WASHINGTON — The CIA launched a secret program in 2005 designed to degrade Iran’s nuclear weapons program by persuading key officials to defect, an effort that has prompted a “handful” of significant departures, current and former U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the operation say.
The previously undisclosed program, which CIA officials dubbed “the Brain Drain,” is part of a major intelligence push against Iran ordered by the White House two years ago.
Intelligence gathered as part of that push provided much of the basis for a U.S. report released last week that concluded that the Islamic regime had halted its nuclear weapons work in 2003. Officials declined to say how much of that intelligence could be attributed to the CIA program aimed at recruiting defectors.
Although the CIA effort on defections has been aimed in part at gaining information about Iran’s nuclear capabilities, its goal has been to undermine Iran’s emerging atomic energy capabilities by plucking key scientists, military officers and other personnel from its nuclear roster.
Encouraging scientists and military officers to defect has been a hallmark of CIA efforts against an array of targets, ranging from the Soviet Union to Iraq. But officials said those programs did not generally seek to degrade the target country’s capabilities, suggesting that U.S. officials believe that Iran’s nuclear know-how is still thin enough that it can be depleted.
The program has had limited success. Officials said that fewer than six well-placed Iranians have defected, and that none has been in position to provide comprehensive information on Iran’s nuclear program.
The CIA effort on defectors reflects the urgency with which the U.S. government has sought to slow down Iran’s nuclear advances, as well as the importance U.S. officials attach to finding human sources who can help fill in intelligence gaps left by high-tech means of collection such as satellites and electronic eavesdropping equipment.
The White House ordered the stepped-up effort in hopes of gathering stronger evidence that Tehran was making progress toward building a nuclear bomb. The Bush administration “wanted better information” on Iran’s nuclear programs, said a U.S. official briefed on the expanded collection efforts.
“I can’t imagine that they would have ever guessed that the information they got would show that the program was shut down,” the official said.
That was the central finding of the comprehensive intelligence report released last week. The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran contradicted previous intelligence assessments and undercut assertions by the Bush administration.
The new estimate on Iran, which represents the consensus view of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, also concluded that Tehran “at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons” and continuing to pursue civilian nuclear energy technologies that could help the Shiite Muslim country make a bomb.
The Bush administration’s decision to step up intelligence collection on Iran in 2005 was a reversal from a position the White House took after Bush was first elected. Former CIA officials said the agency had built up a large Iran Task Force, made up of nearly 100 officers and analysts at headquarters, by the end of the Clinton administration. But that office shrank to fewer than a dozen officers in early in the Bush administration, when the White House ordered resources be shifted to other targets.
“When Bush came in, they were totally disinterested in Iran,” said a former CIA official who held a senior position at the time. “It went from being a main focus to everything being switched to Iraq.”
Some of that reduced task force capacity since has been restored, former CIA officials said. Two years ago, the CIA created an “Iran division” within its directorate of operations, its overseas spying division, giving a single country resources and emphasis usually reserved for multinational regions.
The stepped-up effort went beyond the CIA, and has also involved the National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on other countries’ communications, and the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates U.S. spy satellites.
The defector program was put in place under then-CIA Director Porter Goss. The agency compiled a list of dozens of people to target as potential defectors based on a single criterion, according to a former official involved in the operation: “Who, if removed from the program, would have the biggest impact on slowing or stopping their progress?”
In the two years since it was launched, the program has led to carefully orchestrated extractions of a small group of Iranian officials who operated in the mid- to upper tiers of the Islamic regime’s nuclear programs.
Officials declined to discuss the whereabouts of the defectors, or details regarding the methods used to approach them. The former senior U.S. intelligence official said potential defectors have not been approached directly by the CIA, but through other contacts the agency has cultivated inside the country.
The “Brain Drain” program is the latest in a long series of efforts to shore up U.S. intelligence on Iran. It was launched at a time when a presidential commission was preparing a scathing report on the inadequacies of U.S. intelligence on Iran and other nations suspected of having nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
U.S. intelligence officials said the information that surfaced over the summer prompting the major re-evaluation of Iran’s nuclear weapons program centered on intercepts of Iranian government officials’ conversations, and the seizure of a journal that contained notes documenting the country’s decision to shut down its weapons research.
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