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| The Iranian Nuclear Program |
December 10, 2007 |
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Dear Friends,
Last Monday night I saw the Director of the CIA, General Mike Hayden, at a social function at the White House. I've known Mike for close to twenty years. We served together in the same small group on the National Security Council Staff in the late 1980s. He's a professional intelligence officer and a good man.
Mike told me that the Director of National Intelligence had just publicly released the key findings of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program. He told me the gist: the Intelligence Community believes Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. My eyebrows went way up.
I asked him the same thing I asked his predecessor, George Tenet, when Tenet briefed members of Congress on some very important information on Iraq's biological weapons and a small drone program in the fall of 2002: "How confident are you in your sources?" Mike's answer was remarkably similar to his predecessor's: very confident.
The reactions the next day of some Democratic Members of Congress to this new report sounded like the politicization of intelligence to me. Before even reading it, let alone probing it in detail, people who are senior enough to know better were commending the report as evidence that the Intelligence Community had "learned its lesson" from the faulty Iraq intelligence and the need for intelligence to be independent of policy making. Their real message was that the new intelligence report helps advance their particular foreign policy preferences. Suspending skepticism when a new intelligence report is in line with one's world view is a very dangerous habit.
Our intelligence agencies have always prided themselves on their independence from policy making. The important question isn't whether they are independent; it's whether they are right.
We had our first classified briefing on the Iran report on Wednesday in the House Intelligence Committee. We spent several hours getting more information on the sources the community is relying on for this new report, and probing the rigor of their analysis.
Our intelligence agencies have had both successes and failures on nuclear matters. We were surprised by Saddam's nuclear program in 1990 and by Pakistan's in 1998, not to mention the Soviet Union's in 1949. On the other hand, good intelligence uncovered Libya's nuclear program and led to its dismantlement.
The initial answers to the questions I posed in classified session about the Iran report were not entirely reassuring. Either the intelligence community has gotten it wrong for the last few years, when they asserted that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, or they have it wrong now. The new intelligence report on Iran may be right, but it's no slam dunk.
The work I do on intelligence is almost entirely done in classified meetings. It has to be that way. Even though done in private, I will continue to ask tough questions, push for better sources and insist on rigorous analysis so that policy decisions vital to the nation can be made on the best possible information.
Wish you were here,
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