US intelligence didn’t know as much about the second Iranian enrichment facility as they made it appear in the news coverage, says US investigative journalist Gareth Porter.
“What they knew was that there was a site which was suspicious and that had certain characteristics, but they couldn’t say for sure this was an enrichment facility until after the Iranians told the IAEA – and then they turned around and said, ‘well, they only did it because we forced them,’ and this was a little bit of an exaggeration,” Porter said.
If you carefully read the transcript of the news briefing on the intelligence, Porter added, it turns out that they had clues and they had suspicions, but they didn’t really have the goods.