[NYTr] The Secret History of the Impending War on Iran

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[Note this is a month old. There's so much disinfo flying around about
Iran there's no way of knowing what is accurate. - NY Transfer]

sent by MichaelP - activ-l - Nov 18, 2007

Esquire - October 18, 2007
http://www.esquire.com/features/iranbriefing1107#story

The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran 
That the White House Doesn't Want You to Know

By John H. Richardson

Two former high-ranking policy experts from the Bush administration say 
the U.S.  has been gearing up for a war with Iran for years, despite 
claiming otherwise. It'll be Iraq all over again. Two former
high-ranking policy experts from the Bush administration say the U.S.
has been gearing up for a war with Iran for years, despite claiming
otherwise. It'll be Iraq all over again.

In the years after 9/11, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann worked at the 
highest levels of the Bush administration as Middle East policy experts 
for the National Security Council.  Mann conducted secret negotiations 
with Iran.  Leverett traveled with Colin Powell and advised Condoleezza 
Rice.  They each played crucial roles in formulating policy for the
region leading up to the war in Iraq. But when they left the White
House, they left with a growing sense of alarm -- not only was the Bush
administration headed straight for war with Iran, it had been set on
this course for years. That was what people didn't realize. It was just
like Iraq, when the White House was so eager for war it couldn't wait
for the UN inspectors to leave. The steps have been many and steady and
all in the same direction. And now things are getting much worse. We
are getting closer and closer to the tripline, they say.

"The hard-liners are upping the pressure on the State Department," says 
Leverett.  "They're basically saying, 'You've been trying to engage
Iran for more than a year now and what do you have to show for it?
They keep building more centrifuges, they're sending this IED stuff
over into Iraq that's killing American soldiers, the human-rights
internal political situation has gotten more repressive -- what the
hell do you have to show for this engagement strategy?'"

But the engagement strategy was never serious and was designed to fail, 
they say.  Over the last year, Rice has begun saying she would talk to 
"anybody, anywhere, anytime," but not to the Iranians unless they
stopped enriching uranium first. That's not a serious approach to
diplomacy, Mann says.  Diplomacy is about talking to your enemies.
That's how wars are averted. You work up to the big things. And when
U.S.  ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had his much-publicized meeting
with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad this spring, he didn't even
have permission from the White House to schedule a second meeting.

The most ominous new development is the Bush administration's push to
name the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization.

"The U.S. has designated any number of states over the years as state 
sponsors of terrorism,"  says Leverett. "But here for the first time
the U.S.  is saying that part of a government is itself a terrorist 
organization."

This is what Leverett and Mann fear will happen: The diplomatic effort
in the United Nations will fail when it becomes clear that Russia's and 
China's geopolitical ambitions will not accommodate the inconvenience
of energy sanctions against Iran. Without any meaningful incentive from
the U.S.  to be friendly, Iran will keep meddling in Iraq and
installing nuclear centrifuges. This will trigger a response from the
hard-liners in the White House, who feel that it is their moral duty to
deal with Iran before the Democrats take over American foreign policy.
"If you get all those elements coming together, say in the first half
of '08," says Leverett, "what is this president going to do?  I think
there is a serious risk he would decide to order an attack on the
Iranian nuclear installations and probably a wider target zone."

This would result in a dramatic increase in attacks on U.S. forces in 
Iraq, attacks by proxy forces like Hezbollah, and an unknown reaction
from the wobbly states of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where millions
admire Iran's resistance to the Great Satan. "As disastrous as Iraq has
been," says Mann, "an attack on Iran could engulf America in a war with
the entire Muslim world."

Mann and Leverett believe that none of this had to be.

Flynt Lawrence Leverett grew up in Fort Worth and went to Texas
Christian University. He spent the first nine years of his government
career as a CIA analyst specializing in the Middle East. He voted for
George Bush in 2000.  On the day the assassins of Al Qaeda flew two
hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center, Colin Powell summoned
him to help plan the response. Five months later, Leverett landed a
plum post on the National Security Council. When Condoleezza Rice
discussed the Middle East with President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld,
Leverett was the man standing behind her taking notes and whispering in
her ear.

Today, he sits on the back deck of a house tucked into the curve of a 
leafy suburban street in McLean, Virginia, a forty-nine-year-old white 
American man wearing khakis and a white dress shirt and wire-rimmed 
glasses. Mann sits next to him, also wearing khakis. She's thirty-nine
but looks much younger, with straight brown hair and a tomboy's open
face. The polish on her toenails is pink. If you saw her around McLean,
you wouldn't hesitate:

Soccer mom. Classic soccer mom.

But with degrees from Brandeis and Harvard Law and stints at Tel Aviv 
University and the powerful Israeli lobby known as AIPAC, she has even 
better right-wing credentials than her husband.

As they talk, eating grapes out of a bowl, lawn mowers hum and birds 
chirp.  The floor is littered with toy trucks and rubber animals left 
behind by the youngest of their four children. But the tranquillity is 
misleading.  When Mann and Leverett went public with the inside story 
behind the impending disaster with Iran, the White House dismissed
them. Then it imposed prior restraint on them, an extraordinary episode
of government censorship. Finally, it threatened them.

Now they are afraid of the White House, and watching what they say. But 
still, they feel they have to speak out.

Like so many things these days, this story began on the morning of 
September 11, 2001. On Forty-fifth Street in Manhattan, Mann had just
been evacuated from the offices of the U.S. mission to the United
Nations and was walking home to her apartment on Thirty-eighth Street
-- walking south, toward the giant plume of smoke. When her cell phone
rang, she picked it up immediately because her sister worked at the
World Trade Center and she was frantic for word. But it wasn't her
sister, it was a senior Iranian diplomat.  To protect him from
reprisals from the Iranian government, she doesn't want to name him,
but she describes him as a cultured man in his fifties with
salt-and-pepper hair.  Since early spring, they had been meeting
secretly in a small conference room at the UN.

"Are you all right?" he asked.
 
Yes, she said, she was fine.
 
The  attack  was a terrible tragedy, he said, doubtless the
work of Al Qaeda.

"I hope that we can still work together," he said.

That same day, in Washington, on the seventh floor of the State
Department building, a security guard opened the door of Leverett's
office and told him they were evacuating the building. Leverett was
Powell's specialist on terrorist states like Syria and Libya, so he
knew the world was about to go through a dramatic change. As he joined
the people milling on the sidewalk, his mind was already racing.

Then he got a call summoning him back to Foggy Bottom. At the entrance
to a specially fortified office, he showed his badge to the guards and
passed into a windowless conference room. There were about a dozen
people there, Powell's top foreign-policy planners. Powell told them
that their first job was to make plans to capture or kill Osama bin
Laden.  The second job was to rally allies.  That meant detailed
strategies for approaching other nations -- in some cases, Powell could
make the approach, in others the president would have to make the call.
Then Powell left them to work through the night.

At 5:30 a.m.  on September 12, they walked the list to the office of
the deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage.  Powell took it
straight to the White House.

Mann and Leverett didn't know each other then, but they were already 
traveling down parallel tracks. Months before September 11, Mann had
been negotiating with the Iranian diplomat at the UN. After the
attacks, the meetings continued, sometimes alone and sometimes with
their Russian counterpart sitting in. Soon they traded the conference
room for the Delegates' Lounge, an airy two-story bar with ashtrays for
all the foreigners who were used to smoking indoors. One day, up on the
second floor where the windows overlooked the East River, the diplomat
told her that Iran was ready to cooperate unconditionally, a phrase
that had seismic diplomatic implications. Unconditional talks are what
the U.S. had been demanding as a precondition to any official
diplomatic contact between the U.S.  and Iran. And it would be the
first chance since the Islamic revolution for any kind of
rapprochement.  "It was revolutionary," Mann says.  "It could have
changed the world."

A few weeks later, after signing on to Condoleezza Rice's staff as the
new Iran expert in the National Security Council, Mann flew to Europe
with Ryan Crocker -- then a deputy assistant secretary of state -- to
hold talks with a team of Iranian diplomats. Meeting in a light-filled 
conference room at the old UN building in Geneva, they hammered out
plans for Iranian help in the war against the Taliban. The Iranians
agreed to provide assistance if any American was shot down near their
territory, agreed to let the U.S. send food in through their border,
and even agreed to restrain some "really bad Afghanis," like a rabidly
anti-American warlord named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, quietly putting him
under house arrest in Tehran. These were significant concessions. At
the same time, special envoy James Dobbins was having very public and
warm discussions in Bonn with the Iranian deputy foreign minister as
they worked together to set up a new government for Afghanistan. And
the Iranians seemed eager to help in more tactical ways as well. They
had intimate knowledge of Taliban strategic capabilities and they
wanted to share it with the Americans.

One day during the U.S.  bombing campaign, Mann and her Iranian 
counterparts were sitting around the wooden conference table
speculating about the future Afghani constitution.  Suddenly the
Iranian who knew so much about intelligence matters started pounding on
the table.  "Enough of that!"  he shouted, unfurling a map of
Afghanistan.  Here was a place the Americans needed to bomb. And here,
and here, he angrily jabbed his finger at the map.

Leverett spent those days in his office at the State Department
building, watching the revolution in the Middle East and coming up with
plans on how to capture the lightning. Suddenly countries like Syria
and Libya and Sudan and Iran were coming forward with offers of help,
which raised a vital question -- should they stay on the same enemies
list as North Korea and Iraq, or could there be a new slot for
"friendly" sponsors of terror?

As a CIA analyst, Leverett had come to the view that Middle Eastern 
terrorism was more tactical than religious. Syria wanted the Golan
Heights back and didn't have the military strength to put up a serious
fight against Israel, so it relied on "asymmetrical methods." Accepting
this idea meant that nations like Syria weren't locked in a fanatic
mind-set, that they could evolve to use new methods, so Leverett told
Powell to seize the moment and draw up a "road map" to peace for the
problem countries of the Middle East -- expel your terrorist groups and
stop trying to develop weapons of mass destruction, and we will take
you off the sponsors-of-terrorism list and start a new era of
cooperation.

That December, just after the triumph over Afghanistan, Powell took the 
idea to the White House. The occasion was the regular "deputies
meeting" at the Situation Room. Gathered around the table were the
deputy secretary of state, the deputy secretary of defense, the deputy
director of the CIA, a representative from Vice-President Cheney's
office, and also the deputy national security advisor, Stephen Hadley.

Hadley hated the idea. So did the representatives from Rumsfeld and 
Cheney.  They thought that it was a reward for bad behavior, that the 
sponsors of terrorism should stop just because it's the right thing to
do.

After the meeting, Hadley wrote up a brief memo that came to be known
as Hadley's Rules:

If a state like Syria or Iran offers specific assistance, we
will take it without offering anything in return. We will accept it
without strings or promises. We won't try to build on it.

Leverett thought that was simply nutty. To strike postures of moral 
purity, they were throwing away a chance for real progress. But just a
few days later, Condoleezza Rice called him into her office, warming
him up with talk of how classical music shaped their childhoods. As he
told her about the year he spent studying classical piano at the Liszt
Academy in Budapest, Leverett felt a real connection. Then she said she
was looking for someone to take the job of senior director of Mideast
affairs at the National Security Council, someone who would take a real
leadership role on the Palestinian issue. Big changes were coming in
2002.

He repeated his firm belief that the White House had to draw up a road
map with real solutions to the division of Jerusalem and the problem of 
refugees, something with final borders. That was the only remedy to the 
crisis in the Middle East.

Just after the New Year, Rice called and offered him the job.

The bowl of grapes is empty and the plate of cheese moves to the center
of the table. Leverett's teenage son comes in with questions about a
teacher. Periodically, Mann interrupts herself. "This is off the
record," she says. "This is going to have to be on background."

She's not allowed to talk about confidential documents or intelligence 
matters,  but  the  topic  of  her  negotiations  with the Iranians is 
especially touchy.

"As far as they're concerned, the whole idea that there were
talks is something I shouldn't even be talking about," she says. All
ranks and ranking are out. "They don't want there to be anything about
the level of the talks or who was involved."

"They won't even let us say something like 'senior' or 
'important,' 'high-ranking,' or 'high-level,'" Leverett says.

But the important thing is that the Iranians agreed to talk 
unconditionally, Mann says. "They specifically told me time and again
that they were doing this because they understood the impact of this
attack on the U.S., and they thought that if they helped us
unconditionally, that would be the way to change the dynamic for the
first time in twenty-five years."

She believed them.

But while Leverett was still moving into the Old Executive Office
Building next to the White House, Mann was wrapped up in the crisis
over a ship called the Karin A that left Iran loaded with fifty tons of
weapons. According to the Israeli navy, which intercepted the Karin A
in the Red Sea, it was headed for the PLO. In staff meetings at the
White House, Mann argued for caution. The Iranian government probably
didn't even know about the arms shipments. It was issuing official
denials in the most passionate way, even sending its deputy foreign
minister onto Fox News to say "categorically" that "all segments of the
Iranian government"  had nothing to do with the arms shipment, which
meant the "total government, not simply President Khatami's
administration."

Bush waited. Three weeks later, it was time for his 2002 State of the 
Union address.  Mann spent the morning in a meeting with Condoleezza
Rice and the new president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, who kept
asking Rice for an expanded international peacekeeping force. Rice kept
saying that the Afghans would have to solve their own problems. Then
they went off to join the president's motorcade and Mann headed back to
her office to watch the speech on TV.

That was the speech in which Bush linked Iran to Iraq and North Korea
with a memorable phrase:

"States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an
axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world."

The Iranians had been engaging in high-level diplomacy with the
American government for more than a year, so the phrase was shocking
and profound. After that, the Iranian diplomats skipped the monthly
meeting in Geneva. But they came again in March. And so did Mann. "They
said they had put their necks out to talk to us and they were taking
big risks with their careers and their families and their lives," Mann
says.

The  secret  negotiations with Iran continued, every month for another 
year.

Leverett plunged right into a dramatic new peace proposal floated by
Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.  Calling for "full
normalization"  in exchange for "full withdrawal" from the occupied
territories, Abdullah promised to rally all the Arab nations to a final
settlement with Israel. In his brand-new third-floor office at the Old
Executive Office Building, a tiny room with a very high ceiling,
Leverett began hammering out the details with Abdullah's foreign-policy
advisor, Adel Al-Jubeir. When Ariel Sharon said that a return to the
'67 borders was unacceptable, Al-Jubeir said the Saudis didn't want to
be in the "real estate business" -- if the Palestinians agreed to
border modifications, the Saudis could hardly refuse them. Al-Jubeir
believed he had something that might actually work.

But  the  White  House  wasn't interested. Sharon already rejected it, 
Rice told Leverett.

At  the Arab League meeting, Abdullah got every Arab state to sign his 
proposal in a unanimous vote.

The White House still wasn't interested.

Then violence in the Palestinian territories began to increase,
climaxing in an Israeli siege of Arafat's compound. In April, Leverett
accompanied Colin Powell on a tour that took them from Morocco to Egypt
and Jordan and Lebanon and finally Israel.

Twice they crossed the Israeli-army lines to visit Arafat under siege. 
Powell seemed to think he had authorization from the White House to 
explore what everyone was calling "political horizons," the safely
vague shorthand for a peaceful future, so on the final day Leverett
holed up in a suite at the David Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem with a
group of senior American officials -- the U. . ambassador to Israel,
the U. S. consul general to Jerusalem, assistant secretary of state for
Near Eastern affairs Bill Burns -- trying to hammer out Powell's last
speech.

Then the phone rang. It was Stephen Hadley on the phone from the White 
House.  "Tell  Powell  he  is not authorized to talk about a political 
horizon," he said. "Those are formal instructions."

"This  is a bad idea," Leverett remembers saying. "It's bad
policy and it's  also  humiliating  for  Powell, who has been talking
to heads of state about this very issue for the last ten days."

"It doesn't matter,"  Hadley said. "There's too much
resistance from Rumsfeld and the VP. Those are the instructions."

So Leverett went back into the suite and asked Powell to step aside.

Powell  was  furious,  Leverett  remembers. "What is it they're afraid 
of?" he demanded. "Who the hell are they afraid of?"

"I don't know sir," Leverett said.

In the spring, Crown Prince Abdullah flew to Texas to meet Bush at his 
ranch.

The way Leverett remembers the story, Abdullah sat down and told Bush
he was going to ask a direct question and wanted a direct answer.

Are you going to do anything about the Palestinian issue?

If you tell me no, if it's too difficult, if you're not going
to give it that kind of priority, just tell me.

I will understand and I will never say anything critical of
you or your leadership in public, but I'm going to need to make my own
judgments and my own decisions about Saudi interests.

Bush  tried  to stall, saying he understood his concerns and would see 
what he could do.

Abdullah stood up. "That's it. This meeting is over."

No Arab leader had ever spoken to Bush like that before, Leverett says. 
But Saudi Arabia was a key ally in the war on terror, vital to the 
continued U.S. oil supply, so Bush and Rice and Powell excused
themselves into another room for a quick huddle.

When  he  came  back,  Bush  gave Abdullah his word that he would deal 
seriously with the Palestinian issue.

"Okay,"  Abdullah said. "The president of the United States
has given me his word."

So the meeting continued, ending with a famous series of photographs of 
Bush and Abdullah riding around the ranch in Bush's pickup.

In a meeting at the White House a few days later, Leverett saw Powell 
shaking his head over Abdullah's threat. He called it "the near-death 
experience."

Bush rolled his eyes. "We sure don't want to go through
anything like that again."

Then the king of Jordan came to Washington to see Bush. There had to be
a road map for peace in Palestine, the king said. Despite the previous 
experience with Abdullah in Crawford, Bush seemed taken by surprise, 
Leverett remembers, but he listened and said that the idea of a road
map seemed pretty reasonable.

So suddenly they were working on a road map. For moderate Arab 
states, the hope of a two-state solution would offer some political
cover before Washington embarked on any invasion of Iraq. In a meeting
with the king of Jordan, Leverett made a personal promise that it would
be out by the end of 2002.

But nothing happened. In Cheney's and Rumsfeld's offices, 
opposition came from men like John Hannah, Doug Feith, and Scooter
Libby. In Rice's office, there was Elliott Abrams.  Again they said
that negotiation was just a reward for bad behavior. First the
Palestinians had to reject terrorism and practice democracy.

Finally, it was a bitter-cold day just after Thanksgiving and 
Leverett was on a family trip to the Washington Zoo, standing in front
of the giraffe enclosure.  The White House patched through a call from
the foreign minister of Jordan, Marwan Muasher, who said that Rice had
just told him the road map was off. "Do you have any idea how this has
pulled the rug out from under us, from under me?" Muasher said. "I'm
the one that has to go into Arab League meetings and get beat up and
say, 'No, there's going to be a plan out by the end of the year.' How
can we ever trust you again?"

On Monday, Leverett went straight to Rice's office for an explanation.

She told him that Ariel Sharon had called early elections in Israel and 
asked Bush to shelve any Palestinian plan. This time Leverett couldn't 
hide his exasperation.  "You told the whole world you were going to put 
this out before Christmas," he said. "Because one Israeli politician
told you it's going to make things politically difficult for him, you
don't put it out? Do you realize how hard that makes things for all our
Arab partners?"

Rice  sat  impassively  behind her broad desk. "If we put the
road map out," she said, "it will interfere with Israeli elections."

"You are interfering with Israeli elections, just in another
way." "Flynt, the decision has already been made," Rice said.

There was also an awkward scene with the secretary of defense. They
were in the Situation Room and Leverett was sitting behind Rice taking
notes when suddenly Rumsfeld addressed him directly. "Why are you
laughing? Did I say something funny?"

The room went silent, and Rumsfeld asked it again. "Why are
you laughing? Did I say something funny?"

"I'm  sorry  Mr.  Secretary,  I don't think I know what you're
talking about."

"It looks to me like you were laughing," Rumsfeld said.

"No sir. I'm sorry if I gave that impression. I was just listening
to the meeting and taking notes. Didn't mean to disturb you."

The meeting continued, message received.

By that time, Leverett and Mann had met and fallen in love. They got 
married in February 2003, went to Florida on their honeymoon, and got
back just in time for the Shock and Awe bombing campaign. Leverett quit
his NSC job in disgust.  Mann rotated back to the State Department.

Then came the moment that would lead to an extraordinary battle with
the Bush administration.  It was an average morning in April, about
four weeks into the war. Mann picked up her daily folder and sat down
at her desk, glancing at a fax cover page. The fax was from the Swiss
ambassador to Iran, which wasn't unusual -- since the U.S. had no
formal relationship with Iran, the Swiss ambassador represented
American interests there and often faxed over updates on what he was
doing.  This time he'd met with Sadeq Kharrazi, a well-connected
Iranian who was the nephew of the foreign minister and son-in-law to
the supreme leader. Amazingly, Kharrazi had presented the ambassador
with a detailed proposal for peace in the Middle East, approved at the
highest levels in Tehran.

A two-page summary was attached. Scanning it, Mann was startled by one 
dramatic concession after another -- "decisive action" against all 
terrorists in Iran, an end of support for Hamas and the Islamic Jihad,
a promise to cease its nuclear program, and also an agreement to
recognize Israel.

This was huge.  Mann sat down and drafted a quick memo to her 
boss, Richard Haass. It was important to send a swift and positive 
response.

Then she heard that the White House had already made up its
mind -- it was going to ignore the offer. Its only response was to
lodge a formal complaint with the Swiss government about their
ambassador's meddling.

A  few  days  after  that,  a  terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia killed 
thirty-four  people,  including  eight  Americans, and an intelligence 
report  said  the  bombers  had  been  in  phone contact with Al Qaeda 
members  in  Iran. Although it was unknown whether Tehran had anything
to do  with  the  bombing or if the terrorists were hiding out in the
lawless areas  near  the  border,  Rumsfeld  set  the  tone  for  the 
administration's  response  at  his next press conference.

"There's no question but that there have been and are today senior Al 
Qaeda leaders in Iran, and they are busy."

Colin Powell saw Mann's memo. A couple weeks later he approached her at
a State Department reception and said, "It was a very good memo. I
couldn't sell it at the White House."

In response to questions from Esquire, Colin Powell called Leverett
"very able"  and confirms much of what he says. Leverett's account of
the clash between Bush and Crown Prince Abdullah was accurate, he
said.  "It was a very serious moment and no one wanted to see if the
Saudis were bluffing." The same goes for the story about his speech in
Israel in 2002. "I had major problems with the White House on what I
wanted to say."

On the subject of the peace offer, though, Powell was defensive. "I
talked to all of my key assistants since Flynt started talking about an
Iranian grand bargain, but none of us recall seeing this initiative as
a grand bargain."

On the general subject of negotiations with Iran, he responded with 
pointed politesse.  "We talked to the Iranians quietly up until 2003.
The president chose not to continue that channel."

That is putting it mildly.

In May of 2003, when the U.S. was still in the triumphant
"mission accomplished"  phase of the Iraq war, word started filtering
out of the White House about an aggressive new Iran policy that would
include efforts to destabilize the Iranian government and even to
promote a popular uprising. In his first public statement on Iran
policy since leaving the NSC, Leverett told The Washington Post he
thought the White House was making a dangerous mistake.  "What it means
is we will end up with an Iran that has nuclear weapons and no dialogue
with the United States." In the years that followed, he spoke out in
dozens of newspaper editorials and a book, all making variations on the
same argument -- America's approach to rogue nations was all sticks and
no carrots, all economic sanctions and threats of war without any
dialogue. "To bring about real change," he argued, "we must also offer
concrete benefits." Of course states like Iran and Syria messed around
in Iraq, he said. Iran was supporting the Iraqi opposition when the
U.S. was still supporting Saddam Hussein. It was insane to expect them
to stop when the goal of a Shiite Iraq was finally in reach. The only
way to solve the underlying issues was to offer Iran a "grand bargain"
that would recognize the legitimacy of Iran's government and its right
to a role in the region. But  that  was  an  unthinkable  thought. The
White House ignored him. Democrats ignored him. The Brookings
Institution declined to renew his contract.

Then he started talking about the peace offer. By then it was 2006 and
the war wasn't going well and suddenly people started to respond: You
mean Iran isn't evil? They helped fight the Taliban? They wanted to
make peace? He summed it all up in a long paper for a Washington think
tank that happened to be scheduled for publication last November, a
vulnerable time for the White House, just after the Democrats swept the
midterm elections and the Iraq Study Group released its report calling
for negotiations with Syria and Iran. When he submitted the paper to
the CIA for a routine review, they told him the CIA had no problem with
it but someone from the NSC called to complain. "You shouldn't have
cleared this without letting the White House take a look at it," the
official said.

Leverett told them he wasn't going to let White House operatives judge
his criticisms  of  White House operatives and distilled his argument
into  an op-ed  piece  for  The New York Times. This time he shared a
byline  with his  wife, who had experienced the peace offer up close.
They  submitted their first draft to the CIA and the State Department
on a Sunday in early December, expecting to hear back the next day.

The next morning, Leverett gave a blistering talk on Bush's
Iran policy to the influential conservatives at the Cato Institute. The
speech was carried live on C-SPAN. Later that day, he flew to New York
and made the same arguments at a private dinner with the UN ambassadors
of Russia and Britain. He was starting to have an impact.

By Tuesday, he still hadn't heard from the CIA review board.

They  called  on  Wednesday  and  told  him  that  there  was
nothing classified  in  the  piece  as  far  as  the agency was
concerned, but someone  in  the West Wing wasn't happy with it and
would be redacting large sections.

"You're the clearing agency," Leverett said. "You're the
people named in my agreement."

They said their hands were tied.

After consulting a lawyer, Leverett and Mann and a researcher worked 
through the night to assemble a list of public sources where the 
blacked-out material had already been published. They also took out one 
line that might have been based on a classified document.

But the White House wouldn't budge. It was a First Amendment
showdown.

On Thursday, Leverett and Mann decided to publish the piece with large 
sections of type blacked out, 168 words in all. Since the piece had
been rendered pretty much incomprehensible, they included a list of
public sources. "To make sense of our op-ed article, readers will have
to look up the citations themselves."

As they tell their story, Mann rushes off to pick up one of
their sons from a play date and Leverett takes over, telling what
happened over the following months:

Bush sent a second carrier group to the Persian Gulf.

U.S.  troops  started  to  arrest Iranians living in Baghdad, accusing 
them of working with insurgents.

Bush accused Iran of "providing material support" for attacks
on U.S. forces, a formulation that suggested a legal justification for
a preemptive attack.

Senator Jim Webb of Virginia pushed through an amendment requiring Bush
to get congressional authorization for an attack.

Colin Powell broke his long silence with a pointed warning. "You can't 
negotiate when you tell the other side, 'Give us what a negotiation
would produce before the negotiations start.'"

Even Henry Kissinger started giving interviews on the need to 
"exhaust every possibility to come to an understanding with Iran."

>From inside the White House, Leverett was hearing a scary scenario: The 
Russians were scheduled to ship fuel rods to the Iranian nuclear
reactor in Bushehr, which meant the reactor would become operational by
this November, at which point it would be impossible to bomb -- the
fallout alone would turn the city into an urban Chernobyl. The White
House was seriously considering a preemptive attack when the Russians
cooled things down by saying Iran hadn't paid its bills, so they would
hold back the Bushehr fuel rods for a while.

That put things into a summer lull. But by August, tensions
were rising again.  U.S. troops in Baghdad arrested an official
delegation of Iranian energy experts, leading them out of a hotel in
blindfolds and handcuffs. Then Iran said that it had paid its bills and
that the Russians were ready to deliver the Bushehr shipment. In Time
magazine, former CIA officer and author Robert Baer quoted a highly
placed White House official:

"IEDs are a casus belli for this administration. There will be
an attack on Iran."

Mann steps back out on the deck and starts collecting the scattered
toys to prepare the house for a dinner party, the typical modern
American mother multitasking her way through a busy day. "The reason I
have to be so careful now is that I'm legally on notice and they will
prosecute things that I say or do," she says, picking up a plastic
truck. "Because of that one article?"

"Yeah."

Outside, it's getting warmer. There's a heavy haze and floating bugs
and for a moment it feels a bit ominous, a gathering silence, one of
those moments when giant pods start to sprout in local basements.

"We're tired," Mann says. "Nobody listens."

It seems inconceivable to her that once again a war could be coming,
and once again no one is listening. Another pair of lawn mowers joins
the chorus and the spell breaks. A cab pulls in the driveway. The
caterer comes to prepare for the dinner guests.