Iran: America’s Options
We have been indulging in wishful thinking for a decade. It’s time to stop.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/283254
In 2007, America’s intelligence agencies delivered a National Intelligence Estimate to President Bush declaring: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” As the latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) makes clear, Iran did indeed end its “structured” nuclear-weapons program. Kudos to the intel agencies for spotting this change. Where they did much less well was in spotting that the “structured” nuclear-weapons program was transitioned into an “unstructured” nuclear-weapons program.
One might wonder what the difference between a “structured” and an “unstructured” program might be. Well, the “structured” program was consolidated under the “AMAD Plan” and coordinated by the “Orchid Office.” In 2003, Iran halted the AMAD Plan and closed the Orchid Office. A few weeks later, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh — the head of the Orchid Office — opened the Section for Advanced Development Applications and Technologies (SADAT) and began coordinating nuclear-weapons research in an “unstructured” way. There you have it. All it took to fool the best and the brightest in U.S. intelligence was changing the nameplates on the door. This February, apparently worried that U.S. intelligence had finally found him out, Fakhrizadeh doubled down and renamed his nuclear-weapons research team the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research. That should keep America’s spies running in circles for another few years.