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Notes from Iranian Military Deliberations Led to U.S. Shift

[New York Times] David E. Sanger and Steven Lee Myers - American intelligence agencies reversed their view about the status of Iran's nuclear weapons program after they obtained notes last summer from the deliberations of Iranian military officials involved in the weapons development program, senior intelligence and government officials said on Wednesday. The notes included conversations and deliberations in which some of the military officials complained bitterly about what they termed a decision by their superiors in late 2003 to shut down a complex engineering effort to design nuclear weapons, including a warhead that could fit atop Iranian missiles. Ultimately, the notes and deliberations were corroborated by other intelligence, the officials said, including intercepted conversations among Iranian officials, collected in recent months. In a statement Wednesday, the White House revised its account of what Mr. Bush was told in August and acknowledged that Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, had informed him new information might show that "Iran does in fact have a covert weapons program, but it may be suspended." In fact, some in the intelligence agencies appear to be not fully convinced that the notes of the deliberations indicated that all aspects of the weapons program had been shut down. The crucial judgments released on Monday said that while "we judge with high confidence that the halt lasted at least several years," it also included the warning that "intelligence gaps discussed elsewhere in this Estimate" led both the Department of Energy and the National Intelligence Council "to assess with only moderate confidence that the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran's entire nuclear weapons program."
2007-12-06 01:00:00
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