Somewhere, Dick Cheney is smiling.

To understand why, a bit of history is required. Risen's national security reporting generally, and especially his scoop about the NSA's warrantless wiretapping, exposed illegal acts at the highest levels of government. Bush Administration officials speculated about having Risen tried and imprisoned for violating the Espionage Act, secretly surveilled his phone calls, and singled him out for harassment even when he was writing the same stories as other national security journalists, he reports in a sworn affidavit filed last week in a Virginia district court. "I was told by a reliable source that Vice President Dick Cheney pressured the Justice Department to personally target me because he was unhappy with my reporting and wanted to see me in jail," the affidavit states. "An organized campaign of hate mail from right wing groups with close ties to the White House was launched, inundating me with personal threats. Meanwhile, protestors supporting the Bush Administration picketed my office."

In 2006, Risen expanded on his newspaper reporting in a book entitled "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration." Its a chapter of that book that concerns us here:

In Chapter 9 of State of War, I reported on Operation Merlin, an intelligence operation in 2000 during the Clinton Administration that was intended to stall - but which may have actually helped - Iran in its efforts to develop a nuclear weapons program. The plan behind Merlin was to have a former Russian scientist provide Iranian officials with faulty nuclear blueprints. The CIA hoped that based on those flawed plans, Iran would build an inoperable nuclear weapon....



As reported in Chapter 9, Merlin was deeply flawed and mismanaged from the start. First, the flaws in the nuclear blueprints were so obvious that the Russian scientist noticed them within minutes of seeing the plans. When the scientist explained this to his CIA handlers, they inexplicably refused to call off the operation and simply told him that he should go ahead and deliver the plans to the Iranians.



On January 24, 2008, the Bush Administration subpoenaed Risen, insisting that he reveal the confidential source for that chapter. Like any good reporter who promises confidentiality, he was prepared to go to jail rather than do so, and guessed that was the Bush Administration's intent all along. "I believe that this investigation started as part of an effort by the Bush Administration to punish me and silence me," Risen states. "In fact, the first subpoena issued to me was the culmination of a prolonged campaign against me by the Bush Administration and its supporters."

In his judgment, "the efforts to target me have continued under the Obama Administration, which has been aggressively investigating whistle-blowers and reporters in a way that will have a chilling effect on the freedom of the press in the United States." Risen received his second subpoena in April of 2010, and pressure has intensified since the January 6, 2011 indictment of former CIA agent Jeffrey Sterling, his alleged source, who is charged with leaking the classified information.