In Saddam's ominous shadow
The spies were fooled on Iraq. What about Iran and North Korea?
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.
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.
advertisement
