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WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — A new assessment by American intelligence agencies released Monday concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting a judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.
The conclusions of the new assessment are likely to reshape the final year of the Bush administration, which has made halting Iran’s nuclear program a cornerstone of its foreign policy.
The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran is likely to keep its options open with respect to building a weapon, but that intelligence agencies “do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”
Iran is continuing to produce enriched uranium, a program that the Tehran government has said is intended for civilian purposes. The new estimate says that the enrichment program could still provide Iran with enough raw material to produce a nuclear weapon sometime by the middle of next decade, a timetable essentially unchanged from previous estimates.
But the new report essentially disavows a judgment that the intelligence agencies issued in 2005, which concluded that Iran had an active secret arms program intended to transform the raw material into a nuclear weapon. The new estimate declares instead with “high confidence” that the military-run program was shut in 2003, and it concludes with “moderate confidence” that the program remains frozen. The report judges that the halt was imposed by Iran “primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure.”
It was not clear what prompted the reversal. Administration officials said the new estimate reflected conclusions that the intelligence agencies had agreed on only in the past several weeks. The report’s agnosticism about Iran’s nuclear intentions represents a very different tone than had been struck by President Bush, and by Vice President Dick Cheney, who warned in a speech in October that if Iran “stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences.”
The estimate does not say when intelligence agencies learned that the arms program had been halted, but officials said new information obtained from covert sources over the summer had led to a reassessment of the state of Iran’s nuclear program and a decision to delay preparation of the estimate, which had been scheduled to be delivered to Congress in the spring.
The new report came out just over five years after a 2002 intelligence estimate on Iraq concluded that it possessed chemical and biological weapons programs and was determined to restart its nuclear program. That estimate was instrumental in winning the Congressional authorization for a military invasion of Iraq, but it proved to be deeply flawed, and most of its conclusions turned out to be wrong.
Intelligence officials said the specter of the 2002 estimate on Iraq hung over their deliberations on Iran even more than it had in 2005, when the lessons from the intelligence failure on Iraq were just beginning to prompt spy agencies to adapt a more rigorous approach to their findings.
The 2007 report on Iran had been requested by members of Congress, underscoring that any conclusions could affect American policy toward Iran at a delicate time. The new estimate brought American assessments more in line with the judgments of international arms inspectors.
Last month, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, reported that Iran was operating 3,000 uranium-enriching centrifuges capable of producing fissile material for nuclear weapons, but he said inspectors had been unable to determine whether the Iranian program sought only to generate electricity or to also to build weapons.
Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada and the Senate majority leader, portrayed the assessment as “directly challenging some of this administration’s alarming rhetoric about the threat posed by Iran” and called for enhanced diplomatic efforts toward Tehran. Democratic presidential candidates mostly echoed Senator Reid, but also emphasized that Iran’s long-term ambitions were still a great concern to the United States.
In interviews on Monday, some administration officials expressed skepticism about the conclusions reached in the new report, saying they doubted that American intelligence agencies had a firm grasp of the Iranian government’s intentions.
The administration officials also said the intelligence findings would not lessen the White House’s concern about the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. The fact that Iran continues to refine its abilities to enrich uranium, they said, means that any decision in the future to restart a nuclear weapons program could lead Iran to a bomb in relatively short order. While the new report does not contrast sharply with earlier assessments about Iran’s capabilities, it does make new judgments about the intentions of its government.
Rather than portraying Iran as a rogue, irrational country determined to join the club of nations that possess a nuclear bomb, the estimate says Iran’s “decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.”
The administration called new attention to the threat posed by Iran this year when Mr. Bush suggested in October that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to “World War III.” Mr. Cheney also said that month that as Iran continued to enrich uranium, “the end of that process will be the development of nuclear weapons.”
Yet even as Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney were making those statements, analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency were well under way toward revising the earlier assessment about Iran’s nuclear arms program. Administration officials said the White House had known at the time that the conclusions about Iran were under review but had not been informed until more recently that intelligence agencies had reversed their 2005 conclusion.
In September, officials said, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, and his deputy, Stephen R. Kappes, met with Iran analysts to take a hard look at past conclusions about Iran’s nuclear program in light of new information obtained since 2005.
“We felt that we needed to scrub all the assessments and sources to make sure we weren’t misleading ourselves,” said one senior intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The estimate concludes that if Iran were to restart its arms program, it would still be at least two years before it would have enough highly enriched uranium to produce a nuclear bomb. But it says it is still “very unlikely” Iran could produce enough of the material by then.
Instead, the report released on Monday concludes that it is more likely that Iran could have a bomb by the early part to the middle of the next decade. The report states that the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research judges that Iran is unlikely to achieve this goal before 2013, “because of foreseeable technical and programmatic problems.”
The estimate concludes that it would be difficult to persuade Iran’s leaders to abandon all efforts to get nuclear weapons, given the importance of getting the bomb to Iran’s strategic goals in the Middle East.
Intelligence officials presented the outlines of the intelligence estimate two weeks ago to several cabinet members, along with Mr. Cheney. During the meeting, officials said, policy makers challenged and debated the conclusions. The final draft of the estimate was presented to Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney last Wednesday.
Officials said they now planned to give extensive briefings to American allies like Israel, Britain and France. Israel intelligence officials for years have put forward more urgent warnings about Iran’s nuclear abilities than their American counterparts, positing that Iran could get a nuclear bomb this decade.
Intelligence officials had said just weeks ago they were ending the practice of declassifying parts of intelligence estimates, citing concerns that analysts might alter their judgments if they knew the reports would be widely publicized.
But in a statement on Monday, Donald M. Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, said that since the new estimate was at odds with the 2005 assessment — and thus at odds with public statements by top officials about Iran — “we felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available.”
source: 4dec2007
WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — In the summer of 2005, senior American intelligence officials began traveling the world with a secret slide show drawn from thousands of pages that they said were downloaded from a stolen Iranian laptop computer, trying to prove that Iran was lying when it said it had no interest in building a nuclear weapon.
The slides detailed efforts to build what looked like a compact warhead for an Iranian missile and were portrayed by the Americans as suggesting that the Iranian military was working to solve the technical problems in building a bomb.
Now, that assertion has been thrown into doubt by a surprising reversal: the conclusion, contained in the declassified summary of a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear programs, that Iran’s effort to master the technology of building a nuclear weapon had halted two years before those briefings.
At the time of the laptop slide show, some European and United Nations officials questioned what they were being shown. “I can fabricate that data,” one said at the time. “It looks beautiful, but it is open to doubt.”
At the time, almost no one in the White House or the intelligence community is known to have seriously considered the idea that the weapons program might have been stopped. And the new intelligence assessment does not, as far as is known, suggest that the information relied on in 2005 was fabricated.
Perhaps the slide show presented by the Americans in 2005 was simply outdated — the laptop’s data and other information, like the light from a distant star, taking years to arrive at the lenses of the intelligence gatherers.
The assessment does not explain — unless it is addressed in more than 130 pages still marked classified — how the May 2005 conclusion that Iran was still pressing ahead with a nuclear weapons program went awry.
President Bush himself has said on several occasions that he knew that proving the Iranian case to the world would be difficult. “People will say, if we’re trying to make the case on Iran, well, the intelligence failed in Iraq, therefore, how can we trust the intelligence in Iran?” he said at a news conference in 2005. He concluded that building pressure on Iran “requires people to believe that the Iranian nuclear program is, to a certain extent, ongoing.”
Now, he could end his presidency with even his own intelligence apparatus uncertain about Iran’s true intentions.
“This report will be used to undercut our efforts to build a consensus that Iran must suspend its enrichment program, playing to those who support concessions and undermining the prospects for effective pressure on the regime,” said Robert G. Joseph, who helped to build the case against Iran in the Bush White House during the first term and moved to the State Department in the second term.
Mr. Joseph, who in 2005 was one of the officials who gave briefings on the laptop evidence, said Monday he could not recall “any suggestion in the intelligence that Iran was doing anything other than moving full speed ahead.”
Mr. Joseph’s skepticism is shared by some current officials, mostly hawks, who believe, as he does, that Iran is ultimately seeking a weapons capability. But the officials would not publicly challenge the new finding.
Several officials said that if the new National Intelligence Estimate is right, Iran’s strategy was an unusual one. It might be the first country in nuclear history to halt a covert program to make nuclear weapons, then speed up its program to enrich nuclear fuel, as it did in 2006, in very public defiance of international pressures to stop.
A senior administration official speculated that Iran may have concluded that the risk of getting caught with a covert weapons program was simply too high — especially after the United States presented evidence of secret programs to North Korea in 2002 and Libya in 2003. The official said that perhaps Iran wanted to master the hardest part of the process first — making nuclear fuel — before risking the next step, designing a weapon.
Another official, a senior nuclear specialist with long technical experience in proliferation issues, said it was also possible that Iran had made so much progress in its clandestine work that the 2003 halt might have little practical significance, as long as it can keep working on its open efforts to produce fuel suitable for a weapon. “One scenario is that they’ve already solved all the weapons physics problems and are just waiting for the material,” he said.
But he conceded the other possibility, expressed by the intelligence analysis, “that they were spooked by the perceived pressures and decided to back away.”
International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have found that Iran, working in secrecy for 18 years, from 1985 to 2003, pursued many technologies to enrich uranium. Iran said it was simply seeking to enrich uranium to produce electricity, and had to do so in secret because Europe, Israel and the United States would try to deny it technology.
Much of Iran’s clandestine work violated Iran’s obligations under the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which requires signatories to fully disclose their atomic labors. At the same time, Iran made no secret of its ambitions to build large rockets and warheads that were ideally suited for delivering nuclear arms. For two decades, with the aid of North Korea, the Iranians have developed generations of long-range rockets.
The problem the administration faces now is that it is declaring that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons development with the same certainty that it insisted two years ago that the program was speeding ahead. Asked Monday to explain how that was possible, Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said simply: “Iran is one of a handful of the hardest intelligence targets going. They are very good at this business of keeping secrets.”
William J. Broad reported from New York, and David E. Sanger from Washington.
source: 4dec2007
WASHINGTON — President George W. Bush said Tuesday that a "great discovery" as recently as August prompted the US intelligence community's stunning reversal of its long-held view that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program.
Bush provided no details on the nature of the new intelligence, which set off an in-depth intelligence review of the evidence and assumptions that underpinned a 2005 assessment, which had held with "high confidence" that Iran was determined to acquire nuclear weapons.
Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, came to Bush in August and said: "We have some new information."
"He didn't tell me what the information was. He did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze," Bush said at a White House news conference in describing the encounter.
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were not formally briefed until Wednesday on the intelligence community's new finding that Iran had had a covert nuclear weapons program but halted it in 2003 — a bombshell with major implications for US policy.
Democrats attacked Bush for ignoring the new intelligence on October 17 when he raised the prospect in a speech of "World War III" if Iran acquired the knowledge to make nuclear weapons.
"It's exactly what he did in the run up to the war in Iraq in consistently exaggerating intelligence suggesting that Iraq had WMD (weapons of mass destruction), while failing to tell the American people about intelligence concluding that it did not," said Senator Joe Biden, who is running for president.
The National Intelligence Estimate, as the assessment is called, judged "with high confidence that the halt lasted at least several years."
Because of "intelligence gaps," the report said, the intelligence community had "moderate confidence" that Tehran had not restarted the program as of mid-2007 and did not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.
"Without getting into sources and methods, I believe that the intelligence community has made a great discovery, and they've analyzed the discovery, and it's now a part of our government policy," Bush said.
The Washington Post reported that the new information included intercepts of conversations between Iranian military commanders.
A senior Iranian military official was overheard complaining in one intercepted conversation that the nuclear program had been halted years earlier, the Post said, citing a source familiar with the intelligence.
It said more than 1,000 pieces of information were cited in footnotes to the 140-page classified report, which represents the consensus view of the 16 US intelligence agencies.
The new information initially was greeted with deep skepticism by top Central Intelligence Agency officials and others who feared that Iran was engaging in strategic deception to hide a continuing covert program.
"You want to make sure it's not disinformation. You want to make sure the piece of intelligence you have is real," Bush said, explaining why in October he had warned of the prospect of "World War III" over Iran's nuclear program.
"And secondly, they want to make sure they understand the intelligence they gathered. If they think it's real, then what does it mean?"
Bush went on to say that he believes Iran remains a danger because a country that once had a covert nuclear weapons program could also restart it.
Senior intelligence officials who briefed reporters Monday on condition of anonymity said the review reinforced the 2005 estimate's conclusion that Iran did have a secret weapons program, which Tehran has denied.
The new assessment concludes that international pressure and its growing isolation prompted Tehran to halt the program in 2003, showing that it was more susceptible to world opinion than previously thought.
In the same year, the United States invaded Iraq, the AQ Khan nuclear proliferation network was broken and Libya gave up its nuclear program.
But it was not known whether other world events also had had an impact on the Iranian decision in addition to UN Security Council sanctions, the intelligence officials said.
However, they said there was an "evidentiary trail" that showed that Iran's decision to halt the nuclear weapons program was in response to international pressure.
The officials also attributed the change in the assessment to stepped up intelligence gathering on Iran since 2005 and more rigorous analytical methods put into effect after the intelligence failures in Iraq.
A US intelligence estimate in 2002 that wrongly concluded that Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction helped pave the way for the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
source: 4dec2007
THE NEW National Intelligence Estimate on Iran contains some unambiguously good news: that Tehran halted a covert nuclear weapons program in 2003, and that it is responsive to the sort of international pressure applied by the United States and other Western governments. Iran's "decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs," says the public summary released Monday. That sounds like an endorsement of the diplomatic strategy pursued by the Bush administration since 2005, which has been aimed at forcing Iran to choose between the nuclear program and normal economic and security relations with the outside world. It strengthens the view, which we have previously endorsed, that this administration should not have to resort to military action to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities.
But there is bad news, too, which seems likely to be overlooked by those who have been resisting sanctions and other pressure on the mullahs all along, such as Russia, China and some members of the European Union. While U.S. intelligence agencies have "high confidence" that covert work on a bomb was suspended "for at least several years" after 2003, there is only "moderate confidence" that Tehran has not restarted the military program. Iran's massive overt investment in uranium enrichment meanwhile proceeds in defiance of binding U.N. resolutions, even though Tehran has no legitimate use for enriched uranium. The U.S. estimate of when Iran might produce enough enriched uranium for a bomb — sometime between late 2009 and the middle of the next decade — hasn't changed.
"Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons," says the summary's second sentence. Yet within hours of the report's release, European diplomats and some U.S officials were saying that it could kill an arduous American effort to win support for a third U.N. Security Council resolution sanctioning Iran for failing to suspend uranium enrichment. It could also hinder separate U.S.-French efforts to create a new sanctions coalition outside the United Nations. In other words, the new report may have the effect of neutering the very strategy of pressure that it says might be effective if "intensified."
President Bush yesterday vowed to continue pushing for international sanctions. But Democrats and some Republicans are arguing that now is the time for the Bush administration to begin a broad dialogue with Iran — and drop a precondition that the regime first suspend uranium enrichment. It's an odd time to recommend such a concession: The latest European Union talks with Iran last week were a disaster, in which a new hard-line envoy of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad withdrew the previous, inadequate Iranian compromise proposals. Were the Bush administration to abandon its insistence on a suspension of enrichment, Mr. Ahmadinejad would declare victory over the relative moderates in Iran who have recently criticized his uncompromising stance.
That's not to say the United States should never attempt to negotiate directly with Iran about its nuclear program. But before doing so, the administration should have some indication that the Iranian regime is prepared to comply with binding U.N. resolutions and seriously address other U.S. concerns. A report by U.S. intelligence agencies is an unsatisfying substitute for a signal that has yet to come from Tehran.
source: 4dec2007
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