In My Time - Dick Cheney [253]
On December 3, 2007, the director of national intelligence declassified key findings from a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. The first key judgment in the report asserted: “We judge with high confidence that in the fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” Only if you went to a footnote did you understand that by “nuclear weapons program,” the intelligence community meant “Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work” (emphasis added). The community chose not to consider Iran’s very significant declared enrichment efforts in its dramatic opening statement.
As the NIE indicated, there are three parts to making a nuclear weapon: weapons design, weaponization of the nuclear material, and production of the nuclear material—whether plutonium or enriched uranium. The NIE judged that Iran had halted the first two activities, which are easily resumed, and had made “significant progress” in the third area, involving “declared centrifuge enrichment activities.” But it took careful reading to get to this understanding, and there were few careful readers, especially in the media. The report was read as providing assurance that we need no longer worry about Iran’s nuclear program.
Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell later testified that he would have presented the key findings differently if he had it to do over again. As it was, the NIE clearly gave a false impression. The story of the production of the 2007 Iran NIE is in part a reflection of the continued impact of the bad intelligence we had received about Iraq’s WMD stockpiles. After the charges of politicizing intelligence that filled the air beginning in 2003, policymakers were hesitant to urge edits or suggest that the presentation and structure of the report were misleading. When I was briefed on the report just before its release, I made sure to have two staff members with me, and I said very little. This was the way to avoid being accused of pressuring anyone. But it is not a good way to make policy.
Once it was released, I heard from leaders in the Arab world that they believed the NIE either was prepared at George Bush’s instruction so he would not have to take military action or was put together by a disloyal CIA to ensure that the president did not take military action. Neither was true, but such perceptions hurt us. The NIE itself precluded us from considering as robust a range of options as we might have otherwise.
Secretary Rice had determined that she would not only get a deal with the North Koreans before we left office but would also get an agreement on final-status issues aimed at resolving the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian problem. Although clearly laudable as a goal, neither side nor many experts believed it was possible during our remaining time in office, given the complex set of issues, entrenched hatreds, ongoing violence, and the Hamas-controlled government in Gaza. Moreover, launching a major effort had an impact on other policy priorities. The secretary’s determination to launch a multilateral peace initiative led her to believe she had to get the Syrians to the table to participate. This meant ignoring their efforts to build a covert nuclear reactor. It also meant overlooking the foreign fighters who were crossing the border from Syria into Iraq and killing Americans. It was my view that the Syrians needed to be held accountable, not sent a personal letter from Secretary Rice inviting them to the Annapolis Conference on Middle East peace.
Secretary Rice’s outreach to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad came at a difficult moment for the people of Lebanon.