The words “dissident” and “Flynt Leverett” should never be placed within 10 miles of one another. Actual dissidents, who in Iran are forced to admit to invented crimes on state television or ingest human waste from a sewage pipe, are really not a factor for Mr. Leverett in his strategic calculation toward the Islamic Republic.

Yet this former CIA analyst was introduced Monday at a press conference as a “Republican dissident.” The occasion was Mr. Leverett’s going public about his week-long fight with the publication review board at the agency and his claim that the National Security Council was persecuting him because he is a critic of its foreign policy.

At issue was whether he could publish in the New YorkTimes an article that mentioned Iran was helpful to our interests in Afghanistan and that disclosed Iran’s Foreign Ministry had conveyed through the Swiss its willingness in May 2003 to begin negotiating normalized relations with America. Mr. Leverett has written this before in think-tank reports and op-eds. He has talked about it to reporters, and he detailed this alleged good faith rapprochement on Monday.

Now he poses as a victim. In his remarks he derided the individual who fired him from his brief stint at the Brookings Institution, Kenneth Pollack, who wrote in an op-ed for the Times, which the CIA approved this month, that Iran had provided help to America in Afghanistan. Because Mr. Pollack wrote a book in 2002 claiming Iraq was concealing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs before the war, he was allowed to write for the Times, according to Mr. Leverett.

“It would seem that, if one is expounding views congenial to the White House, it does not intervene in prepublication censorship, but, if one is a critic, White House officials will use fraudulent charges of revealing classified information to keep critical views from being heard,” Mr. Leverett wrote to his friend Steve Clemons for the Web log, Washington Note. While there is no doubt that the Bush administration looks ham-handed when it tries to turn publicly known facts into secrets, Mr. Leverett sounds ridiculous deriding their efficacy.

Has he never heard of Michael Scheuer, the former CIA officer in charge of hunting Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s? Mr. Scheuer was allowed to publish two books making the case that the war in Iraq was a dangerous distraction from the war against Al Qaeda. What about Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism tsar, who shared publicly with the world during the September 11 commission hearings and in his book,”Against All Enemies,” the “Dellenda memo,” a strategy to launch a secret war against the Taliban that was abjured by Mr. Bush. Contrary to Mr. Leverett’s assertion, it seems the only classified material Americans get to see nowadays is precisely the kind that embarrasses Mr. Bush and his policy.

Mr. Leverett may think reporters call him because he is brilliant. It’s really because he has seen information the public cannot for lack of clearances. Mr. Leverett not only had these clearances, but as the Middle East director at the National Security Council, he played a role in resolving the empirical and policy disputes within the bureaucracy that generates those secrets. So he owes his mild fame to a legal regime that makes it illegal for the rest of America to see hundreds of millions of data, analyses, images, and intercepts. He is granted a kind of authority in the public debate the rest of us don’t have.

Mr. Leverett is certainly not getting published based on his penetrating insights on Iran. His most recent paper for the Century Foundation argues for total engagement with Iran and posits that the world’s leading exporter of Khomeinist revolution could be enticed to “working with the United States to ensure the emergence of a stable, unitary, and democratic political order in Iraq.”

The former analyst for the CIA is a proponent of the grand bargain, and while he concedes the price of peace has increased since it was first offered in 2003, he reckons such a bargain is the only way to return to our “leadership position” in the region, whatever that means. He said Monday it was “strategic malpractice” not to seek a dialogue with Iran immediately, as if foreign policy was like medicine and should only be prescribed by the certified and approved.

I have no doubt that the Iranian diplomats and former commanders of the Revolutionary Guards whom Mr. Leverett meets are really telling him a deal is possible. The Soviets found many Americans during the Cold War to convey their sincere wishes to end the arms race. But why would this former intelligence man believe them when our military commanders are finding sophisticated improvised explosives made in Iran and the country’s president is hosting David Duke for a parley on Holocaust denial.

As one former American official who also talks occasionally to the Iranians put it, “Everyone can go up to New York and talk to Javad Zarif. The difference between Flynt and the rest of us is that we know it’s just a bunch of talk.” Sometimes even talking can be deadly. If America does enlist the Middle East’s sovereign families and despots in our war on terrorism as Mr. Leverett recommends, the first casualty will be the dissidents for whom he cares so little.

Mr. Lake is a staff reporter of The New York Sun.