Ron Rosenbaum - How the End Begins

Intelligence officials appeared shocked that the 2007 NIE was misunderstood. When I heard Mike McConnell at a private gathering a few months later, he seemed genuinely hurt or puzzled at the laxity of the media for not reading the footnote. Two and half years later, after just about every intelligence service in the world was coming up with evidence of Iran working away feverishly on its weapons design, the U.S. intelligence community was still trying to clean up the mess it had made—a mess attributable in part to State Department partisans who felt their no-WMD advice had been ignored in the run-up to the Iraq War and were intent this time to err on the side of the false but reassuring wording to defuse a potential confrontation with Iran. This was a history-making intelligence error, which may have more devastating and tragic consequences than the WMD mistake—a regional nuclear war, after all, will cause a bigger death toll than the one continuing in Iraq.]

SENIOR OFFICIAL 1:They [Iran] continue with ballistic missiles and they continue with fissile material pursuit. It was a secret program that they halted. They have never admitted that. So one of our concerns is, is there a connection with North Korea? If there is, we don’t know it. But is there something going on there that resembles this program that we we’re talking about in Syria in Iran?

[One is tempted to say, “No shit, Sherlock.” But the key words here are “They have never admitted that.” The Iranians continue to deny that they have any nuclear weapons programs or designs, even after the discovery of the secret reactor beneath the holy city of Qom (or the announcement of the discovery) in September 2009.

The fact that the program that Iran allegedly halted was a secret, illegal program should have led a capable intelligence community not to fist-pump in triumph but to question what Iran’s real game was and how many other secret illegal programs and facilities had not been shut down or discovered. Indeed, was the Syrian reactor designed to outsource fuel making for its ally Iran, for instance?]

SENOR INTELLIGENCE OFFICIAL 1:That is a very large concern of ours, a major problem that we’re attempting to address. But our unfortunate choice of words in our NIE caused you all in the press to misrepresent what we were trying to explain. [They are right at least in part to blame it on their “unfortunate choice of words” just as they continue to use an “unfortunate choice of words.” They repeat the mistake in not seeming to realize how deceptive estimative language is in the world outside their spy caves. While saying they have “low confidence” that Syria was engaged in a weapons program inside the Enigmatic Box, the entire briefing demonstrated what almost anyone else would call high confidence that the Syrians were building a reactor designed to make weapons with North Korean help because they don’t have a notarized confession from the plant manager. If nothing else the briefing demonstrated that intelligence officials should try to use the same language as planet earth in their briefings. It is no exaggeration that the nuclear future of the world may be at stake in these semantic confusions.] Three parts of the program; they halted one narrow piece of it, which was a secret program. Weapons-head design. They continue with fissile material; they continue with ballistic missile systems for delivery. So we don’t know where it is at the moment. [And the more we learn the less we really know?]

Q:No Iran–North Korea connection?

SENIOR INTELLIGENCE OFFICIAL 1:None.

SENIOR INTELLIGENCE OFFICIAL 2:On nuclear issues.

Q:On nuclear issues.

SENIOR INTELLIGENCE OFFICIAL 2:Robust connection on—

SENIOR INTELLIGENCE OFFICIAL 1:Other places, yes.

SENIOR INTELLIGENCE OFFICIAL 2:Missile issues.

[This “robust connection” is big news, again lost in the misinterpretation of the NIE: North Korea is helping Iran design and build long-range missiles.]

Q:Just to follow up on the Six-Party [North Korean] talks. The assumption now on what is being said is that the negotiators are really focusing on plutonium equation and the HEU [highly enriched uranium] and the Syrian assistance is kind of being pushed down the road a little bit. Does this briefing and this information that is coming out now shift that equation? Is that no longer what the White House wants?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:Well, we have said that North Korea needs to do a full accounting of its plutonium activities, its enrichment activities and its proliferation activities. And that’s what we are pursuing now. In addition, one of the things that this has done, and I think we’ll encourage, is to supplement, in some sense, the Six-Party framework by building in a capacity to verify the disclosures that North Korea is hopefully going to make so that if, down the road, there is evidence that suggests that disclosures are inaccurate or not full and complete that there will be a verification mechanism available in the framework of the Six-Party talks to pursue that issue. So we think we have constructed a framework in the Six-Party talks for dealing with this issue. Thank you. [In other words, discovery of a blatant North Korean lie hampers their ability (but not overly much) to continue lying about that specific piece of blatant proliferation. But North Korea has neither admitted nor disclosed anything further and has learned that it suffers no consequences for what may have been an attempt to outsource the making of bomb-grade fuel. And perhaps the single most shocking word, the most deeply disturbing evidence of naïveté on the part of the entire U.S. intelligence community, is contained in the word “hopefully.” Hopefully the North Koreans will come clean, and be forthcoming with the truth just like the Iranians. These people are the best and brightest the intelligence community can muster and they are an insult to our intelligence.]

MODERATOR:Thanks, everybody, for coming. [Thanks for allowing us finally to tell you how badly you screwed up in the past with our inadvertent clumsy help.]

I found the whole NIE scandal and the Enigmatic Box briefing so scandalous and such a manifestly incompetent demonstration of our intelligence community and its way of thinking that I had to check my perceptions with Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, one of the most respected arms control analysts, no Iran hawk, now a fellow at the New America Foundation where I met him across a table in an empty conference room. He was one of the first to pursue the al-Kibar raid mystery and coined the term “Enigmatic Box.”

Here’s what he said about the NIE:

“Well, I have listened now to multiple people from ODNI [Mike McConnell’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence]. Let’s see. The following things I believe to be true. I believe that the analysts who wrote the 2007 NIE… live in their own little world and have only a vague connection to what the rest of us are doing including people who are informed and likely to be their consumers…. So they wrote a product that had very little chance of being understood by Congress and no chance of being understood by the general public. So to blame the press for reporting it is a little bit feeling sorry for themselves.”

“So they [the 2007 NIE analysts],” I asked, “didn’t mean the weapons program had been halted in 2003, just the clandestine aspect of the warhead design and not fuel enrichment and ballistics?”