WASHINGTON — Although convinced that Iran is "vigorously" pursuing programs to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, the U.S. intelligence community has few sources of reliable information on any illicit arms activities by the Islamic republic, current and former intelligence officials and Middle East experts say.
The United States has struggled to get more than glimpses and incomplete accounts of Tehran's weapons programs, they say, despite the fact that American spy agencies are in a better position to collect information on Iran since U.S.-led invasions and occupations of two of the country's neighbors in the last three years.
The dearth of quality intelligence has complicated American efforts to convince other nations to more aggressively confront Iran, and accounts for the caution expressed by some U.S. intelligence officials last week when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said he had seen important new evidence that Iran was pursuing ways to mount a nuclear warhead on a missile.
"There are parts of the Iranian world that are not impenetrable," said a former senior CIA official who left the agency several months ago. The CIA and other U.S. spy services have been able to get a steady stream of reports on political developments inside the regime, he said, and have had some success tracking Iran's support of terrorist networks, including Hezbollah.
But Tehran "is particularly controlling and tight" in maintaining secrecy around its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, the former official said.
"As with any country that may be pursuing WMD," he said, referring to weapons of mass destruction, "that's the most difficult nut to crack."
The combination of the hard-line U.S. diplomatic stance and the scant underlying intelligence has prompted comparisons to the United States' flawed case for war against Iraq. Despite the parallels, officials and experts said they believe there were important distinctions.
"We have so much more access to Iran" than U.S. intelligence did to Iraq before the war or to North Korea currently, said a congressional official with access to classified intelligence reports.
The official noted that significant numbers of Iranians travel abroad and that Iran is more open to outside visitors than either Iraq or North Korea.
"The window into Iran is much better," the official said.
