Annals of National Security
Iran and the BombHow real is the nuclear threat?
by Seymour M. Hersh
June 6, 2011 .
There is no conclusive evidence that Iran has tried to build a bomb since 2003.
Iran actively trying to develop nuclear weapons? Members of the Obama Administration often talk as if this were a foregone conclusion, as did their predecessors under George W. Bush. There is a large body of evidence, however, including some of America’s most highly classified intelligence assessments, suggesting that the United States could be in danger of repeating a mistake similar to the one made with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq eight years ago––allowing anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical regime to distort our estimations of the state’s military capacities and intentions. The two most recent National Intelligence Estimates (N.I.E.s) on Iranian nuclear progress, representing the best judgment of the senior officers from all the major American intelligence agencies, have stated that there is no conclusive evidence that Iran has made any effort to build the bomb since 2003.
Despite years of covert operations inside Iran, extensive satellite imagery, and the recruitment of many Iranian intelligence assets, the United States and its allies, including Israel, have been unable to find irrefutable evidence of an ongoing hidden nuclear-weapons program in Iran, according to intelligence and diplomatic officials here and abroad. One American defense consultant told me that as yet there is “no smoking calutron,” although, like many Western government officials, he is convinced that Iran is intent on becoming a nuclear state sometime in the future.
The general anxiety about the Iranian regime is firmly grounded. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly questioned the Holocaust and expressed a desire to see the state of Israel eliminated, and he has defied the 2006 United Nations resolution calling on Iran to suspend its nuclear-enrichment program. Tehran is also active in arming Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Iran is heavily invested in nuclear technology, and has a power plant ready to go on line in the port city of Bushehr, with a second in the planning stage. In the past four years, it has tripled the number of centrifuges in operation at its main enrichment facility at Natanz, which is buried deep underground. On the other hand, the Iranian enrichment program is being monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Natanz and all Iran’s major declared nuclear installations are under extensive video surveillance. I.A.E.A. inspectors have expressed frustration with Iran’s level of coöperation and cited an increase in production of uranium, but they have been unable to find any evidence that enriched uranium has been diverted to an illicit weapons program.
National Intelligence Estimates, whose preparation is the responsibility of the Director of National Intelligence, Lieutenant General James Clapper, of the Air Force, are especially sensitive, because the analysts who prepare them have access to top-secret communications intercepts as well as the testimony of foreign scientists and intelligence officials, among others, who have been enlisted by the C.I.A. and its military counterpart, the Defense Intelligence Agency. In mid-February, Clapper’s office provided the House and Senate intelligence committees with an update to the N.I.E. on the Iranian nuclear-weapons program. The previous assessment, issued in 2007, created consternation and anger inside the Bush Administration and in Congress by concluding, “with high confidence,” that Iran had halted a nascent nuclear-weapons program in 2003. That estimate added, “We do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.” The Bush White House had insisted that a summary of the 2007 N.I.E. be made public––an unprecedented move––but then President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney quickly questioned its conclusions. Peter Hoekstra, a Republican from Michigan who had been chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, characterized the N.I.E. as “a piece of trash.”
from the issuecartoon banke-mail this.The public dispute over the 2007 N.I.E. led to bitter infighting within the Obama Administration and the intelligence community over this year’s N.I.E. update—a discrepancy between the available intelligence and what many in the White House and Congress believed to be true. Much of the debate, which delayed the issuing of the N.I.E. for more than four months, centered on the Defense Intelligence Agency’s astonishing assessment that Iran’s earlier nuclear-weapons research had been targeted at its old regional enemy, Iraq, and not at Israel, the United States, or Western Europe. One retired senior intelligence official told me that the D.I.A. analysts had determined that Iran “does not have an ongoing weapons program, and all of the available intelligence shows that the program, when it did exist, was aimed at Iraq. The Iranians thought Iraq was developing a bomb.” The Iranian nuclear-weapons program evidently came to an end following the American-led invasion of Iraq, in early 2003, and the futile hunt for the Iraqi W.M.D. arsenal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists that Iran, like Libya, halted its nuclear program in 2003 because it feared military action. “The more Iran believes that all options are on the table, the less the chance of confrontation,” Netanyahu told a joint session of Congress last week.
The D.I.A. analysts understood that the 2011 assessment would be politically explosive. “If Iran is not a nuclear threat, then the Israelis have no reason to threaten imminent military action,” the retired senior intelligence official said. “The guys working on this are good analysts, and their bosses are backing them up.”
The internal debate over the Iran assessment was alluded to last fall by W. Patrick Lang, a retired Army intelligence officer who served for years as the ranking D.I.A. analyst on the Middle East and contributed to many N.I.E.s. “Do you all know what an N.I.E. is?” Lang said to an audience at the University of Virginia. “The National Intelligence Estimate is the ground truth of the American government hammered out on the anvil of the Lord. . . . Then, once things are approved, people stand up at meetings and wave them and point to them and say, ‘See here, it says here that Saleh’ ”—Ali Abdullah Saleh, the President of Yemen—“ ‘is a fink.’ And then everybody has to agree that Saleh is a fink.”
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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/06/110606fa_fact_hersh#ixzz1ev5j1gLp
