Flawed Iran nuclear claims won't die

[unhappycamper]

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-01-060214.html



Flawed Iran nuclear claims won't die
By Gareth Porter
Feb 6, '14

WASHINGTON - When Western intelligence agencies began in the early 1990s to intercept telexes from an Iranian university to foreign high-technology firms, intelligence analysts believed they saw the first signs of military involvement in Iran's nuclear program. That suspicion led to US intelligence assessments over the next decade that Iran was secretly pursuing nuclear weapons.

The supposed evidence of military efforts to procure uranium enrichment equipment shown in the telexes was also the main premise of the International Atomic Energy Agency's investigation of Iran's nuclear program from 2003 through 2007.

But the interpretation of the intercepted telexes on which later assessments were based turned out to have been a fundamental error. The analysts, eager to find evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, had wrongly assumed that the combination of interest in technologies that could be used in a nuclear program and the apparent role of a military-related institution meant that the military was behind the procurement requests.

In 2007-08, Iran provided hard evidence that the technologies had actually been sought by university teachers and researchers.