Details in military notes led to shift on Iran, says US

US intelligence agencies reversed their view about the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons...

US intelligence agencies reversed their view about the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons programme after they obtained notes last summer from the deliberations of Iranian military officials involved in the weapons development programme, senior intelligence and government officials said.

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.

The newly obtained notes contradicted public assertions by US intelligence officials that the nuclear weapons design effort was still active. But according to the intelligence and government officials, they give no hint of why Iran’s leadership decided to halt the covert effort.

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Ultimately, the notes and deliberations were corroborated by other intelligence, the officials said, including intercepted conversations among Iranian officials, collected in recent months. It is not clear if those conversations involved the same officers and others whose deliberations were recounted in the notes, or if they included their superiors.

The US officials who described the highly classified operation, which led to one of the biggest reversals in the history of US nuclear intelligence, declined to describe how the notes were obtained. But they said the CIA and other agencies had organised a “red team” to determine if the new information might have been part of a disinformation campaign mounted by Iran to derail the effort to impose sanctions against it.

Ultimately, US intelligence officials rejected that theory, though they were challenged to defend that conclusion in a meeting two weeks ago in the White House situation room, in which the notes and deliberations were described to senior members of President Bush’s national security team.

The officials said they were confident that the notes confirmed the existence, up to 2003, of a weapons programme that US officials first learned about in a laptop computer, belonging to an Iranian engineer, that came into the hands of the CIA in 2004.

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Ever since the major findings of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear programme were made public, the White House has refused to discuss details of what Bush, in a news conference, termed a “great discovery” that led to the reversal. Some of Bush’s critics have questioned why he did not adjust his rhetoric about Iran after the intelligence agencies began to question their earlier findings.