When President Barack Obama and senior administration officials proudly announced that all U.S. troops in Iraq would leave by the end of the year, there was no mention of the millions of Iraqis who were forced to flee their homes by the U.S. invasion or the thousands who risked their lives by working directly for the U.S. military.

"It is wonderful that American troops will finally be able to come home, but we must remember that for the nearly three million Iraqis displaced by the war, returning home is still not an option," said Becca Heller, director of the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project at the Urban Justice Center.

The U.S. neglect of Iraqi refugees -- especially those who can no longer live in safety in Iraq due to their work with the U.S. military -- is not a new phenomenon.  Your humble Cable guy has met dozens of Iraqi refugees over the years, mostly women, who had somehow managed to secure a rare special visa to enter the United States, but this status has been offered to only a fraction of those who helped the U.S. military by working as guides or translators.

Most of those refugees were living in the United States without jobs, permanent residences, or any financial support from the U.S. government. Many were wholly dependent on the kindness of the soldiers they had worked with in Iraq, who felt an obligation to aid them. Some even married those soldiers.

As early as 2007, The New Yorker and other outlets were reporting about the herculean efforts U.S. soldiers had gone to in order to help their Iraqi staffers flee to safety, even creating an "underground railroad" to bring Iraqis to the U.S. embassy in Amman, Jordan, because the Baghdad embassy would not process their visa requests.

The late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) took up the issue of Iraqi refugees, introducing a resolution to expand the available number of visas and pressing the State Department to streamline the process for those who sacrificed on behalf of the U.S. effort. He had some success, but died before finishing the work.

Four years later, advocates are still pressing the administration to issue all the visas it can to help Iraqis resettle in the United States and then help them get on with their new lives.

"The United States failed to honor its commitment to Iraqi refugees this year, admitting less than half of the 17,000 refugees we had promised to help. This includes thousands of Iraqis whose lives are at risk, or family members have been killed, as a direct result of their work as interpreters and drivers with U.S. forces in Iraq," Heller said. "The U.S. must continue to honor its obligations to the Iraqis for whom withdrawal is not an option."

We know now that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Secretary of State Colin Powell didn't get along. And Powell is back in the news this week, refuting the assertions against him that Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld's BFF, makes in his new book.

But once upon a time, when Powell, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice were just starting out in the newly formed George W. Bush administration, they all got along and even ate lunch together every Wednesday. Powell even had some fun with his neocon colleagues, as Rumsfeld noted in this Feb. 8, 2001 snowflake:

February 7 Condi, Dick Cheney and I went to the State Department for the Wednesday lunch. The table was set elegantly, and there were silver covers over each of our four places. We all teased Colin about being so elegant at the State Department. When we took the silver metal covers off, underneath was a plain paper bag with our sandwich in it. It was a classic ruse.

One wonders what would be in a paper bag that Powell would give to Rummy, Cheney, and Condi today...

This week's toppling of the Qaddafi regime in Libya shows that the Obama administration's multilateral and light-footprint approach to regime change is more effective than the troop-heavy occupation-style approach used by the George W. Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan, a top White House official told Foreign Policy today in a wide-ranging interview.

"The fact that it is Libyans marching into Tripoli not only provides a basis of legitimacy for this but also will provide contrast to situations when the foreign government is the occupier," said Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for communications, in an exclusive interview on Wednesday with FP. "While there will be huge challenges ahead, one of the positive aspects here is that the Libyans are the ones who are undertaking the regime change and the ones leading the transition."

Despite criticism from Congress and elsewhere, President Barack Obama's strategy for the military intervention in Libya will not only result in a better outcome in Libya but also will form the basis of Obama's preferred model for any future military interventions, Rhodes said.

"There are two principles that the president stressed at the outset [of the Libya intervention] that have borne out in our approach. The first is that we believe that it's far more legitimate and effective for regime change to be pursued by an indigenous political movement than by the United States or foreign powers," said Rhodes. "Secondly, we put an emphasis on burden sharing, so that the U.S. wasn't bearing the brunt of the burden and so that you had not just international support for the effort, but also meaningful international contributions."

Rhodes said that the United States is not going to be able to replicate the exact same approach to intervention in other countries, but identified the two core principles of relying on indigenous forces and burden sharing as "characteristics of how the president approaches foreign policy and military intervention."

Rhodes also weighed in on several other aspects of the Libya saga:

• Rhodes confirmed the comments by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice on Tuesday that the TNC can choose whether to prosecute Muammar al-Qaddafi themselves or hand him over to the International Criminal Court, which has indicted him on war crimes. ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, however, has argued that the decision is not up to the Libyans.
• "We believe it's something that the Libyans and the [Transitional National Coalition], were they to capture Qaddafi, would then be in charge of, in consultation with the ICC," said Rhodes. "Were he to go to any third country, they would have an obligation to turn him over to the ICC."
• On the role of the NATO operation in Libya, Rhodes said the civilian protection mission continues but that consultation will soon begin in Brussels on the conclusion of the mission. The need for the NATO protection mission is still present for now, Rhodes said, but the White House doesn't anticipate the TNC requesting a peacekeeping force from NATO or the United Nations that involves any foreign boots on the ground. "There's no plan for that type of effort," he said.
• Rhodes said the drive to release between $1 billion and $1.5 billion of Qaddafi's frozen assets to the TNC is moving along quickly. "We think that should be complete in the next few days and we don't foresee an insurmountable problem there," he said. The Obama administration feels confident the TNC can manage the money and prevent it from being stolen or funneled to unsavory actors. The administration will also try to ensure the money goes to the urgent needs identified by the TNC.
• Rhodes also addressed the effects the developments in Libya may have on Syria, saying that "it sends a message to Damascus that a crackdown of the sort that Qaddafi and [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad have pursued is not a means of maintaining legitimacy and staying in power in the long run."
• Rhodes said that a transition to democracy in Syria is in the U.S. national interest, and would weaken Iran's ability to influence regional events. "The Iranians have suggested that the Arab Spring was somehow a positive development for Tehran, the fact you see their principal ally in the region having completely lost legitimacy... would be a blow to Iran," he said. But he emphasized that the administration does not see a military intervention in Syria as the right step.
• On the fate of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Mohmed Ali al-Megrahi, who senior lawmakers and GOP presidential candidates said on Tuesday should be re-arrested and extradited to the United States, Rhodes said the extradition issue was a legal question for the Justice Department, "but the president never thought he should have been released in the first place ... so that continues to be our view."

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in an exclusive interview with The Cable, credited the Bush administration's Freedom Agenda with setting the stage for the current wave of revolutions sweeping the Arab world. But he also warned that Egypt and the other countries in the region could easily slip into the hands of repressive groups that have been lying in wait.

"That region does not have a long proud history of free political institutions, free economic institutions, and democracy," Rumsfeld said. "What President Bush has done in Iraq and Afghanistan is to give the people in those countries a chance to have freer political systems and freer economic systems. There's no question that the example is helpful in the region."

But now, several years later, nominally pro-Western movements throughout the Middle East have been defeated by repressive and authoritarian organizations -- a situation that could very well repeat itself in Egypt with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, Rumsfeld said, because those groups tend to be better organized and more vicious.

"So while what's happening is hopeful, all of us have to be realistic and hope the process is one, that unlike Lebanon, unlike Gaza, and unlike Iran, does not end up bringing people's hopes up and then dashed with a repressive regime," Rumsfeld said.

Rumsfeld criticized the Obama administration's mixed messaging during the Egypt crisis, specifically referencing the State Department's decision to send Frank Wisner as an unofficial envoy to Cairo. The Obama administration was subsequently forced to distance itself from Wisner when he publicly called for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to stay in power only days later.

"I think it's unfortunate that they appointed Frank Wisner and then within a matter of hours got cross waves between the Department of State, the White House, and their special envoy. Clearly that weakens our voice to have mixed signals," Rumsfeld said.

Regarding the role of the Egyptian military, which now has effective control of the government in Cairo, Rumsfeld said that it may or may not turn out to be a responsible steward of power and the transition to free and fair elections.

"If one had to put some money down, you would want odds, but I would take the odds favoring that [the Egyptian military] would behave in a positive and constructive way," Rumsfeld said. "One has to say that managing this process is not going to be easy."

Rumsfeld said that he believes the tidal wave of change sweeping the Arab world presents the United States with an opportunity to increase its support for the opposition movement in Iran.

"I hope there are a variety of things taking place in our government, in some instances appropriately public but in some instances private ... and that the examples that we are seeing elsewhere in the region, I would hope we would encourage in Iran," he said.

Rumsfeld has over 40 years of experience dealing with Egypt and the Arab world. In his new memoir Known and Unknown, he recounts the first time he met then Vice President Mubarak, in June 1975. At the time, Rumsfeld was serving as chief of staff to President Gerald Ford. "On a personal level, I found him animated, even ebullient," Rumsfeld wrote.

MANAMA, Bahrain—U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asked Friday what foreigners should think about the extraordinary breach of cybersecurity that led to the WikiLeaks crisis, pointed to the George W. Bush administration's decision following the 9/11 attacks to vastly expand the sharing of secret information.

Asked how such a huge leak could have occurred and why no alarm bells went off when a low-level intelligence analyst allegedly downloaded 250,000 classified diplomatic cables, Clinton replied: "The decision was made in the Bush administration to add the diplomatic cables to the Defense Department's special network that was created for that purpose."

While she defended the move as defensible at the time, she emphasized that these policies were being rolled back in the wake of the WikiLeaks crisis, perhaps for good.

"The process was undertaken in order to do a better job of what's called ‘connecting the dots,' because after 9/11, one of the principle criticisms of the government was that the information was stovepiped, that the Defense Department knew things that the State Department didn't know, that the White House didn't know," Clinton explained. "So it was understandable for the Bush administration to say, ‘We need to end the stovepiping and figure out how to have greater situational awareness and sharing of information.'"

Without identifying anyone by name, she then said that it was in the Defense Department, not the State Department, where the leak occurred.

"The individual... was a fully cleared military intelligence officer... [The Pentagon is] conducting a very vigorous investigation to determine why no alarm bells went off," Clinton said. (Media speculation has swirled around Pfc. Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst with the 10^th Mountain division in Iraq who has been charged with transferring classified information to an unauthorized source.)

Clinton then explained that the State Department had severed its classified files from the Secret Internet Protocol Routing Network (SIPRNet), a network that was set up to share information between Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon. She revealed for the first time that this action had been taken well before the WikiLeaks cables starting floating out into the open.

"I directed we would cease sharing, for whatever time it may take, our cables. That stopped as soon as this gentleman was apprehended," she said. Manning was arrested in May.

Clinton also pledged that the United States would prosecute anyone connected to the disclosures. She said that any guilty parties would certainly be prosecuted, and that the prosecutions would go further, reaching those involved in distributing the cables such as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

"[Manning] is clearly going to be prosecuted along with anyone who participated or contributed to the crimes that he committed," Clinton said.

She continued the administration's two-pronged public relations strategy of playing up the danger of the leaks, while downplaying the information in the cables themselves. On the one hand, she warned the assembled leaders of dozens of countries at the conference that the problem was serious and was as dangerous to them as to the United States.

"The attack on the United States' information system was really an attack on the international community," she said. "I believe that this attack, if left unpunished, will be just the first of many against anyone, anywhere."

She then told the assembled leaders that the cables contained nothing really shocking.

"Some of the analysis that has been done with the information that has been made available through these leaks has basically concluded there's not much news... There's no big revelation; it's the day-to-day work of what diplomats all around the world do."

A behind-the-scenes clash is playing out over President Obama's nominee to be the next U.S. ambassador to Turkey, a key Middle East post at a time of tense relations between Washington and an increasingly independent-minded Ankara.

The would-be envoy, Francis J. Ricciardone, Jr., is a 32-year veteran of the Foreign Service who most recently served as the deputy ambassador in Kabul. He's served in Ankara in the past and speaks fluent Turkish. Ricciardone also played a role in organizing the Iraqi exile community before the 2003 U.S. drive to Baghdad.

But it's his tenure as George W. Bush's envoy to Egypt that has provoked the most criticism, particularly among neoconservatives who are hoping to persuade Republican senators to torpedo his nomination.

Ricciardone served as the U.S. ambassador in Cairo from 2005-2008. Activists and journalists dubbed those first few years the "Arab Spring," when street demonstrations, political ferment, and contested elections in Baghdad, Beirut, and other Arab capitals inspired hope that the Middle East's stagnant authoritarian regimes -- including that of Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt with an iron fist since Anwar Sadat's assassination in 1981 -- might finally fall.

The Bush administration exerted special efforts to promote democracy and human rights in Egypt, a longtime recipient of billions in military and economic aid, and a close U.S. partner on regional security matters. U.S. officials repeatedly raised human rights concerns with Mubarak's government, including the case of dissident political leader Ayman Nour. Then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice delivered a ringing 2005 address on democracy at the American University in Cairo, calling on Mubarak to embrace political reform.

Those efforts came crashing down months later, amid the widespread fraud and violence of Egypt's parliamentary elections. The opposition Muslim Brotherhood performed surprisingly well in the early rounds, prompting a harsh government crackdown that continues to this day. When Hamas shocked the world by winning the Palestinian elections the following January, the Bush administration appeared to lose its appetite for promoting Arab democracy altogether.

Former top National Security Council aide Elliott Abrams blames Ricciardone.

"Especially in 2005 and 2006, Secretary Rice and the Bush administration significantly increased American pressure for greater respect for human rights and progress toward democracy in Egypt. This of course meant pushing the Mubarak regime, arguing with it in private, and sometimes criticizing it in public. In all of this we in Washington found Ambassador Ricciardone to be without enthusiasm or energy," Abrams told The Cable.

Ricciardone's supporters counter that he is a distinguished diplomat with a history of serving in tough parts of the world. Some former officials maintain he forged close working relationships across the interagency, worked effectively with the military, and argue that  his past experience in Turkey makes him ideal to advance that relationship and U.S. interests across the region as a whole.

"He's an outstanding and extremely dedicated Foreign Service officer who has served his country in some very delicate and dangerous postings," said Mitchell Reiss, who served at the State Department's director of policy planning under Bush,

But other former Bush administration officials are circulating stories they believe show Ricciardone in a negative light.

In one of them, before Rice's Cairo speech, she had a particularly nasty press conference with Foreign Minister Aboul Gheit, where Gheit defended his regime's conduct by criticizing U.S. conduct in the war on terror. Sitting next to Rice following the press conference, Ricciardone blurted out "the problem is that fucking Patriot Act," one senior Bush administration official said, adding that Rice was incensed.

Egyptian officials have cited the Patriot Act in explaining the continued need for their own much-criticized Emergency Law, which contains loopholes that facilitate far-ranging restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly.

"Putting aside the language, this seemed to those in the secretary's party to be yet another case of our ambassador's unwillingness even to see bad conduct by the government of Egypt, and to blame any case of it on Washington," the official said.

Ricciardone's critics claim that his strong personality and often blunt speaking style are the wrong mix for the current task at hand -- and that he has a tendency to get too close to his foreign interlocutors.

"Now is not the time for us to have an ambassador in Ankara who is more interested in serving the interests of the local autocrats and less interested in serving the interests of his own administration," said Danielle Pletka, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute.

Aides from two GOP Senate offices said that while it's too early to say there is firm opposition on the Hill, their bosses have reservations about Ricciardone that could complicate his confirmation process. They plan to not only examine his time in Cairo, but his stints as deputy chief of mission in Turkey once before and his time serving as an official in Baghdad and in Kabul.

"Ricciardone has a lot to answer for on his record in Afghanistan, Egypt and on Iraq policy.  What's more, his temperament and professionalism are in serious doubt," said one senior GOP aide. "It's unclear why the administration would send this FSO [Foreign Service officer] to such an important country given the tenuous state of Turkey's relationship with the West."

For all of Riccardione's detractors, he seems to have at least as many supporters. Experts, former officials, and diplomats from across the political spectrum have contacted The Cable in recent days to express their support for him and push back against what they see as the criticisms of a few. They say Ricciardone was made the scapegoat for a flawed Bush administration democracy push that never really had the financial commitment or follow-through it would have needed to be successful.

Steven Cook, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that there was never real consensus inside the Bush administration as to how to implement the pro-democracy push Rice highlighted in her Cairo speech, and that Ricciardone was put in the impossible situation of having to manage a complex relationship with a supposed ally while implementing a new policy that was aimed at his overthrow.

"He was quite effective as a U.S. ambassador at a time when the Bush administration and the Egyptian government were at loggerheads. There needed to be someone who could continue the conversation on a range of other things, not just democracy promotion," said Cook.

Ricciardone was tasked with doing two things that seem to be in direct contradiction: Pushing Egypt to help the United States on a host of regional issues, such as the war in Iraq and the fracturing of the Palestinian government, while also pushing Cairo to make reforms it was severely resisting.

"The Bush administration was saying ‘Carry our water while reforming yourself out of power,'" Cook explained, adding that Bush's Egypt democracy initiative never had the financial backing it would have needed to succeed, especially in light of the fact that meanwhile, the U.S. was giving Egypt more than $1 billion in military aid.

Actually, Ricciardone had a solution for that as well. In Cairo, he worked with Faiza Abu El Naga, who runs Egypt's Ministry of International Cooperation, to propose a huge new aid endowment for Egypt, under the thinking that by institutionalizing non-military aid to Egypt, democracy promotion could escape the annual tribulations of the often complicated congressional appropriations process. The fight over that endowment continues to this day.

The nomination fight over Ricciardone will likely become a debate over how best to approach Turkey during this delicate stage. For those who want to use the stick, he's destined to be the wrong choice. For those who think carrots are preferable, Ricciardone's extensive knowledge, fluent Turkish, and reputation for getting heavily involved in public diplomacy make him the perfect selection.

"Let's face it, there hasn't been much of an Obama effect in Turkey, so having an ambassador there who can get out among the people could be very useful," Cook said.

When push comes to shove in the Senate, the main question will be whether the Obama administration is willing to make that case and use some of its political capital to push the nomination through. They haven't always been eager to do so, as with the nomination of Robert Ford to be ambassador to Syria. Ford is well-liked by everybody, but the administration hasn't been active in pressing for his confirmation, potentially because it isn't eager to have a public debate about its policy of engaging Syria -- which has yet to show results.

Another Senate GOP aide who is critical of Ricciardone predicted that the administration won't want to make an issue of the Ricciardone nomination and anticipated that if they don't press it, his confirmation process could languish. "We don't need to put up much of a fight because things are moving so slowly anyway," the aide said.

South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint is quickly becoming the leading spokesman arguing against President Obama's reset policy with Russia, but his penchant for extreme rhetoric and loose understanding of the facts is overshadowing his message and, according to the administration, unhelpfully muddying the discussion.

DeMint has made increasing forays into the foreign-policy game this year. He was a key player in the Honduras policy debate, taking sides against ousted president Manuel Zelaya weeks before the administration eventually followed suit. He is deeply involved in the GOP drive to hold up a range of State Department nominees, and has used his perch on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to stall the appointment of international broadcasting officials as well.

But when it comes to Russia, DeMint's rhetoric is hurting his case. That was on full display during an event on the visit of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev held by the Foreign Policy Initiative Wednesday afternoon at the Capitol building, where the senator referred to Russia several times as the "Soviet Union."

"Clearly the Soviet Union as a democracy is a fraud. Rule of law is very loose, foreign investment is very low," he said. "The Soviet Union, I mean Russia, is making the countries around it concerned with how Russia is constantly trying to manipulate their elections, undermine their freedom, and impose some control."

Think Progress blogger Max Bergmann noted that DeMint called Russia the Soviet Union at a hearing on the new START treaty last week as well.

At the FPI event, DeMint also explained his overall take on Russia. "Russia is trying to undermine American strength in different parts of the world. As we think of Russia, it s important to think of them as a threat to many and a protector of none," he said. He also at one point said, "I don't pretend to be an expert."

DeMint's expertise on Russia was also called into question after he seemingly misrepresented the objectives of both the Bush and Obama administrations in deploying ballistic missile defense systems in Europe.

At a May 18 hearing, he complained that the current design of the system isn't sufficient to combat Russia's missile arsenal, which numbers into the thousands. "Is it not desirable for us to have a missile defense system that renders their threat useless?," he asked.

Both administrations have gone to great pains to explain that the system has always been aimed at Iran, not Russia, and it's hard to find a credible expert who believes that any feasible conception of missile defense could be built to overpower the Russian capability.

Inside the Obama administration, officials look at DeMint's Russia activity with a mixture of amusement and concern. They believe that he is sacrificing his own credibility by fumbling on the issue, but at the same time, they worry that foreign governments and publics might actually take him seriously.

"We are happy to let Senator DeMint keep digging away at the hole he is already in," an administration official told The Cable. "He seems to have forgotten that even the Rumsfeld-led Pentagon in the last administration explicitly ruled out a U.S. missile defense system targeting Russia's nuclear forces -- and for good reason."

But they don't discount the effect DeMint is having on the debate. Among administration officials, there is some legitimate concern that DeMint's statements only reinforce the paranoia of some elements in Russia (and China) that U.S. missile defense systems are indeed targeted at their strategic nuclear forces.

"It is unfortunate that the hard-liners in the United States and Russia feed off each other and feed the other's paranoia," said John Isaacs, executive director of the Council for a Livable World. "Just as GOP senators quote Russian statements on missile defense to prove their case, Russians will be happy to quote Senator DeMint."

Sylvie Stein contributed to this article.

As Washington works itself into a tizzy over whether to release Guantánamo prisoners following the underwear bomber incident (President Obama announced earlier this week that he wouldn't transfer any of them back to Yemen "at this time"), news of a secret Pentagon report is being bandied about as proof that "recidivism" of released GTMO prisoners is on the rise.

Oh, how easily we forget that the whole idea of measuring the recidivism of Guantánamo detainees was debunked last May. The original baseline for saying that the trend of recidivism is on the rise was founded in this front-page New York Times article by Elisabeth Bumiller, which stated that the Pentagon had found that one in seven, or 14 percent, of released GTMO prisoners had "returned to terrorism or militant activity."

There were several problems with the reporting, not the least of which was that there is no way to determine if the alleged militants "returned" to the fight because there were never proper legal procedures at Guantánamo to determine if the prisoners were guilty in the first place.

That language was removed from the story after Bumiller's piece was torn apart by the Times' public editor Clark Hoyt, who said the article was "seriously flawed and greatly overplayed."

Moreover, as Hoyt pointed out, the one in seven number failed to distinguish between those who were "suspected" of militancy and those who were "confirmed" to have done something violent. "Had only confirmed cases been considered, one in seven would have changed to one in 20," Hoyt wrote.

Independent analyses put that number even smaller. Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann at the New America Foundation looked into the numbers even further and found that both confirmed and suspected military rates of released Guantánamo prisoners as of last summer was one in 25, or about 4 percent.

But none of that critical analysis made it into this Jan. 7 LA Times article by Julian E. Barnes and Christi Parsons, which cites a new and also secret Pentagon report to argue that now 20 percent of released Guantánamo prisoners have "resumed extremist activity."

The story says that both conservatives and liberals dispute the figures (although I haven't seen where the number is said to be an underestimation), but fails to point out that the 14 percent figure from May was disputed by the very paper that reported it.

Bloomberg's story on the report did a better job of explaining that the numbers are suspect, at best.

In an interview with The Cable, Bergen noted that beside the fact that the numbers are inflated, the Pentagon's insistence on classifying the underlying information makes the numbers wholly unverifiable.

"The 14 percent is based on a ‘trust us, we can't tell you,'" said Bergen, adding that the 20 percent figure in the LA Times story "defies credulity."

When a Guantánamo prisoner joins the fight against America, that's a huge propaganda coup for the extremists and they tend to announce it in a way that's noticeable, he added. "I'm enormously skeptical that there are these levels of releases joining the fight because I think we would know about it."

As Barack Obama settles into the Oval Office and begins his stated mission of reorienting U.S. foreign policy, there's been a flurry of attention to exactly when and how Obama will open a direct dialogue with Iran, as he promised in his campaign. No question that will mark a break from the stinging rhetoric and halting, inconsistent diplomacy of the Bush years. But several sources told The Cable that the informal dialogue between senior Americans and the Iranians was much more robust in recent months than has been previously reported.

Over the past year, our sources confirmed, former Defense Secretary William Perry and a group of high-level U.S. nuclear nonproliferation specialists and U.S. experts on Iran held a series of meetings in European cities with Iranian officials under the auspices of the Pugwash group. (Pugwash, a group founded in 1957 by an international group of scientists, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for advocating for the elimination of nuclear weapons.) Perry served as a member of the Obama campaign's national security working group.

Sources familiar with the meetings suggest they may be coming to light now via deliberate leaks to the Iranian media, by jockeying Iranian political power players trying to maneuver for advantage amid a shifting Washington-Tehran dynamic and their own upcoming elections in June. Among the Iranian officials who attended the Pugwash dialogues, The Cable has learned, was Ali Asghar Soltanieh, the Iranian ambassador and permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

Patrick Clawson, director of research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, described Soltanieh as a technocrat whose presence at the Pugwash dialogue was significant. "He matters because when he writes these reports back to the regime, they will not be thrown in the trash," Clawson said. "They will be looked at."

Adding to the intrigue, one expert said to participate in the meetings was Robert J. Einhorn, sources told The Cable. Einhorn, who was a former assistant secretary of state and top nonproliferation advisor to the Hillary Clinton campaign (and later for Obama) and is currently at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is expected to be named undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. Einhorn did not immediately respond to a request for comment. [UPDATE: Einhorn later e-mailed that he "did not participate in the Pugwash dialogue on Iran." Asked further if he'd participated in the series of meetings being described, Einhorn said, "I have participated in no Pugwash meetings on Iran, nor any other meetings with Bill Perry on Iran. This is my last response."]

Another source informed about the Pugwash dialogue said it was spearheaded by Pugwash's General Secretary Paolo Cotta Ramassino, and consisted of four meetings over the past year, including an August meeting in The Hague and a two-day December meeting, the last one, in Vienna.  

The Pugwash-sponsored meetings, which focused on nuclear issues, are one series of what sources say are several "Track Two" discussions that have taken place between the two countries.

According to Jacqueline Shire, a former State Department nonproliferation expert who did not participate in the Pugwash forum, such Track Two dialogues typically work as follows: a think tank hand acting in an individual or institutional capacity initiates a project to hold discussions with Iranian government officials. In the process, he or she is likely to brief and be debriefed by the State Department in a quasi-official way. "He or she would check in before going and when he/she returns, to make sure the discussions don't go too far afield," Shire said. "One is acting in a private capacity, but not completely freelancing."

While Iran and the United States have not had official relations since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, they have had some limited diplomatic interactions and plenty of back-channel contacts. Relations between the two countries were further strained by the 2003 discovery that Iran had been pursuing a nuclear program and by elements within the Bush administration which supported, at least for a time, a "regime change" policy toward Iran, as well as by Iran's alleged support for militants in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian group Hamas.

Although the U.S. goal of persuading the Iranian regime to curtail its nuclear program and its support for militant groups in the region remains largely the same as during the Bush years, the new Obama administration has made clear that it intends to pursue a different approach to Tehran, including direct government-to-government talks.

"I do think that it is important for us to be willing to talk to Iran, to express very clearly where our differences are, but where there are potential avenues for progress," Obama told Al Arabiya television in the first interview he granted since becoming president earlier this week. "And we will over the next several months be laying out our general framework and approach. And as I said during my inauguration speech, if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us."

Along with reports that the State Department is drafting a letter to the Iranian leadership and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice's comments this week that the United States will pursue direct diplomacy with Iran, the Obama administration is undertaking an intensive policy review toward Iran even as it gets its new team members into place.

"I am seeing actions that seem to be really quite different," says Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, a Washington group that promotes U.S. engagement with Iran. "Obama was not president for even 20 minutes when he said ‘mutual respect.' That is an Iranian buzz word. No one in the Middle East uses that more than Iran."

"By [Obama] speaking directly to the Iranian leadership and the Iranian people the way he has," says Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, "and the way he may be answering Ahmadinejad's letter, it presents his views unfiltered and it shows his respect for the Iranian nation. That's very important."

Meanwhile, the diplomatic calendar marches on. Most immediately, the Obama administration will send a representative, most likely Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs William J. Burns, to next week's meeting in Berlin of the group of U.N. Security Council permanent five members plus Germany. The P5+1, as it's known, has been the nucleus of recent international efforts to pressure Iran to abandon its uranium enrichment program in exchange for fuller international recognition and engagement and other incentives.

Contacted about an Iranian media report about alleged "secret" meetings involving Perry and Iranian officials, a U.S. government official working the Iran issue responded with a hint of rolled eyes: "This is just more of the same 'Track II' activities that so many of the participants love to think of as secret talks. There are a number of these things going on and it's hard to keep them straight. This particular one would appear to be merely another in a series of meetings under Pugwash auspices, and there have been many of them.  Absolutely nothing to do with government to government."

A person familiar with the Pugwash U.S.-Iran meetings declined to speak on the record or provide many details, except to confirm Perry's participation and say that they involved four meetings in different cities in Europe over the past year. They were among the most interesting and most valuable of such meetings that have occurred, The Cable was told. (Another discreet, high-level Track Two dialogue series between the U.S. and Iran has been conducted by Thomas Pickering, the former undersecretary of state for political affairs and United Nations Association-USA cochair, who has cowritten about his experience with fellow participants William Luers, the former UNA-USA president and U.S. ambassador to Czech Republic, and Jim Walsh for the New York Review of Books.)

Messages left for Pugwash's executive director in Washington and an e-mail to Perry were not immediately returned.

 "There is one constant in U.S.-Iranian relations," one former official who dealt on Iran said. "The U.S. side is always looking for a way to speak directly to Iran. There are always ‘hints' from the Iranian side that the best way to do that is to have quiet talks between intermediaries. Any attempt to have such a discussion ...immediately devolves into publicity designed to make the U.S side look foolish."

"If I were doing the negotiations [for the U.S. government], I would really press at a principals meeting [about] whether at the end of the day, we are going to accept" if Iran can enrich uranium to low grade or not, says former ambassador-at-large Robert Gallucci, now president of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. "I don't think we have enough folks to [make a determination] actually yet in place" -- not just assistant secretaries, but the principals, and deputies.

The kind of intensive policy review and decisions being undertaken now, Gallucci says, "are not going to be hammered out for a month or six weeks." In the meantime, "what you have got to do now is set up your willingness to engage. Short of getting the outcome you want ... you let it be known that we're willing to talk right now, that we're going to talk, not just as a reward for good behavior."

Gallucci said that he himself has participated in various recent Track Two meetings on Iran, including one led by Luers in New York, although he thought there were no currently serving Iranian officials at any of those he attended.

"I had one contribution to this, and it was entirely unwelcome," Gallucci said. "I said, ‘I don't think we can have Iran producing highly enriched uranium. Therefore, I don't believe we can have Iran produce low enriched uranium. That was very unwelcome, in the sense that it means, if all else [fails], we will have to act unilaterally."

He also said that he had been asked to take a job in the Obama administration, but declined, preferring to contribute in a more project-based or advisory panel capacity (he previously served on a national security advisory board panel for CIA, he mentioned). He declined to say what the job he turned down was.

UPDATE: Jeffrey Boutwell, executive director of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, offered more perspective in a call Friday morning. He confirmed Pugwash was the sponsoring organization for the Track Two "Resuming constructive U.S.-Iranian dialogue" that occurred, as we reported, in four meetings in Europe throughout 2008 (three meetings in The Hague, and one in Vienna).

They were, he said, "wide-ranging, atmospheric discussions: how to move beyond the 1953 coup and the 1979 revolution; how to move beyond the historical baggage that is holding back U.S.-Iranian relations."

"Then," he added, "getting into the larger issues of US-Iran relations: security and the entire Middle East .... Iran's wish to be integrated in the wider world ......Then a specific discussion about Iranian nuclear program: concerns about the motivation for Iran's program, how to increase transparency ...how to have its program be totally transparent and no misgivings about any military uses ...how to achieve that last aim ... and establish a constructive dialogue."

Boutwell said there were currently serving senior Iranian officials participating in the discussions of equal or greater seniority than Ambassador Soltanieh, but declined to identify them.

He said that members of the group met in 2008 with several key members of Obama's circle of advisors, "people now moving into positions of influence."

He confirmed Perry's participation, but would not comment on whether Einhorn participated or attended.

Boutwell added that it is his belief that it would be a "huge mistake for the administration to delay talking to Iran until after the June Presidential election, in the (mistaken) belief that somehow this will improve Ahmedinejad's re-election chances. Iranians will vote mainly on domestic economic issues. More important, waiting until June sends the wrong signal... that the US is not serious about re-establishing dialogue, and the various issues that need discussion (enrichment, Iraq, Afghanistan) will only get more complicated over the next six months." 

Photo: File; TORSTEN BLACKWOOD/AFP/Getty Images