This is intercepted.

I'm Jeremy Skahill coming to you from the offices of the intercept in New York City,

and this is episode 109 of Intercepted.

There can be no excuse for anyone entrusted with vital intelligence to leak it,

and no excuse for any newspaper to print it.

In the spring of 2003, just after the invasion of Iraq began,

my colleague James Reisen, who was then a National Security reporter at the New York Times,

found himself in an office in the West Wing of the White House.

Sitting across from him was the National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice,

as well as George Tenet, who was then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Reisen was there because he had planned to publish a story about Operation Merlin,

a half-baked CIA scheme that had tried to disrupt Iran's nuclear weapons development.

Reisen had information that Operation Merlin, if it had been successfully carried out,

would have possibly achieved the opposite goal, potentially helping Iran to actually advance its program.

Condoleezza Rice warned the New York Times that publishing that story could get people killed,

and she strongly urged the Times not to publish James Reisen's story.

In declassified talking points from this meeting, Reisen noted,

if you write it, you endanger lives and national security.

Reisen's editors at the New York Times sided with the Bush White House, and they spiked the story.

The ground rules of the meeting, which we agreed to, were that it would be off the record,

because the president wanted to present us with what he said were classified details

about the effectiveness of the program that he thought would persuade us not to publish the article.

...