WASHINGTON/TEHRAN, 14 February 2005 — The US intelligence community, chastened by its fiasco in Iraq, has launched a broad review of its classified data on Iran to assess its suspected drive to manufacture nuclear weapons, US officials have said. The review, ordered by the National Intelligence Council, was expected to produce two major papers — a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran and a so-called “memo to holders,” the officials said.
“It involves the entire intelligence community to write these products,” said one of the officials, who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity. The official gave no specific date but said the new NIE was “coming out” while the memorandum was expected “several months from now.”
The official made a point to say that the “memo to holders” was “self-initiated.” “It is not that somebody has requested it,” the official added. The US relied extensively on a similar intelligence review in arguing its case to go to war on Iraq in 2003, but the intelligence community has not produced a formal estimate on Iran since 2001.
A report in The Washington Post yesterday, meanwhile, revealed that the United States has been flying drones over Iran since April 2004, seeking evidence of nuclear weapons programs and probing for weaknesses in Iran’s air defenses. Such aerial espionage is standard in military preparations for an eventual air attack and is also employed as a tool for intimidation, the Post pointed out.
Iran yesterday rejected a European offer aimed at limiting its nuclear fuel activities and warned the United States against “playing with fire” in an increasingly bellicose standoff between Tehran and the West. Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi insisted Iran would not give up construction of a heavy-water reactor, which can be used to make nuclear weapons material, in exchange for a light-water reactor offered by the Europeans. “We welcome such proposals but we will not under any circumstances replace our heavy-water research reactor,” Asefi said at a press conference in Tehran. “We will continue working on our heavy-water reactor,” under construction at Arak southwest of Tehran.
