Posted on 09/25/2009 4:46:04 PM PDT by jazusamo
Late Thursday night, two hours after it sent out President Barack Obama’s Friday schedule, the White House told reporters it was adding another event – a statement that he would give in the morning. Amid all the hoopla of the G-20 economic summit in Pittsburgh, there was scant indication the announcement would be dramatic.
But behind the scenes, the Obama administration was furiously preparing for a major public intelligence disclosure that it had not planned to make: that the U.S. had known for years about a previously undisclosed clandestine nuclear enrichment facility Iran has been building since 2005 in a mountain near Qom.
Interviews with administration and international officials, diplomats, non-proliferation and Iran experts suggest the administration had no plans to announce its suspicions before beginning international talks with Iran next week. But its hand was forced after learning some time during the week of a letter Iran had sent the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency in Vienna acknowledging construction of a previously undisclosed facility.
POLITICO has learned that the International Atomic Energy Agency did not notify the United States or other member states of the receipt of the Iranian letter or its contents. Only on Friday morning, a few hours before Obama’s announcement, and only then in a press statement that was prompted by news reports, did the IAEA acknowledge receiving the notification from Iran.
“Generally, communications from member states are supposed to be confidential,” one official in Vienna close to the atomic agency told POLITICO on condition of anonymity. “ I think in terms of notification, we generally don’t release member states’ communications unless the member state asks us to. A fundamental tenet of the agency and its members is that they have to be able to trust us.”
Indeed, one international official who asked for anonymity said that to this person’s knowledge, it was an Associated Press reporter in Vienna, George Jahn, who having learned of the Iranian letter, may have first tipped off western officials to its existence. Jahn broke the story of the letter by 5:55 a.m. EST Friday, but his reporting on it earlier earlier in the week may have been what eventually alerted U.S. officials to Iran’s communication with the IAEA.
An administration official declined to tell POLITICO how the U.S. had learned of the letter.
Shortly after the A.P. story broke, the IAEA sent out a press statement confirming that it had received a letter from Iran. “I can confirm that on 21 September Iran informed the IAEA in a letter that a new pilot fuel enrichment plant is under construction in the country,” an IAEA spokesman said in a statement.
The IAEA statement indicated it was made in response to numerous calls following first the A.P. story, and shortly thereafter stories from Reuters, and the New York Times, which was apparently told about the U.S. intelligence by the White House on Thursday night, under an embargo lifted shortly before Obama’s statement.
At 8:30 am, Obama made the announcement, flanked by Britain’s Gordon Brown and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy in a show of international unity. But the haste with which the event was pulled together was perhaps underscored by who was not with them in Pittsburgh.
Many of the key officials who work most closely on the Iran nuclear issue were still in New York, meeting with their foreign counterparts in town for the annual swirl of meetings that occur on the sidelines during the opening of the U.N. General Assembly. Not in Pittsburgh, for instance, were Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and Verification Ellen Tauscher or Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs William Burns, the U.S. government point person to the international talks with Iran that begin next week in Geneva.
As Obama spoke, the administration sent out background guidance to Congress and the press with more information on the Qom facility.
“We learned earlier this week that Iran has sent the IAEA a letter indicating that it is constructing an enrichment facility but providing no detailed information that would enable the IAEA to monitor the site,” that White House-provided guidance said.
The guidance neither indicated when precisely in the past week, nor how, the administration had learned of the Iranian letter. It said that the U.S., Britain and France had briefed the IAEA in Vienna on Wednesday on what it knew of the Qom program.
“Iran’s letter was the trigger” for Obama’s announcement, a U.S. official told POLITICO on condition of anonymity. “The [Iranian] letter sent to the IAEA, how we learned about it, that I don’t know,” he continued. “It’s possible,” he added, “that it was via the media.”
Why would the White House have preferred not to publicly disclose its Qom evidence, seemingly something of a smoking gun for the case that Iran hasn’t been transparent about even its current nuclear activities? Why was it only prompted to make the announcement after it learned of Iran’s letter to the IAEA?
“Because the Iranians are trying to get in front and create an argument that they didn't do anything wrong,” the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s George Perkovich told Politico. “So to try to block that, Obama had to get [it] out. We would have been better off not announcing and keeping it as leverage and a way to see if the Iranians kept their word in a future deal.”
Woo hoo, praise be to O! We already know that Bush knew about this.
thpit
Correction: The Obamaloons wouldn’t recognize a lit flashlight in a blackout. The EVIL CIA knew about this. Our military probably knew about it. The Israelis knew about it.
The Obamaloons wouldn’t recognize a turd in an Obamahouse.
I guess having 120,000 troops next door in Iraq turned out to be a decent idea after all. Bush is looking smarter every day it appears.
He’s looking for anything to get his numbers back up. ANYTHING!
I don't understand the logic of this. Would the Obama who said last week that the Iranians do not pose a nuclear threat really do anything with this information, or would it have been swept under the rug to keep the Iranians "talking" (as if that makes one bit of difference)?
The key is this: Ivan and the Chicoms knew about it all along, and were sitting on the information. They had no intention of going along with sanctions, even though they knew the Iranians were lying.
They still don’t.
Best,
Chris
Just this week, smokin’ Joe Biden said that Iran was not a threat... Where are the adults?
It’s not like we could have 120,000 troops in Afganistan.
Obama still doesn’t know what it is he is supposed to know, and he won’t understand it until his teleprompter tells him what to say. Odummy better get new help.
“Rimshot Joe” is getting old and having a hard time keeping up. He needs to start reading Free Republic.
Faux outrage from our Dear Leader? I am shocked I tell ya. Shocked.
Iran better be terrified.
I used to support the action of taking out the nuke sites, but I think we would be better to help the new Iranian Revolutionaries overthrough Iamadamnnutjob.
Seems Obama pooped his pants again on this one. What will he do now, threaten a preemptive retreat?
The Dear Leader will take a big boom in Israel with no problem and he will then have faux sympathy and support for what is left of Israel.
If we take out the nuke sites we have to take out the leadership of Iran as well or we just have to do it all over again. I wonder how the average Iranian would take that...
CRISIS!!!!!!!
( We know all along sonce 2005!Buahahahahahah!)
Military Action ( Bibi forces Obathings hand)not off the table.
We have never been more united with Britain, Germany,France...blah,blah,blah....
This is a poll crisis , I gotta look strong like Bibi!
Obama is tanking like a powned gurly man who has no spine!
Bibi did the job.
Thank you Bibi.
I’m praying that you are wrong and that someone with some
common sense stops him.
That lie stuck out like a sore thumb.
They, the Iranians, are following the same rope-a-dope tactics that they saw were so successful, by the North Koreans, with Clinton and Bush - make sure everyone knows they have more chips to bargain over right before more negotiations start.
Obama, apparently already aware of the intelligence, was hoping to quietly include that knowledge as one of HIS chips, and, just as the Koreans did before them, the Iranians trumped him in the same screw-you, so-what fashion.
With the Iranian Mullahs and the North Korean dictators we never gain anything diplomatically or otherwise by pretending we know less than we do, as soon as we know it or have reasonable suspicion of it.
Revealing anything that we know that they were trying to hide, will not alter their course to continuing the disclosed effort. They may be concerned about what we know when we know it, but that concern will only change their intelligence efforts, not their WMD efforts; and in most cases we have as much ability to see their altered intelligence tactics as we did to see the original activity they tried to hide.
The Pentagon, not the state department, should be making the decisions on diplomacy with Iran and North Korea.
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