Iran Estimate: Debate Persists
Friday, February 22, 2008
On December 3, 2007, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell declassified a set of key judgments from a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's efforts to build a nuclear weapon. The judgments may have contained some good news -- namely, "that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program" -- but few in the upper ranks of the Bush administration warmly embraced this declaration.
Indeed, in the month after the release, McConnell and President Bush publicly distanced themselves from the NIE's dramatic headline. Key American allies went further: The French defense minister and the head of Israeli intelligence declared the NIE wrong, contending that Iran's weapons work continues.
All of those officials, who play key roles in pressing for further international sanctions against Iran, say that Tehran continues to publicly enrich uranium under the implausible auspices of a civilian energy program, and that it continues to test-fire ballistic missiles. Bush used his State of the Union address to remind the world of these two facts and to assert that Iran remains as much of a threat as it was before December 3.
With the key judgments public, intelligence officials and weapons experts are in a definitional sparring match over what constitutes a nuclear weapons program, whether the NIE should have been released at all, and how the estimate was written. The key judgments acknowledged the points that Bush made in his speech. But the final document emphasized the riveting new information about the halted "nuclear weapons program" rather than Iran's ongoing enrichment and missile activities.
Furthermore, the NIE narrowly defines the program as consisting of weapons "design work," presumably for a warhead that can be put atop a missile, plus some covert enrichment activities. The estimate explicitly states that the weapons program does not include Iran's publicly acknowledged uranium enrichment work, which Tehran says is aimed at low-level enrichment that can be used for civilian nuclear power. Skeptics say that if Iran masters low-level uranium enrichment it can eventually develop the high-level enrichment necessary for a nuclear bomb.
The definition of what exactly constitutes a weapons program is important, but the key judgments relegated it to a footnote. Some former intelligence officials say that the footnoted information could have been stated more boldly, and they speculate whether the key judgments were deliberately written in such a way as to convince readers that Iran's nuclear threat has lessened. Intelligence estimates, by definition, are supposed to state the views of the intelligence community, not to argue policy, these former officials say.
There is little evidence to indicate that intelligence analysts are trying to pre-empt a U.S. invasion of Iran by undercutting the Bush administration's ostensible rationale for such action. But the NIE leaves many of the intelligence community's supporters wondering if its authors grasped how the document would be read -- quickly, incautiously, and through political lenses. If the NIE was meant to clarify matters on Iran, it has arguably failed.
A number of longtime intelligence analysts and weapons experts, including those who have helped draft NIEs in the past and hold no particular allegiance to Bush, criticize the key judgments as poorly written, politically tone-deaf, and betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of what actually constitutes a nuclear weapons program.
Production of fissile material -- highly enriched uranium, or plutonium -- is generally viewed as the long pole in the nuclear tent. Once a country overcomes that hurdle, the path to a finished nuclear weapon is downhill. Iran may have halted some design activities, but how significant is that in light of its continuing low-level uranium enrichment and missile testing? As one former intelligence official with experience in NIEs put it, the intelligence community seemed to go to great lengths to answer the least important question -- the work on a warhead design.
Defenders of the NIE, including the senior officials and analysts who wrote it, counter that the document is the product of new, compelling information and a rigorous, top-to-bottom scrubbing of all the known intelligence about Iranian nuclear issues. One former senior intelligence official close to the NIE's drafters said that journalists had blown the top finding out of proportion. Indeed, the clause immediately following the opening sentence, which declared that the program was halted in 2003, reads, "We also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons."
The key judgments clearly didn't give the Iranians a "clean bill of health," says Jeffrey Lewis, who directs the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation and runs the blog ArmsControlWonk.com. "The press reporting took a badly written NIE and pulled out probably the least important fact, or misidentified what the NIE said," Lewis argues.
Reporters weren't the only ones to run with the headline, however. Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, blasted the key judgments before a Knesset committee earlier this month. The document "pulls the rug out from under" the push for stricter Iran sanctions, he said. The U.S. estimate leaves "Israel to face the threat alone," Dagan added.
A few days earlier, the French defense minister, Herve Morin, said during a visit to Washington, "Coordinated information from a number of intelligence services" had led the French to believe that Iran is "continuing to develop" a nuclear weapon.
Both Dagan and Morin presumably have access to information that was not contained in the declassified judgments. But even the U.S. intelligence community's top man has publicly tried to shift attention away from the NIE's conclusion about Iran's narrowly defined weapons program. McConnell, like Bush, has been far more emphatic about the threat that Iran poses. Eschewing the hedged language of his analysts -- "high confidence," "moderate confidence" -- his assessments are more rigid and more focused on Iran's growing strength. In a lengthy January profile in The New Yorker, McConnell said, "There's no doubt in this observer's mind that Iran is on the path to get a nuclear weapon. It will force an arms race in the region."
Where Iran lies on its road to nuclear status may be up for debate. But on one fact, all sides agree: Without all of the key components -- fissile material, a compact and resilient warhead, and a long-range missile to deliver it -- Iran has no nuclear weapon. Could Iran make a nuclear device that might work? Maybe. Does it have the technological infrastructure to go further? Certainly. But does Iran have a viable, long-range weapon with which to threaten its neighbors? No.
And perhaps that was the intelligence community's point in the NIE. If the Iranian nuclear program were likened to a three-legged stool, then one leg -- the weapons design -- was taken out nearly five years ago. It could be repaired, but in the meantime, the stool is useless.
"I turn the tables on the critics of the NIE," says George Friedman, the head of Stratfor, a private intelligence firm. "Lay out the number of components you need to produce a weapon. If there is one that the Iranians weren't working on, they have no program."
But this assessment may ignore the political realities of Iranian nuclear ambitions. Tehran's possession of even a rudimentary nuclear device could fundamentally upset the regional power balance. "Would you like to have to convince Israel or the Saudis not to worry that these devices are too large and crude to be delivered by missiles?" asks David Kay. He is the former United Nations chief weapons inspector who led the 2003 Iraq Survey Group that found that Saddam Hussein no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction. "Nukes are less about war fighting than about politics by other means," he says.
Kay adds that the intelligence community is apparently conflicted about Iran's capabilities and its intentions. A bullet point within the key judgments states, parenthetically, that because of "intelligence gaps," the Energy Department and the National Intelligence Council "assess with only moderate confidence" that Iran's 2003 halt to the weapons design program represented a stop to the "entire nuclear weapons program."
"That's a direct contradiction of the first sentence," which declared that the program had halted, Kay says, "and yet it doesn't come after the first sentence, which implies that all 16 agencies are in agreement." The Energy Department's less confident view is especially worrisome, Kay says, because DOE oversees the nation's nuclear laboratories and has the most nuclear weapons expertise within the intelligence community.
For his part, McConnell appears to understand that his release of the key judgments has affected not only the political climate but also the future work of his analysts and spies. He told The New Yorker, "I think putting it out was the right thing." But he admitted that the intelligence community continues to need better information to verify if Iran has restarted its weapons design work.
"Our job is to steal the secrets of foreign governments or foreign terrorist organizations, and so the more they know about the effectiveness of our tradecraft the more difficult it's going to be for us," McConnell said. "For the community I represent, I just made our life a lot harder."
Published in National Journal
Friday, February 22, 2008
On December 3, 2007, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell declassified a set of key judgments from a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's efforts to build a nuclear weapon. The judgments may have contained some good news -- namely, "that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program" -- but few in the upper ranks of the Bush administration warmly embraced this declaration.
Indeed, in the month after the release, McConnell and President Bush publicly distanced themselves from the NIE's dramatic headline. Key American allies went further: The French defense minister and the head of Israeli intelligence declared the NIE wrong, contending that Iran's weapons work continues.
All of those officials, who play key roles in pressing for further international sanctions against Iran, say that Tehran continues to publicly enrich uranium under the implausible auspices of a civilian energy program, and that it continues to test-fire ballistic missiles. Bush used his State of the Union address to remind the world of these two facts and to assert that Iran remains as much of a threat as it was before December 3.
With the key judgments public, intelligence officials and weapons experts are in a definitional sparring match over what constitutes a nuclear weapons program, whether the NIE should have been released at all, and how the estimate was written. The key judgments acknowledged the points that Bush made in his speech. But the final document emphasized the riveting new information about the halted "nuclear weapons program" rather than Iran's ongoing enrichment and missile activities.
Furthermore, the NIE narrowly defines the program as consisting of weapons "design work," presumably for a warhead that can be put atop a missile, plus some covert enrichment activities. The estimate explicitly states that the weapons program does not include Iran's publicly acknowledged uranium enrichment work, which Tehran says is aimed at low-level enrichment that can be used for civilian nuclear power. Skeptics say that if Iran masters low-level uranium enrichment it can eventually develop the high-level enrichment necessary for a nuclear bomb.
The definition of what exactly constitutes a weapons program is important, but the key judgments relegated it to a footnote. Some former intelligence officials say that the footnoted information could have been stated more boldly, and they speculate whether the key judgments were deliberately written in such a way as to convince readers that Iran's nuclear threat has lessened. Intelligence estimates, by definition, are supposed to state the views of the intelligence community, not to argue policy, these former officials say.
There is little evidence to indicate that intelligence analysts are trying to pre-empt a U.S. invasion of Iran by undercutting the Bush administration's ostensible rationale for such action. But the NIE leaves many of the intelligence community's supporters wondering if its authors grasped how the document would be read -- quickly, incautiously, and through political lenses. If the NIE was meant to clarify matters on Iran, it has arguably failed.
A number of longtime intelligence analysts and weapons experts, including those who have helped draft NIEs in the past and hold no particular allegiance to Bush, criticize the key judgments as poorly written, politically tone-deaf, and betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of what actually constitutes a nuclear weapons program.
Production of fissile material -- highly enriched uranium, or plutonium -- is generally viewed as the long pole in the nuclear tent. Once a country overcomes that hurdle, the path to a finished nuclear weapon is downhill. Iran may have halted some design activities, but how significant is that in light of its continuing low-level uranium enrichment and missile testing? As one former intelligence official with experience in NIEs put it, the intelligence community seemed to go to great lengths to answer the least important question -- the work on a warhead design.
Defenders of the NIE, including the senior officials and analysts who wrote it, counter that the document is the product of new, compelling information and a rigorous, top-to-bottom scrubbing of all the known intelligence about Iranian nuclear issues. One former senior intelligence official close to the NIE's drafters said that journalists had blown the top finding out of proportion. Indeed, the clause immediately following the opening sentence, which declared that the program was halted in 2003, reads, "We also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons."
The key judgments clearly didn't give the Iranians a "clean bill of health," says Jeffrey Lewis, who directs the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation and runs the blog ArmsControlWonk.com. "The press reporting took a badly written NIE and pulled out probably the least important fact, or misidentified what the NIE said," Lewis argues.
Reporters weren't the only ones to run with the headline, however. Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, blasted the key judgments before a Knesset committee earlier this month. The document "pulls the rug out from under" the push for stricter Iran sanctions, he said. The U.S. estimate leaves "Israel to face the threat alone," Dagan added.
A few days earlier, the French defense minister, Herve Morin, said during a visit to Washington, "Coordinated information from a number of intelligence services" had led the French to believe that Iran is "continuing to develop" a nuclear weapon.
Both Dagan and Morin presumably have access to information that was not contained in the declassified judgments. But even the U.S. intelligence community's top man has publicly tried to shift attention away from the NIE's conclusion about Iran's narrowly defined weapons program. McConnell, like Bush, has been far more emphatic about the threat that Iran poses. Eschewing the hedged language of his analysts -- "high confidence," "moderate confidence" -- his assessments are more rigid and more focused on Iran's growing strength. In a lengthy January profile in The New Yorker, McConnell said, "There's no doubt in this observer's mind that Iran is on the path to get a nuclear weapon. It will force an arms race in the region."
Where Iran lies on its road to nuclear status may be up for debate. But on one fact, all sides agree: Without all of the key components -- fissile material, a compact and resilient warhead, and a long-range missile to deliver it -- Iran has no nuclear weapon. Could Iran make a nuclear device that might work? Maybe. Does it have the technological infrastructure to go further? Certainly. But does Iran have a viable, long-range weapon with which to threaten its neighbors? No.
And perhaps that was the intelligence community's point in the NIE. If the Iranian nuclear program were likened to a three-legged stool, then one leg -- the weapons design -- was taken out nearly five years ago. It could be repaired, but in the meantime, the stool is useless.
"I turn the tables on the critics of the NIE," says George Friedman, the head of Stratfor, a private intelligence firm. "Lay out the number of components you need to produce a weapon. If there is one that the Iranians weren't working on, they have no program."
But this assessment may ignore the political realities of Iranian nuclear ambitions. Tehran's possession of even a rudimentary nuclear device could fundamentally upset the regional power balance. "Would you like to have to convince Israel or the Saudis not to worry that these devices are too large and crude to be delivered by missiles?" asks David Kay. He is the former United Nations chief weapons inspector who led the 2003 Iraq Survey Group that found that Saddam Hussein no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction. "Nukes are less about war fighting than about politics by other means," he says.
Kay adds that the intelligence community is apparently conflicted about Iran's capabilities and its intentions. A bullet point within the key judgments states, parenthetically, that because of "intelligence gaps," the Energy Department and the National Intelligence Council "assess with only moderate confidence" that Iran's 2003 halt to the weapons design program represented a stop to the "entire nuclear weapons program."
"That's a direct contradiction of the first sentence," which declared that the program had halted, Kay says, "and yet it doesn't come after the first sentence, which implies that all 16 agencies are in agreement." The Energy Department's less confident view is especially worrisome, Kay says, because DOE oversees the nation's nuclear laboratories and has the most nuclear weapons expertise within the intelligence community.
For his part, McConnell appears to understand that his release of the key judgments has affected not only the political climate but also the future work of his analysts and spies. He told The New Yorker, "I think putting it out was the right thing." But he admitted that the intelligence community continues to need better information to verify if Iran has restarted its weapons design work.
"Our job is to steal the secrets of foreign governments or foreign terrorist organizations, and so the more they know about the effectiveness of our tradecraft the more difficult it's going to be for us," McConnell said. "For the community I represent, I just made our life a lot harder."
Published in National Journal
Labels: Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence, Iran
Full Article
The Other About-Face on Iran
Friday, December 14, 2007
In releasing a bombshell about Iran's nuclear program, intelligence director Mike McConnell reversed a vow of secrecy. But he probably had no choice.
"You will be disappointed," Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told a gathering of journalists in Washington on November 13. U.S. spy agencies were putting the finishing touches on a National Intelligence Estimate about Iran's nuclear intentions and capabilities, which included new leads that the agencies had been vetting since spring. But departing from recent practice, McConnell said, "I do not intend to release unclassified key judgments" of the NIE, those heavily edited yet potentially telling morsels of analysis that might ultimately show how close the United States is to a war with Iran.
"We have probably done a thousand of these" NIEs, he said. "We have done unclassified key judgments for maybe three. So we created an expectation that we do this, because we did it previously." And that was a bad idea, McConnell said, with some passion.
For starters, even the "sanitized" version of an NIE could compromise vital sources and methods, he said, because the target of the estimate is, of course, going to read the document. Second, "I don't want to have a situation where the young analysts" -- whom McConnell guards with particular devotion because he was once one of them -- "are writing something because they know it's going to be a public debate or political debate. They should be writing it to call it as it is."
McConnell, whom a longtime colleague describes as having "not a political or manipulative bone in his body," also stated he would "make every effort" to prosecute anyone who leaked the NIE. Then, he vowed (twice) to resign if the intelligence was "cherry-picked in an inappropriate way" by government officials.
Things changed dramatically in the three weeks after McConnell's public denunciation of leaks and declassification. On December 3, McConnell and his aides reversed that decision and released the unclassified key judgments of the NIE on Iran. Try as McConnell might to keep the lid on the new estimate, his lieutenants were influenced by the political realities of intelligence these days.
"They thought it would leak and be distorted, and they thought they'd get ahead of that," said one former senior intelligence official close to the deliberations. "They decided it was better to put out a clean set of key judgments." Vice President Cheney went so far as to say that officials expected to lose control of some classified material. "There was a general belief -- that we all shared -- that it was important to put it out, that it was not likely to stay classified for long, anyway," Cheney told The Politico on December 5. "Everything leaks."
The leak-prevention strategy was a stark departure from the guidelines that McConnell had set out, both in November and a month earlier, when he issued this official policy: "The possibility that the [key judgments] or other positions of an estimate will be leaked is not a sufficient reason for preparing unclassified [key judgments]." In a briefing with reporters after the NIE was released, a senior intelligence official acknowledged that declassification "obviously represents a departure from [McConnell's] guidance."
The banner headline of the key judgments -- "that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program" -- put the intelligence community precisely where McConnell didn't want it to be: in the middle of a ferocious political and policy debate in which sources and methods of the intelligence on Iran, as well as the analysis, are being openly discussed, exposed, debated, and, yes, cherry-picked to suit a range of agendas. Indeed, even though the NIE does not say that Iran poses no nuclear threat, the key judgments on areas besides the weapons program have had to compete with the dramatic top-line assessment.
Because the new estimate upends its predecessor, made in 2005, and has undercut any nuclear-related pretext for a U.S. bombing of Iran, the political and ideological dispositions of the analysts who wrote the NIE are, predictably, under scrutiny. Within days of the key judgments' release, former Bush administration officials and neoconservative icons mounted a full-scale attack on McConnell's lieutenants, some of whom had long careers in the State Department and have, the critics contend, historically underestimated Iran.
These critics characterized the NIE as the lieutenants' way of cutting off Cheney and the president on their presumed path to war with Iran -- a contention that wasn't refuted by senior intelligence officials' repeated assertions that Iran's decision to stop its program in 2003 and to keep it shuttered resulted directly from international pressures and sanctions. Indeed, intelligence officials have been careful not to assert that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the key motivator for Iran's change of plans. Whether McConnell's aides meant to pre-empt the White House or not, the conclusion is undeniable: The intelligence community is at odds with President Bush's forceful rhetoric on Iran.
Since the NIE was released, McConnell has been notably absent from the public fracas. His deputy, Donald Kerr, a veteran nuclear weapons expert, has given the intelligence community's only two on-the-record statements about the estimate. McConnell was out of the country when the key judgments were released.
Around Washington, rumors persist that McConnell threatened to resign over the issue. It's not clear, however, whether he staked his tenure on the NIE being released or withheld, or whether he saw any cherry-picking by the White House, but the gossip is one more measure of just how political the release of this document has become. Observers point out that in the month preceding the NIE, Bush warned that Iran's nuclear ambitions could lead to "World War III," and Cheney, four days later, gave a bellicose speech reminiscent of the run-up to war with Iraq over its weapons programs. The White House already knew by then, at a minimum, that the intelligence community was vetting potentially groundbreaking intelligence on Iran that could change the NIE.
Perhaps under pressure to back up their bold new claims on Iran, senior officials have gone further, giving on-background press interviews in which they catalog the streams of intelligence that led the analysts to change their nuclear conclusions -- purloined laptop computers loaded with weapons diagrams; notebooks and intercepted phone calls from high-ranking officials; and, as reported by the Los Angeles Times this week, a clandestine operation called "Brain Drain," in which the CIA helped mid- and top-level Iranian nuclear experts flee the country.
Unless officials are trying to affect the Iranian government's actions through a massive disinformation campaign, it would seem that the intelligence community has set aside McConnell's concerns about sources and methods. "I'm shocked by the level of public discussion," said a former senior intelligence official who worked on Iranian issues for many years, adding, "I don't see much good that comes from releasing NIEs."
Kerr has said that the release "was coordinated in discussion with senior policy makers," but that the intelligence community "took responsibility for what portions ... were to be declassified." Officials weighed "the importance of the information to open discussions about our national security" against protecting sources and methods, he said, and "felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available."
Still, only a dramatic turn of events would have led McConnell to abandon his policy of not making NIEs public, several former officials who know him said. One former high-ranking official involved in clandestine operations said that in more than 30 years in the intelligence business, he had never seen a key judgment change so dramatically so fast -- indicating that the new intelligence that officials picked up amounted to a veritable "smoking gun."
"Keep in mind, this thing had been built up, which is somewhat unusual for an NIE," said another former senior official, who has also worked on Capitol Hill. The document was months behind schedule, widely anticipated, and focused on one of the top foreign-policy issues of the moment. "I think this was an extraordinary circumstance," the former official said.
Expressing concern over the public airing of sources, a Senate staffer said that the NIE "has certainly been sucked into a political debate," and that McConnell is clearly concerned about the effect that the fallout might have on analysts. "For that, we will have to wait and see," the aide said. "I still think that he simply had no choice. There was no way this would stay secret, and he didn't want to be accused of trying to bury it. I think he held his nose and let it go."
Many intelligence professionals concur. And in the NIE's release, they see signs not of an outright insurrection against the Bush administration but of a reassertion by the intelligence community of its ability to influence policy -- public or otherwise. McConnell's team is hardly backing down in the face of the neocon onslaught. Last Saturday, Kerr shot back at the NIE's critics in an unusual and terse public statement. Labeled "In response to those questioning the analytic work and integrity of the United States intelligence community," Kerr's statement said that the agencies' "task ... is to produce objective, ground-truth analysis. We feel confident in our analytic tradecraft and resulting analysis in this estimate."
So there.
Published in National Journal.
Friday, December 14, 2007
In releasing a bombshell about Iran's nuclear program, intelligence director Mike McConnell reversed a vow of secrecy. But he probably had no choice.
"You will be disappointed," Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told a gathering of journalists in Washington on November 13. U.S. spy agencies were putting the finishing touches on a National Intelligence Estimate about Iran's nuclear intentions and capabilities, which included new leads that the agencies had been vetting since spring. But departing from recent practice, McConnell said, "I do not intend to release unclassified key judgments" of the NIE, those heavily edited yet potentially telling morsels of analysis that might ultimately show how close the United States is to a war with Iran.
"We have probably done a thousand of these" NIEs, he said. "We have done unclassified key judgments for maybe three. So we created an expectation that we do this, because we did it previously." And that was a bad idea, McConnell said, with some passion.
For starters, even the "sanitized" version of an NIE could compromise vital sources and methods, he said, because the target of the estimate is, of course, going to read the document. Second, "I don't want to have a situation where the young analysts" -- whom McConnell guards with particular devotion because he was once one of them -- "are writing something because they know it's going to be a public debate or political debate. They should be writing it to call it as it is."
McConnell, whom a longtime colleague describes as having "not a political or manipulative bone in his body," also stated he would "make every effort" to prosecute anyone who leaked the NIE. Then, he vowed (twice) to resign if the intelligence was "cherry-picked in an inappropriate way" by government officials.
Things changed dramatically in the three weeks after McConnell's public denunciation of leaks and declassification. On December 3, McConnell and his aides reversed that decision and released the unclassified key judgments of the NIE on Iran. Try as McConnell might to keep the lid on the new estimate, his lieutenants were influenced by the political realities of intelligence these days.
"They thought it would leak and be distorted, and they thought they'd get ahead of that," said one former senior intelligence official close to the deliberations. "They decided it was better to put out a clean set of key judgments." Vice President Cheney went so far as to say that officials expected to lose control of some classified material. "There was a general belief -- that we all shared -- that it was important to put it out, that it was not likely to stay classified for long, anyway," Cheney told The Politico on December 5. "Everything leaks."
The leak-prevention strategy was a stark departure from the guidelines that McConnell had set out, both in November and a month earlier, when he issued this official policy: "The possibility that the [key judgments] or other positions of an estimate will be leaked is not a sufficient reason for preparing unclassified [key judgments]." In a briefing with reporters after the NIE was released, a senior intelligence official acknowledged that declassification "obviously represents a departure from [McConnell's] guidance."
The banner headline of the key judgments -- "that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program" -- put the intelligence community precisely where McConnell didn't want it to be: in the middle of a ferocious political and policy debate in which sources and methods of the intelligence on Iran, as well as the analysis, are being openly discussed, exposed, debated, and, yes, cherry-picked to suit a range of agendas. Indeed, even though the NIE does not say that Iran poses no nuclear threat, the key judgments on areas besides the weapons program have had to compete with the dramatic top-line assessment.
Because the new estimate upends its predecessor, made in 2005, and has undercut any nuclear-related pretext for a U.S. bombing of Iran, the political and ideological dispositions of the analysts who wrote the NIE are, predictably, under scrutiny. Within days of the key judgments' release, former Bush administration officials and neoconservative icons mounted a full-scale attack on McConnell's lieutenants, some of whom had long careers in the State Department and have, the critics contend, historically underestimated Iran.
These critics characterized the NIE as the lieutenants' way of cutting off Cheney and the president on their presumed path to war with Iran -- a contention that wasn't refuted by senior intelligence officials' repeated assertions that Iran's decision to stop its program in 2003 and to keep it shuttered resulted directly from international pressures and sanctions. Indeed, intelligence officials have been careful not to assert that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the key motivator for Iran's change of plans. Whether McConnell's aides meant to pre-empt the White House or not, the conclusion is undeniable: The intelligence community is at odds with President Bush's forceful rhetoric on Iran.
Since the NIE was released, McConnell has been notably absent from the public fracas. His deputy, Donald Kerr, a veteran nuclear weapons expert, has given the intelligence community's only two on-the-record statements about the estimate. McConnell was out of the country when the key judgments were released.
Around Washington, rumors persist that McConnell threatened to resign over the issue. It's not clear, however, whether he staked his tenure on the NIE being released or withheld, or whether he saw any cherry-picking by the White House, but the gossip is one more measure of just how political the release of this document has become. Observers point out that in the month preceding the NIE, Bush warned that Iran's nuclear ambitions could lead to "World War III," and Cheney, four days later, gave a bellicose speech reminiscent of the run-up to war with Iraq over its weapons programs. The White House already knew by then, at a minimum, that the intelligence community was vetting potentially groundbreaking intelligence on Iran that could change the NIE.
Perhaps under pressure to back up their bold new claims on Iran, senior officials have gone further, giving on-background press interviews in which they catalog the streams of intelligence that led the analysts to change their nuclear conclusions -- purloined laptop computers loaded with weapons diagrams; notebooks and intercepted phone calls from high-ranking officials; and, as reported by the Los Angeles Times this week, a clandestine operation called "Brain Drain," in which the CIA helped mid- and top-level Iranian nuclear experts flee the country.
Unless officials are trying to affect the Iranian government's actions through a massive disinformation campaign, it would seem that the intelligence community has set aside McConnell's concerns about sources and methods. "I'm shocked by the level of public discussion," said a former senior intelligence official who worked on Iranian issues for many years, adding, "I don't see much good that comes from releasing NIEs."
Kerr has said that the release "was coordinated in discussion with senior policy makers," but that the intelligence community "took responsibility for what portions ... were to be declassified." Officials weighed "the importance of the information to open discussions about our national security" against protecting sources and methods, he said, and "felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available."
Still, only a dramatic turn of events would have led McConnell to abandon his policy of not making NIEs public, several former officials who know him said. One former high-ranking official involved in clandestine operations said that in more than 30 years in the intelligence business, he had never seen a key judgment change so dramatically so fast -- indicating that the new intelligence that officials picked up amounted to a veritable "smoking gun."
"Keep in mind, this thing had been built up, which is somewhat unusual for an NIE," said another former senior official, who has also worked on Capitol Hill. The document was months behind schedule, widely anticipated, and focused on one of the top foreign-policy issues of the moment. "I think this was an extraordinary circumstance," the former official said.
Expressing concern over the public airing of sources, a Senate staffer said that the NIE "has certainly been sucked into a political debate," and that McConnell is clearly concerned about the effect that the fallout might have on analysts. "For that, we will have to wait and see," the aide said. "I still think that he simply had no choice. There was no way this would stay secret, and he didn't want to be accused of trying to bury it. I think he held his nose and let it go."
Many intelligence professionals concur. And in the NIE's release, they see signs not of an outright insurrection against the Bush administration but of a reassertion by the intelligence community of its ability to influence policy -- public or otherwise. McConnell's team is hardly backing down in the face of the neocon onslaught. Last Saturday, Kerr shot back at the NIE's critics in an unusual and terse public statement. Labeled "In response to those questioning the analytic work and integrity of the United States intelligence community," Kerr's statement said that the agencies' "task ... is to produce objective, ground-truth analysis. We feel confident in our analytic tradecraft and resulting analysis in this estimate."
So there.
Published in National Journal.
Labels: Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence, Iran, Management, Politics
Full Article