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Britain: Iran "Hoodwinked" CIA Over Nuclear Plans

[Telegraph-UK] Tim Shipman, Philip Sherwell and Carolynne Wheeler - British spy chiefs have grave doubts that Iran has mothballed its nuclear weapons program, as a U.S. intelligence report claimed last week, and believe the CIA has been hoodwinked by Teheran. The timing of the CIA report has also provoked fury in the British Government, where officials believe it has undermined efforts to impose tough new sanctions on Iran and made an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities more likely. The security services in London want concrete evidence to allay concerns that the Islamic state has fed disinformation to the CIA. The report used new evidence - including human sources, wireless intercepts and evidence from an Iranian defector - to conclude that Teheran suspended the bomb-making side of its nuclear program in 2003. But British intelligence is concerned that U.S. spy chiefs were so determined to avoid giving President Bush a reason to go to war - as their reports on Saddam Hussein's weapons programs did in Iraq - that they got it wrong this time. A senior British official delivered a withering assessment of U.S. intelligence-gathering abilities in the Middle East and revealed that British spies shared the concerns of Israeli defense chiefs that Iran was still pursuing nuclear weapons.
2007-12-10 01:00:00
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