New Interview of Bob Kelley on Recent Events Including Operation Merlin Developments

Once again, Bob explains recent developments, and puts things in context, better than anyone. See the interview here.

Peter Jenkins wrote a great piece on Lobelog making several of these points this past week. See it here.

And Jonathan Tirone wrote a piece on Bloomberg about the implications of the Operation Merlin revelations for IAEA intelligence assessment, with a quote from me here.

You can Google information about Operation Merlin. It’s been known about for a long time, since James Risen’s 2006 book State of War. It has all come to the fore again recently with the espionage conviction last week of Jeffrey Sterling, for having been the source of leaks on the program from the CIA.

As I said in the Reuters piece, this incident does significantly undermine the idea that the IAEA should be relying for its assessments on intelligence information provided to it by third-party states, some of whom have proven that they have no compunction about falsifying documents, ambush-killing civilian nuclear scientists, using cyber attacks against civilian facilities, and generally doing anything within their power, including all manner of subterfuge, to frustrate Iran’s nuclear program.  And as Bob says in his interview, the IAEA is not itself an intelligence agency. It does not have the capability to independently assess the credibility of intelligence provided to it by third party states.  I’ll be writing more about this in my forthcoming book.