Daniel Gallington
2007-12-12 08:00:00.0
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WASHINGTON -

Let’s see if I have this right: The Intelligence Community issues a “new” National Intelligence Estimate concluding that the Iranians gave up their nuclear weapons program almost five years ago.

Furthermore, the IC now believes that the Iranians are unlikely to produce enough weapons-grade nuclear material to build a nuclear weapon until 2010 to 2015.

Wow, we really dodged a bullet on this one, didn’t we? Not only that, we finally have a Bush administration NIE that the Democrats can agree with; and, it kicks the Iranian nuclear weapon can down the road and well into the next administration.

The only problem with this scenario is the very high likelihood that the NIE is flat wrong, and that the Iranians are still hard at work on building nuclear weapons, and that the likely next act in this drama is for them to “pop one” in the desert.

But how can I — with absolutely no access to the information behind the NIE — be so sure about this? Well — for all you doubters — here are just a few reasons, based only on my years of watching these kinds of kabuki dances:

* First, there definitely are politics involved with the new NIE; however, not the kind that are usually alleged to go with Bush administration NIEs. In this case, it’s probably the “senior professionals” in the IC who have revolted. Why? They’re already anticipating a new administration and want to show that they are tough professionals who are immune from political pressure, blah, blah and blah. The real reason, however, is a lot less noble: They want to get themselves properly positioned for senior jobs in the next administration. But, would they “wimp up” an NIE to do it? You bet they would.

* We don’t have to go back very far to recall Clinton administration rookie Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet’s apologies for getting it 100 percent wrong about the Pakistani and Indian nuclear tests in the 1990s. They completely and totally “deceived” our intelligence collectors. In addition, both the Indians and the Pakistanis had active human “denial” programs about their nuke programs.

* We got it wrong about the North Korean nuclear program, and the North Koreans cheated us blind on the agreement they made with the Clinton administration. And, of course, we got it wrong about the Iraqi nuclear weapons program; it was the other way around, but we got it wrong nevertheless.

*We were/are in a continual state of “technical surprise” about the various Soviet — now Russian — and Chinese nuclear weapon programs, beginning in the late 1940s and continuing to this day.

The basic reason we usually get it wrong on these programs? We are typically deceived by the human intelligence that we are “given” or pay for, and/or we just don’t have the inside sources that we need for reliable assessments.

It’s simple: A covert nuclear weapons program is going to be kept very secret by the country having it. How? Deception, denial, false leads, double agents, manipulation of media, paying off people, killing people — in short, any way it can do it.

One of the things it will most certainly do is to have its agents and stooges tell people that it doesn’t have a program — and, as countries have learned, if they do it long enough, somebody may even believe them!

Like us!

Now — I ask you — Iran has been pursuing a nuclear weapons program for almost 30 years, through Democratic and Republican administrations alike; and now, in 2007, we somehow determine that — in 2003 — it decided not to continue with its program!

How did we learn this? Did Iran bury a time capsule in 2003 that we just dug up somewhere? Did the North Koreans tell us? Or, did someone else who we believe tell us?

However we determined it, don’t bet on it.

Daniel Gallington is a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for policy studies in Arlington.