Washington, August 19: The CIA is opening a counterproliferation center to combat the spread of dangerous weapons and technology, a move that comes as Iran is on the verge of fuelling up a new nuclear power plant.
CIA Director Leon Panetta said yesterday that the new unit would place CIA operators side by side with the agency’s analysts to brainstorm plans to “confront the threat of weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, chemical and biological.”
The center would formalise the collaboration between the agency’s analysts and operators, a close working relationship that CIA spokesman George Little said already has yielded intelligence successes.
Little cited their work in last year’s revelation of the “discovery of the Syrian covert nuclear reactor and Iran’s undeclared uranium enrichment facility near Qom.” That Iranian city is the ideological centre of Iran’s Shiite Muslim rulers.
–PTI