In London, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond told members of Parliament Tuesday that the Republican letter could throw "a spanner in the works" at the negotiations and will have an "unpredictable effect" on the government in Tehran.

The Guardian’s Julian Border wondered if Republican intervention in Iranian nuclear negotiations would confirm Tehran's suspicions about the West and make it easier for Iran to blame Washington if talks fail.

"The 'spanner' effect was on display in the Iranian capital where the hard-line press splashed news of the letter across its front pages. The moderate media focused instead of Zarif’s rebuke. But what really counts is the impact on one person, the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. His judgment will be critical in determining whether there is an agreement at all, and he is famously suspicious of the West’s motives towards Iran," Border wrote.

In Israel, the Jerusalem Post wrote an editorial that said, "The subtext of the GOP letter to the Iranians is: Think twice before signing a deal with a lame-duck president."

Long-sought by historians, the Wilber history is all the more valuable because it is one of the relatively few documents that still exists after an unknown quantity of materials was destroyed by CIA operatives – reportedly "routinely" – in the 1960s, according to former CIA Director James Woolsey. However, according to an investigation by the National Archives and Records Administration, released in March 2000, "no schedules in effect during the period 1959-1963 provided for the disposal of records related to covert actions and, therefore, the destruction of records related to Iran was unauthorized." (p. 22) The CIA now says that about 1,000 pages of documentation remain locked in agency vaults.

During the 1990s, three successive CIA heads pledged to review and release historically valuable materials on this and 10 other widely-known covert operations from the period of the Cold War, but in 1998, citing resource restrictions, current Director George Tenet reneged on these promises, a decision which prompted the National Security Archive to file a lawsuit in 1999 for this history of the 1953 operation and one other that is known to exist. So far, the CIA has effectively refused to declassify either document, releasing just one sentence out of 339 pages at issue. That sentence reads: "Headquarters spent a day featured by depression and despair." In a sworn statement by William McNair, the information review officer for the CIA's directorate of operations, McNair claimed that release of any other part of this document other than the one line that had previously appeared in Wilber's memoirs, would "reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the national security of the United States." Clearly, the "former official" who gave this document to The New York Times disagreed with McNair, and we suspect you will too, once you read this for yourself. The case is currently pending before a federal judge. (See related item on this site: "Archive Wins Freedom of Information Ruling Versus CIA")