If public sources are to be believed, something changed between July of this year and August in the US knowledge of Iran’s nuclear intentions and capabilities. In July one of the authors of the new NIE was saying the same old bellicose things to Congress. In August, President Bush said that new information was coming to light from Mike McConnell, but he didn’t know just what it was. Questions:

– (a) did the new information come from Iranian intelligence officer Ali Reza Asgari, only the latest general who had gone missing in March, and was speculated to have been a long time mole? (was the kidnapping of Iranian American scholar Haleh Esfandiari a retaliatory measure?)

– (b) Most importantly, what pieces of information, and from whom, resulted in the mysterious but highly important clandestine raid on a joint Syrian/Korean/Iranian enterprise near the Syria Turkey border on September 6?

You should re-read the Times story of this raid on a clandestine Syrian nuclear cache (also excerpted here). It seems likely to us that a Syrian nuclear facility is in effect a proxy Iranian nuclear facility.

According to reports, the Israeli military had brought specimens of nuclear material from the facility to US intelligence in August, so that its provenance could be confirmed as North Korean. Then the surgical strike was carried out by Israel on September 6, with technological and logistical support (at a minimum) from the US, on the complex. (Were workers detained for interrogation? — that would seem to be an awfully good idea.) Had Israel and the US destroyed a critical location in Syria to which Iran had outsourced nuclear weapons activity after 2003?.

In any event, what was going on at this nuclear facility was so clandestine that no one complained about its obliteration or the foreign attacks involved, or just about anything else. It became the international incident that never happened. It would not surprise us in the least if the September 6 raid were the linchpin of the administration’s turnaround, wherein the US could have gained significant insights into the nuclear capabilities of Iran, Syria and North Korea, degraded those capabilities, perhaps rounded up some knowledgeable personnel, and acquired some genuine negotiating leverage on various issues. These elements would be sufficient that all of the — otherwise loud and bellicose — parties have kept mum about just what went down on September 6.

In that classic detective story, the dog that didn’t bark was a clue. When a pack of mad dogs doesn’t bark, that might be even more than a clue.

UPDATE

On the other hand, maybe the current NIE is just wrong, September 6 was just a raid, and nothing much has changed. John Bolton: “Rarely has a document from the supposedly hidden world of intelligence had such an impact as the National Intelligence Estimate released this week. Rarely has an administration been so unprepared for such an event. And rarely have vehement critics of the ‘intelligence community’ on issues such as Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction reversed themselves so quickly…Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than ‘intelligence’ analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it.” HT: Powerline

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 4:28 am and is filed under General, Iran, MSM, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.