JOHNSON: Iran a hard target to penetrate

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By Andy Johnson

OPINION/ANALYSIS:

It's time to hit the pause button and cease the attacks on the intelligence community over its 2007 judgment that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program. The rush to declare the community guilty of sins ranging from incompetence to perfidy may serve the political purposes of some, but it only further weakens an already bruised relationship between the intelligence and policy communities.

Shock waves reverberated through the Washington policy establishment two years ago when the National Intelligence Council took the unprecedented step of publicly releasing its judgment that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003 owing to increasing international scrutiny.

The 2007 judgment was a reversal of the intelligence community's equally confident 2005 assessment that Iran was determined to develop nuclear weapons despite international pressure. Details supporting the surprise switch were absent from the public version of the estimate, reserved only for senior policymakers in the administration and overseers on the congressional intelligence committees.

Doubters immediately challenged the finding, citing Tehran's history of drive and deception in pursuit of nuclear-club membership. Allied nations reportedly took issue with the notion that Iran had halted its program and claimed to have their own intelligence to the contrary. Reaction from critics inside the Beltway and among pundits was bare-knuckled, with some questioning the competency and objectivity of the intelligence community.

After all, wasn't this the same community that wrongly claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was aggressively trying to build a nuclear weapon prior to the war? Was the community now seeking to correct the assumption-based bias of its 2002 Iraq weapons of mass destruction analysis by taking a more cautious, but equally as flawed, approach on Iran's nuclear intentions?

And why had the community publicly released its 2007 judgments in the first place if not to counter and embarrass Bush administration officials for their increasingly bellicose statements toward Iran?

With the public disclosure in September that Iran was constructing a secret uranium-enrichment facility at a military base near Qom, and further, that U.S. intelligence had been tracking the facility for some time, the credibility of the judgment was in tatters in the eyes of many. Amid recent charges that the 2007 estimate had been "willfully misleading" and "politically skewed," unnamed senior officials have been quoted conceding the need to rethink the premise that Iran had halted its weapons program in late 2003.

The stated goal of the National Intelligence Council is to provide "the best, unvarnished, and unbiased information - regardless of whether analytic judgments conform to U.S. policy." The National Intelligence Estimates it produces are vetted throughout the intelligence community and reviewed by a board chaired by the director of national intelligence and the heads of intelligence agencies before being issued. The conspiratorial notion that the entire community from then-national intelligence Director Mike McConnell down to senior intelligence analysts had willfully misled policymakers in 2007 is hard to swallow.

The problem with the 2007 Iran estimate is not as much what it said but what it didn't say. Or more to the point, was it wise in the first place to release the report publicly if details supporting the reversal in judgment could not be divulged? The community invited a controversy it knew it couldn't quell by issuing the truncated, unclassified product. The decision may have served the legitimate purpose of helping inform the public debate on Iran, but it also spotlighted both the messenger and the message. When information began leaking that allied intelligence services and even the International Atomic Energy Agency thought the Iran nuclear program to be robust and ongoing, the community was isolated and unable to defend itself.

Is it possible that the community was in possession of conclusive information that other intelligence services either did not possess or had discounted? Short answer: Yes, it is possible. But doesn't the Qom facility pull the rug out from underneath the community's judgment? Not necessarily.

The community defines Iran's nuclear weapons program - relegated to a footnote in the 2007 estimate - to include nuclear-warhead design and weaponization in addition to covert uranium-enrichment efforts. The Qom facility may turn out to be a smoking gun that Iran was or is aggressively pursuing an undeclared capability to enrich uranium for weapons use, but is there a plausible reason why Iran would seek to produce this fissile material independent of a concurrent warhead-design effort to build an operational bomb? Conventional thinking would say no. But conventional thinking also assumed that Saddam Hussein retained Iraq's vast chemical- and biological-weapons stockpiles before the war when in fact he kept their destruction secret from the world.

The intelligence community should commission a new review of Iran's nuclear intentions and capabilities. To do so would not signal a disavowal of the 2007 findings but represent an acknowledgment that analytic snapshots must be continuously challenged and, if necessary, recast in light of new information.

Iran is a hard target, difficult to penetrate. Casting misguided stones at the intelligence officials dedicated to deciphering the vexing question of Iran's nuclear program only compounds the challenge and threatens to politicize the unbiased intelligence that the president and Congress needs.

• Andy Johnson is the national-security director at Third Way, a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank. He is the former staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and has 26 years' experience in the national-security sector.