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2 Iran's 'bomb' and dud
intelligence By Richard M
Bennett
Apart from terrorism, hard
information on weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
has for many years undoubtedly been at the very
top of the "want lists" of the intelligence
agencies of the leading Western powers.
Yet repeatedly, the major players in the
field, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
and Britain's MI6 among them, have failed to
deliver the required intelligence when most
needed.
To add to the problems, in many
cases the information that has been acquired has
either been wrongly analyzed, of doubtful quality
or has been simply ignored by their host
government as an inconvenient irrelevance.
However, what is without question the most
alarming aspect of
this continuing
intelligence failure has been the number of times
the CIA in particular has been deliberately misled
by "trusted" sources, or through a surprising
level of naivety has fallen victim to
disinformation ploys either by its opponents or by
those seeking political or financial gain.
Put simply, Western intelligence gets
conned far too often.
Were these
intelligence failings due to just a lack of
experienced analysts or was it because the senior
management of the most important national
intelligence agencies cravenly gave in to pressure
to simply report what their political masters
wanted to hear?
Whatever the answer, to
many a well-informed observer, this can be taken
to be nothing less than a grave dereliction of
duty by the intelligence services and indeed a
gross breach of the trust placed in them by the
peoples of both the US and Britain.
Little
that has happened since September 11, 2001, would
suggest that simply throwing huge sums of money at
the problem, employing thousands of extra spooks
and investing in highly expensive technological
wizardry will provide any form of viable
short-term solution.
The problem is
further exacerbated by the willingness of
governments in both Washington and London to
appoint political cronies to positions of
importance within the intelligence community.
Porter Goss at the CIA and to some extent former
British premier Tony Blair's pal John Scarlett at
MI6 have been obvious examples.
It fits
rather too closely to the growing suspicion that
an immature Western political leadership appears
to constantly reject intelligence, even when it
has a high level of provenance that conflicts with
preconceived policies and instead prefers to rely
on often manipulated "facts" or even downright
disinformation if it can be used to prop up some
cherished political aims or further personal
political ambitions.
The track record is
not good, and while it cannot be denied that
intelligence services have always suffered from
the "successes stay secret, while failures become
public" syndrome, it is still apparent that
significant mistakes occur with what appears to be
alarming regularity.
The most significant
occasions in recent years include the complete
misreading of the flow of information about Iraqi
WMD before the invasion of 2003.
There was
a stack of evidence that strongly suggested that
Iraq retained no significant CBW (chemical and
biological weapons) ability after the first Gulf
war in 1991. No WMD or the means to deliver them.
There was no hard evidence provided before 2003
and none of any importance discovered since,
despite five years of searching to prove
otherwise.
Yet the CIA chose to accept the
poisonous whisperings and uncorroborated
information provided by "Curveball" and other
equally dubious sources.
Britain's
much-vaunted MI6, in tandem with the Joint
Intelligence Committee, far from providing a
council of caution, instead blundered into the
fray by producing the ludicrously amateurish
report on Iraqi WMDs as decisive confirmation of
the threat, even adding the absurd "45-minute"
element much trumpeted in the House of Commons and
elsewhere.
Discredited NIE report
In 2007, yet another confusing picture was
presented to the world. The US intelligence
community had appeared to be wholeheartedly, both
in public and in many private off-the-record media
briefings, behind the George W Bush
administration's contention that Iran had a
dedicated nuclear weapon research program up and
running.
However, in late 2007, the flawed
and now largely discredited NIE (National
Intelligence Estimate) report, "Iran: Nuclear
Intentions and Capabilities", was published by the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence
(DNI) in Washington and simply discarded years of
supposedly hard intelligence.
Tehran, it
seemed, had placed its WMD research and
development on hold around late 2003, though no
one, not agents in Iran, nor the vast resources of
the CIA, the DNI, the signals intelligence of the
National Security Agency or the spy satellites of
the National Reconnaissance Office had noticed
this.
It is reported that concrete proof
of Iran's sophisticated disinformation came in
mid-December 2006, when the CIA intercepted a
conversation between two unidentified officials at
the Defense Ministry in Tehran, reporting
differences between the Atomic Energy Organization
of Iran (AEOI) and the Ministry of Defense.
One of the Iranian officials reportedly
said, "Currently, as for the CTBTO [Comprehensive
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization], I think
that the Ministry of Defense must have the last
word, because they [the leaders of the AEOI] know
that ultimately we intend to conduct tests."
Yet this damning evidence of deliberate
Iranian deception was also discounted in the NIE
findings.
So are the spooks value for
money? On such evidence as this, one must think
not.
Worse was still to come, for by this
year the US intelligence community had already
given the appearance of changing its stance once
again.
The NIE report it seems was no
longer to be taken as the "holy grail"; the facts
were now in urgent need of reinterpretation and
the US administration has now seemingly largely
rejected the findings of the NIE report.
The United Nations Security Council had
also largely ignored the NIE report and recently
passed a third set of sanctions designed to force
Iran to halt its uranium enrichment program.
It seems that few experts outside the
rather credulous US intelligence community
believed the so-called evidence of a hiatus in
Iran's nuclear development and most chose to
dismiss it as bogus.
Interestingly,
Francois Heisbourg, the internationally renowned
French defense expert and director of the
Fondation pour la Recherche Strategique
(Foundation for Strategic Research), after
analyzing the findings of the NIE in December
2007, is quoted in the Swiss newspaper Le Temps as
saying that this report's conclusion could be the
result of revenge by some in US intelligence
against a president who put them in a tough spot
during the Iraqi crisis. He added, "Compared to
the NIE report on Iran, even Mohamed ElBaradei
looks like a hawk." ElBaradei is the head of the
UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
It is important at this point to remember
that despite being rarely reported, a number of
IAEA documents also apparently point to the
existence of an Iranian military nuclear research
program.
On February 25, 2008, Olli
Heinonen, the Finnish deputy director general of
the IAEA, reportedly presented further evidence
that strongly supports this contention.
The leading French newspaper Le Monde
reported in March 2008 that newly discovered
documents strongly suggested that Tehran still
pursued a military nuclear program after 2003,
contrary to what the NIE had stated.
These
documents reportedly included a letter written in
2004 by Mahdi Khaniki, an official deeply involved
with the IAEA and a former Iranian ambassador to
Syria, to Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, the vice
president of the Atomic Energy Organization of
Iran.
Le Monde claimed that Khaniki
pointed out that the IAEA inspectors demanded to
see the contracts for the purchase of spare parts
used in the development of Iran's centrifuges and
added that at a meeting held on January 31, 2004,
in the presence of Dr Hassan Rohani, the chief
negotiator of the Iranian nuclear program until
the end of 2005, it was decided that these
contracts should be prepared in accordance to the
AEOI's wishes, so they would be ready to be
delivered to the IAEA. Le Monde claimed that
portions of these contracts were then crossed out
with black lines and that the quantities did not
appear.
Le Monde went on to cite sources
close to an intelligence service, affirming that
this letter also referred to "Project 13" (also
known as "project for the disappearance of
threats"), allegedly aimed at deceiving IAEA
inspectors. To many expert observers, this letter
represents clear evidence of the military
character of this program and to continuing
Iranian efforts to conceal it.
Controversially, China was also reported
to have recently embarrassed Iran by providing the
UN with intelligence on its close ally's efforts
to acquire nuclear technology.
Concern
over Tehran's secretive research program had been
increasing over the past few months after
officials at the IAEA
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