The Intelligence War Over Iran

In a replay of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction charade, neoconservative supporters of George W. Bush are pushing the U.S. intelligence community to take a more alarmist view about Iran's nuclear program -- only this time, the nation's top spy John Negroponte is resisting the pressure unlike former CIA chief George Tenet.

Tenet joined in Bush's hyping of the WMD evidence about Iraq -- famously telling the President that the case was a "slam dunk." But Negroponte is defying hardliners who want a worst-case scenario on Iran's capabilities. Instead, he is citing Iran's limited progress in refining uranium and their use of a cascade of only 164 centrifuges.

"According to the experts that I consult, achieving -- getting 164 centrifuges to work is still a long way from having the capacity to manufacture sufficient fissile material for a nuclear weapon," Negroponte said in an interview with NBC News on April 20.

"Our assessment is that the prospects of an Iranian weapon are still a number of years off, and probably into the next decade," said Negroponte, who was appointed last year as the Director of National Intelligence, a new post that supplanted the traditional primacy of the CIA director as the head of the U.S. intelligence community.

Expressing a similar view about Iran's nuclear program in a speech  at the National Press Club, Negroponte said, "I think it's important that this issue be kept in perspective."

In effect, the Director of National Intelligence was splashing cold water on the fevered assessment of Iran's nuclear progress favored by the neoconservatives. Some Bush supporters are now complaining that Negroponte has shown disloyalty to the President by siding with intelligence analysts who reject the direst predictions on Iran.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. an original signer of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, even called for Negroponte's firing because of the Iran assessment and his "abysmal personnel decisions" in hiring senior intelligence analysts who were skeptics about Bush's Iraqi WMD claims, too.

In an article  for Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, Gaffney attacked Negroponte for giving top analytical jobs to Thomas Fingar, who had served as assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, and Kenneth Brill, who was U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which debunked some of the U.S. and British claims about Iraq seeking enriched uranium from Africa.

The State Department's Office of Intelligence and Research led the dissent against the Iraq WMD case, especially over what turned out to be false claims that Iraq was developing a nuclear bomb. Gaffney specifically faulted Fingar for his testimony against neoconservative favorite John Bolton to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

"Given this background, is it any wonder that Messrs. Negroponte, Fingar and Brill ... gave us the spectacle of absurdly declaring the Iranian regime to be years away from having nuclear weapons?" wrote Gaffney, who was a senior Pentagon official during the Reagan administration.

Gaffney accused Negroponte of giving promotions to "government officials in sensitive positions who actively subvert the President's policies," an apparent reference to Fingar and Brill. The neoconservatives have long believed that U.S. intelligence should fit administration policies, rather than inform them. [See Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]

Expectations

When Negroponte was appointed last year, the former ambassador to Honduras and Iraq was expected to be more of a team player. Known as an old Cold Warrior, Negroponte had overseen the U.S. Embassy in Honduras in the early 1980s when the CIA was organizing the contra paramilitary force to attack Nicaragua.