US under fire over Iran N-plan report
By James Blitz in London and Tony Barber in Brussels
Published: March 5 2008 19:43 | Last updated: March 6 2008 01:52
A US intelligence report into Iran’s nuclear arms programme was on Wednesday subjected to strong criticism by a senior UK diplomat, who claimed the assessment had been too categorical in stating that Tehran halted work on building an atomic weapon in 2003.
The remarks from the diplomat, who has been involved in Iran policy, came as Britain prepares to argue that the European Union should act to consolidate the sanctions agreed by the United Nations Security Council this week.
Mr Yatom, former head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, who is now an MP, is touring Europe and Asia to persuade governments that a “wait and see” stance to Iran’s nuclear programme is no longer wise. He told the Financial Times that the world must act to stop Iran’s nuclear programme because Tehran is within a year of making a nuclear bomb.
The UK diplomat criticised the National Intelligence Estimate, saying the outside world could not be sure Tehran had stopped covert work on a weapon.
Requesting anonymity, he also suggested that US intelligence downgraded its assessment of Iran’s nuclear plans because it feared repeating the mistake it made over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
Last December’s NIE stated that Tehran stopped work on a weapons programme five years ago, seriously weakening international pressure on Iran. Although the Security Council this week agreed a third sanctions resolution on Iran, the NIE report helped ensure the resolution was not as strong as it could have been.
The diplomat said: “When the NIE came out, many of us were surprised at how emphatic the writers of it were, first of all [in saying] that the activity stopped in 2003, and secondly that they had medium confidence it had not been resumed and that they had high confidence it had been stopped.
“I have never seen any intelligence that gives me even medium confidence that these programmes have not been resumed,” he said.
Admiral Michael McConnell, US national intelligence director, has since walked away from the report. He recently told Congress that, in retrospect, he might have presented the conclusions differently. Adm McConnell told the Senate intelligence committee last month that the “only thing that they’ve halted was nuclear weapons design, which is probably the least significant part of the programme”. He said Iran continued to develop uranium enrichment technology and longer-range ballistic missiles.
This week’s UN resolution states that member governments should closely monitor the role of Iranian banks in their territory but the UK hopes the EU might curb their activities altogether.
Mr Yatom said Israel was willing to explore all diplomatic and economic means of halting Iran’s programme and saw a unilateral military strike as a last resort.
