Leon Panetta: US knew of second Iranian nuclear site for years

The United States had been aware of Iran’s recently disclosed second uranium enrichment facility for the last three years, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Leon Panetta, has said. Iran officially disclosed the existence of the facility, near the city of Qom, to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last month. American officials say that Tehran informed the UN nuclear watchdog only after learning that Western intelligence agencies had breached the secrecy surrounding the project.

In an interview with ‘Time’, Panetta said that the site first attracted the attention of Western intelligence agencies in 2006, when the CIA noted unusual activity at the mountain in which the facility was being built. “It was built into a mountain; obviously that raised question marks,” he told the magazine. Panetta said that after he was confirmed as the agency’s director in February 2009, the CIA, along with British and French intelligence, spent months trying to get better intelligence about the site, and conducted covert operations into that area.

He would not say want kind of covert operations were carried out or how the CIA was able to conclude that the site was nuclear. A US counterterrorism official, who was not named, told ‘Time’ that earlier this year, US intelligence agencies were able to reach “the high-confidence conclusion that this was a cover nuclear facility.”

Panetta said he had ordered his staff this summer to work with European and Israel’s intelligence agencies to compile a comprehensive presentation about the facility to be presented to the IAEA. On the eve of the United Nations General Assembly summit last month, Iran sent the nuclear watchdog a note acknowledging the presence of the nuclear facility. The next day, Panetta dispatched a team to the IAEA’s headquarters in Vienna to make the presentation. IAEA inspectors are due to visit the site for the first time on 25 October.