U.S. scrambled to realize disputes in Iran. Wikileaks.

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   Washington talked with allies' embassies and Iranian dissidents and businessmen to gauge the Iranian opposition, according to dispatches disclosed by WikiLeaks. As protesters poured into the streets of Iran in the aftermath of the disputed 2009 reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, U.S. diplomats scrambled to decipher the erupting political crisis and the goals of the opposition's so-called green movement, according to recently disclosed diplomatic cables. The diplomats hurried to understand without the benefit of an official outpost in Tehran, a result of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Instead they read news bulletins and spoke with allied embassies in places like Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Turkey and Dubai, United Arab Emirates. They contacted Iranian dissidents, human rights activists and disgruntled businessmen, according to the confidential dispatches made public in recent days by WikiLeaks. By early this year, diplomats dubbed "Iran watchers" at the U.S. Consulate in Dubai had produced the first in a series of cables examining the Iranian opposition since the 2009 election. "What started as a movement to annul the election now gives shelter both to those seeking the full set of rights guaranteed them by Islamic Iran's constitution and those seeking a new system altogether," reads a cable sent Jan. 12 to the State Department. "But like the regime that seeks to crush it," the cable reads, the opposition "is not monolithic and there is a clear gulf between the opposition's elite leadership and the popular movement protesting in the streets."

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