I wish I could recall for sure the name of the author. Maybe it is Arthur Shnitzler or Joseph Roth. In any case, a German Jewish writer, probably from Vienna. If you now who the author is please let me know.
Anyway, it's not about the who's who. It's about the vignette. I can't do it justice but here goes:
A cuckolded husband obsesses about his wife and her affairs. He sees her and him in many confirming circumstances. One day he follows his darling to their assignation. What does he see? A little preliminary stuff that couldn't be counted as proof in a court. And then the denouement. The assignee goes to the window and pulls down the shade.
"Ah, if only he hadn't pull the shades down. Then I would know."
The United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has at least twice in the last weeks reported significant discoveries of uranium tracings at the once hush-hush secret Syrian base that the Israelis destroyed earlier this year. The U.S. Army might have fumbled into a treasure hunt in its search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But the Israeli Air Force is not MAD: it knew exactly where to go in Syria and what to do once its airplanes hovered.
The fact is that Syria signed the nuclear weapons non-proliferation treaty in 1969. Everybody knows that, like Iran, it is violating its own commitments.
But the IAEA can't bring itself to reach the obvious conclusion: like the cuckolded husband it says that Syrians have pulled down the shades. In fact, Syria--like the assignee in the story--has been acting in flagranti.