[Cryptography] crypto leak to Iranians via Iraqis

[iang]

https://theintercept.com/2018/01/03/my-life-as-a-new-york-times-reporter-in-the-shadow-of-the-war-on-terror/

James Risen


3 STELLAR WIND

IN THE SUMMER of 2003, the New York Times named a new Washington bureau 
chief: Philip Taubman, an old friend of Bill Keller’s. Taubman had been 
the Times’s Moscow bureau chief when Keller won a Pulitzer Prize as a 
correspondent there. Now Taubman was Keller’s man in Washington.

Taubman and I developed a friendly relationship. He had covered national 
security and intelligence matters earlier in his career, and he seemed 
eager for scoops. But by 2004, I began to disagree with some of his 
decisions. That spring, I learned that the Bush administration had 
discovered that Ahmad Chalabi, the neoconservatives’ golden boy in Iraq, 
had told an Iranian intelligence official that the National Security 
Agency had broken Iranian codes.

That was a huge betrayal by the man some senior Bush administration 
officials had once considered installing as the leader of Iraq. But 
after I called the CIA and NSA for comment, NSA Director Michael Hayden 
called Taubman and asked him not to run the story. Hayden argued that 
even though Chalabi had told the Iranians that the U.S. had broken their 
codes, it wasn’t clear the Iranians believed him, and they were still 
using the same communications systems.

Taubman agreed, and we sat on the story until the CIA public affairs 
office called and told him that someone else was reporting it, and that 
we should no longer feel bound not to publish. I was upset that I had 
lost an exclusive, and I believed that Hayden’s arguments against 
publication had been designed simply to save the White House from 
embarrassment over Chalabi.



(The rest is worth reading too!)