Questionable intelligence

These are the main conclusions of the excerpted sections of the IAEA report:

1. Iran has "sufficient information" to produce an implosion-type nuclear weapon, a more sophisticated kind of bomb (and thus more difficult to produce);

2. Iran has done extensive research, like testing high-voltage detonators and firing text explosives;

3. Iran has a "high explosives industry" capable of producing the elements of a nuclear weapon.

If these points are true, they suggest Iran has a much more developed nuclear weapons programs than previously thought. But are they true? There's reason to be skeptical.

The IAEA's "classified annex" is based on information from a laptop obtained by Olli Heinonen, the IAEA's deputy director general for safeguards. Skeptics call this the "Laptop of Death" and liken it to the faulty WMD intelligence that helped lead the U.S. into the Iraq war.

Why the skepticism? For one thing, there are questions about the laptop's provenance. The IAEA says it came from an Iranian agent working for German intelligence, according to the ISIS report.

... was smuggled out of Iran by the wife of an Iranian who was recruited by German intelligence. Iranian authorities had discovered his activities, and one of his last acts before arrest was the passing of the records to his wife. Intelligence officials told ISIS that they assume he is dead. His wife fled to Turkey and turned the electronic media over to U.S. authorities.

Wild story. It sounds like a movie script: A brave Iranian spy's last act, his wife's furtive flight across the Turkish border.

It also sounds bogus. Gareth Porter reported last year that, according to German intelligence, the laptop actually came from the Mujahideen e-Khalq, an Iranian dissident group which is officially classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. Not exactly an objective source -- sort of like getting information about Iraqi WMDs from Ahmad Chalabi. Remember how well that worked out?

Other problems with the laptop: Julian Borger reported in 2007 that everything on the laptop is in English. That makes sense for technical details, since English is sort of the lingua franca of science. But as one official put it to Borger, "at some point you'd have thought there would be at least some notes in Farsi."

There's also the question of why Iran would store sensitive information on a laptop, a mobile device that can easily be stolen.

Indeed, the laptop has been a source of dissent within the IAEA. Heinonen thinks it's the real deal. But IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei does not. This is from Sanger and Broad's story:

Last month, the agency issued an unusual statement cautioning it "has no concrete proof" that Iran ever sought to make nuclear arms, much less to perfect a warhead. On Saturday in India, Dr. ElBaradei was quoted as saying that "a major question" about the authenticity of the evidence kept his agency from "making any judgment at all" on whether Iran had ever sought to design a nuclear warhead.

In other words, the entire IAEA "classified annex" is speculation based on information of very dubious origin, and senior officials at the IAEA think it is bogus. Once again, Sanger and Broad should have included that context in their story. They didn't; instead, Heinonen's report is presented as fact. (Noticing a pattern?) They're either being sloppy or mendacious.

Glenn Greenwald thinks journalists reporting on Iran are making the same mistakes they made on Iraq. Sadly, I have to agree.

(To be clear: None of this means Iran does not want the capacity to produce nuclear weapons. I think that's why Iran built the Qom facility: To give the regime the option to produce highly-enriched uranium for some (hypothetical) future bomb.)