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Wednesday, February 12, 2014

New Article on Iraqi Intel on Iranian Nuclear Program Based on Captured Documents

The CIA's latest issue of Studies in Intelligence has a new piece by an anonymous author entitled "Iraqi Human Intelligence Collection on Iran's Nuclear Weapons Program, 1980-2003" that relies upon a number of Iraqi documents captured by U.S. forces that are available at the Conflict Records Research Center at the National Defense University. The abstract of the new piece is below and available here, the full-text pdf of the article is here.
Well before the United States and the Western world first questioned Iran’s nuclear goals, members of Iraq’s intelligence services had recruited high-level Iranian officials and individuals involved in Tehran’s nuclear program. This article draws on captured IIS and GMID records held at the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. Until US forces entered Iraq in 2003, most research on Saddam’s regime had relied on secondary sources or “the occasional memoir or defector’s account.” This is no longer the case. From the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, US troops and their allies captured millions of Iraqi state records. The records, many of which are available to scholars today, offer a variety of primary sources relating to the inner-workings of Saddam’s Ba’athist state. The records also reveal much about Iraq’s foreign human intelligence (HUMINT) collection discipline, and it is upon these records that this account is largely based.

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