Today's announcement that Iran has built a secret, illegal uranium enrichment facility may have been news to many, but it was not news to a handful of others in Washington, Paris, London, Tel Aviv or Vienna. Some have argued that the US has known about the site since its 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which asserted that Iran was not building weapons an assessment which the administration says has not been changed. The site's existence was a topic of conversation in Israel last summer.
Indeed, officials told the New York Times that Iran's hasty announcement of the existence of the facility in a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Monday came as a result of Iran's realisation that the west had extensive knowledge of the facility.