How Cheney Cooked the Intelligence on Iran


by Gareth Porter


Huffington Post - 2007-11-09


As I reported for Inter Press Service this week, ***** Cheney has been trying
to pressure intelligence analysts who have not drunk the neocon kool-aid on
Iran to go along with his line on the issues at stake in a National
Intelligence Estimate on Iran that the White House has been holding up for
more than a year. Think Progress immediately noted the parallel between the
Cheney's effort to get an Iran NIE that is more to his liking and the way he
pushed intelligence analysts to accept the fabrications the neocons were
pushing in on Iraq in 2002.
The similarities between Cheney's efforts to cook the intelligence on Iraq
and on Iran are worth noting, but so are the differences. Cheney may have
had a bigger impact in shaping the intelligence estimate on Iran to fit the
policy he is pursuing than was the case on Iraq in 2002.

The Washington Post reported in June 2003 that Cheney and his chief of staff
Scooter Libby had visited CIA analysts several times in 2002 to get them to
reexamine their skeptical analysis on the WMD issue. But equally important,
the Post quoted a "senior agency official" as saying that speeches by Cheney
in August 2002 charging Saddam with having a nuclear weapons program "sent
signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from
here."

The effect was achieved despite the fact that the October 2002 NIE on Iraqi
WMD was done very quickly, because it had been forced on the White House in
September by the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
Sen. Bob Graham. The White House had only just begun to roll out its
propaganda campaign on the fictive Iraqi nuclear weapons program at that
point.

Now flash forward to autumn 2006. Cheney had a draft NIE on Iraq that he
didn't like. The intelligence community had already issued an NIE on Iran in
spring 2005 that had concluded Iran's nuclear program would not progress to
the point of having the capability to produce a nuclear weapon until
sometime between 2010 and 2015. The new draft Iran estimate was still
reportedly offering a similar analysis. Cheney wanted it to endorse the
neocons' alarmist view that Iran could acquire the knowledge with which to
make nuclear weapons much sooner than that.

Furthermore, Cheney needed an NIE that would support the policy of attacking
Iran over its alleged role in Iraq and seizing supposed Iranian "Quds force"
personnel there. He wanted it to endorse the charge that Iran is supplying
armor-piercing weapons to Shiites in Iraq who were killing American troops.
But the draft NIE didn't do that, according to former CIA analyst Philip
Giraldi.

So part of Cheney's strategy was to keep sending the draft back for further
work while he was creating a new political atmosphere on Iran's role in
Iraq. He began in early 2007 to use the U.S. military command in Iraq to
wage an intensive propaganda campaign on how the Iranians were supplying
EFPs to anti-U.S. Shiite guerrillas through the Quds force. Ignoring
intelligence available to the military that EFPs were being manufactured in
machine shops in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus and his subordinates formulated a new
narrative that would dominate media coverage and political discourse on the
issue of Iran and Iraq.

That Iranian EFP narrative has now been repeated without any alternative
view being reflected in the media for ten months. The complete dominance of
that narrative in the society for so long has certainly had its effect on
the NIE process. As a former CIA intelligence officer told me, "Look, most
of the intelligence analysts are young guys with less than ten years of
experience. A lot of them are willing to give the administration line on
Iran the benefit of the doubt."

My sources suggest that the analysts ready to go along with the new
narrative are now the majority. Nevertheless, some intelligence analysts on
Iran are reportedly still refusing to say that there is concrete evidence to
support the official line that the Iranian regime is exporting EFPs to Iraq.
They are insisting on including their dissenting views on the issue in the
NIE.

That is why the new Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, under
orders from Cheney, has refused to circulate the NIE until all dissenting
views on the issue have been removed.

There has been no comparable administration propaganda campaign over Iran's
nuclear program, so Cheney's tactics were more direct. Last April the
chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Thomas Fingar, who presides
over the NIEs, was made to go on National Public Radio and declare that the
intelligence community was reevaluating whether its judgment on how soon
Iran might produce a nuclear weapon needed to be revised. Fingar said the
estimate "might change" and vowed that the analysts were "serious about
reexamining old evidence". He even revealed the fact that the NIE on Iran
was being delayed because of the reexamination.

Although he didn't say so explicitly, Fingar's statement left little doubt
that the White House had forced the reexamination of the analysts' judgment
on the Iranian nuclear program by holding the NIE hostage. How successful
that hardball tactic has been in getting language more acceptable to Cheney
is still not known, but there were still differences of view on the issue in
the draft NIE as of last month, according to my sources.

These approaches to cooking the intelligence on Iran are even more nefarious
than Cheney's direct approach on Iraq in 2002. They will certainly give
Cheney language supporting his belligerent policy that he can leak to the
press and use to keep Congress in line. Hopefully responsible officials with
access to whatever dissenting views remain will leak those to anti-war
Democrats,