THE IRAN NIE: WHEN?

Gareth Porter reports that the WH may have known about a significant change in estimates about Iran as early as March 2003. Now, we've seen that in early August there was a marked change in the language the WH used to describe the Iran "threat" and that presumably reflects the fact that our intelligence community had checked out the new information and concluded that it was time to revise the estimate. Of course, that did not stop the agit-prop ("World War III") from the WH.


POLITICS-US: Did Bush Get New Iran Intel Last Winter?
Analysis by Gareth Porter*

The key development that altered the course of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, according to intelligence sources, was the defection of a senior official of the Iranian Ministry of Defence, Ali Reza Asgari, on a visit to Turkey last February, as widely reported in international news media in subsequent weeks. The Washington Post's Dafna Linzer, citing a "senior U.S. official", reported on Mar. 8 that Asgari, who had been deputy minister of defence for eight years under the reformist President Mohammad Khatami from 1997 to 2005, was already providing information to U.S. intelligence.

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi has told IPS, however, that, according to intelligence sources, information provided by Asgari was indeed a "key component" of the intelligence community's conclusion that Iran ended its nuclear weapons-related work in 2003, although it was corroborated by other sources.

Giraldi says Asgari had been recruited by Turkish intelligence in 2003, and defected to Turkey after he had picked up indications that Iranian intelligence had become suspicious of him. Giraldi said his sources confirm press reports that Asgari came out with "bags of documents". Intelligence officials have confirmed that papers on military discussions of the nuclear programme were part of the evidence that led the analysts to the new conclusion about the Iranian nuclear programme.

Equally important to the NIE's conclusion, according to Giraldi, was the information provided by Asgari about the Iranian defence communications system that allowed U.S. intelligence to gain new access to sensitive communications within the Iranian military. That was a crucial to the intercepted electronic communications which also played a role in the analysis that led to the estimate's conclusion.