Over at his new blog “connecting the dots,” Gabriel Schoenfeld–who is always a “must read” when it comes to intelligence matters–is discussing Kenneth Timmerman’s new book, Shadow Warriors. I have not yet read Timmerman’s book, but Schoenfeld is discussing one of Timmerman’s claims that I have looked into–that is, I’ve tried to look into it as much as I can. According to Schoenfeld, Timmerman writes that “to this day, the CIA has no spies in Iran” and he attributes this claim to “numerous agency insiders and other sources.” Schoenfeld points out that if the CIA did have spies inside Iran, Langley would have an incentive to tell journalists like Timmerman that they didn’t. It is a fair point. The Agency certainly does have a strong incentive to protect its most important sources. Despite his “distrust” of Timmerman’s account, Schoenfeld says his “best guess, knowing a bit about CIA difficulties in recruiting human sources, is that his claim about the agency’s non-coverage of Iran is accurate.” I am also inclined to believe Timmerman is right. Here’s why. In 2006, Chris Wallace of Fox News interviewed Congressman Pete Hoekstra, who was then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Hoekstra was asked what we know about Iran’s nuclear program:
During the same session, Wallace also interviewed Jane Harman, Hoekstra’s Democratic counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee. Harman concurred with Hoekstra: “We don’t know. Our intelligence is thin. I don’t think we have enough sources. I don’t think our analysis is sharp enough.” Is it possible that the CIA hid its sources inside Iran from the senior ranking Republican and Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, so much so that they went on television warning that we didn’t have any real significant intel inside Iran? Maybe, but that certainly isn’t likely. You could argue that Hoekstra and Harman did not say that the CIA had no spies at all inside Iran, which is Timmerman’s claim. That’s true, but their statements leave us in the same place–the U.S. intelligence community is blind when it comes to Iran.
The Robb-Silverman Commission investigated U.S. intelligence failures with respect to Iraq’s WMD programs and also looked into the state of the intelligence community’s penetration of other nations’ programs, including Iran. It wasn’t a pretty picture. Sure, there were some successes, such as the CIA’s infiltration of A.Q Khan’s nuclear proliferation network. (I should note, however, that the CIA’s penetration of Khan’s network came rather late in the game. Khan had been doing deals around the world for the better part of a decade, if not longer, by the time American intelligence finally got good sources on the inside.) But overall, the CIA and its fellow intelligence agencies knew little about places like Iran and North Korea. For example, the Commission found: “Across the board, the Intelligence Community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world’s most dangerous actors. In some cases, it knows less now than it did five or ten years ago.” Understandably, the Commission refrained from discussing the specifics of the intelligence community’s infiltration, or lack thereof, of both the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs. But it is a safe bet, in my opinion, that the statement cited above applied in both cases. There’s much more, including reports that the CIA’s network of spies inside Iran was compromised by its own ineptitude. But, I’ll leave it there for now. Thus, I think Timmerman and Schoenfeld are right to think that the United States has few, if any, spies inside Iran. The preceding discussion dealt mainly with Iran’s nuclear program. Perhaps the CIA has spies with knowledge of other aspects of the Iranian regime, but again that’s doubtful. In the case of Iraq, as Bob Woodward reported in Plan of Attack, the United States had recruited only a handful of its own assets inside Saddam’s regime, and these were on the periphery. My bet is that we face the same situation with Iran: The CIA most likely has few high-value spies working on its behalf inside Iran.
