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Cheney Tried to Stifle Dissent in
Iran National Intelligence Estimate
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Nov 8 (IPS) - A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)
on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to
force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments
on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document
more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily
aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the
process provided by participants to two former Central
Intelligence Agency officers.
But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated
by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without
those dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has
now apparently decided to release the unsatisfactory draft NIE,
but without making its key findings public.
A former CIA intelligence officer who has asked not to be
identified told IPS that an official involved in the NIE process
says the Iran estimate was ready to be published a year ago but
has been delayed because the director of national intelligence
wanted a draft reflecting a consensus on key conclusions --
particularly on Iran's nuclear programme.
The NIE coordinates the judgments of 16 intelligence agencies on
a specific country or issue.
There is a split in the intelligence community on how much of a
threat the Iranian nuclear programme poses, according to the
intelligence official's account. Some analysts who are less
independent are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the
alarmist view coming from Cheney's office, but others have
rejected that view.
The draft NIE first completed a year ago, which had included the
dissenting views, was not acceptable to the White House,
according to the former intelligence officer. "They refused to
come out with a version that had dissenting views in it," he
says.
As recently as early October, the official involved in the
process was said to be unclear about whether an NIE would be
circulated and, if so, what it would say.
Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi provided a similar account,
based on his own sources in the intelligence community. He told
IPS that intelligence analysts have had to review and rewrite
their findings three times, because of pressure from the White
House.
"The White House wants a document that it can use as evidence
for its Iran policy," says Giraldi. Despite pressures on them to
change their dissenting conclusions, however, Giraldi says some
analysts have refused to go along with conclusions that they
believe are not supported by the evidence.
In October 2006, Giraldi wrote in The American Conservative that
the NIE on Iran had already been completed, but that Cheney's
office had objected to its findings on both the Iranian nuclear
programme and Iran's role in Iraq. The draft NIE did not
conclude that there was confirming evidence that Iran was arming
the Shiite insurgents in Iraq, according to Giraldi.
Giraldi said the White House had decided to postpone any
decision on the internal release of the NIE until after the
November 2006 elections.
Cheney's desire for a "clean" NIE that could be used to support
his aggressive policy toward Iran was apparently a major factor
in the replacement of John Negroponte as director of national
intelligence in early 2007.
Negroponte had angered the neoconservatives in the
administration by telling the press in April 2006 that the
intelligence community believed that it would still be "a number
of years off" before Iran would be "likely to have enough
fissile material to assemble into or to put into a nuclear
weapon, perhaps into the next decade."
Neoconservatives immediately attacked Negroponte for the
statement, which merely reflected the existing NIE on Iran
issued in spring 2005. Robert G. Joseph, the undersecretary of
state for arms control and an ally of Cheney, contradicted
Negroponte the following day. He suggested that Iran's nuclear
programme was nearing the "point of no return" -- an Israeli
concept referring to the mastery of industrial-scale uranium
enrichment.
Frank J. Gaffney, a protégé of neoconservative heavyweight
Richard Perle, complained that Negroponte was "absurdly
declaring the Iranian regime to be years away from having
nuclear weapons".
On Jan. 5, 2007, Pres. George W. Bush announced the nomination
of retired Vice Admiral John Michael "Mike" McConnell to be
director of national intelligence. McConnell was approached by
Cheney himself about accepting the position, according to
Newsweek.
McConnell was far more amenable to White House influence than
his predecessor. On Feb. 27, one week after his confirmation, he
told the Senate Armed Services Committee he was "comfortable
saying it's probable" that the alleged export of explosively
formed penetrators to Shiite insurgents in Iraq was linked to
the highest leadership in Iran.
Cheney had been making that charge, but Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defence Robert M. Gates, as
well as Negroponte, had opposed it.
A public event last spring indicated that White House had
ordered a reconsideration of the draft NIE's conclusion on how
many years it would take Iran to produce a nuclear weapon. The
previous Iran estimate completed in spring 2005 had estimated it
as 2010 to 2015.
Two weeks after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced
in mid-April that Iran would begin producing nuclear fuel on an
industrial scale, the chairman of the National Intelligence
Council, Thomas Fingar, said in an interview with National
Public Radio that the completion of the NIE on Iran had been
delayed while the intelligence community determined whether its
judgment on the time frame within which Iran might produce a
nuclear weapon needed to be amended.
Fingar said the estimate "might change", citing "new reporting"
from the International Atomic Energy Agency as well as "some
other new information we have". And then he added, "We are
serious about reexamining old evidence."
That extraordinary revelation about the NIE process, which was
obviously ordered by McConnell, was an unsubtle signal to the
intelligence community that the White House was determined to
obtain a more alarmist conclusion on the Iranian nuclear
programme.
A decision announced in late October indicated, however, that
Cheney did not get the consensus findings on the nuclear
programme and Iran's role in Iraq that he had wanted. On Oct.
27, David Shedd, a deputy to McConnell, told a congressional
briefing that McConnell had issued a directive making it more
difficult to declassify the key judgments of national
intelligence estimates.
That reversed a Bush administration practice of releasing
summaries of "key judgments" in NIEs that began when the White
House made public the key judgments from the controversial 2002
NIE on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction programme in
July 2003.
The decision to withhold key judgments on Iran from the public
was apparently part of a White House strategy for reducing the
potential damage of publishing the estimate with the inclusion
of dissenting views.
As of early October, officials involved in the NIE were
"throwing their hands up in frustration" over the refusal of the
administration to allow the estimate to be released, according
to the former intelligence officer. But the Iran NIE is now
expected to be circulated within the administration in late
November, says Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and founder of
the anti-war group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity.
The release of the Iran NIE would certainly intensify the
bureaucratic political struggle over Iran policy. If the NIE
includes both dissenting views on key issues, a campaign of
selective leaking to news media of language from the NIE that
supports Cheney's line on Iran will soon follow, as well as
leaks of the dissenting views by his opponents.
Both sides may be anticipating another effort by Cheney to win
Bush's approval of a significant escalation of military pressure
on Iran in early 2008.
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