Notes of Iranian military officials meeting were key intelligence

NY Times:

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.

The newly obtained notes contradicted public assertions by American 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.

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 American officials who described the highly classified operation, which led to one of the biggest reversals in the history of American nuclear intelligence, declined to describe how the notes were obtained.

But they said that the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies had organized a “red team” to determine if the new information might have been part of an elaborate disinformation campaign mounted by Iran to derail the effort to impose sanctions against it.

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The officials said they were confident that the notes confirmed the existence, up to 2003, of a weapons programs that American officials first learned about from a laptop computer, belonging to an Iranian engineer, that came into the hands of the C.I.A. in 2004.

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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.”

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Several news organizations have reported that the reversal was prompted in part by intercepts of conversations involving Iranian officials. In an article published on Wednesday, The Los Angeles Times said another main ingredient in the reversal was what it called a journal from an Iranian source that documented decisions to shut down the nuclear program.

The senior intelligence and government officials said a more precise description of that intelligence would be exchanges among members of a large group, one responsible for both designing weapons and integrating them into delivery vehicles.

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The newly obtained notes of the deliberations did not precisely match up with the programs described in the laptop, according to officials who have examined both sets of data, but they said they were closely related.

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The Times finally addresses the issue of the laptop and the nature of the intel. This is the most comprehensive story I have seen on the intelligence. It still does not address the the conduct of Iran since 2003 which suggested that they were up to something.

I am reminded of the different definitions some southerns have for naked and nekkid. Naked means you don't have any clothes on and nekkid means you don't have any clothes on and you are up to something. The Iranians have done a good job of imitating the nekkid over the last four years and we need an explanation of why.

It could be that they were doing an imitation of the mistake Saddam made in hopes of preventing an attack. What ever it was they have been blatantly saber rattling and showing off military hardware that has corresponded with the bellicosity of Ahmadinejad when common sense says that if they stopped, they would invite the IAEA in and do what the Norks are doing now to demonstrate they are not pursuing nukes. When people act guilty, they deserve continued scrutiny.

The Belmont Club raises some interesting questions about the Times story.

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What purpose does the revelation of all this detail serve? It serves to sell the public on the authenticity of the intelligence finding that the Iranians have stopped their nuclear weapons program. Why is it necessary to sell the finding by releasing this detail? Maybe because not everyone is buying it. But what is there to buy into really?

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.”

"Moderate confidence". And it's cleared by the "red team" as not being disinformation. So it must be ... what? Wow. Yet for some, the issue is settled.

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He makes the analogy to the confidence with which one pulls the trigger on a revolver held to their head.