Did the White House block Leverett for discussing Iran-U.S. cooperation in Afghanistan?

• 2:15 am UPDATE: The NY Times has just printed Leverett's op-ed with blacked-out sections alongside citations. Read "What We Wanted to Tell You About Iran"

This week a wave of news stories (Washington Post, New York Times, Financial Times) described how the White House allegedly intervened to block the publication of an op-ed by Flynt Leverett. Leverett has been a critic of Washington's Iran policy, and in his op-ed called for a new, comprehensive bargain with Iran. The passages in question discuss U.S.-Iranian cooperation after 9/11 (a development that had been well-documented.) But they are already documented--as Leverett noted in an interview with The NY Times: “There is no plausible claim that this is confidential stuff...There’s no detail in these paragraphs that has not already been written about by me and other officials.”

Well, the next chapter will be written tomorrow morning, according to Steve Clemons of the Washington Note:

Unless lawyers or other news get in the way, two very important pieces will be up. The first in the New York Times will be Flynt Leverett's CIA-censored op-ed based on his new paper, "Dealing with Tehran." But, op-ed page editor David Shipley will add some "graphic flair" by posting the original op-ed that the CIA reviewed after White House National Security Council staff insinuated themselves into this normally intrigue-free process. The op-ed will run with the blacked out, redacted lines "blacked out." Very cool.

So we won't know precisely what was excluded...but the Times will include a secret decoder ring: links to the citations that include many of the same arguments and data points. One of these key citations made it through the CIA review process just last week--a white paper by Leverett published by my organization, The Century Foundation (full disclosure: I worked with Leverett and others here at Century in the publishing this paper as part of our series on Iran.) You can read the entire paper here, or see the excerpt on U.S.-Iran cooperation in Afghanistan below the break...MORE

Flynt Leverett's analysis appears to draw exclusively on material that has already been declassified--it is troubling if the White House and the NSC tried to intervene in the classification process to silence criticism.  Here's an excerpt from his white paper on the sensitive issue of Iranian-US cooperation:

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration used the cover of the “6+2” process to stand up what was effectively a freestanding bilateral channel with Iran, with regular (for the most part, monthly) meetings between U.S. and Iranian diplomats.

U.S. engagement with Tehran over Afghanistan provided significant and tangible benefits for the American position during the early stages of the war on terror. At a minimum, U.S. engagement with Tehran helped to neutralize the threat of Iranian actions on the ground, either by Afghan proxies or by Iranian intelligence and paramilitary assets, which could have made prosecution of Operation Enduring Freedom and subsequent post-conflict stabilization more difficult. More positively, engagement elicited crucial diplomatic cooperation from Iran, both during the war and afterwards. Over years, Iran had cultivated extensive relationships with key players on the Afghan political scene, including important warlords in northern and western Afghanistan. Iranian influence was critical for arming and managing these players during the U.S.-led coalition’s military operations. After the war, Iranian influence induced these players to support the political settlement enshrined at the Bonn Conference in December 2001, when the Afghan Interim Authority under Hamid Karzai was established.

Tehran appeared to have a variety of motives for cooperating with Bush administration on Afghanistan. At a minimum, Iranian policymakers—well aware of the State Department’s longstanding description of the Islamic Republic as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism—wanted to avoid getting caught on the downside of the administration’s self-declared “global war on terror.” But Iran also seemed to sense a potential strategic opportunity. Iranian diplomats involved in the bilateral channel on Afghanistan indicated to their U.S. counterparts that the discussions were being closely followed at the highest levels of the Iranian power structure and that there was considerable interest in Tehran in the possibility of a wider diplomatic opening. Certainly, from an Iranian perspective, the platform had been created for exploring such an opening.

However, in his January 2002 State of the Union address (just six weeks after the Bonn Conference), President Bush placed the Islamic Republic in the “axis of evil,” along with North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Iranian representatives missed the next monthly meeting with U.S. diplomats in protest, but—in a telling indication of Tehran’s seriousness about exploring a diplomatic opening to the United States—resumed participation in the discussions the following month. The bilateral channel on Afghanistan continued for another year, until the eve of the Iraq war, but it became clear the Bush administration was not interested in a broader, strategic dialogue with Iran. Indeed, the administration terminated the channel in May 2003, on the basis of unproven and never pursued allegations of the involvement of Iran-based al Qaeda figures in the May 12, 2003, bomb attacks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia."

Note also Leverett's revealing comments during a Century Foundation / Center for American Progress panel discussion earlier this week (video ; transcript ) :

The argument that Iran helped us in Afghanistan because they didn’t like the Taliban and they wanted to get rid of the Taliban is, I think, misplaced.  They helped us in Afghanistan because they saw and opportunity after the September 11 attacks to improve their relationship with us....This gets us back to another point in the Pollack editorial that was just flat out wrong.  Ken [Pollack] said that what the Iranians did to help us in Afghanistan was primarily to provide intelligence.  That is just simply not true. 

What they did was to put at our disposal their extensive connections with the Northern Alliance, including Iranian officers embedded with the Northern Alliance; their extensive connections to important regional warlords, other ethnic and sectarian leaders in Iran, and basically deliver those guys to the table so that they would not work against us when we were operating militarily in Afghanistan, and so that they would either support or at least not block a post-Taliban political settlement.  That’s what they did for us in Afghanistan.