US intelligence on Iran ineffective, say experts

WASHINGTON - United States intelligence is unlikely to know much about Iran's contentious nuclear programme and could be vulnerable to manipulation for political ends, former intelligence officers and other experts say.

Amid an escalating war of words between Washington and Tehran, the experts say they doubt the CIA has been able to recruit agents with access to the small circle of clerics who control the Islamic Republic's national security policy.

Serious doubts also surround the effectiveness of an expanded intelligence role for the Pentagon, which former intelligence officials say is preparing covert military forays to look for evidence near suspected weapons facilities.

"I will be highly remarkably surprised if the United States has [intelligence] assets in the organs of power," said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. "They don't even know who the second-tier Revolutionary Guards are."

Iran, in a renewed challenge to US and European efforts to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear bomb, vowed yesterday that it would never give up its nuclear programme.

President Mohammad Khatami also warned of "massive" consequences if it was treated unfairly over its nuclear programme, which Iran says is for peaceful purposes only and Washington believes is a cover for producing a bomb.

In Washington, President George W. Bush said a nuclear-armed Iran would be "a very destabilising force in the world" and urged the West to work together to stop this happening.

Doubts about US intelligence on Iran have arisen amid talk of possible military strikes by the US or Israel against suspected nuclear weapons facilities.

Former chief weapons inspector David Kay warned that the Bush Administration was again relying on evidence from dissidents, as it did in prewar Iraq.

"The tendency is to force the intelligence to support the political argument," Kay said in a CNN interview yesterday.

"We're talking about military action against Iran and we don't have a national intelligence estimate that shows what we do know, what we don't know and the basis for what we think we know."

"If US intelligence was bad in Iraq, and it was atrocious, it's probably going to be worse vis-a-vis Iran," said Richard Russell, a former CIA analyst who teaches at the National Defence University.

- REUTERS