One of the interesting aspects of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s response in the wake of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bombshell revelations on Monday was its insistence that it has no “credible evidence” Iran actively pursued nuclear weapons after 2009.
What makes this significant is that in 2007, the U.S. intelligence community released a new National Intelligence Estimate (a document which represents the consensus view of all U.S. intelligence agencies) rolling back previous conclusions and declaring that Iran was no longer working on a nuclear weapon. Specifically, the NIE declared, “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.”
Now, keep in mind that the U.S. intelligence community had warned since the 1990s that the Islamic Republic was covertly pursuing covert enrichment in pursuit of a nuclear weapons program. Iranian scientists had experimented with plutonium and uranium metal. In 2002, an opposition group revealed the existence of a secret enrichment facility at Natanz.
In order to reach its conclusions in 2007, the authors of the NIE fiddled with definitions. Specifically, they redefined nuclear weapons program to exclude uranium conversion and enrichment. But, even if that sleight of hand is accepted (and many diplomats and congressional democrats did just that in order to constrain the policy options at former President George W. Bush’s disposal) what the IAEA now suggests is that there is evidence that Iran continued its nuclear program well beyond 2007.
This brings us to Monday’s revelations and how U.S. policymakers and the international community define ‘nuclear weapons program.’ Let’s put aside that the whole trove of archived blue prints and notes suggests that Iran was pausing rather than eliminating its nuclear program. There could be no other reason for maintaining tens of thousands of documents and hiding them from international inspectors.
More broadly, however, a nuclear weapons program has multiple components. There’s enriching uranium to bomb grade, something the Iranians now have the technology to do. There’s also designing the weapon itself, something the revealed cache shows the Iranians have worked on. Lastly, however, there’s the delivery system. This is where former Secretary of State John Kerry’s acquiescence to Iranian demands to change wording on U.N. resolutions prohibiting weapons only designed to carry (rather than merely capable of carrying) nuclear warheads was such a gift to Iran’s most militaristic leaders.
Iran has made no secret that it is developing ballistic missiles; indeed, it tests them with a frequency far greater than North Korea does. Given the revelations of Iran’s other nuclear work, any compromise on Iran’s ballistic missiles (as Europeans demand and as former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was prepared to give) would in effect bless the third major component of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Back in 2005, as Hassan Rouhani, at the time the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and Iran’s nuclear negotiator, defended himself from colleagues criticizing his temporary enrichment suspension, he explained that he agreed to a temporary suspension because Iran could use the pause and the goodwill to advance the other components of its nuclear program. Now the president of Iran, Rouhani has been at it again.
The Iranians could never have gotten so far, however, had it not been for the mistakes of many in the U.S. national security community.
First, the intelligence community should determine how the authors of the 2007 NIE got it so wrong. Did they really believe that Bush was more dangerous than the Islamic Republic of Iran? Second, why was it that each and every U.S. intelligence agency signed off on a document that said definitively that Iran stopped its program when the IAEA now says evidence exists that it had continued until 2009? Thirdly, what advice did the U.S. intelligence community give Kerry and crew with regard to Iran’s ballistic missiles, or was Kerry’s concession the product of one man’s inflated ego and a desire for legacy at any cost?
Only one thing is certain: This is one intelligence failure that the United States cannot afford to repeat. There’s simply too much at stake.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
