U.S. Putting In Place New System for Secretly Monitoring Iran’s Nuclear Work

Damian Paletta

September 10, 2015

U.S. Designing Secret Way to Monitor Iran’s Nuclear Program

WASHINGTON—The U.S. intelligence chief said Wednesday that the government is designing a secret way to monitor Iran’s compliance with a pending agreementaimed at curbing its nuclear program, which will go beyond scrutiny from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“We are fielding some independent capabilities, which I can’t go into…that will enable us to have good insight into the nuclear industrial enterprise of Iran, if I can call it that,” U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said at a Washington conference called the Intelligence and National Security Summit, without offering any details.

Mr. Clapper, who has spent more than 50 years working in a variety of government intelligence posts, stopped short of predicting whether the Iranian government would abide by the nuclear agreement, which the White House and five other world powers brokered with the Iranians. But he said the U.S. and others would likely know if Iranians didn’t comply with a range of limits on its nuclear program.

“I come away pretty confident, I won’t say 100%, should never say that… that we can verify from our own sources” and the IAEA “to observe and monitor what the Iranians are doing,” Mr. Clapper said.