shifting currents: changes in national intelligence ...review and approval by the national...
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Shifting Currents: Changesin National IntelligenceEstimates on the Iran NuclearThreatSarah E. KrepsVersion of record first published: 05 Nov 2008.
To cite this article: Sarah E. Kreps (2008): Shifting Currents: Changes in NationalIntelligence Estimates on the Iran Nuclear Threat, Intelligence and NationalSecurity, 23:5, 608-628
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Shifting Currents: Changes in NationalIntelligence Estimates on the Iran Nuclear
Threat
SARAH E. KREPS
Lost in the political fallout of the Iran National Intelligence Estimate
(NIE) of 2007 was any discussion about historical parallels and what
those might say about intersection between intelligence, policy, and
politics. This article argues that the NIEs on the ballistic missile threat
of the 1990s offer a useful analogy. In a short period of time, the NIE’s
assessment of the threat from so-called ‘rogue states’ went from
modest to non-existent, provoking charges of politicization, eliciting
investigations, and pausing the US missile defense program. A similar
sequence of events followed the NIEs on Iran, whose tenor appeared to
shift from alarmist in 2005 to dismissive in 2007. If the experience
of the ballistic missile NIEs is any guide, then it is not clear that
the ‘cure’ – investigations and commissions – are better than the
disease. Both cases illustrate the need for the intelligence community to
remain detached but not unaware of the policy environment into which
these estimates are introduced. They also reaffirm that estimates are
just estimates, probabilistic rather than deterministic judgments about
future events.
The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran set off a firestorm of
responses across the political spectrum. For some conservatives, the response
bordered on vitriolic. Former US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton chided
that ‘Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy
formulation rather than ‘‘intelligence’’ analysis, and too many in Congress
and the media are happy about it.’1 From the other side of the aisle, Senator
Hillary Clinton was quick to point out that ‘the new declassified key
judgments of the Iran NIE expose the latest effort by the Bush administration
to distort intelligence to pursue its ideological ends’.2 Among the few points
of consensus was that the tone of the 2007 assessment appeared to back off
Intelligence and National Security, Vol.23, No.5, October 2008, pp.608–628ISSN 0268-4527 print 1743-9019 onlineDOI: 10.1080/02684520802449484 ª 2008 Taylor & Francis
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notably from that of the more alarmist 2005 which concluded that ‘left to its
own devices, Iran is determined to build nuclear weapons’.3
The contention and apparent reversal surrounding the 2007 NIE finds a
remarkable parallel in a series of NIEs conducted on the ballistic missile
threat in the 1990s. The NIEs on Iran can perhaps therefore draw some
lessons from those earlier NIEs, the Commissions that followed, and their
impacts on the policy process. Whereas the 1993 NIE left open the door of a
ballistic missile threat to the US, the 1995 NIE essentially dismissed the
possibility, an assertion that seemed so divergent from its predecessor that it
triggered a series of investigations on the question of politicization and
‘independent’ assessments of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM)
threat to the US. The Gates Panel found methodological flaws though no
evidence of politicization. Two other investigations were more critical. The
General Accounting Office found that the 1995 NIE ‘overstated the certainty
of its key judgments . . . caveats and intelligence gaps noted in the NIE do not
support this level of certainty’.4 The Rumsfeld Commission chided the earlier
estimate for a thin methodology that was unable to take full stock of
emerging threats. With its revised, comprehensive methodology, the
Commission found that states other than declared nuclear powers could field
an ICBM ‘with little or no warning’ and posed a growing near-term threat to
the US.5 North Korea’s test firing of a missile appeared to confirm these more
hawkish prognostications and plans for cutting missile defense were shelved.
At first glance, charges of politicization on both sides of the political aisle
seemed plausible in the Iran NIE – as they were in the ballistic missile NIEs –
because of the appearance of dramatic changes to the NIE’s conclusions
within a short period of time. But is it also plausible that the changes to these
two estimates are examples of good intelligence analysis, incorporating new
information and sources and allowing them to affect the NIE product? What
do the investigations that ensued after the ballistic missile NIE say about
whether similar investigations might be a fruitful exercise for understanding
the apparent shift in the recent NIE?
By way of offering procedural and historical context for NIE production,
this analysis begins by discussing the NIE process and how estimating threats
has changed over time. It then outlines both cases – the ballistic missile threat
NIEs of the 1990s and the Iran NIEs of 2005 and 2007 – including the
contents of those estimates, how those estimates appeared to shift over a two
year period, and the policy implications for those changes. It then addresses
the political fallout from these NIEs, including the series of investigations
that followed the 1995 NIE and have been recommended following the recent
2007 NIE on Iran. The article closes by drawing inferences from those cases,
including lessons for producers of intelligence estimates, possible ways to
address politicization of intelligence, and the challenges attendant to
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estimating threats. As the study of these cases makes clear, since estimating is
based on incomplete information, it is therefore ‘inherent in a great many
situations that after reading the estimate you still do not know’ the likely
course of future threats.6
THE PROCESS OF NIE PRODUCTION
Former director of the Office of National Estimates (ONE), Sherman Kent,
wrote that ‘estimating is what you do when you do not know’.7 The NIE,
produced by what was once the ONE, replaced by the National Intelligence
Council (NIC) in 1973, assesses the probability of a future course of action
for an issue of importance to US national security policy. It is the result of
coordinated judgments within the Intelligence Community and represents the
‘the most authoritative written judgments on national security issues’, with
the intention of informing civilian and military leaders on appropriate
national security policy.8
The estimating process starts with an NIE request from the executive
branch, Congress, or military commander. For example, four members of the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence requested the 2002 Iraq NIE, the
State Department requested NIEs on communism and proxy-related issues
during the Cold War,9 and Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B.
Johnson and their Defense Departments requested estimates on Southeast
Asia surrounding the war in Vietnam.10 The Director of National Intelligence
(DNI) then authorizes the request, and the NIC assembles the terms of
reference that set the parameters of the NIE, with the National Intelligence
Officers preparing an initial draft to be sent across the intelligence
community for coordination, comment, and critique. At an interagency
coordination session, the community reviews the estimate line by line for
content, analysis, fact, and wording, with the objective of generating a
consensus outcome, or one that is marked by minor points of dissent in
footnotes. It then goes out to community peers before a final draft and then
review and approval by the National Intelligence Board, comprised of senior
representatives from the intelligence community and chaired by the DNI. The
process takes anywhere from two to three weeks for a ‘fast track’ NIE to
several months for a typical NIE.11
NIEs range in subject from the strategic – Soviet intercontinental missile
capacity assessments during the Cold War – to the tactical – the degree of
political stability in Mozambique – to the economic – implications of
Mexican financial instability.12 During the Cold War, many NIEs were
related to the Soviet threat, whether directly based on their arsenal of
weapons, or indirectly as related to their influence in Eastern Europe, Latin
America, and Africa. More recent estimates have been dominated by
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weapons of mass destruction (WMD) development and state sponsors of
terrorism.13
Since they are based on incomplete information, the NIEs tend to hedge
against the uncertainty by including qualifying or probabilistic language.
In assessing the probabilities of a particular outcome, the NIE may
indicate that a particular event is ‘highly unlikely’ or that the agencies can
assess the likelihood with some degree of confidence. Whereas terms such
as ‘unlikely’ or ‘remote’ suggest a less than even chance and ‘probably’
or ‘almost certainly’ indicate a greater than even chance, the terms are
most often not deterministic, since assessments are based on subjective
and incomplete information that may cloud the estimate’s certainty.14
Ideally, NIEs would also include some quantified estimate in the form of
numerical percentages, but admittedly such an approach is controversial
because of the uncertainty involved in assessing why a particular outcome
would have a one in two chance, for example, rather than a three in four
chance.15
THE NIE’S CHECKERED PAST
NIEs are not as old as the intelligence community itself. The decision to
produce NIEs resulted from what was seen as the egregious failure to
anticipate North Korea’s 1950 invasion of the South. Just two years before,
the newly reorganized intelligence community had come under harsh scrutiny
by the 1948 Dulles–Jackson–Correa Committee that had assessed perfor-
mance at the Central Intelligence Agency, discovered dysfunction, and
recommended reform within the CIA. Scant reform followed, however, until
North Korea’s invasion galvanized political support. Reform took the form of
punitive replacements – President Truman replaced the previous Director of
Central Intelligence, Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, with Lieutenant
General Walter Bedell Smith – and a full mandate to overhaul the agency.16
One notable effect of the reforms was the replacement of the Office of
Reports and Estimates, the previous analytical arm of the agency, with the
Office of National Estimates. Beginning in 1950, the office would produce
NIEs, intended to be an interagency coordination of all intelligence
organizations and producer of objective, even ‘unwelcome substantive
intelligence judgments’.17 Until that time, intelligence estimates existed but
not as a coordinated set of judgments that brought to bear the views of all US
intelligence organizations in a coherent fashion.18
Perhaps an improvement over the absence of a coordinated assessment,
ONE’s intelligence products came to be viewed as flawed documents.
National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger dismissed the product, saying that
he had to ‘fight his way through ‘‘Talmudic’’ documents to find their real
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meaning’. He then dismissed ONE altogether and produced estimates from
within the National Security Council.19
As the new DCI in November 1975, George H.W. Bush introduced
competitive analysis, using ‘Team B’ or ‘red teaming’ that would produce
alternative views for a given threat estimate. Though a solid idea in principle,
competitive analysis became a lesson in unintended consequences, as the
team of outside experts brought their own set of decidedly hawkish biases
that ultimately appeared to politicize the original Team A (CIA Analysts)
estimates. The dynamic played out in NIE-11-76 on Soviet strategic
objectives. The Team B product was far more alarmist than the original
estimate, concluding that the Soviet threat was considerably more advanced
along the key parameters of missiles, bombers, economic development, and
intentions and that ‘the Soviet leadership seems to have concluded that
nuclear war could be fought and won’. In one passage, the Team B report
indicated Soviet intentions to ‘crush the capitalist realm by other than
military means; the Soviet Union is nevertheless preparing for a Third World
War as if it were unavoidable’.20 Team B argued that estimators had vastly
underestimated Soviet capabilities by ‘mirror imaging’ US beliefs about
mutual assured destruction rather than considering knowledge of the ‘Russian
soul’ and history, which the Team B hawks argued pointed in the direction of
failed deterrence, vast production of Soviet strategic capability, and an
inevitable nuclear war.21
The Senate Intelligence Committee which later evaluated the compe-
titive analysis process found that the team was ‘so structured that the
outcome was predetermined and the experiment’s contribution lessened’,
meaning that the Team B was so clearly set on locating an outcome
consistent with its anti-detente preferences that its assessment was not
taken as legitimate or serious.22 The whole process became marred by
controversy surrounding the objectivity of Team B’s analysis and provided
an early precedent for charges of politicized intelligence.23 Later
investigation of the Team B findings showed that the conclusions ‘were
wildly off the mark’ and ‘gross exaggerations’ by making worst case
assumptions about Soviet intentions.24
In part because of the debacle surrounding the 1976 Team B exercise, the
Carter Administration sidelined Team B competitive analysis,25 but the
unintended consequence of that reform was a more ad hoc, bureaucratically
fractured, and less authoritative set of judgments. An absence of coordinated
assessments on contemporary threats prompted President Jimmy Carter to
write a note to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, NSA Zbigniew Brzezinski,
and DCI Stansfield Turner criticizing the ‘quality of our political
intelligence’, particularly regarding Iran, which proved to be ineffective in
predicting the fall of the Shah in 1979.26
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Estimates through the end of the Cold War mainly focused on the Soviet
strategic forces and bounced between the hawk–dove dialectic that had
characterized most internal debates during the Cold War. The end of the Cold
War brought calls for restructuring of the intelligence community with a
greater focus on open source information, human sources in new areas of
interest – the argument being that high profile failures such as not anticipating
the 1998 Indian nuclear test resulted from not having spies on the ground –
and greater attention to new and emerging threats, including economic or
religious conflict.27
As the preceding overview shows, the estimating process is fraught with
uncertainties. Far from deterministic, estimates are intended to suggest the
likely course of future events and their implications for US foreign,
economic, and national security policy.28 Outcomes are the product of future
capabilities and intentions, but many estimates conflate the two, others
emphasize one to the detriment of the other, and still others are affected by
cognitive biases that interfere with the objectivity of the estimate. Against
this backdrop, the article now turns to two case studies that analyze in greater
detail the process, pitfalls, and politics of estimating.
THE BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT OF THE 1990S
One of the first significant NIEs to follow the end of the Cold War was an
estimate of the ballistic missile threat from states other than the Soviet Union.
At issue was whether former Warsaw Pact countries, non-NATO countries,
and countries other than declared nuclear powers had the capability and
expertise to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles in the foreseeable
future – 10 to 15 years – that could reach the continental United States.
Estimates were based on countries’ political and economic health, as well as
their ‘technical capabilities to indigenously develop propulsion systems,
guidance and control systems, reentry vehicles (RVs), and nuclear, chemical,
or biological weapon warheads’.29
The product – Prospects for the Worldwide Development of Ballistic
Missile Threats to the Continental United States (NIE 93-17) – was cautious
on the prospects for US security: ‘No evidence exists that any of the countries
examined in this study are developing missiles – especially ICBMs – for the
purpose of attacking CONUS.’ The possibility of ICBM development over
the following years remained open, however. ‘Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and
Libya – have the political support or motivation to undertake an ICBM
program to strike CONUS.’30 In addition to having the political motivation to
undertake an ICBM program, the NIE also found that Iran, Iraq, and North
Korea had the indigenous technical capability to produce an ICBM within 10
to 15 years of the time they decided to pursue development. Thus, though it
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did not declare a high threat to the US from incoming ballistic missiles, the
NIE hedged against that threat, acknowledging that several states might have
the motivation, technical ability, and economic and political environments
suitable for ICBM development.
Whereas the 1993 NIE had identified the possibility, though unlikelihood,
of foreign missile threats, the NIE that followed – Emerging Missile Threats
to North America during the Next 15 Years (NIE 95-19) – categorically
denied any possibility that any country other than the declared nuclear
powers would be in a position to threaten the US or Canada with ICBMs.
Relevant excerpts from the NIE read as follows:
Nearly a dozen countries other than Russia and China have ballistic
missile development programs. In the view of the Intelligence
Community, these programs are to serve regional goals. Making the
change from a short or medium range missile – that may pose a
threat to US troops located abroad – to a long range ICBM capable
of threatening our citizens at home, is a major technological
leap . . . The Intelligence Community judges that in the next 15 years
no country other than the major declared nuclear powers will
develop a ballistic missile that could threaten the continuous 48
states or Canada.31
Similar skepticism existed on the possibility that states such as North Korea
or Iran could develop land attack cruise missiles, space launch vehicles for an
ICBM, or other related capabilities because of technical limitations,
sanctions, or international control regimes.
Close examination of these two NIEs reveals that the key judgments were
not actually inconsistent, nor did they contradict each other. What differed
was the wording of its judgments. Whereas the earlier NIE was written with a
more equivocating tone, the 1995 NIE expressed firm assertions about events
up to 15 years into the future. In contrast, NIE 93-17 had hedged more
against future ambiguities and quantified the uncertainty of its judgments,
indicating a ‘small but significant chance (10 to 30 percent)’ or a particular
event, whereas NIE 95-19 did not quantify the certainty of its judgments,
rather using unquantifiable words such as ‘unlikely’, ‘normally’, and
‘probably’, which are indiscernible in their language.32 The implications of
these semantic nuances, however, cannot be overstated. All forecasts are
guesses about the future but the role of an intelligence analyst is to offer an
informed judgment about the degree of certainty that a particular outcome
will occur. Offering certainty in an estimate emerged as disingenuous given
that the estimating exercise is at best an informed guess about the future
course of events.
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The change in tenor from the cautious NIE of 1993 and the more sanguine
1995 NIE had significant implications for defense and security policy. The
1995 NIE became a key justification for President Bill Clinton’s veto of the
original version of the 1996 defense authorization bill that had called for a
deployment of a missile defense system by 2003. President Clinton suggested
that missile defense was not a necessary component of defense policy,
pointing to the 1995 NIE in arguing that missile defense had intended to
defend against a ‘long-range threat that our Intelligence Community does not
foresee in the coming decade’.33 Critics, however, alleged that the
intelligence community had imposed ‘a priori assumptions on the
process . . . to produce a preconceived and politically convenient conclusion’
in the form of postponing missile defense.34 In a 1996 hearing, Senator Bob
Kerrey seemed unsurprised by the political upheaval that the 1995 NIE had
caused: ‘It’s inevitable the National Intelligence Estimate in question, this
NIE 95-19, would be controversial. Any meaningful pronouncement on a
topic at the center of our defense debates would generate controversy.’ The
problem, he indicated, was that either opponents of missile defense in a post-
Cold War world would have to admit an enduring threat or advocates of
strong defense would have to concede that there was no near-term basis for
missile defense.35 From the standpoint of dueling defense agendas, one of
these constituencies would ‘lose’ based on the NIE’s conclusions.
Apparent discrepancies between the two NIEs coupled with the high policy
stakes led to a series of investigations into why these two NIEs appeared to
vary. An immediate consequence was the appointment of former DCI Robert
Gates to investigate the production of the 1995 NIE. Though this
investigation found no evidence of politicization, it did take issue with some
aspects of the process. It cited the ‘hands-off’ approach by some senior
members of the intelligence community in generating the NIE, argued that it
was foolish to disregard missile threats to Alaska and Hawaii – the NIE
considered threats to just the 48 contiguous states – and that its delay in the
early drafts forced the hasty and rushed completion of the final draft.36
Perhaps most damaging was the charge that the estimate did not present a
strong evidentiary and technical basis. Several inclusions would have
strengthened the NIE’s credibility, according to the Gates-led Independent
Panel Review. It should have reviewed the case of ICBM-possessing states
and traced the amount of time required to develop such a capability; the
exercise would have strengthened the assessment about likely timing of a
future ICBM threat. It could have addressed the hardware and
system integration challenges – not to mention the requirement that it be
clandestine – of engineering a long-range ballistic missile. In addition to
other technical issues, such as obstacles to propulsion, re-entry, and guidance,
the NIE should have noted the basis for the apparent shift between the 1993
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NIE and that of 1995. The Panel sought clarification in the estimate as to
where the analysis had changed since the previous estimate, and specifically
why it had changed.37
The Panel also raised some technical points that it said undermined the
estimate’s standing. It questioned why the estimate excluded missiles
launched from several miles of US territory, such as land attack or sea-
launched missiles, or the possibility that adversaries could seek foreign
technical assistance, or why it assumed that an illegal launch or technology
leakage from the former Soviet Union could not occur. Chairman Gates then
testified, in conclusion, that
The estimate in our view too easily dismisses missile scenarios
alternative to an indigenously developed and launched intercontinental
ballistic missile by countries hostile to the United States, alternatives
such as a land-attack cruise missile. The estimate should have assured
policy makers that this issue will receive continuing high priority, and
that all possible technical alternatives will be investigated vigorously
and time to respond could be provided.38
In spite of these criticisms, the Gates report did not disagree with the
estimate’s conclusions that the US was unlikely to face an ICBM threat from
a new nuclear state before 2010, and found ‘no evidence of politicization’.
On the contrary, it concluded that the estimate reflected the best evidence
analysts had at the time they produced the NIE.39
The Congress also requested an investigation by the Government
Accountability Office (GAO) to compare the content and conclusions of
the 1995 NIE with that of its predecessors, to evaluate whether those NIEs
were objective and empirically sound, and to offer an unclassified assessment
of the threat to the US from foreign missile systems. In its evaluation of why
the 1993 and 1995 NIEs varied in their judgments, the GAO concluded that
‘the 1993 NIEs provided more convincing support than NIE 95-19’ due to the
overwhelmingly more robust set of evidence that the former provided.
Critiquing the apparent certainty of the analytical judgments, the GAO found
that the ‘main judgment of NIE 95-19 was worded with clear (100 percent)
certainty’, a level of certainty vastly overstated based on the caveats that the
analysts themselves noted in NIE 95-19. Those caveats included analytical
gaps, generally that ‘as with all projections of long-term developments, there
are substantial uncertainties’. The GAO report agreed with the Gates Panel’s
criticism that NIE 95-19 had not considered alternative futures.40
In the footsteps of the GAO report came the Rumsfeld Commission, set up
by a Congress dissatisfied with the tepid findings of the Gates Panel and the
continuing assertions of the intelligence community that the US did not face a
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long-range missile threat in the following 10–15 years.41 To that end, the
1997 National Defense Authorization Act (HR 3230) directed the DCI to
convene a panel of independent, non-government experts to review the 1995
NIE. Subtitle B of Title 13 called for a commission to analyze the existing
and emerging ballistic missile threat to the United States. Modeled after the
‘Team B’ intelligence effort in the 1970s,42 this commission would seek to
uncover ‘alternative futures’ that had not been discussed in the original
NIE.43
In its analysis, the Rumsfeld Commission did in fact envision a
dramatically different future. It was as unambiguous in its assertion of threat
as the 1995 NIE had been in minimizing the missile threat to the US
homeland:
Ballistic missiles armed with WMD payloads pose a strategic threat to
the United States. This is not a distant threat. Characterizing foreign
assistance as a wild card is both incorrect and misleading. Foreign
assistance is pervasive, enabling and misleading. . . .
A new strategic environment gives emerging ballistic missile powers
the capacity, through a combination of domestic development and
foreign assistance, to acquire the means to strike the U.S. within about
five years of decision to acquire such a capability (10 years in the case
of Iraq). During several of these years, the United States might not be
aware that such a decision had been made. . . .
The threat is exacerbated by the ability of both existing and emerging
ballistic missile powers to hide their activities from the U.S. and to
deceive the U.S. about the pace, scope and direction of their
development and proliferation programs.44
That the Commission was appointed by recommendations from the Senate
Majority Leader, Speaker of the House, and House and Senate Minority
Leaders (a balance of six Republicans and three Democrats) might have
elicited greater suspicion about the Commission’s conclusions had North
Korea not test-fired a long-range Taepo-Dong I missile over Japan a week
later. The Taepo Dong-1 traveled a distance of 1000 miles and signaled an
‘accelerating ability to launch a multistage missile and to develop a system
with the potential for intercontinental range’.45 The Rumsfeld Commission
coupled with the North Korea missile test essentially had the effect of
nullifying the 1995 NIE.
An NIE conducted in 1999 identified states other than Russia and China as
ballistic missile threats to the US, an assessment that the later 2001 NIE
further confirmed: it reported that North Korea, Iran, and possibly Iraq would
likely present ICBM threats to the US.46 The concern gained momentum with
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the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review that took previous assessments one
step further, stating that ‘the pace and scale of recent ballistic missile
proliferation has exceeded earlier intelligence estimates and suggests these
challenges may grow at a faster pace than previously expected’.47
Shifting threat assessments had a remarkable effect on missile defense
policy. The Congress passed HR 4, the National Missile Defense Act of 1999,
which mandated the deployment of a national missile defense ‘as soon as is
technologically possible’. The vote in the House passed by 345–71; 132
Democrats sided with 213 Republicans and made the margin veto-proof by
the Clinton Administration, which had initially been vocal in its opposition to
the bill. The Senate passed it unanimously and Clinton signed the bill into
law.48
Confirming that the Clinton Administration now embraced the new
assessment of long-range missile threats, Secretary of Defense William
Cohen gave a conference in which he announced the increase of the national
missile defense budget by $6.6 billion. In supporting that increase, he gave a
nod to the Rumsfeld Commission’s ‘sobering analysis of the threat and the
limitations of our ability to predict how rapidly it will change’, evidenced by
the North Korean test of the Taepo Dong 1 missile and its particular threat to
the homeland.49
NIES ON IRAN’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM
In a more recent case, the NIEs on Iran over a similarly short period of time –
2005 to 2007 – also appeared to mark a sharp contrast between estimates, and
an equally acrimonious political debate and policy shift ensued. Whereas the
2005 NIE had described Iran as determined to acquire nuclear weapons, the
December 2007 NIE reported with ‘high confidence that in Fall 2003, Tehran
halted its nuclear weapons program . . . and with moderate confidence that
Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid 2007’.
Though the 2007 NIE suggested that Iran might technically be capable of
producing enough enriched uranium for a weapon between 2010 and 2015, its
intentions to pursue anything beyond civilian capability was based on a cost–
benefit that discouraged rushing towards a nuclear weapon because of the
anticipated negative response by the international community.50
Defenders of the more recent NIE laud it for applying the recommenda-
tions on intelligence practices that had come out of the Iraq experience: the
need to allow new information to challenge long-held beliefs and to conduct
alternative hypothesis testing. The intelligence community incorporated both
of these practices. Intelligence analysts had acquired new intelligence in the
form of communications intercepts between key Iranian officials who
complained about the suspension of the nuclear weapons program in 2003
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and questioned whether it would ever be restarted.51 Concerned that these
notes had been part of a disinformation campaign, the CIA then formed a ‘red
team’ that evaluated and challenged these alternative hypotheses.52 Thus,
there appeared to be two improvements over the way the Iraq NIE had been
conducted: the incorporation of new intelligence that disconfirmed strongly
held views about Iran’s nuclear program, and the ‘red teaming’ of the
assessment.
Challengers of the recent NIE, however, expressed skepticism of the
apparent about-face vis-a-vis the previous assessment. Much as the apparent
inconsistency of the 1990s had raised eyebrows, the 2007 NIE prompted
criticism that the change had been the result of dubious methods, interagency
turf battles, and politics. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argued
that by stating the termination of Iranian’s nuclear program so categorically,
the NIE’s Key Judgments blurred the lines between estimates and conjecture,
policy and intelligence. He concluded by expressing his concern ‘about the
tendency of the intelligence community to turn itself into a kind of check on,
instead of a part of, the executive branch’.53 Former Under Secretary of State
John Bolton echoed that skepticism, arguing that the intelligence community
appeared to be formulating policy rather than analyzing intelligence and that
such meddling would merely torpedo efforts to confound Iran’s enrichment
program.54 Scores of conservative politicians and analysts added to the
criticism that ‘the agency acted as an independent policymaker rather than an
adviser’.55
Implicit in this set of criticisms is that the NIE had remarkable effects on
policy, as ballistic missile threat assessments of the 1990s had done. Where
the Bush Administration had previously been pursuing more aggressive
sanctions against Iran, it found itself without a case for hard-line policies after
the 2007 NIE on Iran’s nuclear program. Why should the international
community sign up to more punishing sanctions, the argument went, if Iran
had discontinued its nuclear weapons program in 2003? How could the Bush
Administration or advocates of a military strike justify the use of force
against Iran if it was not violating any international principles with respect to
nuclear weapon development? As 30-year veteran of the CIA Bruce Riedel
indicated after the DNI released key judgments, ‘there is no possible way that
the United States could now use unilateral military force in the wake of this
estimate. I don’t think the political calculus in this country or that of our allies
abroad would tolerate it’.56
That the NIE appeared to shift dramatically in its conclusions, and that
those conclusions would have a significant impact on US policy towards Iran,
prompted calls for investigations from several members of Congress. In the
wake of the surprising ‘key findings’ of the 2007 NIE, Senator John Ensign,
backed by Senator Jeff Sessions, suggested a commission to investigate the
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NIE’s content and process. They recommended modeling the commission on
the Rumsfeld Commission that investigated the 1995 NIE on the ballistic
missile threat.57 Such a proposal raises at least a few issues, however.
First, the experience of the 1990s suggests that the cure may sometimes be
worse than the disease. Comprised of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz,
Paul Bremer, and Stephen Cambone, all with strongly hawkish bona fides, the
objectivity of the Commission was equally or more dubious than the original
NIE. Though the predictions of the Rumsfeld Commission seemed to be
vindicated by the subsequent missile test in North Korea, some critics
suggested that politicians had launched a ‘conscious political strategy’ to
undermine the CIA estimate because ‘it stood in the way of a passionate
belief in missile defense’.58 Charges of partisanship on the original
assessment were matched by charges of politicization of the post-assessment
investigation. As with the Team B exercise of the 1970s, the well-known
political affinities of the Commission members certainly did not inspire
confidence in the objectivity of its findings.
Second, closer inspection of the recent Iran NIE indicates that changes may
be the result less of politicization than of improvements in analytical
methods. Members of the intelligence community suggested that the
collection capability within Iran had improved in the intervening years since
2005, which in part accounted for the changes in the assessment. One senior
intelligence official attributed the modifications in the 2005 and 2007 Iran
NIE to the fact that ‘we got new information that we judged to be
credible . . . that changed a judgment on a key point’.59 The intent of updating
a threat estimate is to investigate whether the threat has evolved, diminished,
or changed in form; the intelligence community should necessarily seek and
incorporate this new data that speaks to any of those parameters.
Third, despite the political fracas that followed, careful inspection
indicates that two NIEs are not drastically different. As with the substantive
differences between the 1993 and 1995 NIEs, those between 2005 and 2007
are not as large as the differences in tone. The main difference consisted of
how the estimates viewed intentions regarding the weapons program. Where
the 2005 NIE had found that Iran was ‘determined’ to build nuclear weapons,
the 2007 NIE found that Iran had suspended that aspect of the nuclear
weapons production cycle. An understanding of the science behind nuclear
weapons, however, suggests that the core program had not changed and was
just as threatening in 2007 as it had been in 2005. As DNI Michael
McConnell testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in
February 2008, Iran’s ‘declared uranium enrichment efforts, which will
enable the production of fissile material, continue. Production of fissile
material is the most difficult challenge in the nuclear weapons production
cycle’.60 The 2007 NIE predicted that Iran would have enough fissile material
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for a nuclear weapon by late 2009 or more likely between 2010 and 2015, a
timeline unchanged from the 2005 NIE. Differences in tone, however, belied
the fact that the thrust of the assessments was vastly more similar than
divergent. The 2007 NIE had emphasized the weaponization, but in fact this
aspect of the cycle is relatively easy – between a year to three in terms of
time – compared with production of fissile material. In short, the two NIEs’
assessments of Iran’s nuclear trajectory were overwhelmingly congruent.61
LESSONS FOR THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY ABOUT THE
PRODUCTION OF INTELLIGENCE
A study of the ballistic missile and Iran NIE offers several insights on how
the intelligence community might produce more useful or meaningful
intelligence for policy makers. One set of messages comes from a review of
the ballistic missile estimates and the Commissions that followed. What
emerged in the Side Letter of the Rumsfeld Commission were two
recommendations. First, the intelligence community should focus more on
both ‘developing and testing alternative hypotheses’. Second, it should not
neglect long-range, strategic analysis in favor of the near-term, operational
requirements that tend to dominate priorities.62
These two recommendations from the Rumsfeld Commission sound
uncannily similar to those of other recent Commissions investigating
intelligence failure. The 9/11 Commission pointed to the lack of imagination
and the resulting inability to think about a broad range of possibilities with
respect to Al Qaeda; it recommended ‘routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the
exercise of imagination’ in order to think through the range of alternative
scenarios.63 Similarly, the Senate Report on Iraqi pre-war intelligence
indicated that members of the intelligence committee did not make ‘any
effort to question the fundamental assumptions that Iraq had active and
expanded WMD programs, nor did they give serious consideration to other
possible explanations for Iraq’s failure to satisfy its WMD accounting
discrepancies’. Following from this observation was urging for red teaming,
or a ‘devil’s advocate’ team that would challenge the underlying assumptions
in a report.64
Also echoing the Rumsfeld Commission was the observation of the
Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the US Regarding WMD that:
The most common complaint we heard from analysts in the Intelligence
Community was that the pressing demand for current intelligence ‘eats
up everything else’. Analysts cannot maintain their expertise if they
cannot conduct long-term and strategic analysis. Because this malady is
so pervasive and has proven so resistant to conventional solutions, we
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recommend establishing an organization to perform only long-term and
strategic analysis under the National Intelligence Council, the
Community’s existing focal point for interagency long-term analytic
efforts.65
Given that these messages are recurrent across several prior Commissions, it
is worth considering why they are not better implemented. Does the focus on
near-term operational problems preclude thinking about longer-term manage-
ment issues such as routinizing alternative hypothesis testing? The more
plausible problem is in fact the opposite, which is that intelligence analysts
and decision makers have a preponderance of scenarios they must consider on
a daily basis. These alternative scenarios become just one of many scenarios,
a list that becomes too lengthy and too onerous to respond duly to all of them.
Rather than not having enough scenarios, the real problem for an intelligence
analyst, as Richard Clarke said in his testimony to the 9/11 Commission, is
having a ‘huge number of possible alarms that looked as troubling as the
danger that turn out to be real’.66 Separating the useful data from the noise
then becomes prohibitively difficult, particularly under circumstances in
which decision makers are constrained by time and incomplete information,
both of which are conditions more likely to trigger reliance on instincts and
preconceptions.67
A third lesson from the case comparison is the importance of an NIE’s
wording. DNI Michael McConnell alluded to this point in his February 2008
testimony to the US House of Representatives: ‘I want to be very clear in
addressing Iran’s nuclear capability. There’s been considerable confusion in
how this has been reported in the press.’68 The source of confusion, and what
gave the 2007 NIE its forceful impact, was the wording and order of the
findings. The NIE stated early in the report that Iran had most likely
terminated its weapons program in 2003; featured far less prominently
towards the back was the finding that Iran continued to enrich uranium, which
is the ‘most difficult and time-consuming part of the process’ according to
experts who understand nuclear weapons development.69 One reason for the
somewhat careless wording is that the NIE had ostensibly been prepared for
internal rather than external consumption. An internal cohort of decision
makers would digest the contents in a more controlled environment whereas
the external audience was more prone to oversimplification.
The effect of the NIE’s wording and ordering, however, could not be
overstated. According to a Senior Director for Nonproliferation on the NSC,
the 2007 NIE’s conclusions that Iran had terminated its nuclear weapons
program ‘gave them [the international community] the pretext to water down
sanctions and effectively took the use of force off the table for US
policymakers’.70 By the time DNI Michael McConnell had walked back from
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the tone of the earlier assessment in February 2008, admitting that ‘in
retrospect . . . I would do things differently’,71 the political reverberations
had already had their impact on domestic and international support for a hard
line towards Iran’s nuclear program.72 Whether or not Iran’s actual timeline
for producing nuclear weapons had changed became immaterial.
A fourth lesson is that NIEs should properly qualify or quantify the
expected likelihood of a particular outcome. To its credit, the 2007 Iran NIE
did seem to incorporate the criticism of the ballistic missile NIE that had
‘overstated the certainty of its key judgments’ by qualifying the likelihood of
each assertion. Such nuance, however, was lost in a politically charged and
leak-prone environment, which seemed to see the NIE as a Rorschach test in
which partisans could view the results in whatever way best suited their
political agendas.
Lastly, analysts should be aware that the influence of intelligence on the
policy process is such that it will always have the potential to become
political and politicized. In this environment, the challenge for analysts is
understandably difficult. Producers of intelligence need to be agnostic about a
set of policy choices but cognizant of the policy environment into which their
information is introduced, paying particular attention to the possibility of
‘policy panic’ by casting particular judgments in appropriately contextualized
language. Emphasizing Iran’s suspension of the weapons program, for
example, when it had continued along the status quo in the most difficult
aspect of the process, was misleading even if factually accurate.
CONCLUSION
This article suggests what may be uncovered if critics are successful in
establishing a national commission to study the recent Iran NIE’s ‘about-
face’. Investigators will find that critical intelligence assessments are often
based on what appears to be flimsy evidence from ‘soft’ inputs about state
intentions and capabilities – and that evidence is often interpreted differently
by different analysts and different organizations. ‘Team B’ or investigative
commissions offer an easy way to critique other analysts’ estimates, but they
may introduce new problems. The alternative analysis may be as politically
motivated, less objective, or less factually accurate than the original
estimates. They may also be plagued by hindsight bias in which the answers
look manifestly obvious once the dust has settled. Both the original and
second opinion should be viewed with a critical eye.
The answer is not to remove sources of dissent but to acknowledge that, as
with the original estimates, post hoc analysis has its own set of flaws. Perhaps
a ‘Team C’ that can offer a strategic and imaginative set of scenarios would
be a worthy exercise; unlike the early alternative scenarios exercise, however,
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where each team operated sequentially, these teams’ assessments could be
internally debated in parallel. The outcome would be a net assessment of the
various considerations to avoid overwhelming decision makers with a
multitude of scenarios. That net assessment itself, however, would none-
theless need to be qualified and quantified with the likely odds that the
particular outcome would obtain.73 Not only would the decision makers
benefit from analysis of competitive futures, but the single assessment
outcome might be less vulnerable to politicization than having two separate
products that could play off each other, into which the 1976 Team B scenario
degenerated.
The article’s assessment of the 1976 Team B exercise, WMD assessments
of the 1990s, and most recently the Iran threat estimates suggests the degree
to which intelligence estimates may be politicized not just within
administrations or in agencies but in Congress and public discourse.
Estimates on issues at the center of American security debates have higher
stakes and are more likely to have constituencies – pro- or anti-missile
defense, pro- or anti-hardline Iran, for example – that are invested in a
particular policy outcome. High-stakes defense issues may therefore be more
prone to politicization. Moreover, the democratic process and its propensity
for leaks may introduce additional pressures, since the entry into public
discourse increases the number of constituencies and thereby intensifies
exposure to various and competing political agendas.
Finally, the article’s comparison of these NIEs illustrates that the business of
intelligence estimating is indeed just estimating. As the Office of the DNI
instructs, NIEs ‘provide information on the current state of play but are
primarily ‘‘estimative’’ – that is, they make judgments about the likely course
of future events and identify the implications for U.S. policy’.74 If policy
makers expect deterministic judgments based on hard facts, they will be
disappointed. Similarly, treating an estimate as the last word on any given threat
ignores the fact that NIEs are, at best, informed guesses based on incomplete
information about future capabilities and intentions. As nuclear physicist Niels
Bohr once joked, ‘prediction is difficult, especially about the future’.75
NOTES
I would like to thank Erik Dahl, Matthew Fuhrmann, Gustavo Flores-Macıas, and MatthewKroenig, and Eric Rosenbach, for their thoughtful comments on this research. I would also like toacknowledge Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs for itssupport of this work.
1 John R. Bolton, ‘The Flaws in the Iran Report’, The Washington Post, 6 December 2007,p.A29.
2 Marc Santora, ‘Candidates Hold to their Stances on Iran’, The New York Times, 4 December2007.
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3 Dafna Linzer, ‘Iran is Judged 10 Years from Nuclear Bomb’, Washington Post, 2 August2005, p.A01.
4 General Accounting Office, Foreign Missile Threats: Analytic Soundness of Certain NationalIntelligence Estimates (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office 1996).The GAO report is available at5http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/reports/gao/nsi96225.htm4 (accessed 29 September 2008).
5 Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States (The RumsfeldCommission), 15 July 1998, available at5http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/missile/rumsfeld/index.html4 (accessed 31 May 2008).
6 T.L. Hughes, The Fate of Facts in the World of Men: Foreign Policy and Intelligence-Making(New York: The Foreign Policy Association 1976) p.43.
7 Robert L. Suettinger, ‘Overview: History of Intelligence Estimates’, in John K. Allen, JohnCarver and Tom Elmore (eds) Tracking the Dragon: National Intelligence Estimates onChina during the Era of Mao, 1948–1976 (McLean, VA: Central Intelligence Agency 2004).Excerpt available at5http://www.dni.gov/nic/nic_tradecraft_overview.html4 (accessed 1June 2008).
8 Defined in the introduction to Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities, November 2007,available at5http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf4 (accessed 1 June2008).
9 See Algeria’s International Relations, 31 July 1971 (NIE 61-71), released by the StateDepartment Office of the Historian and available at5http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/nixon/e5part2/89622.htm4 (accessed 29 September 2008).
10 For a list of select NIEs on Vietnam, see the National Intelligence Council at5http://www.dni.gov/nic/foia_vietnam_content.html4 (accessed 1 June 2008).
11 The 2002 Iraq NIE took three weeks to complete. See ‘The Rapid Production of the October2003 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s Continuing Programs for WMD’, Chapter 11,Report on the US Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq(Washington, DC: United States Senate 2004) pp.298–303. For an overview of the NIEprocess, see Joseph S. Nye Jr, ‘Peering into the Future’, Foreign Affairs 73/4 (1994) pp.82–93.
12 See the CIA’s Freedom of Information Act site that allows browsing through NationalIntelligence Estimates and Special National Intelligence Estimates,5http://www.foia.cia.gov/search.asp?pageNumber¼1&freqReqRecord¼nic_prod_nie.txt4 (accessed 1 June2008).
13 Jeffrey T. Richelson, The US Intelligence Community (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1999)p.320.
14 Richards J. Heuer, Jr., ‘Biases in Estimating Intelligence’, in The Psychology of IntelligenceAnalysis (McLean, VA: Center for the Study of Intelligence 1999).
15 Joseph S. Nye, Jr., ‘Peering into the Future’, Foreign Affairs 73/4 (1994) pp.82–93.16 Jeffrey T. Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (New York:
Oxford University Press 1995); Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: TheEarly Years of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster 1995).
17 Donald P. Steury, ‘Introduction’, in Sherman Kent and the Board of National Estimates(McLean, VA: Center for the Study of Intelligence 2007).
18 Jack Davis, ‘Sherman Kent and the Profession of Intelligence Analysis’, CIA OccasionalPapers 1/5 (2002).
19 ONE dissolved in 1973 and gave way to the National Intelligence Officer system that remainsin place today. See Donald P. Steury, ‘Introduction’, in Sherman Kent and the Board ofNational Estimates (McLean, VA: Center for the Study of Intelligence 2007).
20 Quoted in Willard C. Matthias, America’s Strategic Blunders, Intelligence and NationalSecurity Policy, 1936–1991 (State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press 2001)pp.309–10; for more on Team B, see inter alia Anne Hessing Cahn, Killing Detente: TheRight Attacks the CIA (College Station, PA: Penn State Press 1998); David Binder, ‘New CIAEstimate Finds Soviets Seek Superiority in Arms’, New York Times, 26 December 1976, p.14.
21 Richard Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2007) pp.121–26; see alsoMatthias (note 20) p.310.
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22 US Congress, Senate, Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Subcommitteeon Collection, Production, and Quality, The National Intelligence Estimates A-B TeamEpisode Concerning Soviet Strategic Capability and Objectives, 16 February 1978(Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office 1978).
23 Stephen Flanagan, ‘Managing the Intelligence Community’, International Security 10/1(1985) pp.58–95.
24 ‘Handicapping the Arms Race’, New York Times, 19 January 1977, p.34; Fareed Zakaria,‘Exaggerating the Threats’, Newsweek, 16 June 2003.
25 Lawrence Freedman, ‘The CIA and the Soviet Threat: The Politicization of Estimates, 1966–1977’, in Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and Christopher M. Andrew (eds) Eternal Vigilance? 50Years of the CIA (Portland, OR: Frank Cass 1997) pp.122–42.
26 DIA and to some extent the CIA expected that the regime would remain in power and that theShah would respond to disorder with a forceful response. That view diverged from the StateDepartment’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which viewed the 1978 riots in Qom asindications of the Shah’s precariousness amid social unrest. Michael Donovan, ‘Intelligenceand the Iranian Revolution’, in Jeffreys-Jones and Andrew (eds) Eternal Vigilance?, pp.143–63.
27 Gregory F. Treverton, Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information(New York: Cambridge University Press 2003); Bruce D. Berkowitz and Allan E. Goodman,Best Truth: Intelligence in the Information Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press2000).
28 National Intelligence Council 2004 (unclassified book describing the roles and responsi-bilities of the NIC); for a House Committee on Foreign Affairs definition of an NIE, seeRichelson (note 13) p.320.
29 Prospects for the Worldwide Development of Ballistic Missile Threats to the ContinentalUnited States, NIE 93-17, available at5http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/nie9317.htm4(accessed 15 February 2008).
30 Ibid.31 Emerging Missile Threats to North America During the Next 15 Years, NIE 95-19, available
at5http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/nie9519.htm4 (accessed 15 February 2008).32 Ibid.33 Statement on Signing the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1996 –
President Bill Clinton on February 10, 1996 – Transcript; Weekly Compilation of PresidentialDocuments, 19 February 1995. See also Steven A. Hildreth and Amy F. Woolf, NationalMissile Defense: Issues for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service2001).
34 Thomas Moore, ‘15 Years and Counting: Why Americans Still are Vulnerable to MissileAttack’, Heritage Foundation Backgrounder #1166, 23 March 1998.
35 Intelligence Analysis on the Long-Range Missile Threat to the United States (Washington,DC: Senate Select Committee on Intelligence 1996) available at5http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1996_hr/s961204.htm4 (accessed 30 May 2008).
36 Independent Panel Review of ‘Emerging Missile Threats to North America During the Next15 Years’ (the Gates Panel) available at5http://www.fas.org/news/usa/1997/02/msg00032b.htm4 (accessed 10 February 2008).
37 Ibid.38 Robert Gates, ‘Intelligence Analysis on the Long-Range Missile Threat to the United
States’, testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 4 December 1996,available at5http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1996_hr/s961204p.htm4 (accessed 1 February2008).
39 Gates Panel (note 36).40 Foreign Missile Threats: Analytical Soundness of Certain National Intelligence Estimates
(GAO/NSIAD-96–225) (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office 1996).41 Hildreth and Woolf, National Missile Defense (note 33).42 The 1976 assessment of the Soviet strategic capability introduced the idea of ‘Team B’ of
outside experts to challenge conventional wisdom on Soviet arsenals; though the ‘Team B’erred on the worst-case scenarios, in principle it did improve the process by introducing
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outside experts and considering alternative outcomes. See Loch Johnson, America’s SecretPower: The CIA in a Democratic Society (New York: Oxford University Press 1991) p.248.
43 ‘GAO Report Validates GOP Concerns’, 12 September 1996 Press Release of the HouseNational Security Committee, available at5http://armedservices.house.gov/comdocs/open-ingstatementsandpressreleases/104thcongress/pdfs/spniepr.pdf4 (accessed 31 May 2008).
44 Rumsfeld Commission (note 5).45 The 31 August 1998 test of the Taepo Dong I ballistic missile/space launch vehicle is thought
to have had a No Dong first stage, Scud-B second stage, and rocket ‘kick motor’ as thirdstage. See Joseph Cirincione, Jon B. Wolfsthal and Miriam Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals:Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Threats (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment forInternational Peace 2005) p.289.
46 Foreign Missile Developments and the Ballistic Missile Threat Through 2015 (UnclassifiedSummary of the 2001 NIE), available at5http://www.fas.org/irp/nic/bmthreat-2015.htm4(accessed 29 September 2008).
47 See the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, available at www.defenselink.mil/pubs/pdfs/qdr2001.pdf
48 David J. Trachtenberg, ‘Off the Radar’, Armed Forces Journal 143/6 (January 2007) pp.12–5.49 Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, DoD News Briefing, 20 January 1999, available
at5http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/program/news99/t01201999_t0120md.htm4 (accessed20 January 2008).
50 Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities, 2007 Iran NIE available at5http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf4 (accessed 29 September 2008).
51 Peter Baker and Dafna Linzer, ‘Diving Deep, Unearthing a Surprise: How a Search for Iran’sNuclear Arms Program Turned Up an Unexpected Conclusion’, Washington Post, 8December 2007, p.A09.
52 David E. Sanger and Steven Lee Myers, ‘Details in Military Notes Led to Shift on Iran, USSays’, New York Times, 6 December 2007.
53 Henry Kissinger, ‘Misreading the Iran Report: Why Spying and Policymaking Don’t Mix’,The Washington Post, 13 December 2007, p.A35.
54 John R. Bolton, ‘The Flaws in the Iran Report’, The Washington Post, 6 December 2007,p.A29.
55 Robert Novak, ‘‘‘Arrogant’’ CIA Angers, Distresses GOP Watchdogs in Congress’, ChicagoSun-Times, 24 December 2007; for a sample of the conservative criticism, see Robin Wrightand Glenn Kessler, ‘Review of Iran Intelligence to be Sought’, The Washington Post, 7December 2007, p.A9.
56 Riedel quoted in Mike Shuster, ‘NIE Report May Block Military Force against Iran’, NPR, 5December 2007, available at5http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId¼169130774 (accessed 29 September 2008).
57 Wright and Glenn (note 55).58 Michael Dobbs, ‘An Intelligence Turnaround: How Politics Helped Redefine Threat’,
Washington Post, 14 January 2002, p.A01.59 Tom Gjelten, ‘Iran NIE Reopens Intelligence Debate’, NPR, 17 January 2008, available at
5http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId¼181771034 (accessed12February2008).60 Michael McConnell, ‘Annual Threat Assessment of the Director of National Intelligence for
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’, 5 February 2008, available at5http://intelligence. senate.gov/080205/mcconnell.pdf4 (accessed 30 May 2008).
61 Michael McConnell, Annual Worldwide Threat Assessment, Hearing of the House PermanentSelect Committee on Intelligence, 7 February 2008, available at5http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2008_hr/020708transcript.pdf4 (accessed 1 June 2008); see in particular pp.9, 23.
62 See 18 March 1999 Intelligence Side Letter to the 1998 Rumsfeld Report, available at5http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/missile/sideletter.htm4 (accessed 1 June 2008).
63 See ‘Foresight and Hindsight’, The 9/11Commission Report (Washington, DC: USGovernment Printing Office 2004) p.344.
64 US Senate Report on the US Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments onIraq, available at5http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/congress/20044 (accessed29 May 2008). For more on alternative hypothesis testing, see Roger Z. George, ‘Fixing
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the Problem of Analytical Mind-Sets: Alternative Analysis’, International Journal ofIntelligence and Counterintelligence 17/3 (2004) pp.385–404.
65 Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the US Regarding Weapons Mass Destruction(Robb–Silberman Commission), available at5http://www.wmd.gov/report/report.html4 (ac-cessed 31 May 2008).
66 Robert Jervis, ‘Reports, Politics, and Intelligence Failures: The Case of Iraq’, The Journal ofStrategic Studies 29/1 (2006) pp.3–52 at 16.
67 Richard K. Betts, ‘Analysis, War, and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures are Inevitable’,World Politics 31/1 (October 1978) pp.61–89.
68 McConnell (note 61) p.9.69 Peter Crail, ‘Intel Report Reshapes Iran Sanctions Debate’, Arms Control Today 38/1
(January/February 2008) p.34. James Schlesinger echoed others in saying that uraniumenrichment is the ‘long pole in the tent’ in terms of the nuclear weapons cycle.
70 David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, ‘Iran is Reported to Test New Centrifuges to MakeAtomic Fuel’, The New York Times, 8 February 2008.
71 Mark Mazzetti, ‘Intelligence Chief Cites Qaeda Threat to US’, New York Times, 6 February2008.
72 In McConnell’s official remarks, he goes to great lengths to explain the process of producingnuclear weapons and indicates firmly that Iran remains on the path towards the most difficultaspect of that cycle. ‘Intelligence Chief Reshapes Iran NIE’, U.S. News and World Report, 6February 2008.
73 Joseph Nye advocates producing a multitude of scenarios since the job of an analyst is to helpthe decision maker ‘think’. ‘Peering into the Future’, Foreign Affairs 73/4 (July/August1994). While decision makers do not need point estimates, in time-constrained environmentsthey might be better served having a net assessment of scenarios that have already beeninternally debated by analysts.
74 ‘National Intelligence Estimates and the NIE Process’, in Iran NIE (note 50) p.3.75 Quoted in David H. Guston, ‘Innovation Policy: Not just a Jumbo Shrimp’, Nature 454 (21
August 2008) pp.940–1.
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