Seeking Nuclear Insight in Fog of the Ayatollah’s Utterances

By JAMES RISEN
NYT

WASHINGTON — 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.”

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