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Shifting Currents: Changesin National IntelligenceEstimates on the Iran NuclearThreatSarah E. KrepsVersion of record first published: 05 Nov 2008.

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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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