Seeking Nuclear Insight in Fog of the Ayatollah’s Utterances

nytimes.com/  By JAMES RISEN

C.I.A. analysts studying the geopolitical gamesmanship now at play over Iran’s nuclear program have expensive and highly classified tools at their disposal, but one of their best sources is free and readily available: the public utterances of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Like much of the information about Iran’s secretive and enigmatic government, Ayatollah Khamenei’s remarks are sometimes contradictory, and always subject to widely different interpretations. But as negotiations over the country’s nuclear program begin on Saturday in Istanbul, efforts to divine where Ayatollah Khamenei really stands on the nuclear issue have taken on critical importance.

Underscoring Ayatollah Khamenei’s direct involvement in the issue, Iran’s chief negotiator, Saeed Jalili, arrived in Turkey with a new title: “personal representative of the supreme leader.”

“Dismissing what he says out of hand is not useful for us,” said Greg Thielmann, a former State Department analyst. “I think the U.S. can exploit what he says.”

Ayatollah Khamenei, who is not only the leader of Iran’s government but also the final authority on Islamic law, often uses religious language when he talks about the nuclear issue, which can jar Western analysts trying to gauge the meaning of such strong statements. With tensions over the nuclear program rising in February, he used that language to signal his opposition to nuclear weapons. “Iran is not seeking to have the atomic bomb, possession of which is pointless, dangerous and is a great sin from an intellectual and a religious point of view,” he said.

Then last month Ayatollah Khamenei was reported to have said that “we do not possess a nuclear weapon, and we will not build one.” Ayatollah Khamenei has also issued a fatwa, an Islamic edict, against the acquisition of a nuclear bomb by Iran.  More >>