JOHN KING: Our "Top Story" in diplomacy tonight: the growing tension between the United States and Iran.

Tomorrow, the United Nations votes on U.S.-supported sanctions to punish Iran for its nuclear program. But some people in this country, including members of the Iraq Study Group, think it is time the United States started talking to Iran. And now two former government officials accuse the White House of trying to silence the debate on the issue, while laying the groundwork, they say, for military action. They make their case in today's "New York Times" in an opinion article called "What We Wanted to Tell You About Iran." Just below that is the original article they hope to publish. But it is full of deletions that the White House insisted on.

The authors, a husband-and-wife team, join me now, Flynt Leverett, former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, and former foreign service officer Hillary Mann.

We want to mention that we called the White House about this story, But, so far, we have received no response.

KING: Flynt and Hillary, thank you very much for joining us.

Let me start, Flynt, by asking you to respond to this. Both of you say it is the White House that -- that insisted on the redactions, as they like to call them in Washington, the deletions, the blacking about....

The White House had complained to the publication review board, and said that the White House needed to be consulted in the future, before the CIA cleared any of my subsequent pieces for publication.

That's also been confirmed in at least some of the journalistic reporting that's been done on this story.

FLYNT LEVERETT, SENIOR FELLOW, NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION: I was told by an official of the CIA's publication review board that, after a publication of mine, a recent paper on U.S. policy toward Iran, on which this draft op-ed is based, was published two weeks ago. The CIA had cleared it, said it did not contain any classified material, didn't ask to change a word...

KING: I remember, from my days covering the White House, that the White House did indeed. Ambassador Zal Khalilzad talked to Iran about Afghanistan. He was not the ambassador to Iraq at the time, but talked to Iran about Afghanistan.

KING: Flynt, let's just take -- let's peel the curtain back, then. If this is all in the public domain, what was redacted? What would it have said?

LEVERETT: The -- the two largest excisions -- and I would actually point out it was Hillary that conducted virtually all of the discussions that this administration had with the Iranians after September 11. Ambassador Khalilzad was in a very small number of those meetings., Hillary was in virtually every one of them. And the passages that were redacted basically detail how, after the 9/11 attacks, the Iranians worked with us, through this dialogue that Hillary was intimately involved in, how they worked with us, not just for a few weeks, not just for a few months, but for well over a year, until we cut off the dialogue in the spring of 2003. The other major excision deals with an offer by Iran, a document, which is available online, a document that came in from the Iranians, offering to negotiate a comprehensive resolution of bilateral differences between the United States and Iran, and how the administration summarily rejected that...

For the complete transcript, please visit the Paula Zahn Now on CNN website.