German Intel: CIA Wrong About Iran Nuclear Program

Remember the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that absolved Iran of nuclear weapons-making? Today the European Wall Street Journal reports on a major presentation by German intelligence arguing that the 2007 report was wrong.

Remember the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that absolved Iran of nuclear weapons-making? Here's Steven Lee Myers in the New York Times, Dec. 3, 2007:

Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate here. An administration that had cited Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons as the rationale for an aggressive foreign policy — as an attempt to head off World War III, as President Bush himself put it only weeks ago — now has in its hands a classified document that undercuts much of the foundation for that approach.

That report seemed fishy even at the time - driven much more by the political agenda of elements of the intelligence community than by real information. In the months since the NIE, word of gathering discomfort has leaked out of one agency after another.

The Los Angeles Times reported in February of this year:

Little more than a year after U.S. spy agencies concluded that Iran had halted work on a nuclear weapon, the Obama administration has made it clear that it believes there is no question that Tehran is seeking the bomb.

In his news conference this week, President Obama went so far as to describe Iran's "development of a nuclear weapon" before correcting himself to refer to its "pursuit" of weapons capability.

Obama's nominee to serve as CIA director, Leon E. Panetta, left little doubt about his view last week when he testified on Capitol Hill. "From all the information I've seen," Panetta said, "I think there is no question that they are seeking that capability."

The language reflects the extent to which senior U.S. officials now discount a National Intelligence Estimate issued in November 2007 that was instrumental in derailing U.S. and European efforts to pressure Iran to shut down its nuclear program.

Today the European Wall Street Journal reports on a major presentation by German intelligence arguing that the 2007 report was utterly wrong. The article is translated from the work of the German journalist Bruno Schirra:

The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, has amassed evidence of a sophisticated Iranian nuclear weapons program that continued beyond 2003. This usually classified information comes courtesy of Germany's highest state-security court. In a 30-page legal opinion on March 26 and a May 27 press release in a case about possible illegal trading with Iran, a special national security panel of the Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe cites from a May 2008 BND report, saying the agency "showed comprehensively" that "development work on nuclear weapons can be observed in Iran even after 2003."

According to the judges, the BND supplemented its findings on August 28, 2008, showing "the development of a new missile launcher and the similarities between Iran's acquisition efforts and those of countries with already known nuclear weapons programs, such as Pakistan and North Korea."

Readiness to believe - or even to tell - pleasing lies is a universal human weakness. It does seem strange however that those in the foreign policy world who take the oddly inapplicable title of "realists" should so often be the most ready to believe the manifestly incredible.