Strong Leads and Dead Ends in Nuclear Case Against Iran

A presidential commission found in 2004 that U.S. intelligence knows "disturbingly little" about Tehran's capabilities. And at a congressional hearing last Thursday, Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte described Iran as a "hard target" to penetrate.

While it is unknown whether Iran would ultimately decide to build a nuclear bomb, it is clear from evidence gathered by U.S. and foreign intelligence and through U.N. inspections that Iran, mostly through its energy program, is acquiring and mastering technologies that could be diverted to bombmaking.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the IAEA, said that after three years of investigation, he still cannot judge Iran's program "exclusively peaceful." At the same time, Iran is "not an imminent threat," he said in a recent interview. "To develop a nuclear weapon, you need a significant quantity of highly enriched uranium or plutonium, and no one has seen that in Iran."

U.S. intelligence experts who helped craft an assessment of Iran's program last year have based their judgments on just that. Until Iran is able to operate an industrial-scale centrifuge cascade for the production of bomb-grade uranium, the country will remain as much as 10 years away from a weapon.

Those experts have said that none of the drawings -- for the test shaft, the conversion facility or Iran's missile program -- alters those projections. Negroponte made that carefully hedged assessment public last Thursday when he said: "Iran, if it continues on its current path . . . will likely have the capability to produce a nuclear weapon within the next decade."

That assessment, by an intelligence community determined not to repeat the embarrassments of Iraq, is more conservative than views expressed by some policymakers. Some in the Bush administration have begun pushing back, suggesting that the CIA is demanding an unrealistically high standard of evidence before reaching conclusions that the White House believes are obvious.

"Taking into account the assessments made by the intelligence community, and others, I just don't have a lot of confidence in the assessments," said a senior administration official who was heavily involved in guiding the White House's use of intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs.

This examination explores the intelligence and evidence that helped form such judgments, and the gaps in understanding that obscure a full portrait of the program. It draws on interviews with senior Bush administration officials, as well as with government and intelligence sources grappling with the accumulating data and their counterparts from U.N. agencies and governments in Europe and the Middle East. Most of those interviewed would discuss the confidential information on Iran's program only on the condition of anonymity.

Green Salt

In the spring of 2001, a small design firm opened shop on the outskirts of Tehran to begin work for what appears to have been its only client -- the Iranian Republican Guard. Over the next two years, the staff at Kimeya Madon completed a set of technical drawings for a small uranium-conversion facility, according to four officials who reviewed the documents.

Iran has one such conversion plant and opened it to IAEA inspectors, but Tehran has not disclosed or produced the blueprints of a second one.

Over coffee in December in ElBaradei's Vienna office, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator was asked about the drawings, sources said. Ali Larijani called them "baseless allegations."

When IAEA inspectors went to Iraq last month, the CIA agreed to let them confront Iran with some of the evidence. Iranian officials dismissed the material but said they would follow up with clarifications at a later date, according to an IAEA report issued yesterday.