U.S. President Barack Obama decided not to support the Iranian opposition during the 2009 elections to protect secret negotiations he was holding with Tehran on its nuclear program, a recently published book alleges.

“The Iran Wars” by Jay Solomon of The Wall Street Journal, several sections of which were published by the Bloomberg news agency Wednesday, holds that Obama actively refrained from assisting the demonstrators. He ignored advisers who told him to support the opposition in Iran, even ordering the CIA to sever ties with opposition leader.

“The Agency has contingency plans for supporting democratic uprisings anywhere in the world. This includes providing dissidents with communications, money and in extreme cases even arms,” Solomon writes. “But in this case the White House ordered it to stand down.”

Demonstrations broke out in June 2009 after then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of elections that many in Iran felt were rigged. From the beginning, Obama and the White House downplayed the demonstrations’ importance, and when he finally did speak about them, he refrained from mentioning election fraud.