Reporters Helped Bust Iran's Nuke Program? (Updated Again)

I'm sure there were spies and secret satellites involved. (Sure were; see below.) But it was
"a media visit to Iran that helped the intelligence community reconsider its assessment" of Tehran's nuclear weapons program, intelligence officials tell USA Today's Richard Willing.

Photographs taken during the media visit this year weren't decisive in determining when Iran stopped its nuclear program, said an officer who helped prepare a National
Intelligence Estimate released Monday. But the photographs from Iran's
Natanz nuclear facility were reviewed by intelligence analysts who concluded Iran continues to face "significant technical problems" in using the facility to enrich uranium.

In recent years, the government has been pushing more and more resources into "open source intelligence" -- knowledge that's out there in the public sphere. Stuff out in the public sphere, in other words. "Perhaps our best source of information is the television," Rear Adm. Ronald Henderson, deputy director of operations for the Joint Staff, noted last year.

Juan Cole, on the other hand, points to a different source for the Iran info: a man named Ali Reza Asghari. (Spook86 over at In From the Cold agrees with Cole -- maybe for the first time on any subject.)

*Asghari had been head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon in the
1980s. He is someone who knows where all the bodies are buried with regard to Iranian covert operations, from involvement in the 1983
attack on the Marines in Beirut, to the training of the Badr Corps (now back in Iraq) and any Iran links to the Mahdi Army. Likewise he was allegedly privy to information on Iran's nuclear research. He rose to be deputy minister of defense. It is alleged that around 2003 he was recruited by a foreign intelligence agency (very likely that of Turkey)
as a spy. The Iranian authorities may have gotten wise to him in late
2006, forcing him abruptly to flee to Istanbul in early 2007.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat said around the same time:*

"According to anonymous officials who spoke to the Turkish newspaper,
‘Millet’, the Turkish intelligence and police had discovered that
Asghari was opposed to the Iranian government and that he holds information regarding its nuclear plan."* *

Some press accounts say that Asghari was able to bring actual documents out with him about Iran's nuclear program.

Since we're on the subject: I've read a whole lot of analysis of the NIE report since it broke. So far, the best -- and most nuanced -- one I've come across in Fred Kaplan's, in Slate.

UPDATE: "Senior officials said the latest conclusions grew out of a stream of information, beginning with a set of Iranian drawings obtained in 2004
and ending with the intercepted calls between Iranian military commanders," according to the Washington Post (via ACW).

In one intercept, a senior Iranian military official was specifically overheard complaining that the nuclear program had been shuttered years earlier, according to a source familiar with the intelligence. The intercept was one of more than 1,000 pieces of information cited in footnotes to the 150-page classified version of the document, an official said.

UPDATE 2: "The only reason for a complete reversal of judgment about a nuclear program... is credible new intelligence from one or more reliable sources," according to John McCreary, a former analyst for the Joint Chiefs. **

• The NIE, understood cumulatively, says that the US has intelligence of exceptional quality that Iran’s most senior authorities decided to halt the nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003 in response to international pressure and exposure of previously undeclared nuclear work. The only high confidence evidence of a decision is a report from an eyewitness, from some remote sensor eavesdropping on a decision meeting or from a chain of sources that is impeccable and which runs to the person or persons who made the decision. *

A fourth potential source is behavior that is consistent with a decision to halt the program and that would occur if and only if a decision to halt had been made. Behavioral evidence indicating a halt also would be essential to corroborate other evidence of a decision under any circumstances, or the analysis could not be considered professionally complete.

ALSO:

* Intel Report: Iran Halted Nuke Arms in 2003
* Iran Nuke in "18 Months"? Unlikely.
* Iran's "Industrial" Nukes: Yawn
* Iran's Nukes: Time to Freak?
* Glimmers of Hope in Iran Report
* Iran's Nuclear Scientist Game