he always ignored CIA’s orders to do so, and CIA simply never found out about it (perhaps in part because the case officer before Sterling did not track that correspondence as closely as Sterling did). But the CIA record shows that he first started balking about using his actual geographic location about a year before going to Vienna, but before that had publicly used his PO Box.

I don’t know

Then there are a series of questions where Merlin clearly either had forgotten key details, or wanted to avoid admitting the truth. For example, when asked by prosecutor Jim Trump (who had met with Merlin before this deposition to go over it) whether this was a rogue operation, Merlin first offered up that it was a “brilliant” operation (elsewhere he took credit for Iran not have gotten nukes since 2000). But when asked a question to which the answer is clearly yes — whether it took significant persuading for Merlin to complete this operation — he claimed he didn’t know.

Trump: It states that prior — prior to your trip to Vienna now is what is being discussed here. “It had taken a lot of persuading by his CIA case officer to convince him to go through what appeared to be a rogue operation.” Is that accurate?

Merlin: It was not rogue operation at all. It was brilliant, brilliant operation.

Trump: Did it take a lot of persuading by you — excuse me, by your case officer to go through with the operation?

Merlin: I don’t know.

Merlin walked out of the meeting on final preparations, after having walked out of the meeting prior. That wasn’t, apparently, because Merlin cared whether this was rogue or not, but because he thought the risk to him was too great for the money he was being paid. But the answer to whether it did take persuading should have been yes.

Just as interesting, when Merlin was asked by defense attorney Edward MacMahon whether he had ever before this deposition told the FBI or CIA he had destroyed the disk on which the final version of the letter to the Iranians, he said he didn’t know.

MacMahon: The first time you–you were, you were asked questions over, over a space of many years, and you never told the FBI at all that you had destroyed the disk that you took to Vienna, did you?

Merlin: I don’t know, but there was, was no reason to bring it back. It just put myself in additional danger to have such disk in possession. If somebody stop me and read this disk, I’m in trouble.

MacMahon: Okay. But you didn’t tell the FBI, you didn’t tell anybody until today as a matter of fact that that’s what your story was as to what you did with the disk in Vienna, correct?

Merlin: I don’t know, but again, it was no reason to keep this disk when action was, operation was accomplished, and no reason to keep it as a drawing, as letter, as whatever.

The answer is clearly no, but Merlin doesn’t want to admit that for some reason (I’ll return to the significance of this question in a future post).

Merlin Was Reading James Risen in 1999

February 6, 2015/3 Comments/in Leak Investigations, WMD /by emptywheel

On March 16, 1999, Jeffrey Sterling met with Merlin, the Russian scientist Sterling was trying to get to establish ties with Iran so he could hand off a nuclear blueprint. (Exhibit 22) Merlin seemed to be getting impatient — and perhaps a little insulted — that the Iranians he was approaching weren’t showing more interest in his 20 year experience as a Russian nuclear engineer. So he made an utterly bizarre suggestion.

[M] then suggested that in some of his future messages, he may make mention of the recent revelation that another country had secured nuclear secrets from the U.S. [M]’s reasoning was that others now see that it is possible to obtain nuclear secrets which can advance their programs, and that the project can build upon that supposition to entice the Iranians. [Sterling] lauded [M] for his thinking but said some thought would need to be given to such a proposition prior to [M] implementing it.

Merlin has to be referring to the stories about Wen Ho Lee which started appearing on page one of the NYT starting on March 6, 1999. (Remember, too, that Merlin lived in the NY area, so if he read this in the dead tree version — as most people still read newspapers in 1999 — he most likely read it in the NYT.)

Those stories were written by James Risen.

Which is strong evidence that Merlin was reading Risen as far back as 1999.

Merlin’s suggestion — that he, a CIA asset, entice Iran to accept his Russian blueprint by pointing out that China had allegedly jump-started its own nuclear weapon program by stealing blueprints from the US — reveals just how unclear on the concept of the operation Merlin was. After all, it had to have been suspicious enough to Iran that a Russian who had moved to the US was seeking to deal blueprints (it’s unclear whether the blueprints were ultimately in English or Russian). Any suggestion that the Iranians would thereby be getting US, as opposed to Russian, technology should have alarmed them greatly.

It’s also, of course, a bizarre commentary on the arc of Risen’s career, that the main character in a future book of his would be monitoring nuclear developments by reading Risen. Risen, of course, managed to protect his sources in both cases, in a series that unfairly identified Wen Ho Lee as a Chinese spy and in a book that raised real questions about what our nuclear establishment was doing.

I’m still waiting for Merlin’s transcript on this point, but his wife was asked whether she and her husband knew of or knew Risen. “I start to know about Jim Risen after he wrote the book,” Mrs. Merlin testified on the stand in her imperfect English. She went further, asserting that her husband did not know (it’s unclear whether she meant “of,” or “personally”) before, either. Given how much of the Wen Ho Lee story was driven by Risen between March 6 and March 16, 1999, Merlin probably had known “of” Risen for years before Risen started reporting on the operation that we now refer to by Merlin’s codename.

And yet, I’m fairly certain, the fact that Merlin offered up Risen reporting to the man now convicted of having leaked to Risen, Jeffrey Sterling, 4 years before that leak began, never got mentioned at the trial.

What Did David Shedd Know and When Did He Know It?

January 30, 2015/5 Comments/in Leak Investigations, WMD /by emptywheel

As I’ve said, I’m working on a larger post about what a shitshow the evidence entered into the Jeffrey Sterling trial showed the Merlin operation to be.

But before I do that, I want to look closely at how David Shedd’s sworn testimony (which according to him, he practiced with prosecutor Jim Trump three times before appearing) contradicts a detail in one of CIA’s cables, because I think it goes to the crux of CIA’s efforts to spin this as a successful program.

Before I do that, let’s review his background. From 1997 (just as the Merlin op started) until March 2000 (literally when the part that shows up in Risen’s book ends), Shedd was the Chief of Operations in the Counterproliferation Division. From March 2000 until February 20, 2001, he was CIA’s head of Congressional Affairs. Then, for over four years, he worked on proliferation issues at the National Security Council. On the stand, Shedd claimed that the NSC provided “real oversight” of intelligence. From 2005 until 2010, Shedd worked in the Office of Director of National Intelligence, ultimately as Deputy. Then he moved to the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he’s now the Acting Director.

In other words, Shedd had a supervisory role over the Merlin program until Merlin handed over the blueprints. Then, after a stint working with Congress, he helped Condi invent her mushroom clouds and was one of the people at NSC cleared into the program when, in 2003, Dr. Rice convinced NYT to kill the first Risen story.

In spite of his potential conflicts, Shedd ended up being the guy who provided a leak assessment for Chapter 9 of Risen’s book for Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte in 2006 (see page 11). Curiously, two parts of that leak assessment are redacted, meaning they have nothing to do with the Iranian op (though it could relate to the other countries CIA used Merlin to deal blueprints to, or to the exposure of all CIA’s Iranian sources described in the chapter).

The prosecution specifically asked Shedd how he was kept informed about the Merlin project. He said Bob S kept him informed in conversations, providing updates “as often as necessary,” and that he, Shedd, might see cable traffic. He also described relying on the National Lab’s assurances that the blueprints Merlin was handing over to Iran could not help their program. “As a non-specialist myself, I had to rely on those with a nuclear specialization.” (Almost all the CIA witnesses involved in Merlin said something similar, and they had really bizarre views on engineering expertise, which might be one reason the program ended up being a clusterfuck.)

Having laid out that background — particularly the bit about briefing in “conversations” with Bob S (who himself testified the CIA writes everything down) — I find a series of Shedd’s responses to Sterling attorney Edward MacMahon particularly interesting. “You know the nuclear blueprints were delivered in a newspaper?” MacMahon asked. “I don’t know,” Shedd, one time advisor to both Condi and Negroponte responded. “You don’t know any details about how the blueprints were delivered?” MacMahon persisted. Merlin “had established contact through letters, he then had a meeting with the person in Vienna,” Shedd responded.

Of course, that’s wrong.

Even according to Bob S’ favorable description of the program, Merlin didn’t meet with anyone in Vienna. He just wrapped nuclear blueprints inside a newspaper with both a computer-written and a handwritten note of quasi-explanation and left them in a mailbox, apparently having taken his PO Box for further contact off the letter. So why was David Shedd — who had a supervisory role over this operation (what Bob S himself called one of the “Generals” who played a key “check and balance” over the program) and then went on to brief Condi and Negroponte on it — misinformed about such a critical detail of the case?

I find Shedd’s statement particularly interesting given that he is named in one of the two cables submitted into evidence on the outcome of the operation.

On March 10, 2000, Bob S wrote a cable (Exhibit 44; he claims Sterling may have been sitting at the next terminal while he wrote it), to Langley and CIA offices 5, 7, and 8.

Having finally located the mission after several very obvious searches in the vicinity, [M] at one point noted that there was someone in the office, but on that occasion he had not brought the document package with him. When he returned on two subsequent days he found the office unoccupied and finally left the package, very clearly addressed to [Iranian subject 1], in the locked mailbox right outside the mission door.

Much of the rest of the cable described what a hash Merlin had made of his delivery in Vienna, even describing Merlin’s “inability to follow even the simplest and most explicit instruction” (Bob S did leave some damning details out, and that assessment did not prevent Bob S from proposing the use of Merlin to do similar operations with other countries within a month).

Then, on March 13, 2000, Bob S wrote another cable (Exhibit 3) to CIA offices 9, 7, and 8, New York, and office 5 for information. Like the previous cable, it was titled “Mission Accomplished.” It asked those offices for any sign of an Iranian response to the blueprints. While the cable didn’t provide as much detail about what a bumbler Merlin was, it did explain,

Our asset visited the Iranian mission facility several times, but did not find any one present in the office on 2 or 3 March during his visits. He accordingly placed the packet in the locked mail box immediately adjacent to the door of the mission inside its host building at 19 Heinestrasse in Vienna’s Second District.

In this paragraph and in others, there’s significant spin. In this paragraph, for example, Bob S doesn’t reveal that Merlin did show up one day to find someone in the office, but claimed at the time he didn’t have the packet with him. But it does reveal a detail Shedd says he doesn’t know: that Merlin never actually met with any Iranian.

Now, it’s a tearline document, meaning the people in each of those offices are supposed to direct the information below the tear line in the cable to specific recipients within the office. The only thing most readers would see is an above line summary, one line of which is redacted here. But this is a document David Shedd signed off on the release of:

Of particular note, given that Shedd may have briefed other superiors about the program, when George Tenet talked James Risen out of reporting the story in 2003 (page 10), he said, “the Russian involved introduced himself to the Iranians [two words redacted].” Did Tenet tell Risen he introduced himself in person, as Shedd claims to have believed?

Now to be fair, one more cable Shedd signed off on (Exhibit 16) described a plan, dating to 1998, to have Merlin meet directly with the Iranians. So it’s possible Shedd simply remembers the operation as it was supposed to be, and not as Merlin’s bumbling execution carried it off.

I’m not sure what to make of the later cable, though. Perhaps Shedd never read beyond the tearline — though that would raise real questions about his level of knowledge of the operation and the “General’s” oversight over it generally. Perhaps he was on his way out of CPD and didn’t read that closely. Or maybe he didn’t sign off on the release of it at all.

But it does seem to suggest that, before Shedd left CPD, he was involved in a cable that made it clear that Merlin just left the nuclear blueprints in a mailbox. And yet the story Shedd now tells, and perhaps told Condi and Negroponte, is the story of the operation as it was meant to be, not as it was actually conducted.

Walter Pincus’ Great Intelligence Work

January 29, 2015/10 Comments/in Leak Investigations, WMD /by emptywheel

Walter Pincus had a piece yesterday purporting to lay out the inaccuracies in the chapter of James Risen’s State of War. In it, he includes this passage.

In Vienna in late February 2000 to deliver the materials to an Iranian mission to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Russian, according to Risen’s book, “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 these blueprints — so he decided to mention that fact to the Iranians in his letter.”

Risen’s book reprints the letter, saying the Russian later gave the CIA a copy.

The CIA trial witnesses and agency memos tell a different story.

The agency plan always was that the schematics and drawings would have some obvious flaws — and the Russian engineer was told about them. It also was part of the plan from the start that the design materials were to be accompanied by a letter from the Russian noting some errors. A Jan. 10, 2000, CIA memo carries a draft of what it describes as “the letter to be included in the package of material.”

It has elements almost word for word found in the letter as printed in the Risen book, but it was written cooperatively with CIA input and made part of the document package for the Iranians more than a month before the Russian arrived in Vienna.

Now, I think the trial did show that there were some inaccuracies in the book — the one the Merlins cared most about is that they weren’t defectors.

But I find it really curious that Pincus claims these were errors. I say it’s curious because unless I’m mistaken, the transcripts for all the CIA witnesses save Bill Harlow have not been loaded onto the docket and so probably aren’t yet done. And in the 5 of 6 days of testimony I attended (including all but a few minutes of Bob S’ testimony, whom Pincus cites by name), I didn’t see Pincus in the courtroom once. And with the exception of Merlin himself, the CIA witnesses I missed, for the most part, talked about issues other than the Merlin operation. So it’s unclear where Pincus got his understanding of CIA witness testimony, and what he got is inaccurate.

Indeed, in this limited example, Pincus makes two pretty significant errors: in suggesting Merlin was supposed to know about the flaws in (as opposed to the incompleteness of) the blueprints, and in suggesting the CIA is certain about what Merlin left at the IAEA in March 2000.

First, the flaws. Throughout discussions about this operation, there has been some confusion between the flaws and the incompleteness, which has allowed the CIA to push back on the story when in fact the CIA records show this may be a convenient way to claim Risen’s book was wrong when what the CIA thought is meaningless if the Russians still had concerns. While Merlin was told the blueprints were incomplete, he was not told about the flaws the nuclear lab (probably Sandia) put in the blueprints that were supposed to prevent the Iranians from using them (but only held back a national lab team 3 months in using the same blueprints). According to my notes, for example, Bob S said they “didn’t want to say [the blueprints] were intentionally flawed,” to Merlin. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that Merlin and (far more importantly) the other Russian asset involved in this operation saw what they believed were problems that would make the blueprints not serve the purpose the Russians believed they were supposed to serve, and there is reason to believe that those concerns were never adequately addressed.

In addition, as I noted in this Salon piece yesterday, CIA doesn’t actually have the final version of what Merlin left with the IAEA. They claim — with questionable credibility, which I’ll return to — not to know what was in the formal letter Merlin left. Bob S himself agreed in his testimony that Pincus supposedly reviewed that Merlin is the only person who knows what he put in the final version. At the very least the story the CIA tells is that Merlin took a copy of the letter drafted in conjunction with the CIA to Vienna but with the nuke references altered to make sure he could get through customs (Bob S called it “sanitized”), then changed them back on the hotel computer and printed a fresh copy (note, earlier in this process, Merlin at times sent stuff off to the Iranians before the CIA had a chance to review it, so he had a history of freelancing). He then destroyed the disk he used, meaning no one — according to what Merlin told CIA — has a copy (though the almost-final version without any last minute changes would reside on Merlin’s poorly secured home computer). Interestingly, Risen’s book says Merlin wrote a report back, but Bob S and Merlin (apparently) claim he did not.

But that printed letter is not all Merlin left with the blueprints. He also left a handwritten letter in his packet of newspaper-wrapped nuclear blueprints — what Bob S called a “cover note.” The current story — relying on an earlier idea floated during the drafting period but not formally adopted — is that the cover note would help alert the Iranian staffers to the ultimate intended recipient of the letter. But that letter was by all appearances ad-libbed by Merlin. So we only have Merlin’s word for what he wrote.

Now these are just two details — details in Risen’s book that Pincus claims were disproven by cables and Bob S’ testimony — but which were anything but.

I will have a much longer summary of all the other details that came out at trial that made it clear the operation was an even bigger shitshow than Risen’s report makes out. But for the moment, I’m just curious what Pincus is trying to accomplish. Perhaps he was in the back of the courtroom for a tiny part of Bob S’ testimony and neither I nor the several other journalists I asked noticed him. But (at least as far as testimony) it appears he’s working off second-hand claims about what the record says and claiming, falsely, that they specifically disprove Risen’s book.

Why?

Why would whoever provided Pincus this partial view of Bob S’ testimony be so desperate to claim that Risen’s book was proven wrong?

The Government’s Database Arbitrage

January 16, 2015/in Drug War, Treasury, WMD /by emptywheel

I have long believed that the government put Iran on its list of approved target countries under the Section 215 dragnet not to use for counterterrorism purposes (the terror Iran seems to have sponsored of late is largely US generated), but instead to support sanctions.

Yesterday, the government claimed it has been using a drug trafficking database (one described differently than Hemisphere) to support sanctions on Iran.

At least that’s the implication of the declaration unsealed in the Shantia Hassanshahi case submitted in response to the judge’s order for more information on how it had identified the defendant.

This database [redacted] consisted of telecommunications metadata obtained from United States telecommunications service providers pursuant to administrative subpoenas served upon the service providers under the provisions of 21 U.S.C. § 876. This metadata related to international telephone calls originating in the United States and calling [redacted] designated foreign countries, one of which was Iran, that were determined to have a demonstrated nexus to international drug trafficking and related criminal activities. This metadata consisted exclusively of the initiating telephone number; the receiving telephone number; the date, time, and duration of the call; and the method by which the call was billed. No subscriber information or other personal identifying information was included in this database. No communication content was included in this database.

In other words it’s just like the Section 215 phone dragnet (and different in a few ways from Hemisphere, the drug-related database collecting US calls), but collected under 21 USC 876, the drug war’s version of Section 215 tangible things provision, rather than Section 215. And they used it to go after sanctions violators, not drug traffickers.

The declaration goes on to say that this database got shut down — at least, shut down under this authority — in September 2013.

Use of the [redacted] database [redacted] that returned the 818 number was suspended in September 2013.1 This database [redacted] is no longer being queried for investigatory purposes, and information is no longer being collected in bulk pursuant to 21 U.S.C. § 876.

1 [5+ lines redacted]

The NYT broke the story of Hemisphere on September 1, 2013, so the month this thing was shut down. September 2013 is also, conveniently enough, the month Hassanshahi was arrested.

But of course, the declaration doesn’t even say it was shut down. There’s the redacted footnote, saying who knows what about the suspension. And the declaration only says this stuff isn’t collected in bulk under 21 USC 876, not that it’s not being conducted in bulk.

Maybe the government has finally moved its Iran sanction phone dragnet under Treasury sanctions authorities, where it should be?