Jeffrey notes that the NYT did a piece on Bob Joseph, who recently left the State Department.

I realize that this illustrates my penchant for lost causes, but I need to point out an error in the piece RE: the PSI.

Joseph helped to draft the PSI, which, according to the Times,

hit early pay dirt in the fall of 2003, intercepting a cargo ship bound for Libya with nuclear centrifuges built by Abdul Qadeer Khan’s nuclear smuggling network...[the operation] led to Mr. Joseph’s biggest success: working with American and British intelligence officials to persuade Libya to give up its nuclear program, which helped break up Mr. Khan’s network.

Unfortunately, the BBC China operation was not a PSI operation. Wade wrote in the summer of 2005 that

John Wolf, who served as assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation from 2001 to 2004, told Arms Control Today May 25 that the BBC China operation was “separate” from PSI. He said the incident stemmed from previous efforts to track and uncover the Khan network.

A foreign official familiar with the operation corroborated Wolf’s version of the event. “The BBC China operation was carried out in the spirit of PSI, but it was not a PSI operation,” the official informed Arms Control Today May 31.

I’ve blogged about this before. Incidentally, this isn’t the first time that the author of the NYT piece, David Sanger, has gotten this issue wrong.

CFR.org also got it wrong a while back.

BTW, here’s an article I wrote about the Libyan case a few years ago.

Happy Saturday.