Intelligence officials, who asked for anonymity discussing sensitive information, told NEWSWEEK that the principal authors of the new Iraq NIE, including the ranking U.S. intel experts on military affairs and the Middle East, are expected to be among the witnesses who will appear at the hearing. NIEs are periodic reports that are supposed to represent the consensus view of the intelligence community’s top analysts on important issues. Congressional intelligence committees routinely receive detailed briefings on major new intel reports. But the political backdrop to the latest NIE report—which was released shortly before Gen. David Petraeus is supposed to deliver his much-anticipated Iraq progress report—is unusually contentious.
Some in Washington question whether Petraeus or his staff had too much influence over the new NIE’s conclusions. A reference in the report to the apparent success of Petraeus’s surge strategy “seems to stick out as out of character with the rest of the document,” said a former intelligence official. Current and former government officials strongly deny that the new Iraq NIE was influenced by political considerations.
Historically, NIEs have been considered some of the intelligence community’s most confidential documents, and they were usually kept secret until 30 years after they were first sent to policymakers. But in the wake of controversies over allegations that it had distorted and politicized intelligence in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration began making public declassified extracts of some new NIEs. So far this year the administration has published key judgments from three new NIEs—two on Iraq and one on terrorism.
The declassified extracts of the latest Iraq NIE, released by the administration last month, were generally pessimistic. The report said that violence remains high and that the current Iraqi government is likely to become “more precarious” over the next six to 12 months. But the report noted some “measurable but uneven improvements” in Iraq’s security over the last eight months, some of which the paper attributed to a backlash by Iraqi tribal leaders against the ruthless and bloody tactics of insurgent groups. The paper also credited stepped-up U.S. counterinsurgency and counterterrorism efforts for some of Iraq’s recent security improvements. The report suggested that those security gains could “erode” if U.S. forces were moved out of their current front-line war-fighting assignments.
Some current and former intelligence officials have questioned whether analysts felt pressure to produce a report that validated the president’s Iraq “surge” strategy. Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee are likely to question NIE authors about this during Thursday’s closed-door Capitol Hill hearing. Intelligence sources familiar with the background to the latest Iraq NIE acknowledged that Gen. Petraeus’s intelligence staff in Baghdad did participate in internal intelligence community debates about the new NIE. As the military experts closest to the action, they would be expected to contribute significant information and analysis to the sections of the report that deal with the military situation on the ground. One senior intelligence official, who spoke anonymously to reporters after a background briefing on the NIE, said that it was entirely appropriate for the intelligence community to weigh in with its own assessment of Iraq’s future shortly before Petraeus’s long-awaited report—since intelligence agencies could rightly be criticized by policymakers and the public if they produced such assessments only after they were relevant to current policy debates.
However, intelligence officials denied that pressure from Petraeus or any political element in the administration had any influence over any of the conclusions or judgments offered in the new Iraq NIE. When asked whether politics played any role in the new report, one senior intelligence official replied, “Absolutely not” and “just not true.”
Meanwhile, NEWSWEEK has learned that intelligence agencies are close to completing three new—and potentially controversial—NIEs on Iran. The most significant of the new Iran intelligence estimates is supposed to be a comprehensive assessment of the current status of Iran’s nuclear research and production program. The two other forthcoming Iran NIE reports will evaluate Iran’s conventional military capabilities and the country’s general political and economic situation.
Were they to be declassified and made public, the three nearly completed Iran NIEs might help inform an increasingly intense debate in Washington. Is the Bush administration secretly making plans to take some kind of military action against Tehran’s nuclear program? Two intelligence officials told NEWSWEEK that at the moment the administration appears unlikely to make public any portion of the new Iran analyses, apparently because they are based too heavily on information from sensitive intelligence sources. It would be difficult to declassify parts of the document in a way that would leave them meaningful and accurate, the officials said.
Some intrigue surrounds the pending Iran nuclear estimate. Originally, the report was supposed to have been completed and sent to policymakers in the spring. But the report was held up while “new information” was incorporated. Two officials familiar with the process said that this new information was classified, and that it was unclear how much of an impact it will have on the conclusions of the new Iran NIE. However, three intelligence officials also said that so far as they knew, the thinking about Iran’s nuclear weapons program has not changed: the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment remains that Tehran is between 2.5 and 8 years away from being able to produce a nuclear bomb.
