Iran has nukes, Iran doesn't have nukes. Well, which is it, General Baluyevsky?

"Iran does have nuclear weapons. Of course, these are non-strategic nuclear weapons. I mean these are not ICBMs with a range of more than 5,500 kilometers and more. But as a military man, I see no danger of aggression against Russia by Iran. As for the danger of Iran's attack on the United States, the danger is zero."
-- General Yuri Baluyevsky, May 2002

"[The Russian military] said from the very beginning we had no data to speak about intensification of efforts in Iran in the field of nuclear armaments."
-- General Yuri Baluyevsky, December 2007

General Yuri Baluyevsky is Russia's First Deputy Minister of Defense and, since July 2004, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.

The general did not exactly say in the 2007 quote above that Iran had no nuclear weapons, but his other words at the time imply he said as much:

As he commented on [the December US National Intelligence Estimate report] that Iran had suspended its nuclear armaments program back in 2003, Gen Baluyevsky recalled that Russia has always met with much caution the claims that Iran was working on military applications of its nuclear program.

General Baluyevsky's comment about Iran having nuclear weapons came at a press conference during the United States-Russian Federation Moscow Treaty summit, May 23-26, 2002.

As to why his comment didn't make headlines around the globe, I imagine the World Tribune also wondered about that; to my knowledge World Tribune and Iran Press Service were the only news sources to pick up on Baluyevsky's statement.(1) The IPS report mentions that the World Tribune:

... observed that journalists at the briefing completely missed the importance of general Baluyevsky's assertion. "The Russian deputy chief of staff has just said on the record that Iran has nuclear weapons", highlighted World Tribune.

But the spring of 2002 was a different era; news services, and publics around the world, had a great many other things on their mind at that time. Iran's nuclear ambitions were near the bottom of everyone's list, which was still topped by al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations and the US presence in Afghanistan.

What would explain General Baluyevsky's flip-flop between the spring of 2002 and the end of 2007? Again, 2002 was a different era. The US and Russia were on much better terms in 2002 than today; the general's announcement about Iran's nuclear weapons came during a summit when the US and Russia were working out greater cooperation on nuclear proliferation issues.

Also, it was to be several months after the press conference before it was clear that the US intended to invade Iraq -- something that Russia was very much against. Even the famous Downing Street meeting, during which British officials first discussed the likelihood of the US invading Iraq, did not come until July 2002.(2)

By 2007 General Baluyevsky was seriously bent out of shape about US attempts to place components of a missile shield in Europe.

MOSCOW, November 13 (RIA Novosti) [...] "If the Americans deploy the radar by 2011 and anti-ballistic missiles by 2012-2013, they will certainly be directed against Russia, and we can easily prove it," the Chief of the Russian General Staff, Gen. Yury Baluyevsky said in an interview with Russia Today, an English-language state TV channel. [...]

He also reiterated that the alleged Iranian missile threat was used by the U.S. as a simple pretext to deploy weaponry close to Russia's borders, as Iran does not possess the technology to develop and produce long-range inter-continental ballistic missiles.

Iran promptly repaid Baluyevsky for his generosity by test launching the Ashoura missile, which certainly looks by the map at Missile Monitor as if it could shave easternmost Europe, and certainly cream Turkey.

So then General Baluyevsky had to do some fancy footwork, which he managed rather well:

Russia has no data to confirm reports by Iranian leaders that Teheran has tested a new long-range ballistic missile Ashura [Ashoura], General Yuri Baluyevsky, the Chief of General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces said Thursday.

An official statement on testing the Ashura missile, the effective range of which ostensibly reaches 2,000 kilometers, was made November 27 by Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar

Gen Baluyevsky quoted his U.S. counterparts as saying the test launch of the missile took place November 20. He said however that officials in the Pentagon, the Department of State and White House’s National Security Council, whom he had talks with, refused to provide any more information on the incident when he asked them about it.

“When I asked them to share technical surveillance data on it, they refused to do it,” he said.

Gen Baluyevsky reiterated that Russian missile experts carefully verify all the information pertaining to development of the Ashura missile by Iran.

“Nonetheless, I can’t tell you for sure right now that the launch took place, indeed, and that the missile covered 2,000 kilometers,” he said.

“I don’t rule out that in this case we see political bluffing on the Iranian side – something that happened in a number of cases before,” Gen Baluyevsky said.

So, General, was Iran bluffing back in 2002 when you announced they had nuclear weapons?

I add that Iran denied what Baluyevsky said in 2002:

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asifi rejects the remarks of General Yuri Baluyevsky, Russian deputy chief of staff, that Iran has the equipment to produce nuclear weapons. He adds that the Russian official was not aware of Iran's peaceful nuclear program.
— From "Iran Rejects Reports on Nuke Weapons, reiterates IAEA Pledge," IRNA (Tehran), 10 June 2002(3)

I am not sure which of Baluyevsky's statements Asifi was commenting on; there may have been several statements at that Moscow Treaty conference or at another venue:

General Yuri Baluyevsky, Russian deputy chief of staff, says that Iran has received tactical nuclear weapons from a country other than Russia. [See NTI March 1993 post, below.]
—From "Iran, Russia Again Argue Over Nukes," Middle East Newsline, Vol. 4, No. 207, 24 May 2002 (4)

Without the transcript of the press conference mentioned by World Tribune, I can't nail down where the general made the above statement.

In any case, reports of Iran acquiring ready-made nukes are an old story:

March 1993
The Arms Control Reporter reports that by December 1991, Iran had imported four nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union, including a nuclear artillery shell, two nuclear warheads that could be launched on Scud missiles, and one nuclear weapon that could be delivered by a MiG-27 aircraft. [Note: See 24 May 2002 NTI entry.]

The report says that fissile material was exported from Kazakhstan to Iran and the rest of the components were exported from other republics of the former Soviet Union through Turkmenistan. Although the codes to arm the warheads were not provided with the missiles, the report says two experts from Russia arrived to bypass arming codes. [...] (2)

As to why I'm mucking around in old reports about Iran's nuclear ambitions, because I got tired of scratching my head over John Batchelor's statement "Iran has nuclear weapons" on his radio show last Sunday.

John has told his audience that he only deals in open source information. "Open source," to my understanding, is declassified data that is published somewhere, even if only in an obscure journal.

I don't have the resources to track down obscure journals on nuclear proliferation but I thought I'd give Google a whirl. The word string "Iran has nuclear bomb" immediately brought up the 2002 mention of Baluyevsky's statement.

That's not necessarily the report John was referencing -- and I noted that the Google page showed more than 200,000 references for the words I entered. Yet given that Russia's government was in a sharing mood during the Moscow Treaty summit, the 2002 statement by Russia's top military commander is interesting. I didn't start listening to Batchelor's show until March 2003 so it's possible he mentioned Baluyevsky's 2002 announcement at the time.

Iran Press Service, which reported on the World Tribune article in 2002, tartly observed that Baluyevsky's happy estimate of "zero" for the chance that an Iranian nuke could reach the US ignored that the Shahab-3 medium-range missile, which Iran was testing in 2002, was a threat to Middle Eastern nations. Yes, the Shahab-3 could hit any nation in the Middle East, from the map at Missile Monitor.

Next question: If Iran indeed has ready-made nukes, where would they store them? Maybe somewhere that the IAEA wouldn't think to look, if they were inspecting for an Iranian nuclear program? And would they store them in one piece, or do as Pakistan does and tuck nuke bomb components in different locations?

To be continued.

1) It is unclear from the June 6, 2002 Iran Press Service report I've linked to whether IPS picked up on Baluyevsky's statement from their own source, or from the World Tribune article that the IPS reporter quotes.

Complicating matters is that IPS did not publish the link to the World Tribune article they referenced. My attempts to locate the World Tribune article via their archives have failed, which might suggest that World Tribune was not the original source for a report on Baluyevsky's statements at the press briefing. I assumed at the time of publishing this post that I could easily locate the World Tribune link via Google, but my attempts came up dry. (Dec 16 update: I have written the World Tribune editor asking for help in locating the article and link.)

2) There was talk during the run-up to the May 2002 summit that Russia would be willing to help the US overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime provided the US supported Russia's financial interests in Iraq. But any such overtures on Russia's part came at a time when it seemed very unlikely that the US could obtain UN aproval for an invasion.

3) NTI Iran Nuclear Chronology 2002

4) NTI Iran Chronology 1993
* * * * * * * * * * *
December 16, 3:00 PM ET Update
I have added a link to my mention of the Ashoura, which underscores the relevance and gravity of Baluyevsky's 2002 statement that Iran has nuclear weapons. I might have waited until hearing from the World Tribune editor. But after reading their December 14 report on the Ashoura I set aside my obsessive insistence on providing links or at least titles for source documents before I published. The Ashoura link takes you to the World Tribune report.
7:00 PM ET Update
"Pundita:
Thank you for writing WorldTribune.com. We are familiar with the information but have had trouble with our online archives.

The following may be relevant including the piece in our password-protected Geostrategy-Direct.com newsletter.

Robert Morton, Publisher
WorldTribune.com
Geostrategy-Direct.com
East-Asia-Intel.com
East West Services, Inc.

http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/
WTARC/2002/me_iran_08_15.html

http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/
WTARC/2002/eu_russia_05_24.html

http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/
WTARC/2002/eu_russia_01_07.html

Geostrategy-Direct.com
April 12. 2006
Report: Ukraine may have sold Iran 250 nuclear warheads

MOSCOW — Ukraine might have sold nuclear warheads to Iran, the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported April 3. Approximately 250 nuclear warheads that had been in the Soviet arsenal were never returned to Moscow.

"Russia's General Staff has no information about whether Ukraine has given 250 nuclear warheads to Iran or not," said Russian Chief of Staff Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, who is also deputy defense minister. "I do not comment on unsubstantiated reports." [...]"

"Ironically, the United States is financing Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution"

"I wrote the book to find out why poverty has been reduced by half across the world during the past 25 years and why this phenomenon has happened almost everywhere but Latin America. That’s why I went to China, to India, to Ireland, to the Czech Republic, to Poland, among other places. One of the main things I discovered is that [economic development] doesn’t have anything to do with ideology.

"The real difference between countries today is not how [Hugo] Chávez would like us to believe that there are “Right” countries and “Left” countries, but rather between countries that are drawing investments and countries that are scaring investments away. And the country that is attracting the most investment in the developing world is a communist country, China. That drove [Chavistas] crazy. That’s why Chávez spent one of his speeches lashing out against me."
-- Andres Oppenheimer, Latin America expert and author of Saving the Americas: The Dangerous Decline of Latin America and What the U.S. Must Do

I have one quibble with Andres Oppenheimer's brilliant analysis, which I feature in full later in this post.

I think the Leftist tilt in certain Latin American countries does not only reflect an anachronistic view of government; it also reflects a backlash against the elites in those countries who abused neoliberal economic policies, which include an acceptance of virtually unlimited foreign investment.

Yes, it's throwing the baby out with the bath water to throw out foreign investment, but some Latin American governments were falling because they couldn't translate the benefits of foreign investment into perceivable gains for the majority.

The excuse was that it would take time for the benefits to trickle down. But when an a powerful elite backed by de facto military rule controls the government, and blocks programs that would allow the majority to see some benefits of foreign investment, a Leftist backlash is inevitable.

Oppenheimer mentions Poland, but Poland and other developing countries set to join the European Union got tremendous help from the EU while they struggled to apply various aspects of neoliberal policies. Latin American countries such as Venezuela did not receive such help.

US policy toward the poorest Latin American countries must recognize that such countries are not Britain or the United States, where the introduction of Thatcher and Reagan economics, which are reflected in neoliberalism, was softened by a large middle class and strong liberal democracy.

In 2005 a reader sent me a report about a group that was making inroads at converting the 'natives' to Islam in a particular Latin American country. The name of the country escapes me at this moment but the point is that the report noted that the natives in that country were so downtrodden that they could not even step on the same sidewalk used by descendents of the Spanish conquerors.

When citizens are greatly malnourished and see no way possible to ever move up in their society, don't expect them to say, 'Okay, we'll just tighten our belts through this rough patch while foreign investment trickles down to us.'

And that is a big difference between China and the poorest Latin American countries, a difference which Oppenheimer's analysis ignores. Yes, Beijing encourages foreign investment, but they are also very careful to encourage upward mobility for the impoverished masses, and to hurl government resources at their worst-hit economic regions.

All that said, Oppenheimer is on target when he argues that the Left-Right framing of politics ignores the realities of this era. Today, it comes down to how well a government does governing. That includes getting up the gumption to read the riot act to the elite -- a point I pounded home in my 2005 rant Why Vicente Fox is going straight to hell.

If they put you in power, that doesn't excuse them being so greedy they risk touching off a Leftist revolution. A leader has to stand up to an elite that's gone that far around the bend, even if he's scared they'll bump him off. He has to capitalize on the fact that he has a majority at his back, and sell that point to the military.

Part of standing up is figuring ways to temper the long agonizing wait for the benefits of foreign investment to trickle down. This is not rocket science, for crying out loud.

Now to Andres Oppenheimer's discussion with Foreign Policy, which throws much light on Hugo Chavez's problems at this time.

Foreign Policy: Why do you think Venezuelans rejected Hugo Chávez’s proposed changes to the constitution?

Andres Oppenheimer: Conflict fatigue. About 40 percent of the Venezuelan population was opposing Chávez to begin with, and many of the others who supported Chávez were tired of his habit of picking fights—daily—with anybody who came across him. If it wasn’t the Catholic Church, it was the businesspeople; if it wasn’t the businesspeople, it was the students; if it wasn’t the students, it was the United States; if it wasn’t the United States, it was the king of Spain; if it wasn’t the king of Spain, it was the president of Colombia. And the Chávez supporters just got fed up with this polarization.

FP: How much of a factor was his failure to make good on his promises to cut poverty?

AO: There’s no question that many Venezuelans thought it a bit of a contradiction for Chávez to be talking about creating a socialist state when there were shortages of basics foodstuffs such as milk in Venezuelan stores. And there was also a lot of resentment among Chávez supporters for him to be spending billions of dollars helping what he calls “alternative Bolivarian movements” throughout Latin America. A lot of people sent him a message saying, “Why don’t you focus on your own country?”

FP: In your book, Saving the Americas: The Dangerous Decline of Latin America . . . and What the U.S. Must Do, you describe how and why Latin America, including Venezuela, has been so unsuccessful at fighting poverty. What was Chávez’s response to your argument?

AO: I wrote the book to find out why poverty has been reduced by half across the world during the past 25 years and why this phenomenon has happened almost everywhere but Latin America. That’s why I went to China, to India, to Ireland, to the Czech Republic, to Poland, among other places. One of the main things I discovered is that [economic development] doesn’t have anything to do with ideology.

The real difference between countries today is not how Chávez would like us to believe that there are “Right” countries and “Left” countries, but rather between countries that are drawing investments and countries that are scaring investments away. And the country that is attracting the most investment in the developing world is a communist country, China. That drove [Chavistas] crazy. That’s why Chávez spent one of his speeches lashing out against me.

In Beijing, they are putting out a red carpet for foreign investors, whereas in Latin America, many presidents are going out to the balcony and yelling against foreign investors. [In my book], I tell the story of when I arrived in China, and the first thing I read in the [local] paper was that the entire Chinese government was celebrating the arrival of the board of directors of McDonald’s, who were there to announce the opening of 400 restaurants in China. I had just come from Venezuela, where the Chávez government had just suspended McDonald’s restaurants for three days for some phony tax investigation and the government was taking pride in “teaching foreign capitalists a lesson.”

FP: Do you think this rejection at the polls will harm his reputation and popularity in the region?

AO: Chávez’s reputation in the region has never been very high. In the region when he’s polled, he scores at the very bottom of the list, alongside President Bush, and only second-to-last before Fidel Castro. He has strong support among very vocal, radical, leftist support groups, but his base is not widespread. I think it will embolden opposition forces in Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia who will now feel that there’s nothing irreversible about radical leftist leaders who win democratic elections and try to erode democracy from within.

Chávez is down, but not out by any means. He still controls the presidency, Congress, the military, 20 of 22 governorships, and much of the media. If this is a boxing match, he lost the round but by no means did he lose the match itself.

FP: You’ve spent a good deal of time comparing Latin America to the rest of the world. One easy comparison I see is between Chávez and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Both are semiauthoritarians who are ruling petrostates; both are hostile to the United States. Yet on the same day, they had very different electoral results. What do you make of this?

AO: Well Chávez’s concession was not a trial of his democratic instincts, although one has to be happy that Venezuelan press reports today are talking about the fact the military high command told Chávez to accept his defeat. he conceded. He delayed the announcement for about seven hours in Venezuela, and according to a government-sanctioned monitoring group, the opposition victory was larger than officially reported. So we shouldn’t rush to celebrate Chávez’s sudden conversion into a Jeffersonian democrat.

In Putin’s case, he uses the same methods Chávez uses in Venezuela: massive uses of public resources; control of much of the media. There’s not such a huge difference. [But] Putin may be focusing more on Russia and the Russian people than Chávez is focusing on the Venezuelan people. A lot of Chávez supporters resented the fact that he spends most of his time in Saudi Arabia and Iran, talking about the world revolution when they want bread and butter.

FP: You’ve written about the much-discussed wave of neopopulism in Latin America and said it is misunderstood. What do you think an election result like this says about this so-called populist wave, if anything?

AO: Well, that’s the key question. Of course I’m worried about Chávez, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa scaring away investments and making the countries poor, but that’s not the key issue in Latin America; because if you put all these countries together—Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua—they barely amount to 8 or 9 percent of Latin America’s GDP. U.S. officials and we in the press love to write about Chávez because he screams and yells and is colorful and insults everybody and he makes great copy. But the real story of Latin America is being written elsewhere: in Mexico; in Brazil; in Colombia; in Chile.

What really worries me about Latin America’s future is that we’re falling behind in education, science, technology, and research and development. If you look at all the international standardized tests for kids, Latin America has among the lowest scores in the world. When you look at the London Times’s ranking of the world’s 200 best universities, this year only three Latin American universities are among the world’s [top] 200 and they’re all between 195 and 200. This is scandalous. And it’s because, when the rest of the developing world is moving rapidly to create more skilled workforces, Latin America is talking ideology.

Look at Chávez. He speaks to the nation every day in front of a huge painting of Simón Bolívar. He changed the country to name it after Simón Bolívar. In every speech, he cites Bolívar as inspiration for every single measure he takes. The trouble is that Bolívar died in 1830—four years before the invention of the telephone and 150 years before the invention of the Internet.

FP: Do you think then that a lot of people who are agitating for democratic ideals would be better off if they channeled all of their anger and resentment toward Chávez and people like him into issues like education?

AO: When it comes to his opponents in the United States, I think Washington should bypass Chávez. Instead of focusing on Chávez and responding to him, Washington should build bridges with Brazil, with Mexico, with Colombia, with Chile, with Peru and simply ignore Chávez. If Washington is really serious and really worried about Chávez, the thing it should do is be serious about reducing America’s dependence on imported oil. The United States is financing Chávez. We buy $34 billion a year worth of Venezuelan oil. That’s what keeps Chávez alive. Ironically, the United States is financing Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution.

Andrés Oppenheimer is the author of “The Oppenheimer Report,” a prize-winning column on Latin American affairs in the Miami Herald, and Saving the Americas: The Dangerous Decline of Latin America . . . and What the U.S. Must Do (New York: Random House, 2007).

The Kingdom of Heaven and disillusion with authority

I received a letter from a reader asking what I've done all day, given that I had not put up a post or even a note about why I hadn't done so. Part of my day was spent in a sometimes heated exchange of emails with a correspondent. Below is some of my end of the exchange. My thoughts are not crystallized on the matter I discuss, but this post might be the closest I come to publishing anything about the deep concern I expressed in the emails.

What we are seeing unfold since the US invasion of Afghanistan is a still-building movement to completely demonize war; Ridley Scott's film The Kingdom of Heaven makes this quite clear, as does Wolfgang Peterson's Troy.

Of course this movement has its contradictory elements -- e.g., support for Palestinian terrorism against Israel and Chechen terrorism against Russia's government. But the movement plays into the hands of the enemy.

From that viewpoint, I argue that nothing is insignificant about the NIE debate, which I see as having great magnitude. I am not so much debating NIE as debating Wolfgang Peterson and Ridley Scott. Troy and The Kingdom of Heaven, both of which I saw within the past two weeks, were box office flops in the US but a success in Europe -- and KOH was also a success in Arab countries, including Egypt.

One may dismiss the historical inaccuracies in KOH and Peterson's mangling of Homer's telling of the Battle of Troy, but both directors were intent on portraying authority as evil and war under any conditions as having no merit.

Scott used Hamid Dabashi, an intellectual who is also an anti-war activist, as the 'history' consultant for KOH. Scott, according to Wikipedia, defended KOH's flights from the truth by saying that the script was "approved and verified" by Dabashi. Scott also said that in his opinion, Dabashi is an "important man in New York."

That latter defense of Dabashi is very funny. But Dabashi, as with many of his Iranian countrymen, and as with so many Arabs and Africans, is still caught up in a post-Colonial mindset. My rant a few days ago to Africans took aim at the mindset.

So the pivotal part of Dabashi's viewpoint went above Scott's head, and above the head of the KOH script writer. Yet I am trying to get at something more difficult, which I can't express adequately because I still don't understand it. Here's my best try for now:

Barack Obama is riding on the call for "change" as many political analysts term it. Lou Dobbs is riding on the same call. I am becoming fearful that change, in this context, is a stand-in, a symbol, for blind rage building against all authority.

Far from a cry for change, the rage is rooted in a desire to go back -- to return to a time when change was not happening so suddenly and from so many quarters.

That's why I warned yesterday that President Bush spoke too soon to support the NIE. At some point, people flip into a mood where they won't believe anything said by anyone in authority -- any kind of authority.

One may argue that Ridley Scott was simply duped by Dabashi but if you have seen the movie -- which Scott doesn't like because it was mangled in its theater release edits -- Scott's theme transcends Muslim-Christian themes and the Crusades.

The only 'good' authority in the movie is a leper who dies young and whose position is very tenuous. In other words, the only good in the world is too weak to stand up to the Juggernaut of evil authority in all spheres.

The Kingdom of Heaven taps into a spreading mindset in Europe that fears European Union authority, which fears being overrun by refugees from Muslim countries, which fears this era -- the era of globalization. It fears everything and flirts with nihilism.

It seems that Move On and other anti-war organizations are trying to import this mindset to the United States because it makes cannon fodder against Bush's preemption doctrine and war hawks. If so, the anti-war activists are handling something very dangerous because the mindset calls up the worst part of the Depression era.

But I am still trying to understand the mindset, and wondering whether it is tinder waiting for a match. If it is tinder, the match could be a sharp economic downturn in the United States that like falling dominoes engulfs emerging economies in Asia and Africa.

Yet I acknowledge your argument that the mindset I fear is no more than a small fleeting shadow on the sweep of history. Truly, this is a grand time to be alive, a grand time for human progress. But there is The War, which for many people distracts attention from the progress -- even though the war is part of progress away from tyrannies.

With regard to your comment about Corey and Jeff, they were not actually debating, to my reading; Corey, in his comment to Jeff's piece, was just underscoring that NCRI led him to Natanz but also that NCRI's original identification of the facility's use was incorrect.*

Corey's comment does not clarify whether NCRI led "US intelligence agencies" to their first bead on Natanz in 2002. I assume NCRI did provide the first lead, but it would be helpful to nail that down. And NCRI needs to defend themselves against Jeff's implication that NCRI intelligence is unreliable. Only in some cases, it seems; in other key aspects, they are on target.

I know you don't think my point is important. But this war, for the good guys, is all about pushing a peanut across a sawdust floor with one's nose, to quote Joyce Carol Oates out of context. Important battles about even the tiniest data mosaics. Credibility: how right has NCRI been in past? Very important question in light of the NIE key judgment that Iran shut down their nuke weapons program in 2003.

Afterthought: This is my nod to the complexity of Scott's film: I suppose that a deeply religious or spiritual reader, or a reader who is simply interested in questions of ethics, would contest my view of The Kingdom of Heaven. If you cast out many things about the film, yes, Ridley Scott does wrestle with questions about conscience versus expediency, and about what true spirituality represents.

He threw a great deal into the movie, as he did with Gladiator and Blade Runner. Yet I think a film about war, and which demands the viewer become deeply involved in the situations leading to particular battle, is a hard place in which to blank out all but spiritual issues.

An ironic coda: The Kingdom of Heaven is also a tribute to history's military engineers, although I suspect that some of the tribute ended on the cutting room floor. Scott's depiction of the siege machines used against Jerusalem is jaw-dropping. It brings home that the machines were weapons of mass destruction in their day. I don't think any other living director but Ridley Scott could have portrayed the ingenuity of the siege machine builders, and their destructive capacity, so well.

* From Jeffrey Lewis's post today for Arms Control Wonk:

[...] NCRI put out a press release declaring that Negroponte: Iran’s Uranium enrichment first revealed by Iranian Resistance. Well, not quite. I repeat, as I have before, that:

> In December 2002, Mark Hibbs reported that the US intelligence community, based on imagery and procurement data, had suspected that Iran was building a clandestine uranium enrichment plant in Natanz and a heavy water production facility in Arak for about a year.

> Hibbs also reported that six months earlier, in mid 2002, the US briefed the IAEA on the intelligence, providing “precise geographical coordinates of the sites.”

> When NCRI held its press conference a few weeks later, in August 2002, they misidentified the purpose of the Natanz facility as a fuel production plant.

> In December 2002, Corey Hinderstein, then with the Institute for Science and International Secruity, was the first person to publicly identify Natanz as a gas centrifuge facility.

You can look it up.

Here is Corey's comment about the post:

Thanks for the props, Jeff. It bugs me every time I see it. They were close, and NCRI’s info led me to Natanz, but they did not identify it correctly.

Credit should go also to David Albright, since after I found the site on satellite photos we worked together to ID it as a centrifuge plant.

— Corey Hinderstein - Dec 12, 10:51 AM

More NIE fallout: Iranian group claims Tehran's nuclear weapons program still operational

4:00 PM Update
So many news reports have appeared since the Wall Street Journal published their report today on the NCRI announcements that I'm having trouble keeping track of them.

Each report has some information not contained in the others. So I've culled 'unique' quotes from three of the later reports -- from AP, AFP and Fox -- and tacked them at the end of the excerpts I published earlier from the Wall Street Journal report.

One of several surprises in the Fox report relating to the NIE conclusions is that NCRI claims the Iranians did not shut down a nuke weapons site in 2003 because of international pressure but because they were caught red-handed by NCRI and wanted to stay a step ahead of the IAEA.

It's funny the way things work out; if NCRI had announced their intelligence two weeks ago, they would have gotten a yawn from most of the mainstream press with maybe the exception of Fox news. But the publication of the NIE conclusions has guaranteed that NCRI's announcements would draw attention from across the mainstream.
* * * * * * * * * * *

One problem with using intelligence provided by Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK) and their political wing, National Council for Resistance (NCRI) is that both groups are designated as terrorist organizations by the United States and the European Union. And yet the groups have provided accurate intelligence in some cases.

Now that intelligence used by the NIE is being reassessed in many quarters, I question the wisdom of President Bush's rush to publicly support the National Intelligence Estimate. Bush's political enemies have not been mollified by his generous words for the NIE. And if Bush and the NIE group are forced by new intelligence to recant -- the public can only take so much flip-flopping on intelligence matters.

So all things considered, it would have been wiser if Bush had been noncommittal in his public statements about the NIE -- at least until Israel could respond, and intelligence experts outside the NIE group could examine the report's key judgment on Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Here are key excerpts from today's Wall Street Journal report on the NCRI intelligence:

Group Says Iran Resumed Weapon Program
by MARC CHAMPION in Brussels and JAY SOLOMON in Washington
Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2007; Page A4

The Iranian opposition group that first exposed Iran's nuclear-fuel program said a U.S. intelligence analysis is correct that Tehran shut down its weaponization program in 2003, but claims that the program was relocated and restarted in 2004. [...]

A former U.S. intelligence official who works closely with the White House on Iran said that all the intelligence related to the NIE was being reassessed and that information coming from sources such as the NCRI would be included. "You have to take seriously what they say, but you also have to realize that they have gotten things wrong," the official said. [...]

The NCRI is the political wing of the Mujahedin e-Khalq [MEK], a group that still has as many as 4,000 members in a disarmed military camp just inside Iraq's border with Iran. The MEK has its roots as a Marxist-Islamist body that fought to overthrow the Shah and has been seeking to overthrow the current government since the mid-1980s. The U.S. and the European Union list both the NCRI and Mujahedin e-Khalq as terrorist organizations. The NCRI has had a mixed record in the accuracy of its claims concerning Iran's nuclear program.

U.S. intelligence officials have declined to comment on what role the NCRI or other Iranian dissident groups may have played in developing the new intelligence estimate. The NCRI first identified Iran's covert nuclear-fuel facilities in 2002, and the White House and State Department have credited the group with helping to expose the program. [...]

According to the NCRI, Iran's Supreme National Security Council decided to shut down its most important center for nuclear-weapons research in eastern Tehran, called Lavisan-Shian, in August 2003. [...]

But at the same meeting, the council decided to disperse pieces of the research to a number of locations around Iran, according to the NCRI. By the time international nuclear inspectors were allowed to get access to the Lavisan site, the buildings allegedly devoted to nuclear research had been torn down and the ground bulldozed. [...]

The NCRI, which claims to have intelligence sources inside Iran, said Lavisan was broken into 11 fields of research, including development of a nuclear trigger and of the technology to shape weapons-grade uranium into a warhead. [...]

"What the first part of the NIE says is right, that they halted their weaponization research in 2003," said Mohammad Mohaddessin, foreign-affairs chief for the NCRI. "But the second part, that they stopped until at least the middle of 2007, is wrong. They scattered the weaponization program to other locations and restarted in 2004."

Equipment was relocated first from Lavisan-Shian to another military compound in Tehran's Lavisan district, the Center for Readiness and Advanced Technology, Mr. Mohaddessin said. Two devices designed to measure radiation levels were moved to Malek-Ashtar University in Isfahan and to a defense ministry hospital in Tehran, he said. Other equipment was sent to other locations the NCRI hasn't been able to identify, he said.

"Their strategy was that if the IAEA found any one piece of this research program, it would be possible to justify it as civilian. But so long as it was all together, they wouldn't be able to," Mr.Mohaddessin said.

The NCRI said in a report on Iran's nuclear program in September 2005 that the Lavisan facility had been closed, setting back the regime's weaponization program by approximately one year. Mr. Mohaddessin said his group was certain no other Iranian nuclear facilities were closed in 2003.

A representative of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog in Vienna, declined to comment on the claims, but said the agency would consider seriously any NCRI information. A spokesman for the Iranian government couldn't be reached for comment.

Excerpts from three later reports:

(Associated Press)Four years ago, the [NCRI] group disclosed information about two hidden nuclear sites that helped uncover nearly two decades of covert Iranian atomic activity. But much of the information it has presented since then to back up claims that Iran has a secret weapons program has not been publicly verified.

Paragraph from AFP report on NCRI announcements:

In August 2002, [Alireza Jafarzadeh of NCRI] first reported the existence of secret Iranian nuclear sites at Natanz and Arak, prompting denunciations of Tehran by Washington and hurried inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

And excerpts from Fox News interview with Alireza Jafarzadeh.

WASHINGTON (Fox news)- Twenty-one commanders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps are the top scientists running Iran's secret nuclear weapons program, says the man who exposed Iran's nuclear weapons program in 2002. [...]The scientists working on the alleged civilian nuclear centrifuge program are IGRC commanders, said Jafarzadeh, who was providing a list of names to the press on Tuesday. But their intention is not a nuclear energy source for civilians. [...]

"It's the IRGC that is basically controlling the whole thing, dominating the whole thing," Jafarzadeh told FOXNews.com. "They are running the show. They have a number of sites controlled by the IRGC that has been off-limits to the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and inspectors, including a military university known as Imam Hossein University. ... That site has not been inspected. They have perhaps the most advanced nuclear research and development center in that university."

Jafarzadeh said the 2003 decision to stop the weaponization program, which was operating in Lavizan-Shian, a posh northeast district of Tehran, was not Iran's own. The site had been exposed by the opposition, the National Council of Resistance on Iran, in April 2003 after revelations of several other nuclear sites that could be portrayed as dual purpose facilities; Lavizan-Shian could not, he said.

"The regime knew that this is not the site that they can invite the IAEA ... this site was heavily involved in militarization of the program," Jafarzadeh said. "They were doing all kinds of activities that were not justifiable. So they decided before the IAEA gets in — and it usually takes four to six months before they can go through the process and get in — use the time and try to basically destroy this whole facility, and that's what they did."

Jafarzadeh said the Iranians razed the buildings, removed the soil, cut down the trees and allowed the IAEA to inspect the Lavizan-Shian site, which had been turned into a park by June 2004. He noted that the regime acted as if it had succumbed to municipal pressure to open a park with basketball and tennis courts and that is why the area had been flattened.

Jafarzadeh said that "in a way it's correct for the NIE to say that in late 2003 the weaponization of the program was stopped, and they said it was due to international pressure. But they failed to say that it restarted in 2004" in a location called Lavizan 2, he said.

Lavizan 2 "has never been inspected by the IAEA," Jafarzadeh added. [...]

"Iran has nuclear weapons" and yet more fallout from NIE

The quote in the title was plopped into a discussion that John Batchelor had with Bill Roggio last night about Iran's military activities in Iraq. Batchelor made the statement almost in passing while noting that in Iraq, the US is already at war with Iran.

At first I thought I'd misheard; I thought perhaps Batchelor had said Iran has a nuclear weapons program. But about 40 minutes later, during his closing monologue for KFI 640 AM radio, he said it again, and that time there was no mistaking.

He said, "Iran has nuclear weapons. Iran has a nuclear weapons program."

If the statement, which Batchelor did not support with data, had come from any other news source I would have filed it. But from the years I've been following his news program, I know that John Batchelor is a very cautious, very careful, analyst and news reporter. The sources he features on his show have sometimes been wrong, but John's track record is virtually unblemished because he is so cautious. As an analyst he lives by the golden guideline that in war, the first three reports are wrong.

A recent example of John's cautiousness is his refusal to speculate on the target of Israel's September 6 bombing raid in Syria. And his refusal to give weight to any of the published speculations. He has told his radio audience that the only "story" we have on the bombing is that we don't have the story.

So when Batchelor stated flatly that Iran had nuclear "weapons" -- I note the plural -- that was enough to cause me to drop my jaw.

Where from here? I await further developments.

The podcast for John's show on KFI-AM last night will be available in a few days, if you'd like to check my hearing.

You can also listen right now to Bill's discussion on Batchelor's show last night. Visit Bill's Long War Journal site for a link to the podcast. (Bill generally leaves the podcasts on his radio appearances up for a few days only.)

Meanwhile, the fallout from the NIE continues to rain down:

China's leaders have leaped into the breach created by the NIE publication; they have given the nod to Sinopec to go ahead and sign a $2 billion oil deal with Iran.

It's a good thing I didn't learn of that development on a Tuesday or Thursday, which I reserve for being deeply cynical. In that case I might have commented about the China-Iran deal signing that Thomas Fingar's work is now done. More than one observer of Mr Fingar's career has termed him a Panda Hugger, for those who don't get Pundita's little joke.

More fallout: Britain's intelligence community is bent out of shape about the NIE:

British spy chiefs have grave doubts that Iran has mothballed its nuclear weapons programme, as a US intelligence report [NIE] claimed last week, and believe the CIA has been hoodwinked by Teheran. [...]

A senior British official delivered a withering assessment of US intelligence-gathering abilities in the Middle East and revealed that British spies shared the concerns of Israeli defence chiefs that Iran was still pursuing nuclear weapons. [...]

A US intelligence source has revealed that some American spies share the concerns of the British and the Israelis. "Many middle- ranking CIA veterans believe Iran is still committed to producing nuclear weapons and are concerned that the agency lost a number of its best sources in Iran in 2004," the official said.

The same report from today's (UK) Telegraph notes:

The timing of the CIA report has also provoked fury in the British Government, where officials believe it has undermined efforts to impose tough new sanctions on Iran and made an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities more likely.

Britain's government is not half as furious with the NIE publication as some members of Israel's government. Aaron Klein reported last night for John Batchelor, and again in World Net Daily, that at Sunday's Knesset session:

[...] lawmakers here blasted the report and questioned America's commitment to Israel and its front against Iran.

"It cannot be that Bush is committed to peace as was declared at Annapolis, and then the Americans propagate such an intelligence report which contradicts the information we have proving Iran intends to obtain nuclear weapons," stated Minister Yitzhak Cohen, a member of the Shas party, a key coalition partner in Olmert's government.

Cohen compared the NIE report to what he said were faulty reports released by the U.S. during the Holocaust that Jews were not being killed in spite of information possessed by American intelligence of the existence of concentration camps.

"In the middle of the previous century the Americans received intelligence reports from Auschwitz on the packed trains going to the extermination camps. They claimed then that the railways were industrial. Their attitude today to the information coming out of Iran on the Iranians' intention to produce a nuclear bomb reminds one of their attitude during the Holocaust," stated Cohen.

Now that's what I'd call fury.

Meanwhile, the meeting took place today between Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mullen and Israel's defense minister Barak, during which Mullen was slated to review, among several other things, Israel's intelligence on Iran's nuclear weapons program.

No details have yet emerged from the meeting, with the exception of an inane statement by Mullen's spokesman, Captain John Kirby:

"Sometimes friends disagree," said Kirby of the differences of opinion between Israel and the US over Iran's agenda.

This is not about friends disagreeing and it's not about "opinion." It's about hard data, evidence, that Iran has continued with their nuclear weapons program. Israel's military says they have the data. The ball is now in the US government's court because the NIE on Iran's nuclear threat says the program was abandoned in 2003.

More NIE fallout: Pundita mumbles an apology of sorts to Mike McConnell

In a December 7 post I grumbled:

McConnell showed bad judgment in deciding to declassify the NIE right away. He rushed to get the NIE to the public and the shaky grounds that "... we felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available," explained Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence.

That was before Retired Col. W. Patrick Lang, a former official in the Defense Intelligence Agency, said that senior CIA analysts involved in the NIE threat assessment on Iran demanded of the White House that the "gist" of the NIE key judgments be released to the public -- or they would leak the findings, even if it meant they had to go to jail.

Col. Lang's statement has been published, although I don't have the link at this time. Of course Lang's statement, which does not reference his source, might be wrong. But it is plausible enough to prompt me to hold my fire until more is known about McConnell's decision.

I still think it was the wrong decision, but it was surely made in consultation with senior White House officials and probably even President Bush. Certainly, the White House would know that any hint from CIA analysts that they would leak the key judgements would have to be taken seriously, given the recent history of leaks in Washington.

This said, I stand by my Dec 7 comments:

... the public can't have 'accuracy' on the report because certain elements of it remain classified! And because the report is public, it would be hard for US intelligence officials who signed off on the NIE to back away from the key conclusion -- that Iran had abandoned their nuclear weapons program in 2003 -- no matter what evidence Israel brings to the contrary.

As David Kay noted during an interview with Campbell Brown this weekend for CNN, the portion of the NIE that has been released is basically "headlines;" no supporting data have been published. So the public is still feeling around in the dark when it comes to assessing the NIE conclusions.

Given the grave events spinning out from the NIE publication, it might have been better to risk dealing with a leak than to have gone ahead with publication at this time. But this would be a judgment call made under great time pressure. So, for now, I'm letting McConnell halfway off the hook.

Thomas Fingar the "principal author" of Iran NIE

Perhaps now readers will understand why I have been so focused on Thomas Fingar ever since I learned he was closely connected with the NIE:

[NIE] Report has torpedoed plans for military action and brought 'howls' from neocons
by Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Saturday December 8, 2007, The (UK) Guardian

... pivotal to the US investigation into Iran's suspect nuclear weapons programme was the work of a little-known intelligence specialist, Thomas Fingar. He was the principal author of an intelligence report published on Monday that concluded Iran, contrary to previous US claims, had halted its covert programme four years ago and had not restarted it. Almost single-handedly he has stopped - or, at the very least, postponed - any US military action against Iran. [...]

The rest of the Guardian piece is mostly a hash of speculations, rumors, and crowing about the blow to Bush's policy on Iran.

The Guardian's editors have never made a secret of their hatred for Bush and his defense/foreign policy -- and hatred is not too strong a word to use in this context. But in this case their hatred may have blinded them to unfolding events since the NIE publication. As I noted in the previous post, it's not only neocons or even Republicans who are questioning the NIE.

So can we trust MacAskill's assertion that Fingar is the chief author of the NIE? I think so, from everything I know about Fingar and the people he works for.

Democrats starting to wake from their slumber on NIE faults

I'm glad to see this because flaws in the NIE report on Iran are a defense thing, not a partisan thing. However; growing concerns about the NIE from across the political spectrum are shutting the barn door after the horse escaped. Publication of the NIE has given Russia and China -- and possibly Germany -- the excuse they needed to back away from applying pressure to Iran:

Doves find fault with Iran report too
By Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times, December 7

WASHINGTON — The new U.S. intelligence report that says Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 is suddenly raising concerns among the political center and left, as well as conservatives who have long called for a hard line against the Islamic Republic.

Moderate and liberal foreign policy experts said that U.S. intelligence agencies, possibly eager to demonstrate independence from White House political pressure, may have produced a National Intelligence Estimate that is more reassuring than it should be on the potential risks of the Iranian nuclear program.

The report, made public Monday, contradicted the Bush administration's assertion that Iran has been secretly working to build nuclear weapons. It also found that Tehran, which says it is enriching uranium solely for civilian energy purposes, appears to have a pragmatic view and has responded to outside pressure and economic sanctions, in contrast to characterizations by administration hawks.

[...] Iran expert Ray Takeyh, a former professor at the National War College and National Defense University, said that although his own politics are left of the president's, he agrees with Bush that Iran's nuclear program is a continuing threat.

"The position I take is that President Bush is right on this," said Takeyh, now at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Takeyh, who has long argued for engaging Iran in diplomacy, said the intelligence report was too easy on Tehran by not objecting to the uranium enrichment program, which many Western governments have alleged is meant to build the knowledge base to eventually develop nuclear weapons. The American intelligence agencies, in effect, accepted Iran's contention that the enrichment is for peaceful purposes, Takeyh said.

[...] Sharon Squassoni, a former government nuclear safeguards expert now with the generally liberal Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, noted that the intelligence report said Iran suspended its enrichment program in 2003 and later signed an agreement allowing U.N. inspections.

But, she said, the portion of the report made public was silent on the fact that the Iranians reversed both actions in 2006.

The ability to develop fissile materials is the most important element of a nuclear weapons program, she told reporters.

Gary Samore, who was a top arms control official in the Clinton White House, agreed that the National Intelligence Estimate did not adequately emphasize Iran's continuing efforts to enrich uranium and build missiles.

"The halting of the weaponization program in 2003 is less important from a proliferation standpoint than resumption of the enrichment program in 2006," said Samore, director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Samore said the report undermined Bush's warnings about Iranian efforts to develop nuclear weapons and left Tehran in a strong position, allowing it to develop its enrichment capacity without a substantial challenge from the United States and its allies. [...]

Anthony Lake, who was a national security advisor to President Clinton, found no fault with the intelligence report. But he said a key message was the importance of taking action.

"While we've got more time, we've got to use the time, because the enrichment activities are continuing," Lake said in an interview. [...]

As long as I'm ragging on Mike McConnell today (see Israel to show US evidence on Iran's continued nuclear weapons program ...), I'll toss in this mention from the above LA Times report, even though Bolton is a conservative:

In a Washington Post op-ed column Thursday, Bolton alleged that many of the officials involved [in writing the NIE] were "not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department" brought in by J. Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence.

Israel to show US evidence on Iran's continued nuclear weapons program: more fallout from latest NIE

The following excerpts from a Jerusalem Post article throw some light on why US intelligence officials at work on the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran did not factor in Israel's intelligence. It seems the intelligence was ignored.

I'll grant it's possible that Israel was unwilling to share their "evidence" -- as distinct from intelligence -- until after the IDF got a look at the NIE.

Yet two things are coming clear: First, John "Mike" McConnell, the United States Director of National Intelligence, showed questionable judgment in keeping President Bush out of the loop for months about 'new' raw data on Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Second, McConnell showed bad judgment in deciding to declassify the NIE right away. He rushed to get the NIE to the public and the shaky grounds that "... we felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available," explained Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence.

But the public can't have 'accuracy' on the report because certain elements of it remain classified! And because the report is public, it would be hard for US intelligence officials who signed off on the NIE to back away from the key conclusion -- that Iran had abandoned their nuclear weapons program in 2003 -- no matter what evidence Israel brings to the contrary.

IDF to show US nuclear data on Iran

Disappointed after failing to make their case on Iran and influence the outcome of the United States's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released this week, [Israel's] military Intelligence will present its hard core evidence on [Iran's] nuclear program on Sunday to the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff during a rare visit he will be making to Israel.

Admiral Michael Mullen will land in Israel Sunday morning for a 24-hour visit that will include a one-on-one meeting with IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, as well as with Defense Minister Ehud Barak. [...]

Mullen's visit to Israel will be exactly a week after the publication of the NIE report that claimed Iran had frozen its nuclear military program in 2003 and has yet to restart it. During his visit, Military Intelligence plans to present him with Israel's evidence that Iran is in fact developing nuclear weapons.

"The report clearly shows that we did not succeed in making our case over the past year in the run-up to this report," a defense official said Thursday. "Mullen's visit is an opportunity to try and fix that." [...]

Let's return to Defense Minister Barak's take on the NIE key conclusion:

"Mr. Barak also said that what appeared to be the source for the American assessment on [Iran's] weapons program was no longer functioning.

“We are talking about a specific track connected with their weapons building program, to which the American connection, and maybe that of others, was severed,” Mr. Barak said cryptically."

In light of unfolding events I don't think he was being so much cryptic as polite.

Pundita will be less polite: This is a royal mess, courtesy of America's daffy intelligence establishment.

Congressional review of NIE Iran findings sought

The following article mentions a "growing backlash" against the Iran NIE by conservatives, neoconservatives, and Republicans in general. Pundita does not fall into those categories, and yet I've been in backlash mode ever since I saw Thomas Fingar's name attached to the NIE report.

Even without my concerns about Fingar's ability for threat assessment, I should think that anyone, including Democrats who have supported actions against Iran, would want to take a close look at the NIE findings.

Review of Iran Intelligence to Be Sought
by Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler for The Washington Post, December 7

Senate Republicans are planning to call for a congressional commission to investigate the conclusions of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran as well as the specific intelligence that went into it, according to congressional sources.

The move is the first official challenge, but it comes amid growing backlash from conservatives and neoconservatives unhappy about the assessment that Iran halted a clandestine nuclear weapons program four years ago. It reflects how quickly the NIE has become politicized, with critics even going after the analysts who wrote it, and shows a split among Republicans.

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) said he plans to introduce legislation next week to establish a commission modeled on a congressionally mandated group that probed a disputed 1995 intelligence estimate on the emerging missile threat to the United States over the next 15 years.

"Iran is one of the greatest threats in the world today. Getting the intelligence right is absolutely critical, not only on Iran's capability but its intent. So now there is a huge question raised, and instead of politicizing that report, let's have a fresh set of eyes -- objective, yes -- look at it," he said in an interview.

Ensign's proposal calls for Senate leaders to put an equal number of Republicans and Democrats on a panel to study the NIE and report back in six months. "There are a lot of people out there who do question [the NIE]. There is a huge difference between the 2005 and 2007 estimates," he said. The 2005 intelligence estimate reported that Iran was still working on a clandestine military program, and the new assessment basically says the previous judgment was wrong on a key point.

"If it's inaccurate, it could result in very serious damage to legitimate American policy," said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). As recently as July, he noted, intelligence officials said in congressional testimony that they had a high degree of confidence that Iran was intent on developing the world's deadliest weapon. "We need to update our conclusions, but this is a substantial change," he said in an interview. [...]

Why is good intelligence on the worst regimes so hard to come by these days?

Spook86 has posted an illuminating discussion at In From the Cold about the limitations of sources and methods used for intelligence gathering in this era:

The growing imbroligo over the Iran NIE is raising new concerns about the intelligence sources and methods used to produce the document--and its controversial judgments. [...]

While there are legitimate concerns about the personal biases and suspected political agendas of the study's primary authors, Americans should also worry about the quality and reliability of the information used in formulating the assessment. [...]

As with any National Intelligence Estimate, we assume the new Iran assessment makes use of the full array of intel sources and methods--SIGINT, HUMINT, IMINT, MASINT and even open-source reporting. But we also recognize that information from these same sources led to a dramatically different conclusion just two years ago. Moreover, the volume and quality of collection from these platforms has not improved dramatically--as far as we can tell. Technological refinements in our intel systems are offset by the adversary's own advances, and their attempts at denial and deception.

Consider the example of signals intelligence, or SIGINT. The National Security Agency (NSA) remains the preeminent SIGINT organization in the world. But agency veterans will tell you that the SIGINT environment has become increasingly challenging, thanks to the proliferation of fiber-optic technology and low-cost encryption devices. Phone calls and other communications that once bounced between relay towers are now routed over fiber-optic cable; intercepting them means tapping into the line, a difficult proposition in places like Iran, Syria or North Korea.

The problem is further compounded by wide availability of personal encryption devices. Complex cyphers that were once the exclusive property of governments and intelligence services can now be downloaded from the internet. Increased use of these systems and devices slows the decrypt of adversary communication--and the flow of information to decision-makers.

What about cell phones, you ask? They operate on a tower-based line-of-sight system. True, but intercepting those transmissions (usually) means getting inside hostile territory, further complicating the collection task.

And SIGINT isn't the only intel discipline facing such challenges. In the internet era, there are scores of websites that offer information on the orbits and potential collection "windows" for spy satellites. Today, an effective satellite warning program is just a few keystrokes away--and there's little we can do about it.

HUMINT? The Robb-Silberman Commission Report (released in 2005) deplored the state of our HUMINT capabilities, noting the meager haul on Saddam's WMD programs in the run-up to the war, and the wholesale lack of reporting on Iraqi leadership intentions. Similar problems are said to exist with the Iranian "target," which presents similar challenges. Clearly, there have been no major "breakthroughs" in traditional collection methods over the past two years. [..]

Read more for the former spook's discussion of the intelligence used for the latest NIE report on Iran.

Aw, John Bolton takes Thomas Fingar's ouija board away from him. And unnamed officials scamble to explain away NIE problems

First I'll turn to John Bolton's discussion for today's Washington Post:

[...] Consider these flaws in the NIE's "key judgments," which were made public even though approximately 140 pages of analysis, and reams of underlying intelligence, remain classified.

First, the headline finding -- that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 -- is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran's nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between "military" and "civilian" programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran's "civilian" program that posed the main risk of a nuclear "breakout."

The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs' motives and objectives. The current NIE freely admits to having only moderate confidence that the suspension continues and says that there are significant gaps in our intelligence and that our analysts dissent from their initial judgment on suspension. This alone should give us considerable pause.

Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of "intelligence."

Third, the risks of disinformation by Iran are real. 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. 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. These are hardly hard scientific conclusions. One contrary opinion came from -- of all places -- an unnamed International Atomic Energy Agency official, quoted in the New York Times, saying that "we are more skeptical. We don't buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran." When the IAEA is tougher than our analysts, you can bet the farm that someone is pursuing a policy agenda.

Fourth, the NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the overvaluation of the most recent piece of data. In the bureaucracy, where access to information is a source of rank and prestige, ramming home policy changes with the latest hot tidbit is commonplace, and very deleterious. It is a rare piece of intelligence that is so important it can conclusively or even significantly alter the body of already known information. Yet the bias toward the new appears to have exerted a disproportionate effect on intelligence analysis.

Fifth, many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department, brought into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national intelligence. These officials had relatively benign views of Iran's nuclear intentions five and six years ago; now they are writing those views as if they were received wisdom from on high. In fact, these are precisely the policy biases they had before, recycled as "intelligence judgments." [...]

How can I be sure that emphasis on trying to divine the psychology of the mullacrats reflects Thomas Fingar's stamp in particular? Plow through yesterday's Pundita post to see why, and give special attention to the David Kaplan report, Hey, Let's Play Ball in the 1:00 PM Update to the post. Fingar wants to turn intelligence work into sort of a university, where the opinions from many academic disciplines, such as psychology, are given much weight.

But then maybe I shouldn't say I'm sure. How about, "I have high confidence?"

Meanwhile, various unnamed "senior intelligence and government officials" have passed along to The New York Times their explanations for the NIE key judgments:

American intelligence agencies reversed their view about the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program after they obtained notes last summer from the deliberations of Iranian military officials involved in the weapons development program, senior intelligence and government officials said on Wednesday.

The notes included conversations and deliberations in which some of the military officials complained bitterly about what they termed a decision by their superiors in late 2003 to shut down a complex engineering effort to design nuclear weapons, including a warhead that could fit atop Iranian missiles.

The newly obtained notes contradicted public assertions by American intelligence officials that the nuclear weapons design effort was still active. But according to the intelligence and government officials, they give no hint of why Iran’s leadership decided to halt the covert effort.

Ultimately, the notes and deliberations were corroborated by other intelligence, the officials said, including intercepted conversations among Iranian officials, collected in recent months. It is not clear if those conversations involved the same officers and others whose deliberations were recounted in the notes, or if they included their superiors.

The American officials who described the highly classified operation, which led to one of the biggest reversals in the history of American nuclear intelligence, declined to describe how the notes were obtained.

But they said that the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies had organized a “red team” to determine if the new information might have been part of an elaborate disinformation campaign mounted by Iran to derail the effort to impose sanctions against it.

In the end, American intelligence officials rejected that theory, though they were challenged to defend that conclusion in a meeting two weeks ago in the White House situation room, in which the notes and deliberations were described to the most senior members of President Bush’s national security team, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

“It was a pretty vivid exchange,” said one participant in the conversation.

The officials said they were confident that the notes confirmed the existence, up to 2003, of a weapons programs that American officials first learned about from a laptop computer, belonging to an Iranian engineer, that came into the hands of the C.I.A. in 2004. [...]

I'll bet the exchange was vivid. The more details the unnamed officials supply, the more nervous I become. They're talking about notes and laptops, not about investigative work to determine the status of Iran's nuke weapons program.

Their reply should not be, 'We can't get such data so we have to assume notes and computer files are right.'

YIKES! Thomas Fingar one of three main authors of NIE report on Iran's nuke program! Start building a bomb shelter!

Just this past February I strenuously warned readers about Thomas Fingar's very limited capacity -- okay, zero capacity -- as a threat assessment analyst. And here he turns up as one of authors -- main authors, no less -- of the National Intelligence Estimate report that exonerates Iran from involvement in a nuclear weapons program.

The Wall Street Journal editorial that mentions this terrifying fact notes that Fingar and the other two main authors of the NIE are anti-Bush. That's neither here nor there. Read the Pundita post on Fingar to understand why he is not cut out for intelligence analysis -- not if it has to do with threat assessment.

And here he was given the task of assessing whether Iran was still a 'near' threat. In light of Fingar's involvement with the NIE analysis, it's doubly troubling that Israel's defense establishment didn't accept the main conclusion of the NIE:

"It's apparently true that in 2003 Iran stopped pursuing its military nuclear program for a time. But in our opinion, since then it has apparently continued that program," Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Army Radio. [...]

Barak uses careful language but it's apparent to me that I'm moving to a cave in the Himalayas unless the intelligence that contributed to the NIE is reconsidered without Fingar's input. Here is the Wall Street Journal editorial.

I hope that Rupert Murdoch will forgive me for publishing the entire thing, given that WSJ is still a subscription site. But this is in the interests of national survival -- and of how many nations, I don't want to consider at this time in the morning:

'High Confidence' Games
December 5, 2007; Page A24

In his press conference yesterday, President Bush went out of his way to praise the "good work" of the intelligence community, whose latest National Intelligence Estimate claims the mullahs of Iran abandoned their nuclear weapons program in 2003. "This is heartening news," Mr. Bush said. "To me, it's a way for us to rally our partners."

We wish we could be as sanguine, both about the quality of U.S. intelligence and its implications for U.S. diplomacy. For years, senior Administration officials, including Condoleezza Rice, have stressed to us how little the government knows about what goes on inside Iran. In 2005, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report underscored that "Across the board, the Intelligence Community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors." And as our liberal friends used to remind us, you can never trust the CIA. (Only later did they figure out the agency was usually on their side.)

As recently as 2005, the consensus estimate of our spooks was that "Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons" and do so "despite its international obligations and international pressure." This was a "high confidence" judgment. The new NIE says Iran abandoned its nuclear program in 2003 "in response to increasing international scrutiny." This too is a "high confidence" conclusion. One of the two conclusions is wrong, and casts considerable doubt on the entire process by which these "estimates" -- the consensus of 16 intelligence bureaucracies -- are conducted and accorded gospel status.

Our own "confidence" is not heightened by the fact that the NIE's main authors include three former State Department officials with previous reputations as "hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials," according to an intelligence source. They are Tom Fingar, formerly of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Vann Van Diepen, the National Intelligence Officer for WMD; and Kenneth Brill, the former
U.S. Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

For a flavor of their political outlook, former Bush Administration anti-proliferation official John Bolton recalls in his recent memoir that then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage "described Brill's efforts in Vienna, or lack thereof, as 'bull -- .'"

Mr. Brill was "retired" from the State Department by Colin Powell before being rehired, over considerable internal and public protest, as head of the National Counter-Proliferation Center by then-National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.

No less odd is the NIE's conclusion that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to "international pressure." The only serious pressure we can recall from that year was the U.S. invasion of Iraq. At the time, an Iranian opposition group revealed the existence of a covert Iranian nuclear program to mill and enrich uranium and produce heavy water at sites previously unknown to U.S. intelligence. The Bush Administration's response was to punt the issue to the Europeans, who in 2003 were just beginning years of fruitless diplomacy before the matter was turned over to the U.N. Security Council.

Mr. Bush implied yesterday that the new estimate was based on "some new information," which remains classified. We can only hope so. But the indications that the Bush Administration was surprised by this NIE, and the way it scrambled yesterday to contain its diplomatic consequences, hardly inspire even "medium confidence" that our spooks have achieved some epic breakthrough. The truth could as easily be that the Administration in its waning days has simply lost any control of its bureaucracy -- not that it ever had much.

In any case, the real issue is not Iran's nuclear weapons program, but its nuclear program, period. As the NIE acknowledges, Iran continues to enrich uranium on an industrial scale -- that is, build the capability to make the fuel for a potential bomb. And it is doing so in open defiance of binding U.N. resolutions. No less a source than the IAEA recently confirmed that Iran already has blueprints to cast uranium in the shape of an atomic bomb core.

The U.S. also knows that Iran has extensive technical information on how to fit a warhead atop a ballistic missile. And there is considerable evidence that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps has been developing the detonation devices needed to set off a nuclear explosion at the weapons testing facility in Parchin. Even assuming that Iran is not seeking a bomb right now, it is hardly reassuring that they are developing technologies that could bring them within a screw's twist of one.

Mr. Bush's efforts to further sanction Iran at the U.N. were stalled even before the NIE's release. Those efforts will now be on life support. The NIE's judgments also complicate Treasury's efforts to persuade foreign companies to divest from Iran. Why should they lose out on lucrative business opportunities when even U.S. intelligence absolves the Iranians of evil intent? Calls by Democrats and their media friends to negotiate with Tehran "without preconditions" will surely grow louder.

The larger worry here is how little we seem to have learned from our previous intelligence failures. Over the course of a decade, our intelligence services badly underestimated Saddam's nuclear ambitions, then overestimated them. Now they have done a 180-degree turn on Iran, and in such a way that will contribute to a complacency that will make it easier for Iran to build a weapon. Our intelligence services are supposed to inform the policies of elected officials, but increasingly their judgments seem to be setting policy. This is dangerous.

1:00 PM ET Update
Partly in response to a reader suggestion I am tacking on the entire February 3, 2007 Pundita post about Thomas Fingar and the grim implications of his rise to great power in the US intelligence community. This will make the post very long, and I hope it doesn't overshadow my earlier post today about the upcoming Africa-EU summit -- an important meeting on many counts.

But the other part of my reason is that I came across a quote in The Washington Post about the NIE that Zenpundit scooped up from Arms Control Wonk for his mini-roundup of opinion on the NIE:

“Dafna Linzer reports in the Washington Post that a crucial bit of information was an intercepted communication by a senior Iranian military official “complaining that the nuclear program had been shuttered.” The intercept - which Linzer notes was one of 1,000 footnotes in a 150 page document - was the final piece in the puzzle, and Linzer reports that the intercepts were briefed to the Bush Administration “beginning in July.” So, that timing would be consistent with Mike McConnell’s reference to “new information collected in late spring that caused a reconsideration of some elements of the assessment.”

See the ACW post or Zenpudit for links to the Washington Post article and McConnell's reference.

The Linzer note doesn't take on full import until you know that Fingar had a heavy hand in the NIE analysis of Iran's nuclear weapons program. If that one intercept was a "final" piece of the puzzle -- has no one in our intelligence agencies heard of counterintelligence? And did no one consider that the Iranians are well aware of SIGINT?

Okay, enough sackcloth and ashes; here is the February Pundita post:

February 3, 2007
Thomas Fingar and the scary new day in US intelligence work

"Happily, the severity of specific threats to our nation, our values, our system of government, and our way of life are low and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future." (1)
-- Thomas Fingar, while Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence And Research, speaking before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing on current and projected national security threats to U.S., February 2001

“We get it. We [in the intelligence community] realize we have got to rebuild confidence [in intelligence work].”
-- Thomas Fingar, Chairman, National Intelligence Council and deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, January 2007

Thomas Fingar is no more suited for US threat analysis work than Miss Beazley. So if Pundita had a really dark sense of humor, she might quip that the DNI was created solely as a desperation measure to dislodge Fingar from State because the man couldn't be fired.

I can dream on but even with the will to fire him, it would have been virtually impossible to do so. Why? Because for decades Fingar's China analyses were very useful to US administrations that wanted to normalize relations with China and downplay intelligence suggesting that China posed any kind of security threat to the US. But about 15 years ago Mr Fingar's intelligence analysis work at the US Department of State began to encompass all countries. I don't believe it's coincidental that during those years State developed a terminal case of Clientitis and was rendered as a blind as a bat.

Yet State's ineptness at assessing security threats and significant political changes in every region on the globe has been held up as a model of effective intelligence analysis. State's INR (Intelligence and Research) bureau has been exempted from DNI (Director of National Intelligence Office) oversight and is deemed the winner in intelligence analysis when compared to the CIA. The comparison is akin to asking whether a tricycle or pogo stick is the fastest means of cross-country transportation.

If that's not enough to give you nightmares, today Mr Fingar is the "keeper of the crown jewels," as one writer termed it. John Negroponte plucked Fingar from State to be the Number Two at DNI:

"The intelligence reorganization legislation gives Fingar responsibility and authority for setting standards and coordinating objectives for U.S. intelligence efforts, although it leaves the analysts at their respective agencies with the goal of allowing them to present independent views. Fingar will also have what a senior intelligence official involved in the process described to reporters yesterday as "governance" over the President's Daily Brief, the summary of most important items given to Bush each day."(2)

Now what is Mr Fingar's idea of "standards" for the US intelligence community? Well, "objectivity" -- meaning intelligence that is not shaped to political ends -- is the buzzword in the new day. How does Fingar plan on bringing in more objectivity? We can glean clues from noting his scholarly background -- he's a China scholar -- and studying a program called SHARP. Watch carefully; don't blink:

Hey, Let's Play Ball
The insular world of intelligence reaches out for a few new ideas
By David E. Kaplan, U.S. News & World Report, October 29, 2006

At a modest office building just outside Boston last July, senior U.S. intelligence officials quietly set in motion an unusual experiment. For four weeks, a handpicked group of 20 outside experts brainstormed, argued, and chewed the fat with 20 top analysts from the CIA and eight other intelligence agencies. Their mission: to understand why people join terrorist organizations and other groups engaged in antisocial activity. The issues went to some of the most basic questions confronting Washington's intelligence mandarins: What's driving the spread of extremism around the globe, and how can it be stopped?

Dubbed the Summer Hard Problems workshop, or SHARP, the program is modeled after a highly successful project by the code-breaking National Security Agency, which for years has brought in top mathematicians to tackle cutting-edge issues in encryption. SHARP similarly threw together leading specialists, but from the social sciences: experts in anthropology, social psychology, insurgency, and Islamic thought, among other fields. But for all the esoteric talk about jihadism, group dynamics, and social networks, the SHARP participants had a second mission: to change the way U.S. intelligence agencies do their job, by opening the notoriously insular espionage community to the rest of the world.

SHARP is the brainchild of the 18-month-old Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is charged with overseeing and reforming the nation's sprawling $44 billion intelligence community. Key to that effort is an organized attack on the kind of "groupthink" that resulted in U.S. intelligence agencies getting dead wrong, among other things, nearly every facet of Saddam Hussein's banned weapons programs. Reformers at the DNI and other agencies hope to answer critics who call the nation's spy agencies obsolete -- a bunch of big bureaucracies so addicted to secrecy that they can't cope in the Internet age. "This culture of secrecy in an information-rich world is totally anachronistic," says Phil Williams, an international security expert at the University of Pittsburgh who often consults with intelligence agencies.

Wiki-spies?
To help change the way the nation's espionage agencies do business, senior DNI officials are pushing an effort unlike any seen since the height of the Vietnam War, nearly 40 years ago. The SHARP workshop is but one of a wide array of outreach projects now underway, involving millions of dollars in contracts, fellowships, conferences -- even wikis and blogs -- directed at scholars and other outside experts. DNI officials are mindful of the past, when Vietnam War-era funding drew loud protests on campus, amid charges that the CIA had skewed academic research on Asian studies and secretly backed groups like the National Student Association.

The new effort has also begun to stir controversy, but for those who respond, the rewards can be considerable, including contracts, lucrative stipends, and a chance to influence analysis at the CIA and 15 other intelligence agencies. The scope is broad: A classified DNI survey this year yielded 240 pages of outreach efforts involving virtually every U.S. agency that generates intelligence information. Those interested (and invited) enter a world of exclusive conferences, workshops, studies, sabbaticals, and scholarships. Participants include not only academics but experts at think tanks, international groups, foundations, and businesses, as well as medical doctors and scientists.

"The intelligence community will never be big enough, will never have enough analysts," says Thomas Fingar, the DNI's chief of analysis. "There's an absolute need to go outside."

Fingar's office is spearheading the charge. The DNI's new plan, "A Strategy for Analytic Outreach," reviewed by U.S. News, calls for a major effort at building "communities of interest" with outside experts and revamping security regulations to allow far greater contact with the outside world. Fingar hopes to replicate what he accomplished as head of the State Department's small but respected intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. [...]

There you have it; Mr Fingar wants to do for all US intelligence agencies under DNI's oversight what he did for State. And he wants to inject into the intelligence community a high degree of dependence on scholarly opinion. The latter is another way of saying that Fingar wants more emphasis on forensic-style proofs in intelligence work, which of course is a contradiction in terms.

Set aside troubling questions about a much closer relationship between academia and intelligence work that Fingar's approach suggests, and which the U.S. News report examines in some depth. What are the biggest flaws in the SHARP approach to intelligence work?

Firstly, anyone who has seen the TV FBI drama "Numb3rs" knows that there is a very direct, very close relationship between mathematics and threat analysis. So the NSA mathematics project, on which SHARP is modeled, makes good sense. But where is the direct connection between anthropology and threat analysis? Between social psychology and threat analysis?

Secondly, even if you could develop a sound rationale for the All is Everything school of intelligence analysis, what the hell kind of data filters would you require, in order to make all the cross-discipline analysis useful for timely threat assessment?

You would end up with the same problem that NSA data analysts always face, which is Garbage In, Garbage Out. You would end up with zillions of teeny tiny data mosaics that may or may not add up to anything useful for threat assessment.

Mr Fingar is not stupid. He understands what I'm saying. So what is his real goal? He wants to purify US intelligence work of the dross of threat assessment.

That is another way of describing State's approach to intelligence work since being infected by the Clientitis bug. Over the decades, the mission of the US foreign office devolved from supporting US strategic objectives to "coordinating with the rest of the world," as one writer put it.

Now, after bringing Mr Finger to DNI, John Negroponte is headed back to State; it does not seem likely that Fingar will follow him back there. Keeping Fingar away from State would be a good thing for State, but keeping him at DNI would be very bad news for US intelligence work. Yet there is nothing you and I can do about the situation; Mr Fingar is burrowed too deep in the intelligence community to hope that anything but retirement will dislodge him.

So, taking a page from the cross-discipline approach, Pundita will attempt an assessment of the situation by quoting Tom Colicchio, head judge for the Top Chef competition. When a semi-finalist complained about the behavior of another semi-finalist in the kitchen throughout the weeks of competition, Colicchio replied:

"We're not judging your behavior in the kitchen. We're judging your food. I really don't care what happens in there, to tell you the truth."

By the same token, nobody outside the spy community really cares how spies make good evaluations. We just want the US government to become skilled at threat analysis. The only thing that will rebuild our confidence is if the intelligence community gets threat analysis right on the big stuff.

1) Fingar 2001 testimony

2) The Washington Post