Yet it made no sense for somebody to defect in order to tell us they halted their nuclear weapons program. That's why I assumed he was spilling his guts about ongoing programs. Why wouldn't he have just called a Chinese or Russian friend and asked them to pass along the relevant information to Washington?
So, on the assumption that Asgari was the source of the information, the only logical conclusion is that Asgari was a plant by the Tehran mullahs to get us to back off.
I'm not the only one to think these things:
The assessment appears to have been triggered primarily by recent humint input. Worrisome is the weight given to what may well be a counter-intelligence effort by Tehran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The humint relied upon is a claim by senior IRGC official Ali Rez Asgari who defected during a February trip to Turkey. Mr. Asgari told a foreign intelligence agency all activity on Iran's nuclear weapons program stopped four years ago. His claim purportedly was supported by intercepted communications among Iranian officials.
The effort to mislead us seems pretty transparent. Yet Iran's effort, if Asgari is an Iranian agent and the NIE change is based on Asgari's report, has the invaluable quality of being exactly what our foreign policy elites wanted to hear--a reason to avoid tackling the problem of Iran's nuclear weapons programs and goals.
