Unprecedented Peril Forces Tough Calls

Iran's facility in Natanz, seen in a satellite image, was the site where much centrifuge equipment was headed. A Pakistani was the supplier. (Reuters)

"This is quibbling, to say they had two plutonium-based weapons and now they have seven," Bolton replied. "The uranium enrichment capability gives them the ability to produce an unlimited number." That program, he said, began when Clinton sought to normalize relations with North Korea and Madeleine K. Albright, his secretary of state, was "dancing in Pyongyang and watching parades."

Purchases in Iran

The summer of 2002, the season of North Korea's burgeoning threat, brought a parallel development in Iran. There, too, a hidden uranium enrichment program was unveiled. Iran's purchases, however, did not begin on Bush's watch. They began on President Ronald Reagan's, in 1987.

Einhorn, assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation under Clinton and through most of Bush's first year, said in an interview that "we were sniffing on the wrong trail through much of the '90s." Iran misdirected attention to a controversial reactor at Bushehr, when its more dangerous purchases of centrifuge equipment were going to a village called Natanz. Later, in 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency would discover that Iran's supplier was Khan.

On Aug. 14, 2002, an exiled Iranian opposition group held a news conference in Washington to disclose the Natanz plant.

"The firepower of the U.S. government was directed at -- we were getting ready to go to war," said Falkenrath, who was senior director for proliferation strategy on the National Security Council staff and deputy White House homeland security adviser before leaving government in the spring. "There was stuff going on with Iran and North Korea" in interagency discussions, he said, "but it wasn't as intense as what was happening in Iraq."

In the Oval Office on Oct. 30, 2002, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei told Bush he had spoken to Iranian leaders and believed they could still be dissuaded from enriching uranium. According to sources with access to written accounts of their meeting, ElBaradei said Iran wanted to talk and offered to help open a quiet channel. Bush demurred.

The president's advisers were at a stalemate on what to do about Iran. One senior participant in the interagency debate, whose shorthand description matched that of many others, said the Defense Department and Vice President Cheney's office "tended toward a 'regime change' view of Iran," while State said "regime change is nice if you can get it at an acceptable price, but you can't."

That argument had begun nine months earlier, when deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley asked the CIA to assess, among other things, the stability of the Iranian government. The agency's report said Iran was evolving toward democracy and that U.S. attempts to undermine the mullahs would cement them in power. Participants in the debate said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz dismissed the report as "one man's opinion."

In a bid for consensus, Hadley supervised preparation of a national security presidential directive to guide Iran policy. Two officials who read the draft said it contained no more than a sentence on nuclear weapons -- calling for U.S. efforts to delay, disrupt and deter Iran's acquisition. Defense officials tried to insert more muscular language, participants said, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's representatives proposed incentives -- such as U.S. agreement to Iran's entry into the World Trade Organization -- if Iran changed its behavior in ways that could be verified.

Mutual vetoes by competing camps left those changes unmade and the document unsigned as Bush completes his term.

Twice more after ElBaradei's visit, Tehran signaled interest in discussing its nuclear program. Swiss Ambassador Tim Guldimann arrived in Washington carrying an plan he had discussed with Mohammad Sadegh Kharazi, a nephew of Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi and Iran's ambassador to France. The agenda laid out the framework of a "grand bargain." The administration brushed it aside. "We're not interested in any grand bargain," Bolton said.

To avoid "misunderstanding and potential conflict," one official said, the Bush administration did permit secret talks as it prepared to launch two wars on Iran's border. Periodically over 18 months, the two sides discussed their mutual interests in Afghanistan and Iraq. But "instructions were clear" to the U.S. negotiators, a Bush administration policymaker said: "Don't bring up the nukes."

Libya's 'Surrender'

One year later, another Bush administration official met a cargo ship arriving from Tripoli. Robert G. Joseph, senior director for proliferation strategy on the NSC staff, watched pier side as stevedores unloaded 500 tons of technology from the M/V Industrial Challenger and dispatched the contents to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

It was Libya's entire nuclear weapons program, bought over a decade for $100 million and change from Khan. On Dec. 19, three months before, Libya had become the first country since 1995 to pull up a nuclear program by its roots -- a striking accomplishment for Bush and Blair.

Explaining that success has become the subject of sharp debate within the administration. Advocates of a hard-line approach to Iran and North Korea argue that Libya's example proves their case. They said isolation, relentless pressure and the U.S. invasion of Baghdad compelled Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi to give up his program -- and that the United States promised nothing in return. Bush and Cheney, on the campaign trail, adhere to that story line.

Their account begins in March 2003, when Gaddafi's son approached British authorities just before U.S. bombing began in Baghdad, and ends in December, when Gaddafi cut a final deal just after Hussein was pulled from a shallow bunker by U.S. forces.

"There were a lot of things that were clearly operating but to say the deployment of hundreds of thousands of U.S. forces had no impact is silly," a proponent of that analysis said.

Other accounts embrace a wider span of time. Libya suffered crushing economic sanctions in 1992, after the 1988 destruction of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Gradual cooperation with U.S. and British investigators in the 1990s suspended the U.N. sanctions. Gaddafi renewed diplomatic relations with London and sought to do so with Washington. Beginning in the summer of 2002, Gaddafi sent intelligence officers to discuss his weapons programs with British intelligence. In March 2003, his son Saif joined the negotiations, and the CIA after that.

Those talks got a final push on Oct. 4, 2003, after investigators received a tip about a German-registered ship bound for Tripoli, the BBC China, with a cargo of thousands of centrifuge components. Authorities diverted the ship to the Italian port of Taranto, they confronted Gaddafi's government and, within days, the Libyan leader allowed British and U.S. experts into Libya.

Flynt Leverett, then director for Middle East affairs on the NSC staff -- now a Brookings Institution fellow who has advised the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) -- said U.S. and British officials offered Libya an "explicit quid pro quo." If Libya relinquished its weapons programs, the United States would lift its sanctions and allow the U.N. sanctions permanently to lapse. That would open the door to lucrative oil deals for both countries. Saif Gaddafi has said in published interviews that his father also received assurances that the United States and Britain would not interfere with his continuation in office.