Word: panetta
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...anyone end the dispute between the nation's intelligence chiefs? The National Security Council tried and failed; National Security Adviser Jim Jones tried and failed. Now it looks as if Vice President Joe Biden's effort to referee the dispute between CIA Director Leon Panetta and his boss, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, has not completely resolved the differences either...
...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...
From then on, the challenge was to keep the information secret. Panetta said he ordered the presentation to be readied "in the event that that information leaked out or that [the Obama Administration] wanted to present it to the International Atomic Energy Agency." British, French and Israeli intelligence agencies were involved in creating the presentation, he added...
...chose to own up to the plant's existence - although how it might have learned of Washington's discovery remains unclear. On the eve of the U.N. General Assembly last month, the Iranians sent the IAEA a terse note, acknowledging the presence of the Qum facility. The next day, Panetta dispatched a team to the IAEA's headquarters in Vienna to make the presentation...