If there is a dominant theme about discussions surrounding the unclassified key judgments of the NIE on Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities, it is the political nature, timing and impact of the report and its release. At a meta-level the thrust of the two main arguments go something like this:
The report reflects new and reliable intelligence, put through new and rigorous analytic methodologies designed to avoid the mistakes that led to the war in Iraq. It is a more accurate reflection of what has been going on in Iran and demonstrates that a given course of action – one that does not involved armed conflict – can be pursued by policymakers with a certain amount of confidence that our disputes with Iran will be resolved. It is an unbiased and widely-agreed-upon piece of work that should be taken seriously.
The report relies on new information of questionable value and subjected to the politically-motivated machinations of a handful of Bush-haters. That it so dramatically contradicts what just two years ago was equally believed as valid indicates that we should doubt its veracity. Full of contradictions, and given Iran’s history, we cannot sanely consider courses of action that do not involve armed force to one extent or another. The timing and content make it clear that political partisans have hijacked what is supposed to be a fact-driven apolitical process.
The motto of the CIA is that the truth will set you free, but in the worlds of both secrets and politics, actual ground truth can be awfully hard to come by. My political acumen is questionable at best, but I share with you some humble, fact-based insights in the hope of clearing away some of the smoke and breaking some of the mirrors surrounding this debate.
Unlike most of the people commenting on the NIE’s key judgments, I’ve actually contributed to a number of NIC-commissioned assessments. Over the years my role varied, but I have a pretty solid understanding of the process and I hope this proves to be useful in the debate.
For starters, ignore the part of any story that talks about NIE’s being a consensus documents of the 16 agencies in the intelligence community. For any given assessment, maybe a dozen agencies are active participants in the process. If you’re writing about a technical threat from a nation-state in Asia, the Coast Guard isn’t going to have a lot to add. For a study on Iran’s nuclear capabilities you can be fairly confident that between eight and a dozen agencies showed up and played major roles.
Secondly, reports that the NIE was drafted by people with a known political agenda – or acute cases of Bush Derangement Syndrome – make for entertaining political hay, but it has been my experience that the principle drafters of such assessments come from one lead agency, not the executives at the top of the food chain. Anyone who can prove that partisan hacks cherry picked the intelligence information they wanted and then strong-armed the rest of the community to go along with their conclusions would have a bombshell on their hands. These executives do play an important role in the NIE process, which I’ll address later.
Finally, building an NIE is not unlike any other bureaucratic exercise that involves multiple agencies of the government. Competing opinions are argued, disputes are mediated, and dissent noted. At the end of the day a deliverable is due – the rough draft – and the involved parties get to sit at their home offices for a period of time, ruminate on the work, and forward to the principle drafter their comments, edits, suggestions and recommendations. What follows are several rounds of review and edit sessions with increasingly more senior members of the agencies involved and the National Intelligence Council, until the final draft is ready for review, approval and dissemination.
I spent almost 20 years in the intelligence community and I have absolutely no idea what the political affiliation or disposition of any of my colleagues or superiors were. No one talked politics; we talked data, methodology and analysis. The idea that a dozen-odd people would sit down for days at a time concocting a piece of work that was purely designed to thwart the efforts of a given administration is more than a little absurd. I have no doubt that I worked with people who did not agree with the Executive’s agenda (regardless of who the Executive was at any given time), but you show up to these things with data and arguments you can defend; you show up with political party talking points and you’re going to catch an intellectual beating.
Time to circle back to the role that the most senior members of the community play in efforts like an NIE. Once all the grunt work is done, a National Intelligence Officer – the leading analyst in the NIC on a particular issue – gets to craft the final version of the assessment. It is at this point that subtle yet powerful changes to verbiage by a political partisan could potentially undue sound analytical work, but here is the rub: for every leaker promoting the partisan interpretation, there should be someone reaching out to a reporter friendly to the other side of the political spectrum to call foul. Anyone who thinks intelligence analysts are introverted bookworms who won’t come close to blows when someone messes with their work doesn’t know the intelligence business.
So what is a more likely explanation for this drastically new assessment?
Whether it is new photographs, new human sources, or new signals intercepts, the fact that just two years ago, indeed just a few months ago, we were confident that the exact opposite of what the latest NIE says Iran is up to suggests that either we have multiple, unimpeachable sources of intelligence that have shown us the light; or the information we have is all over the map and drawing definitive conclusions is next to impossible. That our intelligence services have rarely penetrated a hard target like Iran, and the fact that the intelligence community has missed a laundry list of major strategic developments around the world, suggests the latter case is more likely. I am always willing to hope for the best, but the historical pattern is hard to ignore.
If there is a bias being exerted here (and again, I do not dispute the presence of Bush Derangement Syndrome sufferers in the IC) it is a bias driven by intellectual and professional fear and less raw politics. That may be parsing to some, but I think the distinction is important. Regardless of where an intelligence officer falls out on the political spectrum, none of them can stand being the experts that never get anything right (or more accurately, have their failures so publicly exposed). I’ve been as guilty as anyone in the business: I knew secrets, I should have been able to make better calls that people who did not, but often times I did not. So the dramatic shift in the NIE may have less to do with any killer piece of new information and everything to do with the fact that the community is in a mindset that has them prepared to do anything (anything but apply a full-court intel press against hard targets – and pay the associated human cost) to avoid being exposed as ineffective. In an age of information, spending ~$40 billion a year for 150 pages of “maybe yes, maybe no” isn’t a situation that is going to stand for long.
In the end the real story of this NIE will not be known from some time, but that will not prevent those on either side of the political spectrum from using it to score political points. Ignore the hype and rhetoric and read the key judgments carefully for yourself. Assume everything used to construct the work is accurate and base your own assessment on the language used: do you feel highly confident?
