Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (34 page)

“He gets up early. It’s late. I’ll call him in the morning.”

“No, sir. He wants to speak with you now.”

“Get me the White House switch.”

Steve wanted me to handle the public rollout of the NIE that was going to take place Monday morning. I was free to use the resources of the whole community to make it happen. (Oh, great. I get to play the old DCI for a very bad weekend, I thought.)

Steve added that I needed to develop a plan to inform the allies. They had not yet been brought in on what we were about to announce.

On Saturday we tiered our foreign friends based on our intimacy with them and on their interest in this particular question. We then prepared versions of a cable that varied in detail and sensitivity for each tier. Station chiefs were alerted to make sure liaison partners were briefed before this hit the press on Monday. They did. All this was far too haphazard, but it was good to have a responsive global network to fall back on.

We spent the rest of the weekend preparing for our own press release and backgrounder.

On Monday, after meeting with Steve Hadley, I huddled with my briefing partner, Don Kerr, former head of CIA’s Science and Technology Division and the National Reconnaissance Office and now principal deputy DNI (my successor in the job, actually), and far more tech savvy than I’ll ever be. We alerted the press and then sent some embargoed copies of the redacted key judgments to several key reporters.

We then set out for the K Street meeting location knowing that we had a heavy lift pushing against the easy (and, as it turned out, inevitable) headline: “Iran Halts Nuclear Program.” After all, the NIE began with “
We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.
”

We pointed to the footnote (yes, the
footnote!
) where the analysts in this arcane art form actually identified what had stopped, namely efforts to construct an actual bomb and the Iranian military’s clandestine enrichment program. We pointed in vain to the continuation of generalized enrichment, the increase in centrifuges at Natanz, and the continued development of long-range missiles that had little use without a nuclear warhead. Referring to a classic project management tool used to organize a complex task, I said, “If the Iranian nuclear program had a PERT chart, these would be the critical paths, not the weaponization effort.”

Also lost in the shuffle was the formal judgment that we weren’t out of the woods: “We also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.”

Or that they had had a weapons program and continued to lie about it: “We assess with high confidence that until fall 2003, Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons.”

Or that the NIE, for all its controversy, was a validation of US policy toward Iran: “We judge with high confidence that the halt . . . was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work.”

In other words, we were right to be worried about Iran trying to develop nuclear weapons, and although the risk continued, we had made some progress in trying to ensure that it didn’t happen.

No matter. Once the NIE was released, many of our allies thought that the pressure was off and, here at home, the political right hammered us. Many concluded that the estimate was the intelligence community’s
revenge on the Bush administration for being forced to take the heat on the failed Iraq NIE. Within weeks, the Heritage Foundation published a primer,
A Complete Guide to What Is Wrong with the NIE
. The American Enterprise Institute’s reliably hawkish John Bolton complained in the
Washington Post
, “All this shows that we not only have a problem interpreting what the mullahs in Tehran are up to, but also a more fundamental problem: Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than ‘intelligence’ analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it.” I got a later dose of the same theme during a talk to the conservative Hudson Institute. It made for a nice, tight story, but it just wasn’t true. The facts took us to our conclusions, not retribution or predisposition.

This estimate, by the way, despite some suspicious and troubling Iranian activity in the years since, has survived largely intact. That reality has been reflected in a variety of policy statements, like the one Secretary of Defense Panetta made in 2012 that if “we get intelligence that they’re proceeding with developing a nuclear weapon, then we will take whatever steps are necessary to stop it.” In other words, they have still not gone all out to develop a nuclear weapon.

The persistence of that American position later complicated the relationship between President Obama and Israeli prime minister Netanyahu. Reflecting on a meeting between the two in the Oval Office in March 2012, I suggested that even though both had announced that Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon was unacceptable, I suspected that the two men talked past each other.

I compared the session to high school math and being forced to solve algebraic equations, with Obama pointing out how hard we were working to solve for
y
, where
y
represented Iranian intentions. Unfortunately, in the prime minister’s equation,
y
had already been defined as a constant. Israel believes that it knows where the Iranians are going. In its equation, the unknown is
x
, and
x
is what the United States intends to do about it.

The NIE clearly hurt the Bush administration’s efforts in the short run, but over a longer perspective it’s perhaps not been a bad thing that American intelligence has been more conservative than many on this question. No one can claim we were stampeding them.

 • • • 

D
ESPITE THE
NIE
,
the press headlines, and the right’s reaction, we still knew that the Iranian program was a dangerous thing. But how to stop it?

First, we had to up our intelligence game. Pointing to the successful example of the Counterterrorism Center in working al-Qaeda, CIA deputy director Steve Kappes recommended that we create an Iranian Operations Division (IOD) that put in one office under unified direction the operational, analytic, and technical talent working the Iranian nuclear problem. We launched it in midsummer 2007 as we were crafting the new Iranian NIE, and we assigned a veteran clandestine service officer, one very familiar with Iran, to head it.

He was a great choice. He began his inaugural briefing to me by saying, “The threat from Iran is lethal, strategic, and urgent.” He has stayed with the topic, later leading the DNI’s efforts and then becoming a constant presence supporting the Obama administration’s nuclear negotiations with the Islamic Republic.

In 2007 we gave him license to raid talent from other CIA efforts and then backed him up when the predictable complaints came rolling in. He also created space in IOD for community partners, too, welcoming officers from DIA, NSA, and the FBI, and then he synchronized their HUMINT collection plans.

As we found with the CTC, the melding of ops and analysis and S&T enabled more focused collection, more relevant technology,
and
better analysis. With more centralized direction we could better prioritize requirements, craft collection plans, and ensure a stronger counterintelligence discipline against the tough Iranian services. We could also more comprehensively assess and synchronize what potential partners had to
offer, and I traveled frequently to the region to extend their cooperation. The issue was of such importance that the sharing of very sensitive details with these partners was often unprecedented.

Of course, Israel was as seized with the issue as we were, so we routinely compared notes with them. This dialogue was incredibly useful, and we rarely disagreed about the facts on the ground, but in making assessments about future Iranian milestones, Mossad and Israeli Defense Intelligence tended to be more pessimistic than we were: more Iranian capabilities, sooner, in greater volume. Their estimates were always plausible, and with Tel Aviv less than a thousand miles from Tehran, I always understood the rationale for their math.

Steve and I demanded that IOD update us frequently on the seventh floor. They later told me that they sensed they were being held accountable. They also remembered my admonition (after a briefing showing markedly increased effort) that “activity wasn’t the same thing as progress.”

We also worked to up our policy game. Steve Hadley had begun informal twice-weekly sessions in his West Wing office, and the approach really took off in late 2007 and 2008. The sessions included Steve and his deputy—who was the note taker—the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the chairman of the JCS, the DNI, and me. On the grounds that middle-aged folks get cranky in the afternoon, Steve had the White House mess deliver nachos with cheese dip and taco sauce for the meetings.

There were no backups at these sessions, just principals. Agendas weren’t announced in advance, so Steve got our views rather than those of our staffs. The vice president was a true participant and didn’t use his office to unduly shape discussion. There was a lot of give-and-take, as we could confront one another without witnesses and without leaving bureaucratic scars. Any decisions made or directions set would launch a deputies committee meeting to put them into action through the formal NSC process.

We talked about Iran a lot during these sessions.

As always, good policy was a question of balance. With a complex problem, if you push too hard after one component, others fall off the rails. In this case we wanted to pressure the Iranians, but we didn’t want to provoke a war with them. On the other hand, going too lightly could also provoke a war if states like Israel felt that their concerns were going unaddressed and they concluded that they had to act unilaterally. We were looking for a sweet spot between those extremes.

Some of us were especially concerned about the potential for Israeli action between the November 2008 election and Inauguration Day, reasoning that alienating an outgoing president but presenting an incoming one with a changed strategic reality might be attractive to them. As it turned out, such fears were unfounded.

One could conceive three broad approaches to the problem. The first was a given: make it as hard as possible for the Iranians to develop fissile material, a warhead, and delivery systems. In between the queso dip and taco sauce, we held up to the light every conceivable path we could think of to do just that: overt and covert; unilateral and cooperative; direct and indirect; virtual and physical; kinetic and nonkinetic.

We, of course, had a full menu of sanctions available to punish Iranian or supplier behavior
if
we could get international support (which admittedly became harder to do after the NIE was published). There was also the option of squeezing the supply chain of critical materials on which the Iranians depended. We could “name and shame” scientists affiliated with illicit activity.

Someone else took the brain-drain approach to a higher level. We weren’t the only ones trying to slow the Iranians. Another actor was blowing stuff up and killing their scientists. We had our suspicions, but it was something I never raised with any of our partners, even on evenings like the one I spent at a partner’s safe house in the region, thoroughly engrossed in what the Iranians were doing and what could be done to stop them. Not that we could help anyone if they were doing this. We couldn’t even comment on whether or not we thought killing scientists was a good
idea. (Operationally, yes. In terms of establishing international precedent, not so much.)

We did consider the prospect of a bombing campaign. The Pentagon plans for a variety of contingencies, and the plan for this one looked big. Lots of defense suppression before strikers began attacks against what was a large, dispersed, and hardened target. All of us—Gates, Rice, Hadley, Mullen, McConnell, and me—knew the risks of such a course, but the defense secretary may have had the darkest summary: “If we were to do this,” he regularly reminded us, “we will guarantee that which we are trying to prevent: an Iran that will stop at nothing to, in secret, build a nuclear weapon.”

And the results would be temporary, setting the Iranians back only a couple of years or so. In fact, we all knew that whatever our efforts, we were only slowing the Iranian program, not stopping it. If they wanted a weapon badly enough, they would get one, even after a strike, even after successful covert actions, even after a tough sanctions regime. We could slow and punish, but not stop, if they were willing to pay the price.

The second broad course available to us would address just that, their will. Could we change their minds? We doubted it, but this was too important to be left to just instinct. We were tasked to come up with a straw man. What would a plan to do that look like?

It was a hell of a homework assignment. Basically, what kind of internal tensions would distract the Iranians from the nuclear program, cause them to divert resources from it, or convince them it wasn’t worth the candle or at least make their behavior more costly?

Iran has fault lines; it is far from a homogenous society. Persians make up only about 60 percent of the population. There are large Kurdish and Azeri minorities and smatterings of Arabs, Baluchis, and Turkmen. Would it be possible to exploit or deepen the unhappiness that these groups already had with the government? The small Arab population was neuralgically discontented under Persian rule. The substantial Azeri population comprised a good chunk of the
bazaari
merchant class, who had their issues with corrupt clerical rule and had the magnet of a
self-governing national homeland just to the north. One in ten Iranians were Kurds, who wanted to carve out just such a homeland for themselves. What kind of messaging could mobilize these groups and energize these disputes? What kind of actions could inspire or appear to reflect heightened dissidence?