More on that Iran NIE
Sat Dec 08, 2007 at 03:28:24 AM PDT
Ewen MacAskill of the British Guardian has a piece up today on the politics behind the release of the Iran NIE. MacAskill attributes the report in large part to "a little-known intelligence specialist, Thomas Fingar" -- the report's author -- who he claims "almost single-handedly ... has stopped ... any US military action against Iran." He also notes, however, that Fingar's
report marks a decisive moment in the battle between American neoconservatives and Washington's foreign policy and intelligence professionals - between ideologues and pragmatists. It provided an unexpected victory for those opposed to the neocon plans for a military strike.
MacAskill got me thinking, and I started poking around the web a bit for some background on this report. Below the fold I detail some of the stuff I found, the most interesting of which is a WaPo story from last August based on leaked information from the Fingar report.
First off, I went to the Wall St. Journal's straight reporting on the Fingar report. A piece by Nick Timiraos in today's edition assesses the report's findings and implications. Timiraos clearly links the Iran NIE to the "intelligence failures" that led to the Iraq War, and sees it as the result of the reforms instituted after the Iraq intelligence review.
More interesting than that, however, was this little factoid the editors threw in at the end of Timiraos's piece:
A National Intelligence Estimate this year concluded Iran was playing only a minimal role in fueling sectarian violence in Iraq, a view that contrasted with White House accusations.
I didn't remember that, so I went poking around to see what they were talking about. The best I could come up with was the February Iraq NIE, which the WaPo described in its reporting like this:
Though the administration has repeatedly asserted that al-Qaeda and Iranian operatives are responsible for provoking much of the violence in Iraq, the NIE played down their roles. Analysts studied what would happen if Iran were not a factor inside Iraq and concluded that, even though Iranian agents target U.S. troops, the absence of Tehran's agents would not appreciably alter the sectarian conflict.
That's the twelfth paragraph of a twenty-six paragraph story. Yet another example of the WaPo carefully fulfilling its responsibility to keep its readers well-informed...
In August, WaPo writer Dafna Linzer reported on the Fingar NIE, under the headline "Iran Is Judged 10 Years From Nuclear Bomb." Reading Linzer's story closely, it is clear she is talking about the Fingar report, yet nowhere does she mention the key finding we've been talking about all week. Here's her lede:
A major U.S. intelligence review has projected that Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon, roughly doubling the previous estimate of five years, according to government sources with firsthand knowledge of the new analysis.
The carefully hedged assessments, which represent consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies, contrast with forceful public statements by the White House. Administration officials have asserted, but have not offered proof, that Tehran is moving determinedly toward a nuclear arsenal. The new estimate could provide more time for diplomacy with Iran over its nuclear ambitions. President Bush has said that he wants the crisis resolved diplomatically but that "all options are on the table."
Nothing there about Iran halting its weapons program in 2003. In fact, Linzer went on to say:
The new National Intelligence Estimate includes what the intelligence community views as credible indicators that Iran's military is conducting clandestine work. But the sources said there is no information linking those projects directly to a nuclear weapons program. What is clear is that Iran, mostly through its energy program, is acquiring and mastering technologies that could be diverted to bombmaking.
Now, I don't mean to knock Linzer. Back in September 2006 emptywheel praised her over at thenexthurrah as "the American reporter who [has] everything right, [knows] they [are] lying us into war." But some kind of damage control was going on in August, as folks in the administration knew that this report would eventually leak and were doing their best to control and limit the kind of information that would get released.
Linzer's August reporting was based on anonymous sources, who reported to her on
a fading of suspicions that Iran's military has been running its own separate and covert enrichment effort. But there is evidence of clandestine military work on missiles and centrifuge research and development that could be linked to a nuclear program, four sources said.
Based on Renee Montagne's interview yesterday of Stephen Hadley on NPR's Morning Edition, it seems however that the Fingar report documents exactly the opposite: that what was halted in 2003 was precisely the missile research program. In other words, four sources lied to Linzer about what the report contained.
In this context, MacAskill's report in today's Guardian is even more interesting:
Flynt Leverett, a former CIA analyst and former National Security Council adviser in the Bush administration, was among those celebrating this week, and praised Fingar and his colleagues. "We seem to have lucked out and have individuals who resist back-channel politics and tell it how it is," he said. "That is what the CIA and other agencies are supposed to do."
He continued that Fingar and one of his co-authors, Vann Van Diepen, national intelligence officer for weapons of mass destruction, had opposed the war in Iraq. "They both felt the intelligence was misused in the run-up to the Iraq war. The conservatives are now attacking them, saying they are taking their revenge," Leverett said. "It is not mutiny for intelligence officers to state their honest views."
This gives us a bit more to think about when we assess gchaucer2's diary on the threats to go public made by US intelligence officials which apparently led to last week's declassification.
One more thing. Buried deep in MacAskill's article is this bit on how the new NIE came into being:
Iran's covert programme can be traced back to the mid-1980s when the country was at war with Iraq and fearful that the then Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, might secure a nuclear weapon. The programme involved design, ballistic delivery systems and uranium enrichment; the NIE concluded in 2005 that it was continuing. In July that year US intelligence officials showed IAEA officials an alleged stolen Iranian laptop with thousands of pages relating to nuclear weapons experiments. It was nicknamed the Laptop of Death - it is still not clear whether it was genuine
Fingar and his colleagues have gone back over the material and subjected it to a higher level of scrutiny. They took the same data but reached different conclusions. They also had some new material.
Cannistraro said everyone was pointing towards General Ali-Reza Asgari, a former deputy defence minister, who disappeared in Turkey in February. But he insisted Asgari had been a long-term agent run by the West who has since been debriefed and given a new identity.
"It is not a single source," said Cannistraro. "It is multiple: technical, documents, electronic."
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