U.S. intelligence: Iran halted work on nuclear weapons in 2003

intelligence agencies assessed with “high confidence” that Iran was determined to have nuclear weapons and concluded that Iraq had a secret nuclear weapons program. Since then, officials said they had obtained new information leading them to conclude that international pressure, including tough economic sanctions, had been successful in bringing about a halt to Iran’s secret program. “We felt that we needed to scrub all the assessments and sources to make sure we weren’t misleading ourselves,” one senior intelligence official told Mazzetti during a telephone interview, speaking on condition of anonymity. In a separate statement accompanying the estimate, the deputy director of national intelligence, Donald Kerr, said that, given the new conclusions, it was important to release the report publicly “to ensure that an accurate presentation is available.” It was not immediately clear whether the report would help or hinder the U.S. push to tighten sanctions against Iran, which have been supported by Britain, France, and Germany — the three countries leading negotiations with Iran. The report would likely blunt the sense of urgency over Iranian nuclear progress and intentions, but it also underscored the apparent effectiveness of precisely the sort of sanctions the United States wants. Indeed, the administration sought to make the sanctions argument on Monday. “The estimate offers grounds for hope that the problem can be solved diplomatically without the use of force, as the administration has been trying to do,” Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, said in a statement. “And it suggests that the president has the right strategy: intensified international pressure along with a willingness to negotiate a solution that serves Iranian interests while ensuring that the world will never have to face a nuclear-armed Iran,” he said. “For that strategy to succeed, the international community has to turn up the pressure on Iran with diplomatic isolation, United Nations sanctions, and with other financial pressure, and Iran has to decide if it wants to negotiate a solution.”

The report will certainly cause new questions to be about the intelligence the administration relies on, particularly in making the case for military action. It gave new ammunition to those Democrats worried that the administration might contemplate a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Hadley said, though, that the new analysis “confirms that we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons,” and concludes that the risk of that happening “remains a very serious problem.” Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the international Atomic Energy Agency, had reported last month that Iran was now operating 3,000 uranium-enriching centrifuges, capable of producing fissile material for nuclear weapons. His report said, though, that IAEA inspectors in Iran had been unable to determine whether the Iranian program sought only to generate electricity or also to build weapons.