Back in 2007, US intelligence officials — fearing an overestimation of WMD capabilities similar to Iraq circa 2002 — severely lowballed their analysis of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Their product, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, put the Bush administration on the defensive and claimed that the Iranians had stopped work on the development of a nuclear warhead. Two years later, vindication comes from a most unlikely source: German intelligence.
President Obama has committed to trying diplomacy to stop the Iranian bomb. Time, though, is on the mullahs’ side, not least because so much of it was wasted after the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate made the improbable case that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. This assessment not only contradicted previous U.S. intelligence consensus but — as recent court documents show — also the conclusions of a key U.S. ally with excellent sources in Iran — Germany. The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, has amassed evidence of a sophisticated Iranian nuclear weapons program that continued beyond 2003. This usually classified information comes courtesy of Germany’s highest state-security court. In a 30-page legal opinion on March 26 and a May 27 press release in a case about possible illegal trading with Iran, a special national security panel of the Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe cites from a May 2008 BND report, saying the agency “showed comprehensively” that “development work on nuclear weapons can be observed in Iran even after 2003.”
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