See no evil?

The leaking earlier this month of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) projection that Iran is a decade away from obtaining nuclear weapons – doubling previous official estimates – is, in some ways, more ominous than would have been a finding that the mullahs are about to get "the Bomb." After all, the latter would be no surprise, given the considerable evidence (albeit, much of it circumstantial) that has accumulated about Tehran’s intentions and activities in this area.

By contrast, the pollyanish assessment not only seems wildly out of touch with such realities. Worse yet, the fact that it is one of the first products of the newly "reformed" intelligence community suggests that – far from reducing the dangers of strategic surprise and unconnected "dots" – the Foreign Service Officer-dominated Director of National Intelligence bureaucracy is going to exacerbate past failings and mistakes.

"Intelligence" vs. Reality

Several weeks ago, the Islamic Republic of Iran publicly announced that it was defying its European negotiating partners and the will of the so-called "international community" by resuming the conversion of 37 tons of natural uranium into its gaseous form. It is widely believed that within a month of taking such a step the uranium would be ready for enrichment – a critical step toward having bomb-grade material for weapons purposes.

Yet, the NIE’s authors evidently have allowed a highly debatable assumption to drive their conclusion that Iran is a full decade away from having nuclear weapons: They assert that Iran’s centrifuges are inadequate for the task and that, moreover, its scientists will have difficulty connecting them to a "cascade" (by which uranium flows from one machine to the next).

Incredibly, even the International Atomic Energy Agency’s officials – typically the most inclined to see-no-evil when it comes to would be proliferators like Iran – are confident that Iran can produce and cascade high-quality centrifuges. Indeed, as far back as 2002, Iranian scientists were able secretly to enrich uranium in an experimental cascade, a fact the IAEA did not discover until the following year.

As Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control suggested in a recent op.ed. for the New York Times: "It is unreasonable to assume that Iran could not, after deciding to begin a concerted effort, assemble a 2,000-machine cascade in a year….After a year’s operation of such a cascade, Iran would have one bomb’s worth of highly enriched uranium."

Even more troubling is what we do not know. Tehran has a history of concealment and there are abundant indications that what is being concealed (much of it deep underground) amounts to a vast clandestine nuclear weapons infrastructure. As Mr. Milhollin has noted, there is evidence that this infrastructure is not only being used to advance nuclear-related weapons components but also the manufacture of non-nuclear parts essential to such arms. Factoring in what must be presumed to be considerable clandestine activities would only shorten, not lengthen, estimates of the amount of time it will take Iran to obtain nuclear weapons.

Matters are made worse by highly misleading press characterizations of other leaks, to the effect that an IAEA investigation had concluded that traces of weapons- grade uranium discovered by inspectors in Iran actually came from a contaminated shipping container originating in Pakistan, not an Iranian indigenous program. Whether this is indeed the case or not, such a finding hardly justifies reports that there is now "no evidence" of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

A Taste of What is to Come?

It may be purely coincidental, but this example of "whistling past the graveyard" seems all too familiar given the background of the man who has recently been entrusted by Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte with responsibility for running the newly created National Counter-Proliferation Center (NCPC): Ambassador Kenneth Brill.

During his tenure as the U.S. Ambassador to the IAEA, Brill showed himself to be a tireless advocate of concessions, demarches, and appeasement demanded by, as he put it, the "spirit of Vienna" (i.e., the lowest-common denominator "consensus" positions usually dictated by the proliferators and their friends). Brill repeatedly objected to and otherwise sought to undermine Bush Administration efforts to bring effective international pressure to bear on the world’s two most dangerous proliferation threats – Iran and North Korea.

If the U.S. government’s intelligence agencies are all now being obliged to view suspected proliferators behavior through Amb. Brill’s lens, it is a safe bet that we will see less and less evil as it emerges around the world and be ever less able to prevent it from happening until it is too late. Matters are made no better by the fact that Amb. Negroponte has made another Foreign Service Officer with a record of downplaying threats – Thomas Fingar, former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research – his senior Deputy for Analysis, a critical job in the assessment of all classified information. Worse yet, past problems with "group think" – the absence of vitally needed dissenting opinions and competitive analysis – are likely to be compounded by Fingar also being designated the Chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

The Bottom Line

The stakes are too high to complicate America’s security posture by entrusting the job of being America’s eyes and ears in the caves and tunnels around the world where future threats are gathering to those who have proven less than reliably visionary in the past. Iran is a case in point, a literally ticking time-bomb that we ignore at our peril. As Mr. Milhollin put it: "Americans should resist the latest intelligence-agency lullaby….Iran is determined to get the bomb – all the agencies agree on that – and dealing with that threat is not a job that can be left for the next administration."