Middle East Focus: Reliable Disgruntled Iranian Informants, a Little Warning………..

Arabia Deserta

Reliable Disgruntled Iranian Informants, a Little Warning………..

“Iran's political turmoil has prompted a growing number of the country's officials to defect or leak information to the West, creating a new flow of intelligence about its secretive nuclear program, U.S. officials said. The gains have complicated work on a long-awaited assessment of Iran's nuclear activities, a report that will represent the combined judgment of more than a dozen U.S. spy agencies. The National Intelligence Estimate was due last fall but has been delayed at least twice amid efforts to incorporate information from sources who are still being vetted. Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said in a brief interview last week that the delay in the completion of the NIE "has to do with the information coming in and the pace of developments……….”

No doubt many educated Iranian professionals are fed up with the clerical rule, the potential for its militarization, and recent crackdowns on reformists. Some of them are supplying information of different degrees of validity to the West. Let’s hope there are not many “prize” informants of the type that preceded the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Let’s hope war and peace policies are not based on information from too many disgruntled “reliable” informants.
Cheers
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