Iran's nuclear intentions formidable task to discern

Seattle Times Newspaper — While officials at U.S. spy agencies have believed the Iranians halted efforts to build a nuclear bomb in 2003, the difficulty in assessing the government's ambitions was evident two years ago, when what appeared to be alarming new intelligence emerged, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Intercepted communications of Iranian officials discussing their nuclear program raised concerns the country's leaders had decided to revive efforts to develop a weapon, intelligence officials said.

That, along with a stream of other information, set off an intensive review and delayed publication of the 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, a classified report reflecting the consensus of analysts from 16 agencies. In the end, they deemed the intercepts and other evidence unpersuasive and stuck to their longstanding conclusion.

The intelligence crisis that erupted in 2010, which has not been previously disclosed, highlights how central that assessment has become to matters of war and peace.

Suspicions' effect

As suspicions about Iran's nuclear ambitions have provoked tough sanctions and threats of military confrontation, top Obama administration officials have said Iran has not decided to pursue a weapon, reflecting the intelligence community's secret analysis. But if that assessment changes, it could lift a brake set by President Obama, who has not ruled out military options as a last resort to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.

Publicly and privately, U.S. intelligence officials express confidence in the spy agencies' assertions. Still, some acknowledge significant intelligence gaps in understanding the intentions of Iran's leaders and whether they have approved the crucial steps toward engineering a bomb, the most covert aspect of one of the most difficult intelligence collection targets in the world.

Much of what analysts sift through are shards of information that are ambiguous or incomplete, sometimes not up to date, and that typically offer more insight about what the Iranians are not doing than evidence of what they are up to.

As a result, officials caution that they cannot offer certainty. "I'd say that I have about 75 percent confidence in the assessment that they haven't restarted the program," said one former senior intelligence official.

Another former intelligence official said: "Iran is the hardest intelligence target there is. It is harder by far than North Korea. In large part, that's because their system is so confusing," which "has the effect of making it difficult to determine who speaks authoritatively on what."

He added: "We're not on the ground, and not having our people on the ground to catch nuance is a problem."

Iran maintains that its nuclear program is for peaceful civilian purposes, but U.S. intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have picked up evidence in recent years that some Iranian research that may be weapons-related has continued since 2003, officials said. That information has not been significant enough for the spy agencies to alter their view that the weapons program has not been restarted.

Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, agrees with the U.S. intelligence assessments, even while Israeli political leaders have been pushing for quick, aggressive action to block Iran from becoming what they describe as an existential threat to the Jewish state.

"Their people ask very hard questions, but Mossad does not disagree with the U.S. on the weapons program," said one former senior U.S. intelligence official, who, like others for this article, would speak only on the condition of anonymity. . "There is not a lot of dispute between the U.S. and Israeli intelligence communities on the facts."

Tough to track

Hunting for signs of the resumption of a weapons program is more difficult than monitoring enrichment and missile-building activities, both of which require large investments in plants, equipment and related infrastructure. U.S. intelligence officials said the conversations of only a dozen or so top Iranian officials and scientists would be worth monitoring to determine whether the weapons program had been restarted, because decision-making on nuclear matters is so highly compartmentalized in Iran.

"Reactors are easier to track than enrichment facilities, but obviously anything that involves a lot of construction is easier to track than scientific and intellectual work," said Jeffrey Richelson, author of "Spying on the Bomb," a history of U.S. nuclear intelligence.

The extent of the evidence the spy agencies have collected is unclear because most of their findings are classified, but intelligence officials say they have been throwing everything they have at the Iranian nuclear program.

While the National Security Agency eavesdrops on telephone conversations of Iranian officials and conducts other forms of electronic surveillance, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency analyzes radar imagery and digital images of nuclear sites. Outside analysts think high-tech drones prowl overhead; one came down late last year in Iran, though U.S. officials said they lost control of it in Afghanistan.

Clandestine sensors

Meanwhile, clandestine ground sensors, which can detect electromagnetic signals or radioactive emissions that could be linked to covert nuclear activity, are placed near suspect Iranian facilities. The United States also relies heavily on information gathered by IAEA inspectors who visit some of Iran's nuclear-related facilities.

Collecting independent human intelligence — recruiting spies — has been by far the most difficult task for U.S. intelligence. Some operational lapses — and the lack of an embassy as a base of operations ever since the hostage crisis three decades ago — have frequently left the CIA virtually blind on the ground in Iran, according to former intelligence officials.

In 2005, a presidential commission that reviewed the prewar failures of the intelligence on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction faulted U.S. intelligence on Iran, saying it included little valuable information from spies.

More recently, the CIA suffered a setback in efforts to question Iranian exiles and recruit nuclear scientists. Two years ago, agency officials had to sort through the wreckage of the strange case of Shahram Amiri, an Iranian scientist who apparently defected to the United States in 2009 and returned to Iran in 2010 after claiming he had been abducted by the CIA.

Just as in 2010, new evidence about the Iranian weapons program delayed the National Intelligence Estimate in 2007, the last previous assessment. Current and former U.S. officials say a draft version of the assessment had been completed when the United States began to collect intelligence suggesting Iran had suspended its weapons program and disbanded its weapons team four years earlier.

The draft version had concluded the Iranians were still trying to build a bomb, but as they scrutinized the new intelligence from several sources, U.S. intelligence officials decided they had to change course, officials said. While enrichment activities continued, the evidence that Iran had halted its weapons program in 2003 at the direction of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was too strong to ignore, they said.

One former senior official characterized the information as very persuasive. "I had high confidence in it," he said.

And today, despite criticism of that assessment from some outside observers and hawkish politicians, U.S. intelligence analysts believe the Iranians have not gotten the go-ahead from Khamenei to revive the program.

"That assessment," said one U.S. official, "holds up really well."