"Despite years of covert operations inside Iran, extensive satellite imagery, and the recruitment of many Iranian intelligence assets, the United States and its allies, including Israel, have been unable to find irrefutable evidence of an ongoing hidden nuclear-weapons program in Iran, according to intelligence and diplomatic officials here and abroad. One American defense consultant told me that as yet there is “no smoking calutron,” although, like many Western government officials, he is convinced that Iran is intent on becoming a nuclear state sometime in the future. " Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/06/110606fa_fact_hersh
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Hersh quotes me quite a lot in this piece. I would like to make it clear I that am not the "retired military intelligence official." Nor am I the source in any passage that does not name me as such. I have not read or had saccess to the NIE of 2007 on Iran, nor have I read or had access to the "Memorandum to holders of the Iran NIE" of 2011. I have had no access to classified US Government information on this subject. pl