Page 2 of 2 Spooks refuse to toe Cheney's line on Iran
By Gareth Porter
Richard Perle, complained that Negroponte was "absurdly declaring the Iranian
regime to be years away from having nuclear weapons".
This January 5, President George W Bush announced the nomination of retired
Vice Admiral John Michael "Mike" McConnell to be director of national
intelligence. McConnell was approached by Cheney himself about accepting the
position, according to Newsweek.
McConnell was far more amenable to White House influence than his predecessor.
On February 27, one week after his confirmation, he told the Senate Armed
Services Committee he was
"comfortable saying it's probable" that the alleged export of explosively
formed penetrators to Shi'ite insurgents in Iraq was linked to the highest
leadership in Iran.
Cheney had been making that charge, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, as well as Negroponte, have opposed it.
A public event last spring indicated that the White House had ordered a
reconsideration of the draft NIE's conclusion on how many years it would take
Iran to produce a nuclear weapon. The previous Iran estimate completed in the
spring of 2005 had estimated it at five to 10 years.
Two weeks after Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad announced in mid-April
that Iran would begin producing nuclear fuel on an industrial scale, the
chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Thomas Fingar, said in an
interview with National Public Radio that the completion of the NIE on Iran had
been delayed while the intelligence community determined whether its judgment
on the time frame within which Iran might produce a nuclear weapon needed to be
amended.
Fingar said the estimate "might change", citing "new reporting" from the
International Atomic Energy Agency as well as "some other new information we
have". And then he added, "We are serious about reexamining old evidence."
That extraordinary revelation about the NIE process, which was obviously
ordered by McConnell, was an unsubtle signal to the intelligence community that
the White House was determined to obtain a more alarmist conclusion on the
Iranian nuclear program.
A decision announced in late October indicated, however, that Cheney did not
get the consensus findings on the nuclear program and Iran's role in Iraq that
he had wanted. On October 27, David Shedd, a deputy to McConnell, told a
congressional briefing that McConnell had issued a directive making it more
difficult to declassify the key judgments of national intelligence estimates.
That reversed a Bush administration practice of releasing summaries of key
judgments in NIEs that began when the White House made public the key judgments
from the controversial 2002 NIE on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction
program in July 2003.
The decision to withhold key judgments on Iran from the public was apparently
part of a White House strategy for reducing the potential damage of publishing
the estimate with the inclusion of dissenting views.
As of early October, officials involved in the NIE were "throwing their hands
up in frustration" over the refusal of the administration to allow the estimate
to be released, according to the former intelligence officer. But the Iran NIE
is now expected to be circulated within the administration in late November,
says Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and founder of the anti-war group Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
The release of the Iran NIE will certainly intensify the bureaucratic political
struggle over Iran policy. If the NIE includes both dissenting views on key
issues, a campaign of selective leaking to news media of language from the NIE
that supports Cheney's line on Iran will soon follow, as well as leaks of the
dissenting views by his opponents.
Both sides may be anticipating another effort by Cheney to win Bush's approval
of a significant escalation of military pressure on Iran in early 2008.
Gareth Porter is a historian and national-security policy analyst. His
latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to
War in Vietnam, was published in June 2005.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
