Iran Intelligence Report: Garbage In, Garbage Out By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

Iran Intelligence Report: Garbage In, Garbage Out
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

“Nobody knows anything,” screenwriter William Goldman once said, talking about Hollywood. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess.”

You might say the same of U.S. intelligence, which can’t seem to make up its mind about Iran, Iraq or much of anything else.

Two years ago the combined wisdom of the 16 spy agencies that make up the so-called U.S. intelligence community was that Iran was racing to make nukes.

Last week it said — well, you know: Nev-er-mind.

This is not intelligence. This is journalism, wrong one day, right the next. Maybe the National Intelligence Directorate’s Web site should have a corrections box.

But the fact is that the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran never really said what many in the media (and antiwar camp) claimed it said — that Iran was out of the nukes game, had been for at least four years.

And the NIE’s implication that the flaming Islamic state had foresworn nukes altogether was equally absurd.

“In fact, the report contains the same sorts of flaws that we have learned to expect from our intelligence agency offerings,” wrote two nuclear proliferation experts in The New York Times opinion pages on Thursday, Dec. 6.

“It, like the report in 2002 that set up the invasion of Iraq, is both misleading and dangerous,” wrote Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, and Valerie Lincy, editor of the nonpartisan group’s Web site, Iranwatch.org.

The Iranians are plunging ahead with 3,000 gas centrifuges, they pointed out, which could produce weapons-ready enriched uranium in a year.

The regime is also building a heavy water reactor, which “is ideal for producing plutonium for nuclear bombs, but is of little use in an energy program.”

Why does oil-rich Iran need nuclear energy anyway?

“The community of nuclear experts in Washington, including many of us who oppose military action against Iran, were shocked at the methodologically shallow, confusing and unprofessional way that many of the NIE’s findings were formulated,” Avner Cohen, author of “Israel and the Bomb,” wrote for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, a draft of which he provided to me.

Richard Barlow, a top former CIA and Pentagon expert on Pakistan’s clandestine nuclear program in the 1980s until he was hounded out of the government for telling the truth, also points out that the NIE — or at least its unclassified summary — doesn’t say at what stage the Iranians allegedly “halted” their weapons program in 2003.

“The entire NIE is meaningless without this being addressed,” Barlow told me. “Its omission from the Key Judgments is so glaring to be suspicious. These programs have these little ‘stoppages’ not that infrequently.”

“I noted the same thing,” Kenneth Pollack, a national security adviser in the Clinton White House, told me, adding “it could be very important . . . It may be that the Iranians stopped because they felt they had a workable design. This is one of many big questions on which the NIE is bizarrely silent.”

Bizarre indeed.

“The reliability of the ‘new intelligence,” reportedly based mainly on U.S. electronic intercepts of Iranian scientists complaining about the work stoppage, is being greatly overblown, “ Barlow maintains.

And familiar sounding.

Two years ago, the U.S. intelligence conclusion that the Iranians were racing to build nukes also was said to be based on “new” intelligence — the reported capture of an Iranian scientist’s computer laptop.

Why should this week’s NIE trump the other? Is the other one inoperative now?

Not to Bush and other administration officials, who insisted nothing had changed, the Iranians were still intent on producing nuclear warheads and screwing them onto the top of long range missiles they’re building.

Even the International Atomic Energy Agency, the watchdog the Bush administration loves to hate, agreed, stating “we are more skeptical” about Iran than U.S. intelligence evidently now is.

Melvin Goodman, a respected former top CIA analyst, cautions about drawing conclusions on what the NIE says or doesn’t say, “not knowing what is in the full text (over 100 pages).”

But, he added in an e-mail, “I’m told that the evidence [of an Iranian halt] is both comprehensive and authoritative.”

For that, he credits Thomas Fingar, formerly head of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, who now presides over all spy agency analysis at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In 2002, Fingar was a lone dissenter against the CIA’s “slam dunk” conclusion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

“I think the character who made a difference and really hung in there was Tom Fingar,” Goodman said, “and he allowed the professional analysts to do their jobs, which [the CIA’s chief of Iraq intelligence, Robert] Walpole didn’t do in 2002.”

“Everyone I know calls Fingar a genuine intelligence professional,” Goodman added. “That’s enough for me.”
‘Who Knows?’

Who’s to be believed in the shadow wars of intelligence?

For starters, the Persians have been enmeshed in the deception game for some 2,500 years. They might be expected to be a little better at this than we.

Who’s to say they’re not playing us now, by manufacturing conversations to be intercepted, phony materials to be discovered and false defectors to be embraced (like the wily Greeks did to them at the disastrous Battle of Salamis in 480 B.C.?

“Yeah, exactly,” says Robert Baer, the CIA veteran whose Middle East exploits inspired last year’s spy thriller “Syriana.”

“What the [expletive] can you figure out from a lone intercept?” Baer asks.

The “disastrous February 2002 NIE” asserting Iraq had WMD “was also partly anchored on a stray intercept” that was completely misunderstood, he points out.

Baer claimed no inside dope on the current affair, but his familiarity with Iran told him it was entirely possible that “in the name of deception the Iranians sent out a country-wide notice that they’d stopped the nuke program, to confuse the unwashed. Who knows?”

John Bolton, the former undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, thinks he does.

“The risks of disinformation by Iran are real,” Bolton wrote in The Washington Post. “We have lost many fruitful sources inside Iraq in recent years because of increased security and intelligence tradecraft by Iran. The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism.”

Bolton noted that “In a background briefing, intelligence officials said they had concluded it was ‘possible,’ but not ‘likely’ that the new information they were relying on was deception.”

According to some reports, a key piece of the new, better intelligence arrived earlier this year in the form of General Ali-Reza Asgari, a former deputy defense minister and Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander, said to have defected in Turkey several months ago.

The Iranians’ dispatch of a phony defector to mess up the Americans’ thinking would be payback for a dirty trick the CIA allegedly pulled on them several years ago.

According to a 2006 book by New York Times reporter James Risen, “State of War,” the CIA planted intentionally flawed blueprints for a nuclear bomb on Iran, hoping to send its engineers down a costly and time consuming blind alley.

Instead, Risen reported, the operation actually helped the Iranian bomb effort.

Another mistake led to the exposure of a major CIA spy network in Iran, Risen wrote.
‘A Far More Dangerous World’

So why all the cheering? Why all the huzzahs over such a flawed report, which, according to its boosters in the media and antiwar forces, was produced by intelligence agencies who allegedly — and suddenly — acted with new found “courage” and “independence”?

“Some believe that the intelligence officials, with [Condoleezza] Rice’s assistance, have taken upon themselves the patriotic task of saving Bush from himself,” wrote Cohen, who is also a senior research fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington.

Bush, Vice President Cheney, White House task master on Iran Elliot Abrams, and Donald H. Rumsfeld were singing “Bomb, Bomb Iran” for several years, capped off when the president talked about the possibility of World War III in October.

But now a key member of the original quartet is gone.

When Bob Gates replaced Rumsfeld, the Pentagon began singing a new tune: “It’s Impossible.”

A war game back in 2002 that posited an American naval and air strike on Iran left a number of U.S. generals and admirals dry-mouthed: The Iranians won.

Or at least they did before the game was rigged.

An enemy “red team” headed by retired Marine Corps Gen. Paul Van Riper, using swift boats and propeller-driven suicide planes, shredded the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf.

Key to the shocking knock-out was Van Riper’s strategy of neutralizing the American advantage in big guns and cruise missiles by getting in close before hostilities began.

U.S. electronic warfare tools, meanwhile, were blunted by his mock Iranians’ use of coded messages in calls to prayer and motorcycles to hand-deliver messages between his commanders and their units.

Van Riper, who commanded both the Marine Corps War College at Quantico and the National War College in Washington before retiring in 1997, swept the board so swiftly that the planned three-week, $250 million table-top exercise was over in a matter of hours.

Rumsfeld’s team couldn’t handle that, so they began again, with Van Riper prohibited from using the tactics that sunk the fleet.

There’s no reason to think the military situation has much improved since then. Which is why, by many accounts, the top brass opposed the Bush team’s fervor for war.

To one top former CIA official, a veteran of many NIE bureaucratic battles, the tip-off that the report was designed to derail an attack on Iran came with the manner in which it was released. In the past, such a major shift would be road tested with trustworthy members of Congress or favored columnists.

A “totally new analysis is seldom if ever released first in a National Estimate,” he said. “I am a bit surprised that some ground work for this big story was not laid out in advance.”

But if the CIA, Rice and Gates indeed “saved Bush from himself, “they have bequeathed us a far more dangerous world.”

If one definition of insanity is trying to accomplish a goal with the same tactics that have failed before, then Bush’s team is truly mad.

The months of bluster and veiled threats by the president and his supporters have not made the Iranians more pliant — surprise! — and the release of a patently politicized NIE, no matter how well intentioned, has only compounded the problem.

“No, I think it’s a minor disaster in that respect,” says an academic specialist on Iran who asked not to be quoted by name because he frequently visits the country.

“According to the logic laid out in the NIE, Iran responds to cost-benefit analysis,” he continued. But “if the military option is off the table for the foreseeable future, and probably further UN sanctions as well, Iran suddenly doesn’t have to worry much about costs.”

“That said, it seems very unlikely to me they would negotiate seriously now anyway,” he added.

So what’s left?

Soft power: political, diplomatic, and yes, clandestine intelligence offensives the world over.

“In my mind, the U.S. focus should be (1) to try to undermine [Iranian firebrand president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] in the hope he will not be re-elected in 2009, and, (2) prepare to negotiate with his (hopeful) successor.

“But this might have helped [him], so that is undermined as well,” the professor said.

“All in all, our Iran policy is a mess.”

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.