Experts see little risk of the West blundering into conflict with Iran through a fog of flawed intelligence despite fresh word of differences between Western espionage assessments of alleged Iranian nuclear arms work.

Western governments are acutely sensitive to the dangers of revisiting with Iran Washington's experience with Iraq in 2003, when a US-led invasion was justified by what turned out to be wrong information about weapons of mass destruction.

Yet differences in foreign assessments of Iran's nuclear work have surfaced increasingly in recent weeks, prompting concern about the effectiveness and possible politicisation of Western intelligence coordination.

In the run-up to Thursday's Geneva talks between Iran and six powers, British and US officials appeared to differ over Iran's nuclear capability in what some saw as an uncomfortable echo of differing assessments of Iraq in 2002 and 2003, when France and Germany rejected US and British arguments for war.

A British security source said London suspected Iran had been seeking nuclear weapons for the past few years, in contrast to a US view published in 2007 that Tehran halted work on design and weaponisation in 2003.

French and German intelligence assessments of the Iranian weaponisation issue appear closer to Britain's view than America's, diplomats say.

Last week's revelation of a second nuclear plant in Iran only served to support international suspicions about an Iranian cover-up to mask nuclear weapons designs, the UK source said.

High risk of escalation

Anthony Glees, director of Britain's Buckingham University Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies, said that in light of the Iraq episode in 2003 it would be 'extremely discouraging' if there turned out to be substantial divergences in military intelligence assessments of Iranian nuclear activities.

Dan Plesch, an international affairs expert at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, said he saw a high risk of an escalation between the West and Iran because a compliant Western media was uncritically recycling charges of Iranian wrongdoing and this was reminiscent of Iraq coverage in 2002/03.

'Anyone who thinks intelligence is not politicised is living in cloud-cuckoo land,' he said.

But many analysts argue that good faith differences in the estimates of Western intelligence services are common where data is incomplete. And on the diplomatic front, they say, Iran in 2009 is not a simplistic mirror image of Iraq in 2003.

Malcolm Chalmers, a Professorial Fellow in British Security Policy at Britain's Royal United Services Institute, said.

'Different people put different probabilities on the same data.'

Former U.N. weapons inspector Terence Taylor said a big difference between the Iran situation now and the Iraq episode in 2003 was that Western countries and the U.N. nuclear watchdog were united in their overall view that Iran had a case to answer.

'We're not on the brink of military intervention, something that was colouring everything back in 2002 and 2003,' he said.

'What we're seeing now is more openness about things that used to be discussed in camera. It is a healthy sign of debate.'

Mohamed ElBaradei, Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said he had no evidence to back up the UK assessment, but Tehran had broken a transparency law by failing to disclose much earlier its second enrichment site.

Iran says all its nuclear-related activity is aimed solely at producing civilian electrical power.

After the Iraq crisis, when IAEA evidence countering the US and British view was disregarded, Western espionage coordination with the IAEA had come under greater scrutiny.

Nigel Inkster, an expert on transnational threats at London