The flip side to US
intelligence By Jacob Heilbrunn
With the release of the new intelligence
estimate debunking the claim that Iran is trying
to develop nuclear weapons, the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) is earning laurels for
puncturing the George W Bush administration's
alarms about Tehran's intentions.
But is
its new report really any more reliable than its
original 2005 estimate, which declared that Iran
was marching briskly towards attaining nuclear
status? A look at the history of CIA estimates
suggests that caution is in order. While estimates
are only that - not, as is sometimes assumed,
ironclad statements - and the
difficulties of assessing
clandestine programs are obvious, in no area has
American intelligence gotten it wrong more often
than when it comes to assessing foreign powers'
nuclear prowess.
The CIA's first blunder
established the pattern. In 1946, the CIA's Office
of Reports and Estimates confidently predicted
that Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union was years away
from producing a bomb: "It is probable that the
capability of the USSR to develop weapons based on
atomic energy will be limited to the possible
development of an atomic bomb to the stage of
production at some time between 1950 and 1953. On
this assumption, a quantity of such bombs could be
produced and stockpiled by 1956." On August 24,
1949, the office again declared that Stalin would
most likely not be able to field an atomic bomb
until mid-1953. Five days later, the Soviet Union
conducted its first atomic test.
The
Office of Reports and Estimates was supposed to
prevent a repetition of the blunders and failure
to organize intelligence that occurred before
Pearl Harbor. Instead, its egregious mistakes,
including failing to predict the beginning of the
Korean War, meant that it was abolished in 1950.
According to CIA historian Donald P Steury, "It
had been the object of repeated investigations,
all of which condemned its failures without
reservation."
In the 1950s, the CIA also
failed to anticipate how quickly the Soviet Union
would detonate a hydrogen bomb. It began to
reverse course, perhaps partly as a result of
these embarrassments. Where it had previously
downplayed Soviet progress, the agency now
exaggerated it. Aware that the Soviets were
tapping into the expertise of captured German
scientists, the CIA concluded that a missile gap
existed between the US and the Soviet Union.
Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev had claimed, in
the wake of the 1957 Sputnik success, that the
USSR was producing missiles "like sausages".
The CIA took him at his word. According to
Sidney Graybeal, who was a CIA analyst at the
time, "The estimates were based on capabilities
rather than hard facts." They were also wrong.
After John F Kennedy became president, satellite
photography revealed not only that there wasn't a
missile gap, but that the US was far ahead in the
arms race, one reason that the Soviets backed down
during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
A new round of contention erupted in the
mid-1970s. Neo-conservatives, led by Albert
Wohlstetter, Richard Pipes and other members of
the Committee on the Present Danger, charged that
the CIA was tailoring its estimates on behalf of
detente and soft-pedaling the size of the Soviet
missile force.
The famous Team B that
challenged the CIA's Team A charged, in what
critics later claimed was an anticipation of the
bogus claims made in the run-up to the Gulf War,
that the USSR was on the march and that the CIA
was all wet. Who got it right? In retrospect, the
hawks wildly exaggerated the power and coherence
of the Soviet Union, but it does seem clear that
the Soviet Union was pouring vastly more resources
into the military than the CIA had realized. (In
addition, the CIA had rather amusingly concluded
in the 1970s that East Germany was one of the top
ten economies in the world. It remains an economic
basket-case today.)
If the CIA had
difficulties judging the Soviet Union, it also
badly bungled its assessment of another country's
capabilities. In the 1950s, Israel's Shimon Peres
began dickering with France to obtain nuclear
technology. In order to weaken Egypt, then
supporting an anti-French insurgency in Algeria,
Paris began helping Israel develop nuclear
technology. It took the CIA until 1960 to realize
that Israel was building a bomb in Dimona. John F
Kennedy successfully pressured Ben-Gurion into
allowing a team of Americans to inspect the
facility there, but they saw what they wanted to
see, being unable to find any evidence that it was
something other than a peaceful project.
The CIA report on the failure to identify
the Dimona project earlier has a familiar ring. It
stated: "The general feeling that Israel could not
achieve this capability without outside aid from
the US or its allies ... led to the tendency to
discount rumors of Israeli reactor construction
and French collaboration in the nuclear weapons
area."
Then there was India. In 1998 New
Delhi conducted three nuclear tests. Once again,
the CIA was caught napping. According to the May
18, 1998 Washington Post, "six hours before the
tests, no CIA warning was issued because the US
analysts responsible for tracking the Indian
nuclear program had not expected the tests and
were not on alert". Congress was apoplectic. "Our
failure to detect this shows that India did a good
job of concealing their intentions, while we did a
dreadfully inadequate job of detecting those
intentions", said Senator Richard Shelby, then
chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence.
In response, the CIA could only state the obvious:
"It is apparent that the Indians went to some
lengths to conceal their activities and
intentions."
Is it that surprising, then,
that the intelligence community has found Iraq and
Iran to be so vexing? When it came to Iraq,
American intelligence agencies radically
underestimated the progress that Saddam Hussein
had made before the first Gulf War toward a
nuclear bomb. This was one of the reasons that it
then reversed course before the second Gulf War,
furnishing the Bush Administration with what it
wanted in the National Intelligence Estimate
released in 2003. That document infamously
declared, "We judge that Iraq has continued its
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in
defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions.
Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as
well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN
restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will
have a nuclear weapon during this decade."
Now, in the midst of Bush's mutterings
about a possible World War III with Tehran, the
CIA has performed a somersault on Iran. Opponents
of bombing Iran have seized on the latest estimate
to discredit Bush, while neo-conservatives like
Norman Podhoretz splutter that it represents a
dastardly CIA plot to undermine Bush.
Neo-conservative distaste for the CIA is
longstanding.
It has been voiced by Laurie
Mylroie, who believes that Saddam Hussein was
behind the first bombing of the World Trade
Center; David Frum and Richard Perle, in their
book An End to Evil, present the CIA as a
subversive institution intent on sabotaging the
fight against terrorism. In a sense, such
inanities signal that neo-conservatism, which
started out as a Trotskyist movement vociferously
opposed to American government institutions, has
now come full circle.
Neither the boosters
of the new report nor its detractors really have
it right. The rapidity with which the CIA has
reversed course on Iran should itself induce
circumspection. Dealing with Iran diplomatically
may well be the best option, but the latest
intelligence report shouldn't serve as the final
verdict on its nuclear intentions. Deciding how
best to deal with Iran cannot rest on a single
estimate that likely represents guesswork and
inferences more than verifiable information.
Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior
editor at The National Interest.
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