Iran Docs Led to Intel Shift; Cheney Convinced

Everything from human spies to press pictures to intercepted communications has been given at least partial credit for intelligence community's new view on Iran. To that list, the New York Times adds exploited documents. "American intelligence agencies reversed their view about the status of Iranâ??s nuclear weapons program after they obtained notes last summer from the deliberations of Iranian military officials involved in the weapons development program," the paper reports. Dick Cheney, for one, seems convinced by the new info.

The notes included conversations and deliberations in which some of the military officials complained bitterly about what they termed a decision by their superiors in late
2003 to shut down a complex engineering effort to design nuclear weapons, including a warhead that could fit atop Iranian missiles.

The newly obtained notes contradicted public assertions by American intelligence officials that the nuclear weapons design effort was still active. But according to the intelligence and government officials, they give no hint of why
Iranâ??s leadership decided to halt the covert effort...

The discovery led officials to revisit intelligence mined in 2004 and 2005 from the laptop obtained from the Iranian engineer. The documents on that laptop described two programs, termed L-101 and L-102 by the Iranians, describing designs and computer simulations that appeared to be related to weapons work.

Information from the laptop became one of the chief pieces of evidence cited in the 2005
intelligence estimate that concluded, â??Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons.

The newly obtained notes of the deliberations did not precisely match up with the programs described in the laptop...

In the end, American intelligence officials... were challenged to defend that conclusion in a meeting two weeks ago in the White House situation room, in which the notes and deliberations were described to the most senior members of President Bushâ??s national security team, including
Vice President Dick Cheney.

"It was a pretty vivid exchange,"?� said one participant in the conversation.

But Cheney, at least, seems to have been persuaded.

According to the Politico, Cheney said he has no reason to question the intelligencereleased this week showing that Iran is not an imminent nuclear threat, putting him at odds with conservatives such as former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, a presidential candidate, and others [like John Bolton] who have raised doubts or disputed the findings.

*"??I don'?t have any reason to question what the [intelligence] community has produced,"?� he said. "??Now, there are things they don't know. There's always the possibility that circumstances will change. But I think they've done the best job they can with the intelligence that's available."?� *

Meanwhile, Time's Joe Klein takes a long look today at how and and when the Iran intelligence estimate was developed. He calls it "quite possibly, the most assertive, surprising and rebellious act in the history of the U.S. intelligence community...
Gone were the days when spymasters would come to the White House for morning coffee and whisper the latest intelligence to the President, and the rest of the world would find out decades later, only after numerous Freedom of Information requests had prized the buried treasure from the CIA vault. Now the latest intelligence evaluations were being announced worldwide, nearly in real time."

Okay, that's a probably a bit over the top. But his narrative has some worthwhile snippets, including:

Almost exactly a year ago... a new NIE on Iran was meandering through the intelligence community. A senior U.S. intelligence official told me last week that the report was prepared to say with a "moderate" degree of certainty that Iran had stopped its nuclear-weapons program, but the information wasn't very conclusive. That finding would have put the
U.S. in the same camp as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
â?? deeply concerned about the Iranian efforts to enrich uranium but skeptical about the regime's efforts to fashion that uranium into a bomb...

As recently as two years ago, a senior U.S. diplomat told me, "We don't know anything about what goes on inside that government." But that has changed fairly dramatically in the past year. A special CIA
Iran-analysis group, which calls itself "Persia House," was split off from the agency's Middle East regional analysts. A major effort was made to recruit human intelligence sources inside Iran. And then, in
June and July, the new Iran assets began to pay off. Some of the information may have come from an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps general named Ali Reza Asghari, who defected to Turkey in February. But a senior U.S. intelligence official assured me, "It was multiple collection streams. You don't get a 'high' degree-of-probability assessment without multiple sources."* [Including signals intelligence, almost certainly.]

**
In August, National Intelligence Director McConnell ordered CIA
Director Michael Hayden to have ready by Labor Day a new intelligence estimate reflecting the latest information. Hayden said he needed more time. * [This, it would seem, is when McConnell met with the President, to tell him changes might be afoot.] McConnell set a Nov. 30 deadline. Because some of the information sources were new,
Hayden decided to launch a "red team" counter-intelligence operation to make sure that the U.S. wasn't falling for Iranian disinformation. In late October, the Persia House and red-team analysts offered their findings to Hayden and his deputy, Steve Kappes, around the coffee table in Hayden's office. The red team found that the possibility of
Iranian disinformation was "plausible but not likely." That assessment led two of the 16 intelligence agencies, but not the CIA, to dissent from the final "high" degree of certainty that Iran had stopped its weapons program in 2003. On the other hand, there was general agreement on a "moderate" finding that Iran had not restarted the program. The
National Intelligence Board met and reached its conclusions on Tuesday,
Nov. 27. "The meeting took a little more than two hours," a senior intelligence official told me. "There have been times when it has taken multiple meetings that went on for hours and hours to reach a consensus, especially when dealing with one of Iran's neighbors."*

ALSO:

* Iran: Did Journos Really Provide Key Intel?
* White House Changes Iran Intel Story
* Ahmadinejad: The Movie
* NIE: A Timeline
* International Inspectors 2, Dick Cheney 0
* Diplomatic "Disaster" Led to Iran Intel Spill?
* Iran's Chance to Come Clean?
* Spooks = '76 Buccaneers?
* Reporters Help Bust Iran's Nuclear Program?
* Intel Report: Iran Halted Nuke Arms in 2003
* Iran Nuke in "18 Months"? Unlikely.
* Iran's "Industrial" Nukes: Yawn
* Iran's Nukes: Time to Freak?
* Glimmers of Hope in Iran Report
* Iran's Nuclear Scientist Game