Every Which Way on the NIE
04.22.2008 - 8:52 AMThe November National Intelligence Estimate on Iran declared flatly in its opening sentence that ‘We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.”
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, speaking at West Point last night, said that Iran remains “hell-bent” on acquiring nuclear weapons.
Does Michael Hayden, CIA director, agree? Speaking with Tim Russert on Meet the Press on March 30, he said that “we stand by the judgment” in the NIE. That seems unequivocal.
But Hayden then began to equivocate. Russert asked him point blank: “Do you believe the Iranians are trying to develop a nuclear program?” Here is the transcript:
GEN. HAYDEN: I–personal…
MR. RUSSERT: Yes.
GEN. HAYDEN: Personal belief? Yes. It’s hard for me to explain. And, you know, this is not court of law stuff. This is, this is, you know, in terms of beyond all reasonable doubt, this is, this is Mike Hayden looking at the body of evidence. OK. Why would the Iranians be willing to pay the international tariff they appear willing to pay for what they’re doing now if they did not have, at a minimum, at a minimum, if they did not have the desire to keep the option open to, to develop a nuclear weapon and perhaps even more so, that they’ve already decided to do that? It’s very difficult for us to judge intent, and so we have to work back from actions. Why the continuing production of fissile material, and Natanz? They say it’s for civilian purposes, and yet the, the planet, the globe, states around the world have offered them fissile material under controls so they can have their, their, their civilian nuclear program. But the Iranians have rejected that. I mean, when you start looking at that, and you get, not just the United States, but you get the U.N. Security Council imposing sanctions on them, why would they go through that if it were not to develop the technology that would allow them to create fissile material not under international control?
What about Mike McConnell, director of National Intelligence? Here he is defending the NIE in congressional testimony on February 5:
I’d start by saying that the integrity and the professionalism in this NIE is probably the highest in our history in terms of objectivity, and quality of the analysis, and challenging the assumptions, and conducting red teams on the process, conducting a counterintelligence assessment about were we being misled or so on.
That sounds unequivocal. But then McConnell, too, begins to equivocate:
The only thing that they’ve halted was nuclear weapons design, which is probably the least significant part of the program. So if I’d had until now to think about it, I probably would have changed a thing or two.
So, with Secretary Gates joining in, we now have a trifecta of confusion. The top three intelligence and defense officials of the Bush administration are disavowing the NIE even as the adminstration stands by it.
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April 22nd, 2008 at 5:32 PM
This is exactly how senior officials in any area behave when (a) they do not agree with the work product of staff but (b) are compelled to initially pretend that they do, often because (c) they supervised (however ineffectively) the process that yielded the work product with which they disagree. The way this works is that after a few months’ time, more “new information” becomes available permitting them to distance themselves from a document they knew at the outset was bad or wrong but could not admit.
Question for you IC buffs: Knowing that the NIE was quickly sanitized to be made public, presumably because it was expected to be leaked — presumably again by those who DID agree with it — is it reasonable to infer that the document really had not been subjected to senior officials’ review before thre threat of being leaked became so overwhelming that no more delay was feasible? That by the time they saw it, it was already too late?
April 22nd, 2008 at 7:42 PM
Mr. Belzer raises an interesting issue in his post. Leaking has become more than a problem with people who beleive they know better and are somehow responsible for letting the rest of us know what they want us to know. I am not sure if there is a degree of ego inflation involved, I suspect so. In some 25 years with the USG, there were any number of important issues that I disagreed with, yet I had taken an oath upon entry and believed that it was not my responsibility to leak but to respect my oath. Most, if not all, will come out sooner or later but no one seems to want until “later”. On another note, we are most probably witnessing the falling apart of the current administration as November ‘08 comes closer. It seems that 9/11 and its aftermath is now driving a wedge amongst us instead of uniting us.
April 23rd, 2008 at 1:16 PM
The key, I suspect, is ’vendor data’ and the breakup of Khan’s network. Likely as not, the breakup of Khan’s network probably resulted in the failure of an outside manufacturer to design and build some intergral component(s) which in turn required Iran to shift resources to design, build & test of some component(s) in-country. Only after the component(s) was/were fully designed, manufactured and tested would the data from the component(s) be acceptable to complete the weapons overall design or production.
April 25th, 2008 at 5:21 PM
Richard Belzer — Naahh. The IC leadership knew all along the NIE would be sanitized for an unclassified summary. It’s a core IC function to provide unclassified assessments of this kind; they don’t have to be published to either avert or promote political crises. It’s the construction of their arguments, not the fact of their publication, that has political overtones.
My own assessment is that McConnell and Hayden don’t have the bureaucratic horsepower — or at least, they didn’t think they did — to couch the NIE in different terms. A key reason for that would be that, basically, they don’t. They both belong to the “old IC” that supposedly got it all wrong on Iraqi WMD, and failed to prevent 9/11. McConnell’s nominal subordinate Thomas Fingar, a key Bush policy opponent from the State Department, was put in his new supervisory position in the DNI precisely on the strength of having “doubted” the Iraq WMD intelligence. His was the principal voice being heard from the IC in defense of the 2007 Iran NIE — NYT, WSJ, WaPo — along with his comments about “revisiting” all kinds of “settled” intelligence, now that previous misperceptions about Iran’s nuke programs had been “corrected.”
So, no, I don’t think the unclassified NIE abstract was published preemptively, before the higher-ups had chopped it. It was worded in such a way that DIA would not have disagreed with it FACTUALLY, but only in the implications it suggests but doesn’t explicitly address. I assessed from the beginning that its wording was the least that all sixteen IC agencies could agree on: it didn’t lie outright, it just didn’t lead the reader to the most honest estimate of the truth.
Frankly, I would hate to be McConnell or Hayden right now. Bush’s policy opponents have shown they can punish IC analysts whose work seems to support Bush policies, by reorganizing the whole damn community and getting themselves put in charge of “analytical integrity.” We would all do well to not talk too loudly about how much better WE would do in that situation.
April 29th, 2008 at 10:44 AM
[…] we learn about the NIE, the more it appears to be a disgrace. Ranking U.S. officials have already contradicted its findings in their public statements. But it’s clear that it needs to be officially […]