Even as the UN’s nuclear watchdog said in a new report on Friday that Iran has accelerated its uranium enrichment program, US intelligence analysts continue to believe there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb.
Recent assessments by US spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former US officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate and that it remains the consensus view of the US’ 16 intelligence agencies.
At the center of the debate is the murky question of the ultimate ambitions of the leaders in Tehran. There is no dispute among US, Israeli and European intelligence officials that Iran has been enriching nuclear fuel and developing some necessary infrastructure to become a nuclear power.
However, the CIA and other intelligence agencies believe that Iran has yet to decide whether to resume a parallel program to design a nuclear warhead — a program they believe was essentially halted in 2003 and which would be necessary for Iran to build a nuclear bomb. Iranian officials maintain that their nuclear program is for civilian purposes.
In a US Senate testimony on Jan. 31, James Clapper Jr, the director of US national intelligence, stated explicitly that US officials believe that Iran is preserving its options for a nuclear weapon, but said there was no evidence it had made a decision on making a concerted push to build a weapon. CIA Director David Petraeus concurred with that view at the same hearing. Other senior US officials, including US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, have made similar statements in recent television appearances.
Critics of the US assessment in Jerusalem and some European capitals point out that Iran has made great strides in the most difficult step toward building a nuclear weapon, enriching uranium. That has also been the conclusion of a series of reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspectors, who on Friday presented new evidence that the Iranians have begun enriching uranium in an underground facility near the city of Qom.
Once Iran takes further steps to actually enrich weapons-grade fuel — a feat the US does not believe Iran has yet accomplished — the critics believe it would be relatively easy for Iran to engineer a warhead and then have a bomb in short order.
Yet some intelligence officials and outside analysts believe there is another possible explanation for Iran’s enrichment activity, besides a headlong race to build a bomb as quickly as possible. They say that Iran could be seeking to enhance its influence in the region by creating what some analysts call “strategic ambiguity.”
Rather than building a bomb now, Iran may want to increase its power by sowing doubt among other nations about its nuclear ambitions. Some point to the examples of Pakistan and India, both of which had clandestine nuclear weapons programs for decades before they actually decided to build bombs and test their weapons in 1998.
To be sure, US intelligence analysts acknowledge that understanding the intentions of Iran’s leadership is extremely difficult and that their assessments are based on limited information. David Kay, who was head of the CIA’s team that searched for Iraq’s weapons programs after the US invasion, was cautious about the quality of the intelligence underlying the current US assessment.
“They don’t have evidence that Iran has made a decision to build a bomb and that reflects a real gap in the intelligence,” Kay said. “It’s true the evidence hasn’t changed very much” since 2007, he added, “but that reflects a lack of access and a lack of intelligence as much as anything.”
Divining the intentions of closed societies is one of the most difficult tasks for US intelligence analysts and the CIA for decades has had little success penetrating regimes, like Iran and North Korea, to learn how their leaders make decisions.
Amid the ugly aftermath of the botched Iraq intelligence assessments, US spy agencies in 2006 put new analytical procedures in place to avoid repeating the failures. Analysts now have access to raw information about the sources behind intelligence reports, to help better determine the credibility of the sources and prevent another episode like the one in which the CIA based much of its conclusions about Iraq’s purported biological weapons on an Iraqi exile who turned out to be lying. Analysts are also required to include in their reports more information about the chain of logic that led them to their conclusions and judgements that differ from the prevailing conclusions are featured prominently in classified reports, rather than buried in footnotes.
When an unclassified summary of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program was made public, stating that Iran had abandoned work on a nuclear bomb, it stunned then-US president George W. Bush’s administration and the world. It represented a sharp reversal from the intelligence community’s 2005 estimate on Iran and drew criticism of the CIA from European and Israeli officials, as well as conservative pundits. They argued that it was part of a larger effort by the CIA to prevent US military action against Iran.
The report was so controversial that many outside analysts expected that the intelligence community would be forced to revise and repudiate the estimate after new evidence emerged about Iran’s program, notably from the UN’s inspectors. Yet analysts now say that while there has been mounting evidence of Iranian work on enrichment facilities, there has been far less clear evidence of an ongoing weapons program.
Still, Iran’s enrichment activities have raised suspicions, even among skeptics.
“What has been driving the discussion has been the enrichment activity,” a former intelligence official said. “That’s made everybody nervous. So the Iranians continue to contribute to the suspicions about what they are trying to do.”
Iran’s efforts to hide its nuclear facilities and to deceive the West about its activities have also intensified doubts. However, some US analysts warn that such behavior is not necessarily proof of a weapons program. They say that one mistake the CIA made before the war in Iraq was to assume that because then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein resisted weapons inspections — acting as if he were hiding something — it meant that he had a weapons program.
As Kay explained: “The amount of evidence that you were willing to go with in 2002 is not the same evidence you are willing to accept today.”
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
LANDSLIDES POSSIBLE: The agency advised the public to avoid visiting mountainous regions due to more expected aftershocks and rainfall from a series of weather fronts A series of earthquakes over the past few days were likely aftershocks of the April 3 earthquake in Hualien County, with further aftershocks to be expected for up to a year, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Based on the nation’s experience after the quake on Sept. 21, 1999, more aftershocks are possible over the next six months to a year, the agency said. A total of 103 earthquakes of magnitude 4 on the local magnitude scale or higher hit Hualien County from 5:08pm on Monday to 10:27am yesterday, with 27 of them exceeding magnitude 5. They included two, of magnitude
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique