<p>The Taliban claimed in a 1997 meeting with U.S. officials that it had blocked attempts by both Iraq and Iran to contact Osama bin Laden, according to a previously confidential State Department memo made public yesterday.</p>
<p>The memo says that the assistant secretary of state, Karl Inderfurth, was told on Dec. 7, 1997, by the Taliban's acting minister of mines and industry, Armad Jan, that his government "had stopped allowing [bin Laden] to give public interviews and had frustrated Iranian and Iraqi efforts to contact him."</p>