Word: panetta
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This summer, as the Obama Administration prepared to confront Iran with proof of its undisclosed uranium-enrichment plant in Qum, CIA Director Leon Panetta ordered his staff to work with European intelligence agencies to compile a comprehensive presentation about the facility. Although the Iranians had taken great pains to keep the facility a secret, building it into a mountain 100 miles southwest from Tehran, the CIA had known about it for three years...
...Panetta was told about Qum during the White House transition period in January. "This was presented at that time as something nobody knew about, a secret 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...
...Panetta's message, however, was greeted with skepticism. Speaking after Panetta, Osama Siblani, spokesman for the Congress of Arab American Organizations, asked the CIA director to take a message to President Obama: "It is time we were treated like Americans." (Read about the CIA's attempts to prevent another 9/11...
Many in the audience, and in the larger Arab American community, gave Panetta credit for audacity. Arab Americans make up more than 30% of Dearborn's 100,000 residents, and few CIA directors have visited here, much less sought to recruit. "If you had told me some years ago that the boss of the CIA would come here and ask for our help, I would not have believed it," said Baha Saad, a local restaurateur. "To do that takes some balls." (See pictures of the adventures and misadventures...