On 14 December 2009, The Times of London trumpeted what it claimed were notes produced in early 2007 “from Iran’s most sensitive military nuclear project” documenting Iranian plans to build and test a neutron initiator, a key component of an atomic weapon. The article received widespread international attention and called into question the US intelligence community’s 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (135 kb PDF), which judged “with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.”

But Gareth Porter of the Inter Press Service News Agency today reports that “U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London…is a fabrication” (emphasis added). Porter notes that while such a document would presumably be highly classified, the document (4.5 mb PDF) does not bear any security markings–a fact that The Times failed to disclose.

I have read The Times’ document for myself and note another significant irregularity that The Times failed to note: this allegedly “Iranian” document was composed on a computer that evidently lacked Persian (Farsi)–the Iranian national language–resources. It is readily apparent that the document was composed using Arabic, not Persian resources. For example, the Arabic letter corresponding to the English “y” is “ي”. In Persian, however, the dots are always omitted when the letter appears at the end of a word. (In fact, with a Persian input method selected, one has to press the shift key to obtain the Arabic letter “ي” with two dots underneath.) Throughout the document, the Arabic form of the letter, with dots underneath, appears:

Telltale Dots

In addition, the Persian word-initial long “a” (آ) consistently appears as a regular “a” (ا) in the document. The “little hat” above the long “a” is generally not considered to be optional.

In short, it is evident that an Arabic, and not a Persian, input method was used for composing this document. Why would a computer at Iran’s “most sensitive military nuclear project” be configured to use Arabic language resources instead of Persian ones?

Moreover, why would the Times fail to note the lack of security markings and the glaring typographical irregularities of this document?