Lahey said Prof. Theo Theofanous of University of California Santa Barbara, Professor John J. Dorning of the University of Virginia and Dr. Rusi Taleyarkhan of Oak Ridge National Laboratory had expressed their willingness to join Lahey on such a delegation.
Leahy's e-mail also said Nakhai would need to contact the State Department "to make sure that we have formal permission to go on this trip." Most prominent nuclear scientists had security clearances from the Department of Energy, he noted, and could lose their clearances if they made the trip without official approval.
In mid-March, Nakhai recalls, he called the State Department's Iran desk officer, J. Christopher Stevens. Stevens went on to become ambassador to Libya in 2012 but was killed in an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sep. 11.
In their third conversation that same week, Stevens told the scientist that the trip was "a good idea," according to Nakhai. But Stevens said Nakhai would have to "clear it with the Department of Defence."
Stevens gave Nakhai the telephone number for the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Near East and South Asia Alina Romanowski, the top adviser to the secretary of defence on Near East matters. But when Nakhai called Romanowski, he got a decidedly negative response to the proposed trip.
Romanowski was unequivocally opposed to the idea, according to Nakhai, arguing that the scientists wouldn't be able to get the truth in Iran. "They will mislead you," Nakhai recalled her saying. "They will not show you everything."
"I told her these scientists could not be easily fooled," Nakhai said. He pointed to Lahey's experience in leading a mission to China during the Richard Nixon administration.
Nakhai then told Romanowski that the group would ask to go wherever the Defence Department wanted them to go.
Nakhai asked her to think it over, and said he would call back later.
When Nakhai called back a week later, Romanowski gave him the same answer and the same argument, Nakhai said.
In a later conversation with Romanowski, Nakhai recalled, he offered her assurances that he would include an expert on nuclear weapons on the delegation. He also referred to his contacts with the American Nuclear Society -- the premier professional association of specialists on civilian nuclear power -- and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
And in yet another phone conversation with Romanowski, Nakhai said, he invited the Pentagon to "send somebody of your own choosing as part of the delegation." But Romanowski's opposition remained unchanged.
Nearly two months after he had first contacted the Defence Department official, Nakhai pulled the plug on the project in May 1998.
Romanowski is now deputy assistant administrator in the U.S. Agency for International Development's Middle East Bureau. Responding to a query from IPS Thursday, a spokesman for USAID, Ben Edwards, said, "Ms Romanowski cannot comment about the DoD in her current capacity at USAID."
Robert Pelletreau, who had been assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asia in 1994-97 and had been deputy assistant secretary of defence for the same region in 1983-85, told IPS the decision to oppose the delegation trip would have been made at a higher level at DOD with input from the Joint Staff and others.
DOD's reluctance to see a gesture toward Iran that the State Department was supporting might have been a factor, according to Pelletreau, along with distrust of an initiative coming from an Iranian scientist with no ties to the Pentagon.
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