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How did the nation's spies make their decisions about Iran's nuclear weapons program? At the moment, it's a bit confusing, as Noah has detailed here and here. The fog of war applies also to intelligence, and I'm going to focus here on one particularly cloudy component of this mystery: the alleged contribution of a media visit to Natanz in revising the intelligence estimate.
USA Today claimed on Tuesday that the revision was partly the result of "photographs taken during the media visit this year."
Earlier this year? Really? One problem: there was, so far as I know, no media visit to the enrichment facility in Natanz earlier this year (I suspect this was either an editing error, or the source misspoke). As the Washington Post and other media outlets note, the visit in question was from 2005, when, as reports at the time noted, journalists were "not shown any centrifuges." (emphasis added).
Instead, they were shown a big underground room where the centrifuges were designed to go. And that was over two years ago.
Let's fast forward now to early 2007, when Iran again invited a group of foreign journalists and diplomats from nonaligned countries to visit the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan. It was an unusual visit -- and Iran deserves credit for opening the facility -- but it was not a visit to Natanz. In fact, journalists at that time specifically requested -- but were not allowed -- to visit Natanz.
So, two years have gone by since the 2005 Natanz visit, which even then had limitations, so I have trouble understanding how media pictures from that time played any notable role in the new intelligence estimate (granted, officials cite that as only one factor). I'm not saying it's untrue, but why are officials playing it up? Perhaps it confirms what others have been writing: the substantive parts of the assessment have been known for quite some time. Or perhaps, as others have suggested, the intel community is looking at older information in a different fashion.
[Note: Nathan Hodge and I visited Iran, as part of this year's tour of the uranium enrichment facility. We describe our Iran trip (and other atomic adventures) in a book set to be published by Bloomsbury in June 2008 ].
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