(From the diaries -- Plutonium Page.)
Adapted from The Next Hurrah
A lot of people have noticed that our recent attempts to convince allies to believe our Iran intelligence aren't working. The allies are basically saying, "you have cried wolf too many times before."
What no one seems to have noticed is that this intelligence is not new. Colin Powell presented this information a year ago. And it was pretty seriously questioned then.
Powell Shames Himself, Again
On November 17, 2004, one day after his (reportedly forced) resignation, two days after the IAEA announced Iran had no nuclear bomb program, and not long after Bush eclared his narrow victory gave him a mandate, Colin Powell announced that Iran was designing a missile that could deliver a nuclear weapon.
"I have seen some information that would suggest that they have been actively working on delivery systems. . . . You don't have a weapon until you put it in something that can deliver a weapon," Powell told reporters traveling with him to Chile for an Asia-Pacific economic summit. "I'm not talking about uranium or fissile material or the warhead; I'm talking about what one does with a warhead."
[snip]
"I'm talking about information that says they not only have these missiles, but I am aware of information that suggests that they were working hard as to how to put the two together," Powell said, referring to the process of matching warheads to missiles. He spoke to reporters during a refueling stop in Manaus, Brazil.
"There is no doubt in my mind -- and it's fairly straightforward from what we've been saying for years -- that they have been interested in a nuclear weapon that has utility, meaning that it is something they would be able to deliver, not just something that sits there," Powell
said.
Caveats aside ("aware of information that suggests" is reminiscent of the "British government has learned" construction from the SOTU), in one of his last acts as Secretary of State, Colin Powell once again lent his credibility to help Bush justify a belligerent stance.
Well, now compare that intelligence with what the presentation recently leaked to the NYT.
The Americans flashed on a screen and spread over a conference table selections from more than a thousand pages of Iranian computer simulations and accounts of experiments, saying they showed a long effort to design a nuclear warhead, according to a half-dozen European and American participants in the meeting.
The documents, the Americans acknowledged from the start, do not prove that Iran has an atomic bomb. They presented them as the strongest evidence yet that, despite Iran's insistence that its nuclear program is peaceful, the country is trying to develop a compact warhead to fit atop its Shahab missile, which can reach Israel and other countries in the Middle East.
The briefing for officials of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency, including its director Mohamed ElBaradei, was a secret part of an American campaign to increase international pressure on Iran. But while the intelligence has sold well among countries like Britain, France and Germany, which reviewed the documents as long as a year ago, it has been a tougher sell with countries outside the inner circle.
The computer contained studies for crucial features of a nuclear warhead, said European and American officials who had examined the material, including a telltale sphere of detonators to trigger an atomic explosion. The documents specified a blast roughly 2,000 feet above a target - considered a prime altitude for a nuclear detonation.
The laptop presentation certainly appears to be the same intelligence Powell cited as one of his last acts of shillery for the Bush Administration. Both pieces of intelligence provide details of the advances Iran is (purportedly) making in designing a missile appropriate to carry a nuclear bomb. In fact, Broad and Sanger imply strongly it's the same intelligence.
Until now, there has been only one official reference to them: a year ago in a conversation with reporters, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, briefly referred to new, missile-related intelligence on Iran. Since then, reports in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and other publications have revealed some details of the intelligence, including that the United States has obtained thousands of pages of Iranian documents on warhead development.
Which is interesting, because this intelligence was pretty soundly debunked last year, by Dafna Linzer. Go read Linzer (as well as Broad's and Doug Jehl's skeptical article from a year ago). But for now, I'm just going to look at the claims made on sourcing.
A Walk-In Source Becomes a Trusted Long-Time Source
Last fall, this source was considered sketchy, a walk-in whose ties to unreliable exiles could neither be affirmed nor denied.
According to one official with access to the material, a "walk-in" source approached U.S intelligence earlier this month with more than 1,000 pages purported to be Iranian drawings and technical documents, including a nuclear warhead design and modifications to enable Iranian ballistic missiles to deliver an atomic strike.
[snip]
The information provided by the source, who was not previously known to U.S. intelligence, does not mention uranium or any other area of Iran's known nuclear program, according to the official with access to the material.
Now, that source is considered quite good.
Within the United States government, "the nature and the history of the source has left everyone pretty confident that this is the real thing," said a former senior American intelligence official who was briefed on the laptop.
Except, as they did with their Iraq defectors and some Iraqi scientists who supported their claims, the Bush Administration has made it impossible to verify this source.
American officials, citing the need to protect their source, have largely refused to provide details of the origins of the laptop computer beyond saying that they obtained it in mid-2004 from a longtime contact in Iran.
[snip]
American officials have said little in their briefings about the origins of the laptop, other than that they obtained it in mid-2004 from a source in Iran who they said had received it from a second person, now believed to be dead.
Pretty convenient, huh? They won't reveal who brokered this information to us, and they believe--but don't seem able to verify one way another--that the original source, who could verify this information and provide back-up data, is dead.
I find the reference to a longtime contact especially troubling. As the Jehl article explains, none of our longtime contacts in Iran are particularly strong:
In recent years, some of the most important information about Iran's nuclear program has been brought to the attention of American intelligence by a dissident group, the People's Mujahedeen of Iran. That group, which issued new claims this week, has sometimes shown an inconsistent record as a source of intelligence information.
Former intelligence officials said that in recent months American intelligence officers have gained a new window on Iran as a result of their operations in neighboring Iraq. But it was not clear whether the large flow of new information being gathered on Iran from Iraq was proving reliable, the former officials said.
Add in the one other long-term source the Neocons favor--Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian version of Chalabi, who fooled us badly during Iran-Contra and doesn't seem to be any more reliable now.
Now, Administration officials insist that this supposed nameless and maybe dead source is not a member of an exile group.
Without revealing the source of the computer, American intelligence officials insisted that it had not come from any Iranian resistance groups, whose claims about Iran's nuclear program have had a mixed record for accuracy.
Well, they could be telling the truth for a change. Their source could be Ghorbanifar or someone like him. Or they could be lying, as they did about some of Chalabi's defectors before the Iraq war. In any case, they're using the same excuses to protect their claims as they did before, which doesn't make me believe them.
Finally, if this is the same guy associated with Powell's statements, they obscure the fact this was a walk-in.
The Nose Cone Is this Season's Aluminum Tube
There's one more funky thing I'll lay out here. Powell suggested last year that they had received this intelligence in early November 2004. Assuming that Broad (who received both leaks) is correct and this is the same information, the Bush Administration has now changed that date to mid-2004. There's a reason for that. In August of last year, Iran tested a new design for its Shahab-3 missile.
From Jehl:
In August [2004], a new surprise emerged as Iran test-fired a rocket that bore a suspicious-looking nose cone.
The rocket was an updated version of their Shahab-3 missile, and the test ignited a quiet debate among experts over whether its advanced nose cone was designed to carry a nuclear warhead. For two decades, the Iranians have been developing generations of long-range rockets with the aid of North Korea, and the Shahab, which means shooting star in Persian, stands at the cutting edge.
After last summer's test-firing, Charles P. Vick, an expert on the Iranian program at GlobalSecurity.org, a research group based in Alexandria, Va., said, ''What I've seen fly is a prototype for a nuclear warhead.''
From the recent Broad article.
Tehran test-fired an upgraded version of the Shahab - shooting star in Persian - in a flight that featured the first appearance of an advanced nose cone made up of three distinct shapes. Missile experts noted that such triconic nose cones have great range, accuracy and stability in flight, but less payload space. Therefore, experts say, they have typically been used to carry nuclear arms.
But other experts point to the smaller space of Iran's nose cones as a limiting factor for nuclear payload.
But other experts said the nose cone might be part of Iran's
preparations for launching a satellite into orbit, which Tehran has said it plans to do in April. It was too thin, one said, to hold a relatively crude nuclear weapon.
''These guys need all the space they can get'' atop a missile, said a European expert who closely follows the Iranian program.
Another scientist complains about the method the Bush Administration used in its power point presentation [a presentation on non-classified sources they're giving to more distant allies], comparing Iranian missiles to North Korean ones.
Corey Hinderstein, a nuclear analyst with the Institute for Science and International Security, said the presence of a weapons program could not be established through such comparisons. She noted that North Korea's missile wasn't designed for nuclear weapons, so comparing it to an Iranian missile that also wasn't designed to carry a nuclear payload "doesn't make sense. The idea that it was somehow capable of a nuclear payload is okay. But designed for a nuclear payload, I don't know how you get that."
The nose cones seem to be another aluminum tube, where some scientists insist the design points to nuclear application, while others discount those claim. But the focus on nose cones are interesting for two more reasons.
I find the timing particularly interesting. The first test of these nose cones was in August 2004. Last year, Powell said his intelligence about nose cones had walked in in November. But now, they're claiming it came in during the summer, suggesting the intelligence came in before the missile test. If they've deliberately changed the date, did they do so to create the illusion that they had this information before the Shahab-3 intelligence? Could this intelligence have been a response to the missile test?
But I also find the nose cones important because of what they allow the Bush Administration to prove. We know from the SSCI that BushCo focused on uranium acquisition when making its case about Iraq because it was incendiary, and because (in the absence of an Iraqi nuclear energy program) it provided proof that Iraq's intentions were military. No matter that Iraq already had 500 tons of yellowcake in Iraq. Uranium acquisition made good press.
The missile cone is similar. Iran says its nuclear program is intended strictly for civilian purposes. But the missile cone intelligence--if it were verifiable--would clearly prove Iran was interested in military, not civilian, applications for nuclear technology. No wonder the missile cone is such a central part of their new dog and pony show. No wonder they got Powell to endorse this before they laughed him out of their little cabal.
Anyway, there's more on this here, including more doubts on this intelligence.