Does Jerry Doe Know Anything about Merlin?
In this post, I described that Jerry Doe, a former CIA operative who claims he was fired from the CIA in retaliation for reporting intelligence the CIA didn’t like, now claims that some of that intelligence pertains to Iran. The timing of the allegations of his complaint that may pertain to Iran–2000, not (as the NIE cites) 2003–got me thinking about James Risen.
You see, we know of another operation from 2000 involving Iran that the CIA is still touchy about–the Merlin operation that Risen describes in his book, State of War.
In case you’ve forgotten, in February 2000, the CIA had a Russian nuclear scientist pass blueprints for a nuclear weapon to Iran. The blueprints were erroneous in key ways, so they wouldn’t lead to a nuclear weapon–at least, they wouldn’t have if the Russian hadn’t alerted the Iranians to the faults in the blueprints, which he did. But the CIA was willing to pursue such a crazy plan, Risen reported, because they hoped Iran would follow the blueprints and spend years pursuing a faulty warhead.
Here’s Risen’s description about why CPD tried something as crazy as Merlin.
The Counterproliferation Division within the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, the agency’s clandestine espionage arm, came up with MERLIN and other clandestine operations as creative, if unorthodox, ways to try to penetrate Tehran’s nuclear development program. In some cases, the CIA had worked jointly with Israeli intelligence on such operations, according to people familiar with the covert program.
Now, if his complaint and Warrick’s report on it is true, Jerry Doe was busy penetrating Tehran’s nuclear development program in 2000, at precisely the same time when–purportedly out of frustration with their inability to penetrate Tehran’s nuclear development program using traditional means–the CIA dumped nuclear blueprints into the Iranians’ laps. Though, as Risen notes, the CIA was careful to hide the fact that it was the source of the blueprints.
What better way for the CIA to hide its involvement in this operation than to have a veteran of Arzamas [Russia’s equivalent of Los Alamos] personally hand over the Russian nuclear designs?
Now look at the passage from Doe’s complaint that appears to pertain to Iranian nukes:
Plaintiff was first subjected to a demand that he alter his intelligence reporting in 2000, [2 lines redacted]. Read more →