Word: covert
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...restive southeast border with Pakistan. Although the attack was orchestrated by the Sunni extremist group Jundullah - a separatist organization based among the Baluchi ethnic group that spans the Iran-Pakistan border and has for years conducted low-key terrorism strikes - many in Tehran blamed the bombing on a covert campaign by Western intelligence agencies to destabilize Iran. And that could cast a shadow over President Barack Obama's delicately poised effort to engage Iran in search of a solution to the nuclear standoff...
...facility," he told TIME in an exclusive interview. "It was built into a mountain; obviously that raised question marks." Panetta said that after he was confirmed as the agency's director, "we spent the next months trying to get better intel about what was going on there ... and conducting covert operations into that area." (See pictures of the world's worst nuclear disasters...
Panetta won't say what kind of covert operations were carried out or how the agency was able to conclude that the Qum facility was nuclear. The counterterrorism officials says only that "our body of knowledge, based on multiple sources, grew to the point that allowed us earlier this year to reach the high-confidence conclusion that this was a covert nuclear facility...
...last claim is palpably untrue. Iran has refused to provide all the information required under the treaty, which is why it is the subject of U.N. sanctions. The Qum facility may not be a smoking gun - it hasn't even been loaded yet - but it is a covert operation of some sort, perhaps a bomb-making facility, perhaps a research-and-development shop. It is the latest evidence in Iran's history of attempting to hoodwink the rest of the world about its nuclear program. A similar game was played with the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, which was exposed...
...Natanz - which was also constructed in secret but then subjected to an ongoing IAEA inspection regimen. The result is that Natanz, which gives Iran the capacity to produce fissile material, has become an increasingly intractable fact on the ground, although IAEA oversight prevents such material from being diverted for covert weapons work...