The contested U.S. intelligence conclusion that Iran stopped work on its nuclear weapons program in 2003 is now being downplayed by the same officials who wrote the much-publicized report in November, wrote the Washington Times.
The CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said Sunday it was “hard for me to explain” the intelligence community’s conclusion that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and probably had not restarted it as of the middle of last year. And his boss, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, said the report was so quickly declassified and poorly focused that it confused people.
“If I had it to do over again, I would be very specific in how I described what was canceled and what continued,” Mr. McConnell told a Senate panel of his community’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran.
Most news coverage of the assessment focused on the first sentence in its summary of key judgments: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.”
But, the officials now say that sentence referred only to work on a nuclear warhead.
Mr. McConnell and Mr. Hayden now are emphasizing that Iran continues work on the enrichment of uranium, which could be used to make a weapon, and on ballistic missiles, which could be used to deliver a nuclear warhead. The publicly released NIE described Iran’s highly public enrichment efforts but did not mention the missile program, which already gives Iran the capacity to strike targets in Europe.
Conservative national security analysts roundly condemn the Iran NIE. Among the criticisms: The CIA knows little for sure that Iran has or has not resumed work on a warhead. Critics also say the NIE delivered a public relations victory to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while embarrassing President Bush and eliminating his most powerful option – air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Since the NIE’s declassification, intelligence officials, while not abandoning it, have complained that the news media oversimplified its findings by writing that Iran ended its nuclear weapons research, which it has not.
In public comments, Mr. McConnell emphasizes that a closer reading reveals the NIE said Iran stopped work on only one project – designing the nuclear bomb itself.
He told the Senate Armed Services Committee in February, “I think the press mischaracterized” the NIE, which reversed an earlier finding.
Mr. McConnell heads the committee of 16 intelligence agencies, including the CIA, which wrote and approved the NIE. He not only blamed the press, but he also criticized himself.
“If I had had the foresight to know I was going to be forced to do unclassified key judgments, because of the circumstances, I would have caused the key judgments to be very clear about what was stopped and what continued,” he told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “I’ll take responsibility. That’s an error in judgment on my part. I wasn’t clairvoyant or smart.”
Mr. McConnell then added more complexity to the debate, saying Iran could have restarted work on a nuclear warhead without U.S. intelligence agencies being aware of it.
“If Iran’s nuclear weapons design program … has already been reactivated or will be reactivated, it will be a closely guarded state secret,” he testified.
James Phillips, a Heritage Foundation expert on the Middle East who has criticized the NIE, said Mr. McConnell and Mr. Hayden are “backpedaling.”
“They realize how misleading its conclusions were, especially when taken out of context,” Mr. Phillips said. “There is a growing consensus that the NIE accorded too much weight to the reported halt in weaponization research, which is relatively easy to accomplish, and too little weight to Iran’s acceleration of its uranium enrichment effort, which is a much more difficult hurdle that must be overcome to build a nuclear weapon. Also, the NIE failed to account for Iran’s missile program, which makes little sense.”
