Unintelligence on Iranian Nukes
RUBIN, MICHAEL
Unintelligence on Iranian Nukes Appalling political gamesmanship at the CIA. BY MICHAEL RUBIN During his February 5 testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Director of National...
...The 2007 NIE was built on geopolitical assumptions as much as any hard intelligence, and historians will deem it important not because it was accurate, but because it made utterly clear the collapse of the intelligence community...
...They thought it was funny...
...national security is grave...
...They won’t reelect this man.’ ” The intelligence leadership did not refer the matter to the judiciary, unlike the leak concerning Valerie Plame...
...The paper was retracting three stories which alleged a connection between Chalabi and an Iraqi source code-named Curveball, whose information later turned out to be bogus...
...Hundreds of offi cials were involved and thousands of documents were drawn upon in this report . . . making it impossible for any official to overly sway it,” the Wall Street Journal was told...
...In the months before the war, U.S...
...They continued: “Those offi cials now say that there was no such established relationship...
...W. Patrick Lang, a former Defense Intelligence Agency offi cial, told the American Prospect in 2005 that his intelligence community colleagues used leaks to try to infl uence the 2004 presidential election...
...Often, diplomats, military offi - cials, and Pentagon civilians would learn of such deals only after other Iraqis had been appointed or elected to such offi ces...
...Of course they were leaking...
...The NIE was no accident, and McConnell’s pirouette does more than confi rm the intelligence community’s sloppiness...
...The editors explained that their correspondent had “attribute[d] that account to American intelligence offi cials who spoke on condition of anonymity...
...In order to shield themselves from accountability over flawed intelligence or to bolster their Iraqi proxies at the expense of competitors, CIA offi cials provided a steady stream of leaks to favored correspondents like the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh or McClatchy’s Warren Strobel...
...They’d say things like, ‘This last thing that came out, surely people will pay attention to that...
...men surely paid the price as spurned Iraqis responded to what they saw as betrayal...
...The result is a situation in which journalists who might otherwise double-check sources, take a single intelligence analyst at his word, even if he is using them to fi ght a policy battle...
...In other words, intelligence offi cials lied to a reporter to achieve a policy aim...
...But the fact is, the problem was the opposite: an intelligence community driven by the desire to conduct policy...
...Wayne White, a former analyst in State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, suggested it was “absolutely disgusting” that anyone could impugn the professionalism of lead author (and his former colleague) Thomas Fingar...
...This was never more clear than in a July 17, 2004, New York Times correction...
...Personnel are policy...
...In the wake of the Iraq war, many Democrats accused the Bush administration of politicizing intelligence...
...Putting aside the ridiculousness of the CIA belief that it could invite delegates anonymously to a public conference, more troubling was the principle...
...Not only did McConnell testify that the Islamic Republic was working to master the enrichment of uranium—“ the most diffi cult challenge in nuclear production”—but he also acknowledged that, “because of intelligence gaps,” the U.S...
...policy should be than the policymakers for whom they draft reports...
...Once the son of a Kurdish leader remarked how ridiculous StateDefense bickering was when the CIA had implemented and funded a decision on the policy issue months before without any coordination whatsoever...
...Many of the agency’s senior analysts are arrogant after years behind their computers, believing they know far better what U.S...
...The reverberations of Langley’s policy games haunted reconstruction...
...McConnell’s testimony undercut the idea that the intelligence agencies deserve a reputation for either professionalism or integrity...
...While the crudeness of its assault on the president’s Iran policy makes it the best example of the intelligence community’s agenda politics, it is far from the only one...
...This is disingenuous...
...In our judgment, only an Iranian political decision to abandon a nuclear weapons objective would plausibly keep Iran from eventually producing nuclear weapons—and such a decision is inherently reversible...
...BY MICHAEL RUBIN During his February 5 testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell backpedaled from the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) and its claim that, “in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program...
...We assess with high confi dence that Iran has the scientifi c, technical, and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons,” he testified...
...With the NIE giving Iran what President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared its “greatest victory during the past 100 years,” the consequence for U.S...
...CIA offi cials would promise governorships to Iraqis without any coordination...
...Its representative announced that not only would Langley be inviting its own candidates outside the interagency consensus, but the CIA would not be sharing the names or backgrounds of its invitees...
...Rather than simply present the biographies of the various Iraqi fi gures, the CIA sought to be a privileged policy player...
...Such behavior is not limited to debates over policies impacting countries thousands of miles away...
...The recourse of the disgruntled, bored, or politicized analyst is the leak—the bread and butter of any national security correspondent...
...government officials had assessed thousands of Iraqi political activists and technocrats in order to prepare to fill the Iraqi political vacuum...
...A tolerance for political gamesmanship has besmirched the entire community...
...Journalists who fulfill the leakers’ objectives win ever more tantalizing scoops...
...My initiation into CIA policy plays came less than a week after Baghdad’s fall to coalition forces in April 2003...
...Representatives from State, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council were meeting to vet invitations for the Nasiriya Conference where Iraqis would discuss post-liberation governance...
...They told me about it at the time...
...serviceMichael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was an Iran country director at the Pentagon between September 2002 and April 2004...
...Half of Washington’s battles involve who writes the fi rst and last drafts of any paper or memo...
...those who maintain professional integrity and question the agenda behind any leak, fi nd their access cut...
...It was not uncommon, for example, to see false or exaggerated intelligence attributed to the Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi when it had actually come from Kurdish offi - cials...
...Some U.S...
...government could not be certain that the Iranian government had fully suspended its covert nuclear programs...
...It was a false charge, but good politics...
...Iraq again provides a case study...
...To deflect criticism of the NIE, intelligence offi cials reached out to reporters...
...Such leaks ranged from allegations that the Pentagon’s Offi ce of Special Plans—a policy shop—was a rogue intelligence operation to misattributions of the provenance of prewar intelligence...
...Far from limiting its work to intelligence, the CIA leadership was unabashedly involving itself in major policy initiatives...
Vol. 13 • February 2008 • No. 23
