Lessons of Iraq Aided Intelligence On Iran

Communications intercepts of Iranian nuclear officials and a stolen Iranian laptop containing diagrams related to the development of a nuclear warhead for missiles both yielded valuable evidence about Iran's nuclear past as well as its decision in 2003 to suspend the weapons side of its program.

But there was no "eureka" moment, according to senior officials who helped supervise the collection efforts. The surge in intelligence-gathering helped convince analysts that Iran had made a "course correction" in 2003, halting the weapons work while proceeding with the civilian nuclear energy program.

The result, ironically, was a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that reached conclusions far different from what many intelligence officials expected.

"One reason this is actually an intelligence success is that when we got additional information that could lead to a different conclusion, we had an ability to move in that direction," said a senior intelligence official involved in the drafting process.

Former and current intelligence officials say the new NIE reflects new analytical methods ordered by McConnell -- who took the DNI job in January -- and his deputies, including Thomas Fingar, a former head of the State Department's intelligence agency, and Donald M. Kerr, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and an expert on nuclear weapons technology.

Besides requiring greater transparency about the sources of intelligence, McConnell and his colleagues have compelled analysts working on major estimates to challenge existing assumptions when new information does not fit, according to former and current U.S. officials familiar with the policies.

The report also reflects what several officials described yesterday as a new willingness by the intelligence community to analyze intentions in addition to capabilities. While Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity to make nuclear weapons, including knowledge of how to enrich uranium to a level usable in bombs, the new intelligence collected through intercepted communications raised doubts about Iran's intended use of the technology.

As McConnell said in a Nov. 14 speech, it "inserted some new questions" that made the community go back and review the conventional wisdom about Iran. It also shed light on Iran's susceptibility to international diplomatic pressure -- a large factor in Tehran's decision to cut off research on building a bomb, analysts concluded.

McConnell said his objective in preparing the Iran estimate was "to present the clinical evidence and let it stand on its own merits with its own qualification," meaning that it would contain dissent. "There are always disagreements on every National Intelligence Estimate," he said.

He and other officials jettisoned a requirement that each conclusion in an NIE reflect a consensus view of the intelligence community -- a requirement that in the past yielded "lowest-common-denominator judgments," said one senior intelligence official familiar with the reforms.

"We demolished democracy" by no longer reflecting just a majority opinion, "because we felt we should not be determining the credibility of analytic arguments by a raising of hands," the official said. Some analysts, for example, were not "highly confident" that Iran has not restarted its nuclear program, a result reflected in the classified report. Other analysts said Iran was further away from attaining a nuclear weapons capability than the majority said.

DNI officials also pressed for a broader array of intelligence sources, including news accounts and other "open sources" that traditionally had carried little weight inside intelligence agencies. In the case of Iran, critical information was gleaned from non-clandestine sources, such as news photographs taken in 2005 depicting the inner workings of one of Iran's uranium enrichment plants, an official said.

Those photos helped persuade analysts that the Natanz plant was suited to making low-enriched uranium for nuclear energy but not the highly enriched uranium needed for bombs. "You go to wherever you think the answer might be," the official said, "instead of waiting for it to trickle into your top-secret computer system."

Several top officials said McConnell and others were determined to avoid a repetition of the intelligence community's very public failures in assessing Iraq's weapons programs. Not only were its analytical judgments wrong -- U.S. forces in Iraq never found the chemical or biological weapons that the CIA said they would -- but the agency relied on sources known to be suspect or even discredited.

For instance, U.S. claims that Iraq had built mobile biological weapons laboratories were based on more than 100 reports from a single source, an Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball" whom U.S. officials never interviewed in person. After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, investigators concluded that Curveball's stories were fabrications.

Then-CIA director George J. Tenet initiated some of the reforms in the wake of the Curveball debacle, but Fingar and McConnell added to them and spread them across the intelligence community, officials said.

Staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report.