Defending the Iran NIE
The U.S. intelligence community has taken a beating in some quarters for its National Intelligence Estimate (pdf) on Iran’s nuclear program, which was released to the public last December. CFR.org recently got a hold of Thomas Fingar, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the body that produced the NIE in question. Fingar says they would ...
The U.S. intelligence community has taken a beating in some quarters for its National Intelligence Estimate (pdf) on Iran's nuclear program, which was released to the public last December. CFR.org recently got a hold of Thomas Fingar, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the body that produced the NIE in question.
The U.S. intelligence community has taken a beating in some quarters for its National Intelligence Estimate (pdf) on Iran’s nuclear program, which was released to the public last December. CFR.org recently got a hold of Thomas Fingar, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the body that produced the NIE in question.
Fingar says they would have framed the NIE differently had they known it was going to be made public:
There’s been talk that the Iran NIE was narrowly written, excluding the civilian capabilities, excluding ballistic missile testing or capabilities, and I wonder if you can respond to those claims. And to follow, do you think it was poorly written? Would you have done it differently if you could?
No, we dealt at length with the centrifuge enrichment, and dealt with the missile program. It was not a narrowly crafted [document] — people are reacting to a two-and-a-half-page summary of a 140-page document with almost 1,500 source notes. And believe it or not, you can’t fit the whole book on the book jacket. Was it badly written? The [still classified] estimate itself is very well written. The key judgments, knowing what we do now about the way in which they were spun, perceived, used by folks when released — if we thought for a minute they would be released, which we didn’t, we would have framed them somewhat differently. The judgments would be the same. But we would have framed them somewhat differently that says: “Dear readers [not] following this: You can’t have a bomb unless you have fissile material, [and] the Iranians continue to develop fissile material. A weapon is not much good if you can’t deliver it—they have a missile-development program. But you don’t have a bomb unless you can produce a device and weaponize it. That’s what’s stopped."
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