AMERICAN intelligence on Iran’s alleged weapons programmes is woefully thin, an independent panel set up by President Bush is expected to tell him within weeks.

The findings of the bipartisan commission are at odds with the apparent certainty with which Washington is accusing Tehran of pursuing nuclear weapons.

Mr Bush reiterated yesterday that the US, with European governments, believes “that the Iranians want a nuclear weapon”.

But the verdict of the nine-man panel threatens to cloud such clarity. It suggests that the CIA has poured millions of dollars into gathering intelligence in Iran over more than two decades, but with little effect. One knowledgeable source described US intelligence on Iran as scandalous, according to The New York Times.

In the first leak from the panel’s otherwise watertight considerations, the newspaper said that US intelligence suffered a significant setback in the late 1980s when its spy network in Iran was penetrated by Iranian agents. It has since had little success in garnering highly valued human intelligence.

The verdict of the panel carries clout because it was set up by Mr Bush precisely to learn the lessons of the debacle over Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Mr Bush has said that he has great confidence that the panel will produce “a very solid report”. Its members, led by Laurence Silberman, a retired judge, and Charles Robb, a former Democratic senator and governor, have received unrestricted access to the most senior intelligence officials and the most sensitive papers.

The panel is also critical of US intelligence on North Korea, but concedes that the Stalinist regime there is a harder nut to crack than Tehran.

The commission’s considerations come at a time when US intelligence chiefs are reassessing their conclusions on Iran’s weapons programmes with a view to producing a new assessment in the spring.

Iran signed a deal with Russia this month to receive nuclear fuel for its power plant at Bushehr. Tehran says that its nuclear programme is limited to power production, but the US says that that is a front for a military programme.

Some analysts have suggested that if Iran’s purposes are purely deterrence, it is well served by the appearance of a nuclear programme even if, like Saddam, it does not have one.

The panel, the President’s Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, was set up to look at three areas: the collective failure over Iraq’s WMD; an assessment of the nuclear network of A. Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons; and US intelligence on North Korea and Iran.

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