[continued from previous message] 
  
 might play that game. 
  
 The CIA had discovered that a high-ranking Iranian official would be 
 travelling to Vienna and visiting the Iranian mission to the IAEA, and 
 so the agency decided to send the Russian to Vienna at the same time. It 
 was hoped that he could make contact with either the Iranian 
 representative to the IAEA or the visitor from Tehran. 
  
 In Vienna, however, the Russian 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 the blueprints - so he decided to mention 
 that fact to the Iranians in his letter. They would certainly find flaws 
 for themselves, and if he didn't tell them first, they would never want 
 to deal with him again. 
  
 The Russian was thus warning the Iranians as carefully as he could that 
 there was a flaw somewhere in the nuclear blueprints, and he could help 
 them find it. At the same time, he was still going through with the 
 CIA's operation in the only way he thought would work. 
  
 The Russian soon found 19 Heinstrasse, a five-storey office and 
 apartment building with a flat, pale green and beige facade in a quiet, 
 slightly down-at-heel neighbourhood in Vienna's north end. Amid the list 
 of Austrian tenants, there was one simple line: "PM/Iran." The Iranians 
 clearly didn't want publicity. An Austrian postman helped him. As the 
 Russian stood by, the postman opened the building door and dropped off 
 the mail. The Russian followed suit; he realised that he could leave his 
 package without actually having to talk to anyone. He slipped through 
 the front door, and hurriedly shoved his envelope through the inner-door 
 slot at the Iranian office. 
  
 The Russian fled the mission without being seen. He was deeply relieved 
 that he had made the hand-off without having to come face to face with a 
 real live Iranian. He flew back to the US without being detected by 
 either Austrian security or, more importantly, Iranian intelligence. 
  
 Just days after the Russian dropped off his package at the Iranian 
 mission, the National Security Agency reported that an Iranian official 
 in Vienna abruptly changed his schedule, making airline reservations to 
 fly home to Iran. The odds were that the nuclear blueprints were now in 
 Tehran. 
  
 The Russian scientist's fears about the operation seemed well founded. 
 He was the front man for what may have been one of the most reckless 
 operations in the modern history of the CIA, one that may have helped 
 put nuclear weapons in the hands of a charter member of what President 
 George W Bush has called the "axis of evil". 
  
 Operation Merlin has been one of the most closely guarded secrets in the 
 Clinton and Bush administrations. It's not clear who originally came up 
 with the idea, but the plan was first approved by Clinton. After the 
 Russian scientist's fateful trip to Vienna, however, the Merlin 
 operation was endorsed by the Bush administration, possibly with an eye 
 toward repeating it against North Korea or other dangerous states. 
  
 Several former CIA officials say that the theory behind Merlin - handing 
 over tainted weapon designs to confound one of America's adversaries - 
 is a trick that has been used many times in past operations, stretching 
 back to the cold war. But in previous cases, such Trojan horse 
 operations involved conventional weapons; none of the former officials 
 had ever heard of the CIA attempting to conduct this kind of high-risk 
 operation with designs for a nuclear bomb. The former officials also 
 said these kind of programmes must be closely monitored by senior CIA 
 managers in order to control the flow of information to the adversary. 
 If mishandled, they could easily help an enemy accelerate its weapons 
 development. That may be what happened with Merlin. 
  
 Iran has spent nearly 20 years trying to develop nuclear weapons, and in 
 the process has created a strong base of sophisticated scientists 
 knowledgeable enough to spot flaws in nuclear blueprints. Tehran also 
 obtained nuclear blueprints from the network of Pakistani scientist 
 Abdul Qadeer Khan, and so already had workable blueprints against which 
 to compare the designs obtained from the CIA. Nuclear experts say that 
 they would thus be able to extract valuable information from the 
 blueprints while ignoring the flaws. 
  
 "If [the flaw] is bad enough," warned a nuclear weapons expert with the 
 IAEA, "they will find it quite quickly. That would be my fear" 
  
 ) James Risen 2006 
  
 7 This is an edited extract from State of War, by James Risen, published 
 by The Free Press 
  
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