http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N09358843.htm
CORRECTED - U.S. intelligence on Iran seen lacking - experts
09 Feb 2005 23:56:20 GMT

Source: Reuters

In Washington item "U.S. intelligence on Iran seen lacking - experts"
please read in paragraph 20 ...The task of recruiting useful agents in
Iran faces immense hurdles... instead of ...The task of recruiting
useful agents in Iraq faces immense hurdles...

(corrects country to Iran from Iraq). A corrected version follows:

WASHINGTON, Feb 9 (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence is unlikely to know much
about Iran's contentious nuclear program and could be vulnerable to
manipulation for political ends, former intelligence officers and other
experts say.

Amid an escalating war of words between Washington and Tehran, the
experts say they doubt the CIA has been able to recruit agents with
access to the small circle of clerics who control the Islamic Republic's
national security policy.

Serious doubts also surround the effectiveness of an expanded
intelligence role for the Pentagon, which former intelligence officials
say is preparing covert military forays to look for evidence near
suspected weapons facilities.

"I will be highly remarkably surprised if the United States has
(intelligence) assets in the organs of power," said Ray Takeyh, an Iran
expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"They don't even know who the second-tier Revolutionary Guards are," he
added.

Doubts about U.S. intelligence on Iran have arisen amid talk of possible
military strikes by the United States or Israel against suspected
nuclear weapons facilities.

Former chief weapons inspector David Kay, the first to declare U.S.
intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a failure, warned
that the Bush administration is again relying on evidence from
dissidents, as it did in prewar Iraq.

"The tendency is to force the intelligence to support the political
argument," Kay said in a CNN interview on Wednesday.

He added that the CIA has yet to give U.S. policymakers an up-to-date
comprehensive intelligence assessment on Iran.

NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATE

"We're talking about military action against Iran and we don't have a
national intelligence estimate that shows what we do know, what we don't
know and the basis for what we think we know," Kay said.

Problems arose for U.S. intelligence in Iran a quarter of a century ago
after the Islamic revolution, when Washington cut diplomatic ties
following the seizure of the American embassy by student radicals.

Richard Perle, the influential neoconservative thinker who was a driving
force behind the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, said intelligence suffered a
major setback in Iran with the arrest of about 40 agents in the
mid-1990s.

"As I understand it, virtually our entire network in Iran was wiped
out," Perle recently told the House of Representatives intelligence
committee.

"I think we're in very bad shape in Iran," he said.

Some intelligence analysts argue a preemptive strike is the only way to
delay Iranian nuclear-weapons production, despite the Bush
administration's public emphasis on diplomacy.

Tehran denies U.S. charges that it is seeking nuclear weapons and has
warned that a U.S. or Israeli strike would only accelerate its legal
uranium enrichment activities.

U.S. intelligence has had a huge credibility problem over reports that
prewar Iraq possessed large stockpiles of chemical and biological
weapons and was pursuing nuclear arms.

The assertions were a main justification for the 2003 U.S. invasion, but
no such weapons have been found.

"If U.S. intelligence was bad in Iraq, and it was atrocious, it's
probably going to be worse vis-a-vis Iran," said Richard Russell, a
former CIA analyst who teaches at the National Defense University.

The task of recruiting useful agents in Iran faces immense hurdles posed
by a secretive decision-making hierarchy and widespread mistrust of the
U.S. government, experts said.

"People have worked their whole lives on the 'Iran problem' and they'll
finish their lives with a huge 'A' for effort and probably a 'C' in
terms of recruited human sources," said a former senior intelligence
official who asked not to be named.

Not even covert forays into Iran by U.S. military units would likely
bear much fruit, the former official added.

"They're never going to find anything out of substance except that
there's some mysterious place in the desert with barbed wire and mines
around it," he said.