Iran Redline

While Redline was busy spooling up the flux capacitor to bring our website design into the 21st century, we kind of missed a pretty damn important story: Israel's daring raid on a Tehran warehouse to steal tonnes of archival documents relating to Iran's former nuclear weapons program. Yes, we know - it was perhaps the best story of the past five years or so when it comes to open source information about Iran's weapons-related activities. We apologise! Web design is not fun. Anyway, by now you've almost certainly heard the broad outlines of what happened. On 31 January last year, Israel's intelligence services pulled off the kind of coup that spies dream about - a silent nighttime raid on a secret, secured warehouse and the subsequent spiriting away of more than 30,000 documents relating to Iran's covert nuclear-related programs and research. As you can read in any of the excellent accounts of the Israeli operation, the haul from the archives included...

One Iranian university that we think doesn’t get the attention it deserves - perhaps because of its mouthful of a name – is Khaje Nasir al-din Toosi Industrial University. Catchy right? We know it as KNTU. This is a great acronym if you’re a fan of 1990s advertising campaigns for French Connection . Based in Tehran, KNTU is an elite engineering school that reportedly only admits the top 1% of those who take Iran’s notoriously competitive university entrance exams. That’s what you’ll read on Wikipedia anyway. What you won’t find there is the fact that KNTU is one of Iran’s most important centers for missile research. Without KNTU-developed technology and KNTU-schooled engineers, Iran’s missiles simply wouldn’t fly. You don’t need to take our word for it. Today we’re going to take you through some of the open source evidence that demonstrates KNTU’s key role in advancing Iran’s missile program. We’ll also point out some evidence that suggests KNTU is playing around with nuc...