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  Date / Time: 10/21/2009 5:50 AM UTC

  Who Leaked to Iran?
  

  By: Kenneth R. Timmerman - For three long years, the United States,Britain, and France kept the secret while their intelligence servicesshared information they had been gathering on what appeared to be a topsecret underground nuclear weapons plant near Qom. At the very lastminute, just four days before the allies planned to shock the world byrevealing detailed information on the secret nuclear plant, the Iraniangovernment sent a tersely worded letter acknowledging the existence ofthe site to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and pledgedto open it for future inspections. “Someone leaked,” says DaniellePletka, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, who worksextensively on U.S. policy toward Iran. “Someone informed the Iraniansthat we knew about the plant, prompting them to write to the IAEA. “The consequences of that leak may prove fatal to the effort by Westernpowers to curb Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions short of war. The leakallowed the Iranians to defuse a tense standoff with a Western allianceunited as never before. French President Sarkozy was visibly fumingwhen he stood next to President Obama in Pittsburgh on Sept. 25 to talkabout the new nuclear plant whose existence the Iranians had justrevealed. Sarkozy had been planning to drop that bombshell the daybefore, during a speech at the United Nations. But Obama personallyasked him to hold back. Pletka believes the leak occurred at thepolitical level. “Everyone thinks it came from the Germans,” she toldNewsmax, adding the U.S. could have been the culprit.$0$0A Frenchdiplomat, who accompanied Sarkozy to the United Nations and to the G-20summit the following day in Pittsburgh, discounted the notion of aGerman leak.$0$0“The Germans were briefed [on the intelligence]before the planned presentation at the United Nations. But not longbefore,” he said. “Because they hadn’t helped to develop theintelligence, they were not in the loop.”$0$0Read Ken Timmerman’s thriller on Iran’s nuclear weapons attack on the U.S.$0Www.kentimmerman.com/honor-killing.html$0$0TheWhite House has been telling reporters that the U.S. intelligencecommunity first detected unusual activity at the site dug into amountain to the northwest of Qom in 2006. But it appears that theFrench may have been the first to identify it as a nuclear-weaponsfacility.$0$0“We all wanted to have solid intelligence beforemaking a public presentation,” the French diplomat told Newsmax. “Weneeded human intelligence sources to corroborate the satellite images.”$0$0CIAspokesman Paul Gimigliano called the joint investigation into the Qomfacility “a rigorous, painstaking process that drew on information frommultiple sources, all of which had to be assessed and tested. This wasa classic intelligence success, one that gave our government a clearwindow into a major, concealed facility,” he told Newsmax.$0$0Theintelligence included human sources, believed to have come through theFrench, and was buttressed by signals intelligence, satellite imagery,and internal documents from the Iranian nuclear and missile researchprograms.$0$0The flow and quality of the intelligence acceleratedearly this year as Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) intensifiedwork on the site.$0$0The United States was able to monitor theexcavation activity of the underground enrichment facility usingsurveillance satellites. By measuring the “spoils” brought up out ofthe earth by dozens of trucks and spread out at the foot of the nearbymountains, U.S. analysts were able to get an idea of the size of theunderground facility.$0$0CIA Director Leon Panetta says he wasfirst told about the Qom facility during the White House transition inJanuary. “This was presented at that time as something nobody knewabout, a secret facility,” he told Time magazine.$0$0But Newsmaxhas learned that President George W. Bush personally briefed selectmembers of Congress who were closely tracking Iran’s nuclear weaponsactivities many months earlier.$0$0Despite those briefings, not aword of the secret project leaked out, even as top Republicans inCongress blasted the CIA for what they considered to be apolitically-skewed National Intellience Estimate on Iran issued inDecember 2007 that concluded that Iran had shut down its nuclearweapons programs in 2003.$0$0“Public disclosure of this site isactually an important component of testing if Iran is prepared to takethe concrete, tangible steps needed to create confidence andtransparency and demonstrate that Iran is committed to establishing itspeaceful intentions,” the White House said in a question-and-answer“fact sheet” on the facility.$0$0Several Iranian sources with closeties to Western intelligence agencies believe that a defector from theIRGC named Brig. Gen. Ali Reza Asghari provided key information on theQom facility. Asghari was debriefed by U.S. intelligence in the springof 2007, and by French intelligence in late summer.$0$0The Frenchintelligence officials who Asghari found his information so credibleand alarming that they took it to president Nicolas Sarkozy inSeptember 2007.$0$0Sarkozy was stunned by Asghari’s revelations,which totally contradicted everything France and its allies had beenhearing from the International Atomic Energy Agency and from the CIAabout Iran’s nuclear programs.$0$0“Gen. Asghari’s informationcaused Sarkozy suddenly to change his tune in September 2007 and take ahard line on Iran,” one of these Iranian sources told Newsmax.$0$0ButSarkozy’s stance on Iran, and his effort to generate internationalfocus on Iran’s nuclear weapons programs, was undercut by apolitically-charged National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iranreleased by the National Intelligence Council in December 2007.$0$0Thatmuch-disputed NIE seemed to run counter to everything that Sarkozy andFrench intelligence had learned from General Asghari. It alsochallenged earlier CIA conclusions about the Iranian nuclear weaponsprogram.$0$0Shortly after the NIE was released, Sarkozy dismissed it in an interview with the French newsweekly, Le Nouvel Observateur.$0$0“Everyoneagrees that what the Iranians are doing has no civilian explanation,”he said. “The only debate is whether they will have military capabilityin one year or in five years."$0$0Read: "Skepticism Mounts Over NIE Findings."$0$0Someof the analysts who worked on the December 2007 NIE have told reportersthat they felt an overwhelming sense of political responsibility indrafting their report: to make sure they didn’t give President GeorgeW. Bush an excuse for launching military strikes on Iran.$0$0FormerSecretary of State Henry Kissinger publicly chided the analysts whowrote the NIE for politicizing intelligence. They saw themselves as “akind of check on, instead of a part of, the executive branch,”Kissinger said. He excoriated them for seeking to become “surrogatepolicy-makers and advocates,” instead of analysts.$0$0The goal ofthe analysts writing the NIE was widely seen as tying the hands ofPresident George W. Bush on Iran and specifically taking a militaryoption off the table.$0$0Former State Department intelligenceanalyst Tom Fingar, who coordinated the NIE, told an audience at theNew Americas Foundation that the Iran NIE had been written andrewritten by June 2007, but that he and other analysts weren’t pleasedwith it because it repeated earlier estimates that Iran was continuingto pursue nuclear weapons.$0$0Fingar intimated that he was afraidthis conclusion would give the Bush administration an excuse to launchmilitary strikes on Iran, so he said he held the report, hopingsomething would come up.$0$0“Then we got new information —significant new information,” Fingar said. “And then a lot moreinformation came in,” causing the CIA analysts to look at everythingthey thought they knew “in the light of the new information.”$0$0Thedramatically rewritten estimate now concluded that Iran had shut downits nuclear weapons program, and appeared to have been based oninformation that Asghari provided to the CIA during debriefings.$0$0Sourceswho read the 1,500 source notes to the 140-page report said that itsmost dramatic assertion was based on “a single, unvetted source,” mostlikely Asghari.$0$0But when Newsmax asked Asghari personallythrough a trusted intermediary how he felt about the way theinformation he had provided the CIA had been used in the NIE, hisresponse was startling.$0$0“That’s not what I told the CIA,” hesaid. “I didn’t tell them that the nuclear weapons program had beenshut down, but that it was ongoing.”$0$0Congressional Republicansare now calling on the intelligence community to review the December2007 NIE using a “red team” of outside analysts.$0$0An intelligencecommunity fact sheet on the Qom enrichment facility released by theWhite House recently claimed that the new information on Qom “does notcontradict our 2007 assessment of Iran’s nuclear program.”
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