Amiri was a source for the 2007 NIE
The New York Times reports that the US is now speaking much more openly about what information it received from Iranian nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri. Amiri returned to Iran this past week. The scientist, Shahram Amiri, described to American intelligence officers details of how a university in Tehran became the covert headquarters for the country’s nuclear efforts, the officials confirmed. While still in Iran, he was also one of the sources for a much-disputed National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s suspected weapons program, published in 2007, the officials said. For several years, Mr. Amiri provided what one official described as “significant, original” information about secret aspects of his country’s nuclear program, according to the Americans.But it sounds like Amiri may have signed his own death warrant by returning to Iran.
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It is unclear how Mr. Amiri’s information fed into the 2007 intelligence estimate. That document contended that Iran halted its design work on a nuclear weapon in 2003. A new national intelligence estimate, which has been repeatedly delayed this year, is likely to back away from some of the conclusions in the earlier document. For example, American intelligence officials now believe the design work on a weapon was resumed and continues to this day, though likely at a slower pace than earlier in the decade.
“His safety depends on him sticking to that fairy tale about pressure and torture,” insisted one of the American officials, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified while discussing a classified operation to attract Iranian scientists. “His challenge is to try to convince the Iranian security forces that he never cooperated with the United States.”If I were Amiri, I would try to tell the Iranians that I fed the Americans false information for that 2007 NIE. Because clearly the Americans got that one all wrong.
On Thursday, even as Mr. Amiri was publicly greeted at home by his 7-year-old son and held a news conference, Iran’s foreign minister gave the first official hints of Iranian doubts about his story. “We first have to see what has happened in these two years and then we will determine if he’s a hero or not,” the BBC quoted the foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, as saying to a French news agency. “Iran must determine if his claims about being kidnapped were correct or not.”
Read the whole thing.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:36 PM
1 Comments:
If true, it lends credence to the theory that Shahram Amiri was in fact an Iranian double agent. The Americans were fed false information about the state of Iran's nuclear program and perhaps this is what they wanted to hear. And with a false defection, Iran was able to buy time to complete its goal of constructing a nuclear bomb. Its clear that may have been the real objective all along.
What could go wrong indeed
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