Sun, Feb 26, 2012 page1

• US agencies see no Iranian move to build atomic bomb

  • NY Times News Service, Washington
  • • 
    • 
    • 

  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.”
• Most Popular

  • 1

    Taiwan places military on high alert

  • 2

    China warships near Taiwan nearly doubles

  • 3

    Flights arranged for Taiwanese stranded in Okinawa

  • 4

    Taiwan in Time: The Collector of historic buildings

  • 5

    Intel needs a core business strategy: Morris Chang