Brother David Ignatius explained it all for you

Two and a half years ago, nothing troubled David Ignatius more than a repeat of Iraq. In “Avoiding another ‘Slam Dunk’” he wrote:

Amid all the debate about intelligence, there has been surprisingly little focus on the question the average citizen (and average policymaker, too) would probably have at the top of the list: Will these guys get it wrong again? Will they tell the world that something is a “slam-dunk,” only to discover later that it didn’t exist?

Of course, in our post 9/11 world, it’s odd that the other side of the question didn’t occur to him. What happens if our intelligence services get surprised again after raising no alarms of a very real threat?

Ignatius, of course, was relieved that his favorite bureaucrat, Thomas Fingar, would be in charge of handling intelligence.

The issue here is analysis, the least sexy but arguably most important part of the spy world. In trying to fix what was so obviously broken, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte did a smart thing. He went to the agency that came closest to getting it right on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction — the State Department’s tiny Bureau of Intelligence and Research — and picked its chief, Thomas Fingar, as his deputy for analysis. INR, as it is known, had antagonized many in the Bush administration in 2002 and 2003 by refusing to endorse their case that Iraq was trying to reconstitute its nuclear program — dismissing the claim about Iraqi uranium purchases from Niger as “highly dubious.”

No word if the INR had predicted 9/11 and was ignored.

And then last year, when the NIE was released and claimed that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons research, Ignatius claimed vindication in “The myth of the mad mullahs.”

To break the lock-step culture that allowed the disastrous mistake on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Deputy Director of National Intelligence Thomas Fingar ordered that analysts be given more information about sources and, rather than trying to fit information into preexisting boxes to prove a case, they should simply explain what it meant.

All these strands converged in the bombshell National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that was released Monday. That document was as close to a U-turn as one sees in the intelligence world. The community dropped its 2005 judgment that Iran was “determined to develop nuclear weapons” and instead said, “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program” because of international pressure.

The secret intelligence that produced this reversal came from multiple channels — human sources as well as intercepted communications — that arrived in June and July. At that time, a quite different draft of the Iran NIE was nearly finished. But the “volume and character” of the new information was so striking, says a senior official, that “we decided we’ve got to go back.” It was this combination of data from different sources that gave the analysts “high confidence” the covert weapons program had been stopped in 2003. This led them to reject an alternative scenario (one of six) pitched by a “red team” of counterintelligence specialists that the new information was a deliberate Iranian deception.

But more importantly, according to Ignatius:

For the past several years, U.S. intelligence analysts have doubted hawkish U.S. and Israeli rhetoric that Iran is dominated by “mad mullahs” — clerics whose fanatical religious views might lead to irrational decisions. In the new NIE, the analysts forcefully posit an alternative view of an Iran that is rational, susceptible to diplomatic pressure and, in that sense, can be “deterred.”

“Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs,” states the NIE. Asked if this meant the Iranian regime would be “deterrable” if it did obtain a weapon, a senior official responded, “That is the implication.” He added: “Diplomacy works. That’s the message.”

Yes it has. A year of diplomacy and some mild arm twisting and Tehran continues to move forward with its nuclear program.

But, it’s worse than that. Edward Jay Epstein writes that this new and improved intelligence assessment was wrong.

(h/t Deja Vu, The Spine)

Three pieces of the puzzle uncovered by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency cast a surprising light on how Iran has advanced its capabilities independently of Project 11-1. First, there is the digital blueprint circulated by the network of A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb. IAEA investigators decoding and analyzing the massive computer files of this network found that it had clandestinely provided clients with a detailed design of a nuclear warhead of the version used by first China then Pakistan.

Since the IAEA knew that Iran had been dealing with the Khan network since at least 2003, and features of that digital blueprint matched those described in the Project 11-1 documents, it was suspected that Iran acquired the digital blueprint, along with other components, from the Khan network. If so, it shortened the task of Project 1-11.

Then, in late 2007, IAEA investigators uncovered a detailed Iranian narrative, written in Farsi, that described how a Russian scientist helped the Iranians conduct experiments to help Iranian scientists solve a complex design problem: Configuring high-tension electric bridge wire to detonate at different points less than a fraction of a nanosecond apart. In an implosion-type bomb, this is crucial for properly compressing the nuclear core. As Olli Heinonen, the IAEA’s chief inspector explained at a closed-door briefing in February 2008, these Russian-led experiments were “not consistent with any application other than the development of a nuclear weapon.”

Finally, there is the Polonium 210 experiments that Iran conducted prior to 2004. Since Polonium 210 is used to initiate the chain reaction in early-generation nuclear bombs (and used in the Pakistan design), IAEA inspectors attempted up until 2008 to get access to the facility, or “box,” in which the Polonium 210 was extracted from radioactive Bismuth.

In other words, the NIE was correct. One of the Iranian programs for developing a nuclear weapon was shuttered. The problem was that they had a parallel program running that the NIE didn’t report. It accounted for the possibility that a second program did exist though.

According to the IAEA, which monitors Natanz, by 2008 Iran had 3,800 centrifuges in operation and is adding another 3,000. It has also upgraded many of the older centrifuges, giving it about quadruple the capacity it had in 2003. To date, it has produced and stockpiled 1,380 pounds of low-enriched uranium, which is enough, if further enriched to weapons grade, to build a nuclear bomb.

The 2007 NIE deftly ducked this escalation with a footnote stating it was excluding from its assessment “Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment,” which meant Natanz. However, in light of all the developments in the past year, America’s new president will have to confront the reality that Iran now has the capability to change the balance of power in the Gulf, if it so elects to do so, by building a nuclear weapon.

So the NIE focused on a program that no longer operated but ignored the possibility that “civilian” nuclear research was being used to produce nuclear material for a weapon. Of course that means that the point of the NIE was not to get things correct as Ignatius claims but to serve the political purpose of undermining any effective measures to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Ignatius is even more blatantly political than he accuses the Bush administration of being.

It would appear that Mere Rhetoric analyzed things correctly last year – and he’s paid a fraction of what David Ignatius is for his opinions –

This is still woefully stupid analysis: the new conclusions are based on a grumpy Iranian military officer complaining that Iran’s nuclear program was suspended in 2003. Which is totally true – except for how after the suspension they went ahead and restarted it. Printing things that are technically true but crucially incomplete as part of an effort to mislead Americans into underestimating the threat of political Islam – it’s like the LA Times editorial board took over the US intelligence apparatus. Which they might as well because US intelligence about Iran sucks – ergo the spectacle of political machinations completely reversing the NIE in the span of four months.

and as JoshuaPundit wrote at the time: Israel’s assessment of Iran was correct.

My guess is that Thomas Fingar was a very good source for David Ignatius when the latter needed material to blast the Bush administration. But Fingar told Ignatius exactly what he wanted to hear. Happy that his pre-conceived notions were “confirmed,” Ignatius didn’t think too hard and once again seen only what he wanted to see.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.