Intelligence officials downplay Iran report

The contested U.S. intelligence conclusion that Iran stopped work on its nuclear weapons program in 2003 is now being downplayed by the same officials who wrote the much-publicized report in November.

“Why would the Iranians be willing to pay the international tariff they appear to be willing to pay for what they are doing now if they did not have, at a minimum, at a minimum, they did not have a desire to keep the option open to develop a nuclear weapon and perhaps even more so that they have already decided to do that?” CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said Sunday.

The four-star Air Force general said it was “hard for me to explain” the intelligence community’s conclusion that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and probably had not restarted it as of the middle of last year.

And his boss, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, said the report was so quickly declassified and poorly focused that it confused people.

“If I had it to do over again, I would be very specific in how I described what was canceled and what continued,” Mr. McConnell told a Senate panel of his community’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran.

Most news coverage of the assessment focused on the first sentence in its summary of key judgments: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.”

But, the officials now say that sentence referred only to work on a nuclear warhead.

Mr. McConnell and Mr. Hayden now are emphasizing that Iran continues work on the enrichment of uranium, which could be used to make a weapon, and on ballistic missiles, which could be used to deliver a nuclear warhead. The publicly released NIE described Iran’s highly public enrichment efforts but did not mention the missile program, which already gives Iran the capacity to strike targets in Europe.

“The other aspects of the Iranian nuclear effort, beyond the weaponization, the development of fissile material, the development of delivery systems, all continue apace,” Mr. Hayden said this week.

Last month, Mr. Hayden agreed with Mr. McConnell’s characterization.

Mr. Hayden told editors and reporters of The Washington Times on March 11 that at the time the NIE was released in December he insisted there are three key elements of a nuclear weapons program: fissile material, weaponization and delivery systems.

“What came out in a lot of coverage was ‘Iran stops nuclear program,’ ” Mr. Hayden said. “The only thing we claimed had been halted in ‘03 was the weaponization. The development of fissile material, and the development of delivery systems continued. And one can make the case the development of delivery systems make no sense with just conventional warheads on top of them.”

The declassified NIE key judgments, however, made no mention of delivery systems and focused extensively on the halted program.

Steven Aftergood, an intelligence expert at the Federation of American Scientists, said the shift in tone from the intelligence chieftains has created some uncertainty about Iran’s program.

“There have been mixed signals coming from senior intelligence officials regarding Iran,” Mr. Aftergood said. “But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It helps to remind us that intelligence officials are not omniscient, that they can be mistaken, and that sometimes they change their minds.

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