On Friday, Reuters published a significant article by Tabassum Zakaria and Mark Hosenball, "Intel Shows Iran Nuclear Threat Not Imminent".
The significance, however, is not in the "Intel": the information in the article is far from new. What is significant is that, in the battle amongst US officials to set the agenda over Iran, this information has not only resurfaced but has gained the upper hand.
For months, the analysis that "Tehran does not have a bomb, has not decided to build one, and is probably years away from having a deliverable nuclear warhead", put forward in the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, had been pushed aside. Instead --- partly because of pressure from Congress, partly because of its own drive for tough sanctions --- the Administration had used compliant reporters to put out the spectre of an imminent Iranian threat.
This was just a spectre: there has little if any information since 2007 pointing to a resumption of a militarised Iranian programme. However, politics ruled the day in the presentation of the nuclear issue.
And that is still the case. What changed, with respect to Zakaria and Hosenball, was not some breakthrough of investigative journalism. Rather, key members in the Obama Adminisration, including the President, began to worry that an Israeli attack might become a reality rather than a perpetual warning. And some officials are also seeking a deal with Tehran over the nuclear issue, or at least accepting the resumption of talks.
So the media spin has shifted. Iran is no longer an imminent threat. Although it should still be watched, Tehran is not approaching the Obama "red line" --- the pursuit of the Bomb --- which would bring Washington's endorsement of a strike on Iranian facilities.
Special Report: Intel Shows Iran Nuclear Threat Not Imminent
Tabassum Zakaria and Mark Hosenball
The United States, European allies and even Israel generally agree on three things about Iran's nuclear program: Tehran does not have a bomb, has not decided to build one, and is probably years away from having a deliverable nuclear warhead.
Those conclusions, drawn from extensive interviews with current and former U.S. and European officials with access to intelligence on Iran, contrast starkly with the heated debate surrounding a possible Israeli strike on Tehran's nuclear facilities.
"They're keeping the soup warm but they are not cooking it," a U.S. administration official said.
Reuters has learned that in late 2006 or early 2007, U.S. intelligence intercepted telephone and email communications in which Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a leading figure in Iran's nuclear program, and other scientists complained that the weaponization program had been stopped.
That led to a bombshell conclusion in a controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate: American spy agencies had "high confidence" that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003.
Current and former U.S. officials say they are confident that Iran has no secret uranium-enrichment site outside the purview of U.N. nuclear inspections.
They also have confidence that any Iranian move toward building a functional nuclear weapon would be detected long before a bomb was made.
These intelligence findings are what underpin President Barack Obama's argument that there is still time to see whether economic sanctions will compel Iran's leaders to halt any program.
The Obama administration, relying on a top-priority intelligence collection program and after countless hours of debate, has concluded that Iranian leaders have not decided whether to actively construct a nuclear weapon, current and former officials said.
There is little argument, however, that Iran's leaders have taken steps that would give them the option of becoming a nuclear-armed power.
Iran has enriched uranium, although not yet of sufficient quantity or purity to fuel a bomb, and has built secret enrichment sites, which were acknowledged only when unmasked.
Iran has, in years past, worked on designing a nuclear warhead, the complicated package of electronics and explosives that would transform highly enriched uranium into a fission bomb.
And it is developing missiles that could in theory launch such a weapon at a target in enemy territory.
There are also blind spots in U.S. and allied agencies' knowledge. A crucial unknown is the intentions of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Another question is exactly how much progress Iran made in designing a warhead before mothballing its program. The allies disagree on how fast Iran is progressing toward bomb-building ability: the U.S. thinks progress is relatively slow; the Europeans and Israelis believe it's faster.
U.S. officials assert that intelligence reporting on Iran's nuclear program is better than it was on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which proved to be non-existent but which President George W. Bush and his aides used to make the case for the 2003 invasion.
That case and others, such as the U.S. failure to predict India's 1998 underground nuclear test, illustrate the perils of divining secrets about others' weapons programs.
"The quality of intelligence varies from case to case," a U.S. administration official said. Intelligence on North Korea and Iraq was more limited, but there was "extraordinarily good intelligence" on Iran, the official said.
Israel, which regards a nuclear Iran as an existential threat, has a different calculation. It studies the same intelligence and timetable, but sees a closing window of opportunity to take unilateral military action and set back Iran's ambitions. Israel worries that Iran will soon have moved enough of its nuclear program underground -- or spread it far enough around the country -- as to make it virtually impervious to a unilateral Israeli attack, creating what Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently referred to as a "zone of immunity."
While Israel would not be able to launch an effective offensive in this analysis, the U.S., with its deeper-penetrating bombs and in-air refueling capability, believes it could still get results from a military strike.
Israel has not publicly defined how or when Iran would enter this phase of a nuclear weapons program. Barak said last month that relying on an ability to detect an order by Khamenei to build a bomb "oversimplifies the issue dramatically."
CONFIDENCE IN INTELLIGENCE
U.S. confidence that Iran stopped its nuclear weaponization program in 2003 traces back to a stream of intelligence obtained in 2006 or early 2007, which dramatically shifted the view of spy agencies.
Sources familiar with the intelligence confirmed the intercept of Fakhrizadeh's communications. The United States had both telephone and email intercepts in which Iranian scientists complained about how the leadership ordered them to shut down the program in 2003, a senior European official said.
U.S. officials said they are very confident that the intercepts were authentic - and not disinformation planted by Iran.
"Iran has been a high-priority intelligence target for years. Sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes we really are good," said Thomas Fingar, who was chairman of the National Intelligence Council when it compiled the 2007 intelligence estimate.
While declining to provide specific details, Fingar, now at Stanford University, said: "We got information that we had never been able to obtain before. We knew the provenance of the information, and we knew that we had been able to obtain it from multiple sources. Years of hard work had finally paid off."
The judgment that Iran had stopped work on the weapons program stunned the Bush White House and U.S. allies. Critics accused U.S. spy agencies of over-compensating for their flawed 2002 analysis that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had active nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs.
The 2007 report gummed up efforts by the Bush administration to persuade the U.N. Security Council and others to add pressure on Iran with more sanctions. It was greeted with disbelief by Israel and some European allies.
"It really pulled the rug out of our sanctions effort until we got it back on track in 2008," recalled Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser to Bush.
Overlooked by many was that the report said Iran had been pursuing a nuclear weapon and was keeping its options open for developing one, he said. "The problem was that it was misinterpreted as an all-clear when it wasn't that at all," Hadley said.
A November 2011 report by the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency said suspected nuclear weaponization efforts led by Fakhrizadeh were "stopped rather abruptly pursuant to a 'halt order' instruction issued in late 2003 by senior Iranian officials."
The reasons for this are not clear. Western experts say it was probably related to a fear of being next on the hit list after the United States toppled Saddam next door.
Iran emphasizes its nuclear program is for civilian purposes. Ayatollah Khamenei this week said Iran does not have nuclear weapons and will not build them.
DISMEMBERED AND BURIED
Some key U.S. allies were never entirely comfortable with the 2007 U.S. intelligence estimate. The Europeans conceded that a centrally directed weaponization program probably stopped, but believed pieces of the program were being pursued separately.
Many European experts believed the Iranians had dismembered their bomb program and scattered and buried its parts, some of them in military or scientific installations, some in obscure academic institutions.
Under pressure from both European allies and Israel's supporters, U.S. intelligence agencies late in the Bush administration and early in Obama's tenure began to take a second look at the 2007 estimate. Some consideration was given to bringing it more into line with European views. Intelligence received after publication of the 2007 estimate suggested that in 2006, Iran believed the United States was going to have to abandon its troubled venture in Iraq. Wisps of information were gathered that Iranian officials were talking about restarting elements of the bomb program, a U.S. intelligence official said on condition of anonymity. But analysts were divided about the significance of the new information. The revised estimate was delayed for months. Eventually, at the very end of 2010, an updated version was circulated within the government. Unlike the 2007 estimate, the White House made public no extracts of this document. A consensus emerged among U.S. experts that the new intelligence information wasn't as alarming as originally thought, according to officials familiar with the result. The 2010 update largely stuck to the same assessments as the 2007 report, these officials said. U.S. intelligence chiefs issued a vague public acknowledgement of the ambiguities of their latest assessment.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress in February 2011 that "Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so."
TIME FRAME
The United States and Israel are on the same page in judging how long it would take Iran to have a nuclear weapon that could strike a target: about a year to produce a bomb and then another one to two years to put it on a missile.
Both countries believe Iran has not made a decision to build a bomb, so even if Tehran decided to move forward, it would be unlikely to have a working nuclear device this year, let alone a missile to deliver it.
"I think they are years away from having a nuclear weapon," a U.S. administration official said.
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