How Good Is American Intelligence On Iran?

The CIA Vs. the Mullahs -- The Washington Post

How good is American intelligence on Iran? With the clerical regime intimately involved in Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq, with the mullahs quite probably on the verge of enriching sufficient uranium to make a bomb, and President Obama promising to use more diplomacy and sanctions to stop them, it's a fairly pressing question.

Yet this query has rarely been raised seriously in Washington. I am not aware of one instance since 1978, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini started to preach revolution from France, that an American president requested a thorough assessment of the clandestine service's collection efforts against the mullahs. Congress has been only a little better. Even after the Iraq war made outsiders more attentive to the deficiencies in the Central Intelligence Agency's operations against "hard target" countries, congressional interest in knowing more about the efforts to collect intelligence against Tehran has been thin. Field officers who have seen gross incompetence in Iran operations over the years have wondered more often about Langley's abilities than have its civilian overseers.

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My Comment: If the past is any indication, their track record is awful. But this is from what we know. What we do not know may change this comment 180 degrees.

Our only hope is that our Congressional oversight committees do their jobs right, and will make the changes if necessary. Leon Panetta has a tough job in front of him .... let us hope that he is up to the challenge.