News

January 22, 2008

Edward Turzanski is a Senior Fellow in FPRI's Center on
Terrorism, Counterterrorism and Homeland Security.

On December 3, 2007, the U.S. intelligence community
declassified the key judgments portion of the November 2007
National Intelligence Estimate on "Iran: Nuclear Intentions
and Capabilities." Critics of the Bush administration have
seized upon the document as proof positive that the
president and his foreign policy team have intentionally
overstated the status of Iran's nuclear weapons program--
just as was allegedly done with Saddam Hussein's Iraq--to
justify a shoot-then-ask foreign policy. In fact, the
substance, omissions, timing, and authorship of the document
speak more to what many have come to see as a relentless
guerrilla campaign by the analytical portion of the
intelligence community against the president's foreign and
antiterror policies than they do to any policy deception by
the administration.

Of all the activities and products generated by the
intelligence community, none has proven to be as problematic
over time as NIEs, which represent the collective wisdom and
judgment of the 16 agencies that compose the intelligence
community. Because these agencies must agree on the
conclusions reached, the documents often provide low-risk,
"lowest common denominator" intelligence judgments, and the
conclusions are often qualified to the point of being
useless to policymakers. Dissenting opinions are not
generally welcome and are routinely relegated to footnotes,
and in many cases, these footnotes remain classified. In the
case of the 2007 Iran NIE, only the key judgments section
has been declassified, leaving some 140 pages--and doubtless
some footnotes that would highlight disagreement on key
points--outside public scrutiny.

Not only is this unhelpful in the effort to discern what is
really happening on a given issue, but NIEs have on occasion
delivered astoundingly incorrect judgments on crucial
matters of national interest. A 1962 NIE stated that the
Soviets would not place missiles in Cuba; two in 1974 said
that Hanoi was unlikely to launch a major offensive in the
first half of 1975; and one in 1989 suggested that
hostilities in the Persian Gulf were unlikely over the next
two years. In the lead-up to the 1991 Gulf War, the
intelligence community produced an assessment of Saddam's
WMD and overall military capabilities that was much too
benign. To compensate, it erred on the other side of caution
and produced one on his pre-2003 invasion status that was
far too robust. In assessing the NIE on Iran, it has to be
noted that the intelligence community has an unenviable
record in correctly assessing the status of nuclear weapons
programs, having missed key events in the development of
nuclear weapons in the USSR, Pakistan, India, Libya, North
Korea and Iraq.

To further complicate matters, the 2007 NIE appears to
directly contradict the fundamental finding of a 2005 NIE
which maintained that Iran had an active nuclear weapons
program. In stating "We judge with high confidence that in
fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program" and
that as of the end of October 2007, Tehran had not restarted
the same, the 2007 NIE undermines the rationale put forward
by the Bush administration to compel Iranian cooperation
with International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of its
nuclear program. As if this reversal was not dramatic
enough, it was made public while the Bush administration was
in the advanced stages of engineering a third round of UN
Security Council sanctions against Iran for its
noncompliance with IAEA inspections of its nuclear
facilities. Thus, the published portions of the NIE
severely, and maybe permanently, set back the goal of
forcing Iran to open its nuclear sites to IAEA scrutiny.
They surprised both friends and foes of the Bush policy
towards Iran.

Because both the substance and timing of the declassified
portions of the NIE have had such a large effect on policy,
the president and Congress need to compel satisfactory
answers to several questions.

First, what intelligence prompted the change in assessment
of the Iranian nuclear weapons program? The intelligence
community is entrusted with the critical job of presenting
to elected policymakers information about threats and
adversaries that is real-time, value-added, policy-relevant
and predictive. This is why we spend nearly $45 billion per
year on an intelligence capability and why we allow the
intelligence community to keep its sources and methods out
of the public realm. This information, or "intelligence," is
neither intended to be a policy recommendation nor expected
to be a prophecy. The intelligence community cannot make
policy because it is not accountable to the electorate, and
it should not opine on matters about which it does not have
credible sources of information. The declassified portions
of the 2007 NIE do not address the basis upon which the key
judgment about Iran's suspending its nuclear weapons program
in 2003 is predicated. Subsequent to the publication of the
key judgments, the intelligence community did state that the
source was confidential information held by the Iranian
military, and additional reporting has mentioned intercepts
of communications and a defector as possible sources. The
veracity of these sources has been vigorously challenged by
allied intelligence communities and by at least one
international group--the IAEA, headed by Mohammed El
Baradei, no friend of the Bush administration--normally not
disposed to supporting the Bush administration's posture on
nonproliferation matters.

Second, what assumptions does the intelligence community
make about the present and future state of the program? If
some person(s) within the Iranian military provided the key
information that led to the intelligence community's
fundamental reassessment of its position on the Iranian
nuclear program, it would be reasonable for policymakers to
ask what else is known about the program's current state.
Here the NIE is less instructive in its key judgments than
it is in a footnote thereto. The NIE assesses "with moderate
confidence" that Tehran had not restarted its nuclear
weapons program as of mid-2007 and with "moderate-to-high
confidence" that Iran does not currently have a nuclear
weapon. As to Iran's intentions, it acknowledges that "we do
not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear
weapons." But the footnote carries a bombshell: "For
purposes of this Estimate, by 'nuclear weapons program' we
mean Iran's nuclear weapons design and weaponization work
and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium
enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran's declared
civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment."
(emphasis added)

Many in the nonproliferation business would argue that the
distinction between military and civilian nuclear programs
is artificial at best, and that continuation of Iran's
nuclear activity, outside IAEA inspection and at a scale
(3,000 centrifuges) far beyond what a peaceful nuclear
energy program needs, is precisely the work that will allow
Iran to make the jump to usable nuclear weapons. Even if it
has suspended work on warhead design, if Iran is still
enriching uranium, we should know how quickly Iran could
build a warhead if it enriches enough uranium to place into
one. The NIE only says that Iran could likely produce enough
uranium for a warhead by 2009, and more in the period 2010
to 2015.

The third question is, what prompted the change in Iran's
actions in fall 2003, as the new NIE says it did (a dramatic
policy shift)? The NIE presents beliefs about the philosophy
of Iranian leadership without providing specific supporting
information: "Our assessment that Iran halted the program in
2003 primarily in response to international pressure
indicates Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit
approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the
political, economic, and military costs." "International
pressure" could only refer to the U.S.-led operations in
Afghanistan, where the Taliban had been routed, and Iraq,
where Saddam had been toppled. Yet the NIE goes on to state

"This, in turn, suggests that some combination of
threats of intensified international scrutiny and
pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to
achieve its security, prestige, and goals for
regional influence in other ways, might--if
perceived by Iran's leaders as credible - prompt
Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear
weapons program. It is difficult to specify what
such a combination might be."

If the first part of the key judgment is to be believed
(that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response
to international pressure), then clearly fear of preemptive
military action motivated the Iranians, much as it did
Libya's Khaddafi, who gave up his nuclear program rather
than face the fate which claimed Saddam. It is highly
unlikely that those who wrote the 2007 NIE are arguing for
military action against Iran; though the effect of the
document in eroding international consensus for further
sanctions could make preemptive military action more likely
if another NIE--or some other state (e.g., Israel) reaches a
different key judgment about Iran's nuclear weapons program.

This leads to the fourth question: How do the intelligence
communities of our allies and the IAEA view the key
judgments of the NIE? By all accounts, the Bush
administration was dismayed by the reversal in the 2007 NIE.
Its allies in Britain and Israel were even more displeased;
while the French, reflecting the disposition of the pro-
American President Nicolas Sarkozy, have remained largely
silent on the matter. A senior British official expressed
concerns that the U.S. intelligence community fell under the
influence of Iranian misinformation on the key question of
whether Iran had ended its nuclear program, commenting "It's
not as if the American intelligence agencies are regarded as
brilliant performers in the region. They got badly burned
over Iraq."[1] The Israelis were even more demonstrative in
their disagreement, stating publicly that they would present
their Iran nuclear weapons evidence to Admiral Michael
Mullen, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, on his
December 9 visit to Israel.[2] Perhaps the most telling
reaction came from an unnamed IAEA senior official quoted in
the New York Times as saying "To be frank, we are more
skeptical_We don't buy the American analysis 100 percent. We
are not that generous with Iran."

This brings us to a final question: Is there anything about
the way in which the NIE was produced and released that can
provide a better understanding of its context? As former
American UN Ambassador John Bolton has observed, a number of
the individuals involved in drafting and approving the NIE
were not intelligence professionals, but former State
Department officials imported into the office of the
Director of National Intelligence under former DNI John
Negroponte. Three of them are known as being opposed to Bush
administration policies concerning Iran and Iraq: C. Thomas
Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence for
analysis; Vann H. Van Diepen, national intelligence officer
for WMD and proliferation; and Kenneth C. Brill, director of
the National Counterproliferation Center. Van Diepen is
known to be especially resistant to the use of sanctions to
achieve changes in the disposition of states such as Iran
and has many allies in the State Department/ intelligence
community analysis wing of the national security structure
who believe that the path to a more stable world lies in
negotiating with Iran (without precondition). News accounts
have also reported that the Bush Administration was forced
into declassifying the key judgments when it did because the
New York Times had indicated that it would be publishing a
leaked version of the document.

The leak and subsequent publication of the Iran NIE stopped
cold the administration's efforts to engineer a new round of
sanctions to compel Iranian cooperation with IAEA monitoring
efforts ("Why punish the Iranians if there's no there,
there?" argue the Russians and Chinese). And so, the Bush
administration's foreign policy has once again been
disrupted by an unauthorized disclosure of classified
information. From extraordinary rendition of terror suspects
to the NSA's communication intercept program, from
interrogation methods to uncontroversial programs such as
the SWIFT terror finance monitoring program; unelected,
unaccountable members of the intelligence community, who are
sworn to maintain the confidentiality of classified programs
and materials, have tried to influence policy (and to our
lasting detriment have often succeeded) by means of
unauthorized, illegal leaks to media sources.

The 2007 NIE now joins the sad recitation of instances of
policymaking by leaking and adds the element of policy
disruption by NIE. It is worth recalling the findings of the
2005 Robb-Silberman Commission, which investigated what the
intelligence community knew about WMD programs around the
world. That commission stated that "Across the board, the
Intelligence Community knows disturbingly little about the
nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous
actors. In some cases, it knows less now than it did five or
ten years ago." Thus we have an intelligence community that
has a difficult time divining the secrets of our
adversaries, is even worse at keeping our own secrets, and
appears to have a hard time staying out of policymaking. Our
next president cannot afford to continue to be burdened by
an intelligence analysis gang that cannot--or will not--
shoot straight. Transforming it into a competent tool of
American policy should be at the top of the priority list
for the new administration.

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Notes

[1] "Iran 'Hoodwinked' CIA over Iran," Telegraph, Dec. 12,
2007.

[2] Amir Oren, "U.S. army chief meets Israeli officials to
discuss Iran report," Haaretz, Dec. 10, 2007.