AMY GOODMAN: And it was only the French government who then did a study?
JAMES RISEN: Yes, yes. Yeah, the French government finally -- you know, the U.S. -- the CIA and the Bush administration didn't want to tell anybody what was really happening, where they were getting this information. You know, "This supersecret information about Al Jazeera, we can't tell you." And finally, the French intelligence service and the French government said, "You know, you're grounding our planes. You've got to tell us where you're getting this information." And they got -- they finally shared the information with them, and the French got a French tech firm to look at this, and they said, "This is nuts. This is fabrication." And after a while, the CIA was finally convinced maybe the French were right, and they stopped talking about it. They didn't do anything else. They just like shut it down eventually, but never wanted to talk about what had really happened.
AMY GOODMAN: Then Dennis Montgomery, revealed as a con man --
JAMES RISEN: Yeah, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: -- in jail for that?
JAMES RISEN: Well, no, he's not in jail. But it was a -- he actually got more contracts after that, with the Pentagon and other agencies. And he continued to operate for a long time. You know, he kind of went from one agency to the other.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to James Risen, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist for The New York Times. His new book, just out today, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. When we come back, war corrupts, endless war corrupts absolutely. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We're spending the hour with James Risen, the investigative reporter for The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. It also won him, well, becoming a target, not only of the Bush administration, but of the Obama administration, for year after year, right through to today. He could face years in jail for not revealing a source on one of the stories that he has exposed around a program called Merlin and the U.S. giving flawed blueprints for a nuclear trigger to Iran. This issue of facing years in jail, how are you preparing for this?
JAMES RISEN: Well, as you said, I've had a lot of time to think about it. And it bothered me a lot more at first. I was more nervous about it when it first started. But now it's just like kind of background noise in my life, and so I'm just kind of used to it now, because I know exactly -- I have no doubts about what I'm going to do, and so that makes it pretty easy.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you're covering the very people who could put you in jail.
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