Bombs

Comment

By Steve Coll

updated 4:34 p.m. ET Dec. 10, 2007

Last week, the Bush Administration released declassified extracts from a new National Intelligence Estimate about Iran’s nuclear program. The passages landed in Washington like a religious scroll; they radiated revelation. The N.I.E. drew upon new intelligence, collected last summer, to report with “high confidence” two facts that were previously unknown, or at least heavily disputed: that Iran’s Islamic revolutionary government had commissioned a secret, military-run atomic-weapons program, in addition to its open nuclear-power program, and that, in 2003, Iran halted this secret program, “primarily in response to international pressure.”

This assessment may yet prove to be no more accurate than past American intelligence evaluations of Iran (the Shah’s rule is stable; the Iranian Revolution has reliable moderates; if the United States invades Iraq, Iran will react passively). But, taken at face value, the findings expose some of the bluff, humbug, and extremism that have often dominated nuclear diplomacy between the Bush Administration and Tehran.

Iran’s ruling clerics are revealed in the estimate as nervous types. As the mullahs watched the United States recklessly invade Iraq, in 2003, to destroy weapons of mass destruction that no longer existed, they harbored the guilty secret that their atomic-bomb program did exist, and might yet be discovered. So they apparently put their bomb work to rest. To a considerable extent, the “international pressure” referred to in the estimate must have been neurotic and self-inflicted: if the mullahs confessed their secret program, they might be goners, but if they did not confess and got caught, they might also be goners. Iran’s government seems to have coped with this conundrum in the manner of deceivers throughout history and literature: it blustered, obfuscated, hinted, delayed, negotiated for some way out, but ultimately found itself imprisoned by its own deceit. More pragmatically, it launched a clandestine campaign against the American forces occupying Iraq, to forestall a possible American invasion.

The estimate’s findings provide equally bracing clarity about the Bush Administration: they show that the Cheney regency persists, and that the Vice-President and his neoconservative protégés in the Administration have continued to exaggerate and misuse intelligence to advance preconceived policies—in this case, a policy of militant confrontation with Iran, salted by public misstatements of what was known or knowable about the Iranian nuclear threat. A year ago, in these pages, Seymour Hersh reported that the C.I.A. had acquired intelligence that Iran’s nuclear program was considerably less advanced than the White House advertised, but that this reporting had been dismissed by Cheney and his aides, who wanted only intelligence that would allow them “to accomplish the mission,” as a senior intelligence official told Hersh. The official’s choice of words resonates still.

During a news conference last week, President Bush said that he didn’t learn the new facts about Iran’s bomb program until late November, several months after the discoveries were made. Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, later corrected this assertion, saying that Bush had been told the gist of the new information last summer, but not the details. This puzzling chronology may be explained by the President’s lassitude, or by his desire to deflect attention from how much he knew and when, or by the reluctance of his spy services to deliver unwelcome intelligence, however provisional, to the Cheney-prowled White House.

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