WASHINGTON, 4 January 2006 — A new book on the Bush government’s secret anti-terrorism operations describes how the CIA recruited an Iraqi-American anesthesiologist in 2002 to obtain information from her brother, who was a figure in Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program.
Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad of Cleveland, Ohio, undertook the dangerous assignment to travel to Iraq to spy on the CIA’s behalf. In the book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration she says her brother was stunned by her questions about the nuclear program because — he said — it had been dead for a decade.
New York Times reporter James Risen uses the anecdote to illustrate how the CIA ignored information that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction. His book, to be released in two weeks, describes secret operations of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.
The major revelation in the book has already been the subject of extensive reporting by Risen’s newspaper: the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping of Americans’ conversations without obtaining warrants from a special court.
The New York Times first debated publishing a story about secret eavesdropping on Americans as early as last fall, before the 2004 presidential election. The Times said in its story that it held off publishing the article for a year after the newspaper’s representatives met with White House officials. It said the White House had asked the paper not to publish the story at all, “arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny.”
The paper offered no explanation to its readers about what had changed in the past year to warrant publication. It also did not disclose that the information The decision to withhold the article caused some friction within the Times’ Washington bureau, according to people close to the paper. The article was a dramatic scoop for a newspaper whose national security coverage has been marked by some turmoil in recent years. The Times admitted last year that much of its reporting on Iraq’s weapons programs before the war was flawed. The principal author of those stories, Judith Miller, later spent 85 days in jail to protect the identity of an administration source in the CIA leak case.
More recently, the Times has been scooped by the Los Angeles Times on a story that the US military has been secretly paying to run favorable stories in the Iraqi media, and by The Washington Post on the revelation last month of a secret network of CIA prisons for terrorism suspects in foreign countries. The Times announced last month that it was replacing its deputy bureau chief in Washington, which outsiders read as a sign of the paper’s dissatisfaction with its Washington coverage.
But the fact the newspaper held the story for more than a year and only revealed the secret wiretaps last month, when it became the Reisen book was about to break the news, has created a furor in Washington, with politicians in both parties and civil libertarians saying that President Bush was wrong to authorize the surveillance by the National Security Agency without permission from a special court. Bush and his supporters say the eavesdropping was needed to protect Americans after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The president called the public reports on the once-secret surveillance “shameful.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said over the weekend, that the story had been held, in part, “as part of a marketing campaign for selling the (Risen) book.”
Risen declined to comment on any aspect of the story, but one of his colleagues called the allegation absurd.
Simon & Schuster Inc., the book’s publisher, is not owned by the New York Times Co.
