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Science and Technology News in Context

Intelligence, Diplomacy, and the Management of Credibility

by Dan Plafcan

In early December, U.S. intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program appeared to have taken a dramatic turn. The U.S. government released an unclassified version of the “Key Judgments” section of a recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear program (n. 1). As a part of the previous NIE on Iran in 2005, the intelligence community had assessed “with high confidence” that Iran was “determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure” (n. 2). In its recent NIE of November 2007, however, the intelligence community assessed “with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program” and that “the halt lasted at least several years”(n. 3). This apparent turnaround prompted the New York Times, on the day after the unclassified NIE’s release, to begin its front page “news analysis” article with the observation that “rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate here [in Washington]”(n. 4).

While that observation may have overstated the case, foreign policy and national security commentators were indeed provoked to take immediate stock of the NIE’s judgments and of what they meant for U.S. diplomacy vis-à-vis Iran (n. 5). In particular, commentators critiqued the way in which the U.S. intelligence community and the Bush administration framed and staged the NIE’s technical and political judgments in the context of on-going diplomacy with Iran. According to the conventional wisdom that emerged, U.S. diplomacy was not as much thrown into question by the NIE’s Key Judgments as it was by their framing and staging. This conventional wisdom, however, fails to deal with the root of the problem: the politics of managing credibility when expert knowledge becomes a significant rationale for public action.

The release of the unclassified NIE in early December 2007 came on the heels of failed talks between Iran’s new negotiator and the European Union’s head of foreign policy. In these talks, the Iranian negotiator had declared that years of previous negotiations were irrelevant, that the U.N. Security Council’s sanctions were illegal, and that Iran had no intentions of suspending its on-going enrichment of uranium (n. 6). The NIE’s judgment that “Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program” in 2003 was read as undermining the Bush administration’s efforts to use Iran’s intransigence at these talks to persuade the U.N. Security Council—and in particular veto-wielding China and Russia—to toughen its sanctions (n. 7). With the significance and urgency of the threat having seemingly collapsed, the diplomacy of U.S. and European Union vis-à-vis Iran was reported to be in “disarray” (n. 8).

Yet, the Key Judgments of the unclassified NIE—and presumably much more so for the nearly 140 page classified report—were of course not as cut-and-dry an assessment as “Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” For example, given Iran’s enrichment capabilities, the NIE judged “with moderate confidence” that Iran could technically produce enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon “sometime during the 2010-2015 time frame” (n. 9). The unclassified NIE also stated:

We assess with moderate confidence that convincing the Iranian leadership to forgo the eventual development of nuclear weapons will be difficult given the linkage many within the leadership probably see between nuclear weapons development and Iran’s key national security and foreign policy objectives, and given Iran’s considerable effort from at least the late 1980s to 2003 to develop such weapons. In our judgment, only an Iranian political decision to abandon a nuclear weapons objective would plausibly keep Iran from eventually producing nuclear weapons—and such a decision is inherently reversible (n. 10).

Provided that one considered the development of a nuclear weapon by Iran as a serious problem to be avoided—and the issue is debatable—the Key Judgments of the unclassified NIE, taken in their entirety, are hardly prescriptive of policy.

If that is the case, then how were the Key Judgments initially read to undermine the U.S.’s and E.U.’s diplomacy vis-à-vis Iran? Prominent commentators such as Henry Kissenger, Dennis Ross, and the ubiquitous Thomas Friedman have suggested that the document was improperly “framed” (n. 11). Let’s look again at the document. Before the Key Judgments, in a “Scope Note” section that explains the NIE’s terms of reference, the first bolded section of the document declares:

This NIE does not assume that Iran intends to acquire nuclear weapons. Rather, it examines the intelligence to assess Iran’s capability and intent (or lack thereof) to acquire nuclear weapons, taking full account of Iran’s dual-use uranium fuel cycle and those nuclear activities that are at least partly civil in nature (n. 12).

Their bolded paragraph suggests that the U.S. intelligence community has learned a lesson from their disastrous October 2002 NIE on “Iraq’s Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Unlike in the case of the Iraq WMD NIE, intent in the Iran NIE is not assumed. Check. Now turning to the Key Judgments section, we read the first sentence at the top of the section’s first page: “we judge with high confidence that in the fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program” (n. 13). There’s the attention-grabbing news, but is it the most relevant information for policymakers? The paragraph that follows and the five bullet points that fall under it all focus on Iran’s “nuclear weapons program.” What does the NIE mean by the term “nuclear weapons program?” For instance, is Iran’s enrichment program included in the term? A footnote explains that “for the purposes of this Estimate, by ‘nuclear weapons program’ we mean Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment” (n. 14). Here again seems to be another lesson from the Iraq WMD NIE. Unlike in that document, in this Iran NIE, “weapons program” is defined narrowly. Yet, how does U.S. intelligence know that Iran’s uranium enrichment is in fact “civil” and is not—and will not become—part of a plan to develop “nuclear weapons?” Isn’t that the question under investigation? It is not difficult to imagine how the authors of the Iran NIE could have more skillfully described in their writing the ambiguity of the civil/military boundary.

In his op-ed, Dennis Ross takes the rhetorical analysis of the 2007 Iran NIE a step further from framing to staging (n. 15). After suggesting that the NIE “created a new story line” because it “shifted attention away from enrichment to the weapons,” he argues that although “one can criticize the intelligence community for framing the NIE around the wrong issue,” it was “President Bush and those around him” who were responsible for the “public roll-out” of the NIE. They knew the document would leak, and “they wanted to get out in front of the leaks,” according to Ross (n. 16). There is little reason to doubt—and there are many reasons to agree with—Ross’s assessment here. The cover letter that accompanied the unclassified release of the NIE did explain that “the Intelligence Community is on the record publicly with numerous statements based on our 2005 assessment on Iran. Since our understanding of Iran’s capabilities has changed, we felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available” (n. 17). Yet, just a month earlier in late October, the Director of National Intelligence had issued policy guidance that directed that Key Judgments from future NIEs would not be declassified (n. 18). Especially considering that the cover letter states “the decision to release the declassified Key Judgments was coordinated in discussion with senior policy makers,” we have every reason to think that President Bush acted as the “declassifier-in-chief” (n. 19). Consequently, he and his staff are to blame for the hapless staging of the public release of the Key Judgments.

After the op-eds of Kissinger, Ross, and others the conventional wisdom emerged that U.S. and E.U. diplomacy vis-à-vis Iran was not as much undermined by the substance of the Iran NIE as by the document’s framing and staging. This explanation is correct as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. Why were NIEs produced by the U.S. intelligence community being “framed” and “staged” for the public to begin with? And why had the boundary between intelligence and policy come under such scrutiny? Although complete answers to these questions are complicated, any answer must observe that policymakers in Congress as well as in the Executive branch are increasingly turning to the U.S. intelligence community for expert knowledge to inform their decision making, and as the U.S. intelligence community’s products become increasingly employed by policymakers and exposed to the public, the greater the attention the U.S. intelligence community will pay to the management of their public credibility.

The increasing use of intelligence by policymakers might be expected subsequent to the terrorist attacks of September 11th and the “Global War on Terror.” Yet, in the case of Congress, the trend arguably dates back to debates in the middle of the 1990s over ballistic missile threats to United States (and the implications of that threat for the development of ballistic missile defense). Moreover, in 2002, members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and not the Executive branch, requested the Iraq WMD NIE in order to prepare for the vote on the authorization for use of force (but few members of Congress seemed to have read the NIE). In its National Defense Authorization Act of 2007, Congress requested what became the November 2007 NIE on Iran’s nuclear program. The 2008 House intelligence authorization bill requests an NIE on global climate change. Congress—for better and for worse—has become a customer of intelligence.

Because the Executive branch requires a more intimate relationship with the U.S. intelligence community, the risks of damaging this relationship by exposing intelligence products to publicity are greater than they are in the case of the intelligence community’s relationship with Congress. The 2007 Iran NIE illustrates these risks. The framing and staging required on the part of the U.S. intelligence community in order to manage its public credibility are not necessarily compatible with the framing and staging that are demanded of diplomacy. If—for potentially many good reasons—the Executive branch, Congress, and the American public determine that the assessments of the U.S. intelligence community should be further thrown into the spotlight for the purpose of advising public action, we should not be surprised, if in an attempt to manage its credibility, the intelligence community’s advice becomes more credible to the public, but more cautious and less useful to everyone.

References:
1: National Intelligence Council, Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities (November 2007), http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf (accessed January 12, 2008), hereafter Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities (2007).
2: Ibid., 8.
3: Ibid.
4: Steven Lee Myers. “An Assessment Jars a Foreign Policy Debate.” New York Times, December 4, 2007, A1.
5: See, for example, Thomas Friedman, “Losing Weight in the Gulf,” New York Times, December 12, 2007, A35, hereafter, Friedman (2007); Henry A. Kissenger, “Misreading the Iran Report,” Washington Post, December 13, 2007, A35, hereafter Kissenger (2007); Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, “How to Defuse Iran,” New York Times, December 11, 2007, A33; Michael Levi, “No Change,” The New Republic, December 10, 2007, http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=8060c706-740f-40d6-a07e-d82737e4f607, (accessed January 12, 2008); and Dennis Ross, “The Can’t Win Kids,” The New Republic, December 11, 2007, http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=e240cac9-e666-4092-ba87-2c4e703b3e6d, (accessed January 12, 2008), hereafter Ross (2007).
6: Elaine Sciolino, “Iranian Official Pushes Nuclear Talks Back to Square 1,” New York Times, December 2, 2007, A3.
7: Elaine Sciolino, “Europeans See Murkier Case for Sanctions,” New York Times, December 4, 2007, A16. Maggie Farley, “Iran Nuclear Report: Sanctions Resolution,” Los Angeles Times, December 5, 2007, A9. Steven Lee Myers and Thom Shanker, “White House is Confident of Broad Support on Iran,” New York Times, December 12, 2007, A14.
8: The quote is from Steven Lee and Helene Cooper, “Bush Insists Iran Remains a Threat Despite Arms Data.” New York Times, December 4, 2007, A1. Also see the Washington Post’s account, Peter Baker and Robin Wright, “A Blow to Bush’s Tehran Policy,” Washington Post, December 4, 2007, A1.
9: Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities (2007), 6.
10: Ibid.
11: Friedman (2007), Kissinger (2007), and Ross (2007).
12: Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities (2007), 3.
13: Ibid., 5.
14: Ibid.
15: My use of the term “staging” is indebted to Stephen Hilgartner’s Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
16: Ross (2007).
17: Donald M. Kerr, “Statement by the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence,” December 3, 2007, http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_statement.pdf, (accessed January 12, 2008), hereafter Kerr (2007).
18: Director of National Intelligence J.M. McConnell, “Memorandum For: Intelligence Community Workforce,” E/S 01167, October 24, 2007, and see “US Intelligence Officials Clamping Down on Release of Intelligence Estimates,” International Herald Tribune, October 26, 2007.
19: Kerr (2007).

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Last updated: May 15, 2008