The declassified key judgments of the latest NIE on Iran are yet another opportunity to get a glimpse of the inner-workings of the highest levels of the intelligence community.
The picture isn't pretty.
The key judgments are notable for many reasons, not the least of which is how they contrast with the last NIE on this same topic. In
2005, with access to an Iranian source's laptop, the community was confident that Iran was determined to build a nuclear weapon "despite its international obligations and international pressure." Today it is equally confident that Iran halted its weapons program in 2003 and that it remained suspended for several years.
Why the change on this critical point? Some vary curious opinions have surfaced:
- One intelligence source indicates that it was a journalists photograph of Iranian nuke program components that drove them to re-assess their position. Color me skeptical. Like every other "rogue"
nation with a nuke weapons program they lead inspectors around by the rings in their noses, but photojournalists they just let wander the country freely snapping pics of whatever they like. Sure. - The explanation that signals intelligence contributed to the changing assessment is perhaps the most promising. Targeting communications systems of the toughest programs within the hardest targets is ridiculously risky and complicated, but as a rather obscure story pointed out recently, you can find all sorts of neat stuff by listening in to other people's conversations. What about human spies? Potentially powerful, sure. But the bottom line for me is, you get one source coughing up a laptop with X information, you have another (Asghari)
saying the opposite (sorry, I don't buy the allow this guy to go on a trip to Syria to discuss one issue, and let him take material about others). They apparently contradict each other, so your conclusion is now "high" that you got it right this time? not likely. This has SIGINT
written all over it. - Some have argued that this is the IC's latest salvo against the White
House in an intelligence "war." Frankly, that's verging into tin-foil hat territory. As someone who has helped put together a few NIC-driven products I can say with some authority that politics never entered into our deliberations.
Not only that, think for a moment about the level of effort needed to get hundreds of working-level staff, dozens of senior-level officials, and sixteen agency heads to all agree to a single political agenda. Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men had it easy.
Perhaps the most curious part of the assessment is that Iran supposedly stopped its nuke weapons program in 2003 due to "international pressure." Iran, the country that has been berated, inspected, sanctioned, petitioned and scolded for decades about a wide range of policies without showing one iota of caving to such pressure suddenly finds religion (so to speak). What is oddly not mentioned as a possible source of pressure: the divisions of US armed forces that were running roughshod over the Iraqi military in 2003.
When assessing anything the IC does it is worth nothing three points: the first is that despite what is made public, a whole lot still remains secret; the second is that those who assess the IC itself view their efforts as woefully inadequate in areas that would make assessing Iran easier;
finally, the
IC's record in warning about foreign weapons programs is a lot more '76 Buccaneers than '72 Dolphins.
-- Michael Tanji, cross-posted at Haft of the Spear
