In Saddam's ominous shadow
usnews.com
The spies were fooled on Iraq. What about Iran and North Korea?
By Kevin Whitelaw
It's something of a Washington oddity--a high-level commission that has actually been able to keep its proceedings secret. In its one-year investigation, the commission that President Bush charged with evaluating U.S. intelligence capabilities has been practicing the kind of operational security that would make its subject proud.
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Commissioners are putting the final touches on their classified report--due by March 31--and a shorter, unclassified version they hope to release at the same time. Intelligence officials are bracing for a report that they expect will be sharply critical of the quality of U.S. intelligence on Iranian and North Korean weapons programs. For the 15 agencies in the nation's $40 billion intelligence community, which have weathered unprecedented censures over failures leading up to the September 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, this would be yet another challenge to their credibility.
The CIA is still reeling from its own inspector's conclusion that it was "all wrong" when it came to Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, and the new report could intensify doubts about how much U.S. officials really know about Iranian and North Korean weapons development. The findings will come at a sensitive time for the Bush administration, which is engaged in prickly multilateral diplomacy aimed at preventing the two nations from becoming nuclear powers. In the wake of the Iraq debacle, the U.S. intelligence community's work has been viewed with deep skepticism overseas. The challenge "will be in the international court of public opinion when we try to take Iran to the U.N. Security Council," says Peter Brookes, a former Pentagon and CIA official now with the Heritage Foundation. The commission's conclusions will also affect debates in Washington. "Given where we are now, how are we going to get back to a position where we can make significant policy decisions based on intelligence?" asks a former top intelligence official. "We're in a world where we don't trust the politicians anymore, and then you add to that intelligence that doesn't work."
Compromise criticism. The bipartisan commission, chaired by former Sen. Charles Robb and retired federal Judge Laurence Silberman, is issuing its report several months after Congress enacted a sweeping law to reorganize the intelligence community. The law created the new post of director of national intelligence, for which Bush nominated veteran diplomat John Negroponte, who should appear for his confirmation hearing in the coming weeks. But sources tell U.S. News that many of the commissioners went into their jobs critical of the compromise bill, which a host of experts fear does not truly empower the new DNI or do much to fill the remaining gaps in intelligence collection or analysis. "Without saying that," says one intelligence source, "they will go back and see how they can improve on it."
Ironically, the commission's secretiveness has prevented it from building up any public constituency (unlike its predecessor, the 9/11 commission) and could end up hampering any efforts to promote the reforms it recommends. Many in Congress are reluctant to reopen the painful debate. "I would be stunned if the Congress would be interested in doing anything additional on intelligence reform in the next year or two," says one congressional source.
The Silberman-Robb commission is building on work done by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which released a report last year blasting the intelligence community for serious lapses in collecting and analyzing intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction programs. The report said that the Intelligence Committee "found significant shortcomings in almost every aspect of the intelligence community's human intelligence collection efforts against Iraq's weapons of mass destruction activities." The committee noted that the CIA did not have any spies in Iraq after 1998, for instance, and said information from defectors was not treated with appropriate skepticism. The same committee has more recently launched its own review of U.S. intelligence capabilities in regard to Iran. Its preliminary findings suggest that the CIA's Iran assessments are plagued by many of the same shortcomings. "We're hearing a lot of familiar things," says one congressional source.
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Deception. Both Tehran and Pyongyang are very difficult, inaccessible targets. Satellites and eavesdropping can reveal only so much. And the CIA's human intelligence, or spying, capabilities, which had atrophied in the 1990s, are mostly concentrated today on fighting terrorism, not weapons proliferation.
Another problem is that many so-called rogue regimes have learned how to deceive U.S. spies; some officials believe Saddam Hussein was a master at this. "I pored over the best-resolution satellite photography and infrared I've ever seen, and I'm telling you, Saddam spoofed us," says a recently retired U.S. official. "Saddam fed us things that would corroborate what we were already thinking and extrapolating." This is not an idle concern. "The Iranians don't necessarily have to have a successful nuclear program in order to have the deterrent value. They merely have to convince us, others, and their neighbors that they do," Carol Rodley, a top official in the State Department's intelligence bureau, said recently. "This is a lesson that hasn't been lost on them, and it merely complicates both the collection and the analysis on this issue."
The quality of the CIA's analytical work also remains a concern for many who read its reports on Iraq. "When you don't have any evidence to the contrary, you just extrapolate linearly out into the future," says a former senior U.S. official. "We didn't do the kind of investigative work to show that what we were thinking was wrong." U.S. officials say that the CIA is trying now to be more precise in its analyses to state what it cannot confirm, but it will take a long time to rebuild confidence. "It becomes almost a full-time job figuring out how they reached the judgments they reached and how good these intelligence sources were that they used to reach those judgments," says Christopher Mellon, a former Democratic staff director on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Take North Korea, probably the single most difficult target for U.S. intelligence. An increasingly blustery Pyongyang publicly declared itself a nuclear state in February, but it's not clear whether it's bluffing. In 2003, the CIA stated that North Korea had enough plutonium for one, or perhaps two, nuclear weapons, and U.S. officials privately say that number could now be closer to four or five. But that doesn't mean that it necessarily has any nuclear warheads. "With North Korea, we have to admit that we don't know whether they have a single weapon or not," says a former intelligence official. "We know they have enough fissile material, but the evidence is very thin about whether they have the technology to develop a warhead that sits on the end of a missile." U.S. News has learned that the State Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau (which was the only agency appropriately skeptical of Saddam's weapons programs) recently conducted its own review of raw U.S. intelligence on North Korea and determined that the basis for the CIA's estimates was largely convincing.
The Silberman-Robb commission will offer its own assessment soon. And policymakers are certain to keep its findings in mind when they pore over a forthcoming classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, due in the next few weeks. The stakes just keep getting higher. And the mistakes of the past continue to cast an ominous shadow. |
