Doubts About Iran Intel
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball Newsweek Wednesday 07 February 2007
President Bush insists that Iraq's neighbor is fueling the insurgency in Baghdad. Does the intelligence back him up?
The Bush administration's inflated pre-war claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction may have permanently damaged its credibility when it comes to matters of intelligence. One example: growing public skepticism over the president's dire warnings about Iran's role in aiding Iraqi insurgents.
"Nobody trusts anything," said one intelligence official, describing how the public and Congress react to administration claims about Tehran’s interference in Iraq. Whenever administration officials raise the subject of Iran's nuclear program and its supposed hand in the violence in Iraq, said the official, people immediately ask: "What are they distorting?"
Bruce Riedel, a veteran intelligence analyst who left the CIA late last year, agrees. "They have a serious credibility problem in presenting American intelligence after the way they distorted it in 2002-2003," he said. "Not just in America but around the world. They're going to need a smoking gun to persuade people," But at present, he added, that kind of evidence does not appear to exist. Over the past few months, the administration has escalated its assertions about Iranian involvement in stoking violence in Iraq, pointing to purported hard evidence that Shiite insurgents have used technology-and possibly hardware-made in Iran to launch particularly deadly roadside bomb attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq.
For example, in recent congressional testimony, CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden said that deadly homemade bombs known as "explosive formed projectiles [EFPs] are coming from Iran. They are being used against our forces. They are capable of defeating some of our heaviest armor, and incident for incident cause significantly more casualties than any other improvised explosive devices do, and they are provided to Shia militia."
Philip Zelikow, until recently a senior adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, indicated that intelligence reporting he studied was even more alarming. "Iran has authorized its people to kill Americans, and that is a grave matter," Zelikow told NEWSWEEK. Attacks by suspected Iranian operatives are so debilitating, Zelikow said, that, in his personal view, if such agents are captured, "They ought to be treated as enemy combatants."
But there are also considerable grounds for skepticism about such assertions. Other U.S. and British officials say that intelligence information about Iranian moves in Iran is less clear cut. A U.K. official familiar with the views of M.I.6, Britain's foreign-intelligence service, said the British-whose troops in southern Iraq are as close to front-line encounters with possible Iranian agents as U.S. forces-cannot confirm that Iran has instructed its operatives to attack U.S. troops. "I have not heard that at all," the British official said. A U.S. official familiar with the flow of American intelligence reporting on Iranian activity in Iraq added that he, too, had seen nothing to substantiate the idea that the Iranian government has literally targeted U.S. troops for death. (Like most intelligence sources, they would not speak on the record about sensitive issues.)
Former CIA Middle East expert Riedel said that he never heard that Iran had authorized its operatives to kill Americans. "I don't know of any such instructions being passed," Riedel said. "If [the Bush administration] had this kind of information you would think they would put it out." Riedel and other still-serving U.S. intelligence officials say that even if the administration did have hard evidence of hostile Iranian activity in Iraq, it would face an uphill struggle trying to convince people that the evidence was valid-because the administration got caught exaggerating pre-war intelligence about Iraq's WMD programs and alleged links to Al Qaeda.
Four years ago this week, Colin Powell, who was then secretary of State, assured the world that the United States had rock-solid intelligence about the menacing actions of a dangerous dictator in the Middle East. "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources," Powell told the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, as he laid out the case that Saddam Hussein had amassed weapons of mass destruction and forged an alliance with Al Qaeda terrorists. "These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." Almost all of the specific allegations Powell made against Saddam and his regime later were discredited, however.
Even hawks like Zelikow acknowledge that those claims have now cast a shadow over its ability to use intelligence claims to justify its current statements regarding Iran. "Don't you think every intelligence analyst is aware of that?" Zelikow said. "I would say every single person in the government is aware of that issue."
Despite the doubts, intelligence officials have marshaled what some believe to be deeply troubling evidence about Iranian actions in Iraq. According to a U.S. counterterrorism official who closely monitors reporting from the region, some homemade bombs recovered in Iraq closely match devices known to have been used by the Lebanese Shiite movement Hizbullah-a group that makes little secret of its reliance on Iran for arms and money. The official says instructional videodiscs, believed to have been produced in Iran, have been recovered from insurgents in Iraq. Similar or identical how-to video tutorials have been recovered from Hizbullah, the official said. The videos contain instructions on how to build EFPs, homemade bombs containing "shaped charges" capable of penetrating tank armor.
Some U.S. officials have also said that there is evidence indicating that cheap infrared sensors used to trigger EFP bombs used against U.S. forces in Iraq may have come from bulk orders made by Iranian agents or brokers with sensor manufacturers in the Far East. Other U.S. analysts, however, say that the sensors-identical to devices used in the U.S. to trigger home burglar alarms-are commonly available in stores in Iran and elsewhere around the world. They say the evidence connecting the sensors to the Iranian government is murky at best.
Last month, U.S. officials in Baghdad put out word that they were planning a press conference in which they would make public intelligence substantiating Iranian involvement in stoking violence against U.S. forces. However, the presentation was indefinitely postponed, apparently because U.S. agencies could not agree on what information should be made public. Stephen Hadley, the White House national-security adviser, publicly acknowledged last week administration concerns about the material in the proposed briefing, telling reporters: "The truth is, quite frankly, we thought the briefing overstated. And we sent it back to get it narrowed and focused on the facts."
Even among U.S. intelligence agencies, there are disagreements over the significance and extent of Iranian involvement in stirring up trouble in Iraq. The latest U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, whose principal findings were made public by the administration last week, states that because sectarian antagonisms among Iraqis themselves are so intense and "self-sustaining," Iranian or Syrian involvement is "not likely to be a major driver of violence."
The NIE is also known to contain three "dissents" in which one or more of the 16 agencies who contributed to the document state their disagreements with the estimate's majority finding. NEWSWEEK has been informed that one dissent relates to Iranian involvement in Iraq and Iranian dealings with Al Qaeda, though further details remain classified. Another classified dissent relates to disagreements among U.S. agencies over how deeply the government of Syria is involved in protecting, encouraging or supporting Iraqi insurgents. Some analysts believe the Syrian government is actively supporting the insurgency, while others believe Syrian president Bashar Assad is a weak leader who may not have full control over what goes on in his country.
The third classified dissent in the NIE relates to disagreements among U.S. agencies over the role of the remnants of Saddam's Baath Party in driving violence in Iraq. The argument is over whether the Baath Party itself is still capable of directing violence, or if attacks are being carried out by individuals who happen to be Baathist. The fact that U.S. agencies disagree among themselves on these subjects only complicates the dilemma the Bush administration faces in trying to make their case about Iran.
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