Special to WorldTribune.com

Bill Gertz, Inside the Ring, Washington Times

One of the enduring questions about Iran’s nuclear program, which could be answered under the nuclear deal reached in Vienna this month, is whether a highly debated 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Tehran’s nuclear program was accurate or off the mark.

The controversial NIE concluded that Iran had halted all work on nuclear arms in 2003. The report marked a dramatic and surprising shift by intelligence analysts. Two years earlier, another NIE report said Iran was building enriched uranium-based nuclear arms with help from the covert Pakistani nuclear supplier network headed by A.Q. Khan. …

The 2007 estimate was widely discredited as a “politicization” of intelligence from an intelligence community reeling from an earlier failure to properly assess Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War. …The late James Schlesinger, a former CIA director, skewered the NIE in a 2007 Wall Street Journal article, stating that “the crucial decision, hidden in a footnote, was to define the ‘nuclear weapons program’ which had been halted to mean only ‘Iran’s weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium enrichment-related work.’” The NIE excluded the overt enrichment program.

Mr. Schlesinger noted fissile material production is widely regarded as the “long pole in the tent” of nuclear arms programs, and “thus the NIE defines away what has been the main element stirring international alarm regarding Iran’s nuclear activity.” Similarly, the new Vienna accord signed July 14 also excludes Iran’s past, covert nuclear weapons work, by addressing it in a separate, secret pact between Tehran and the IAEA. …

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who led the agency at the time the NIE was rolled out, told Inside the Ring the 2007 NIE tried to be narrowly focused.

“It says, rather inartfully, that Iran had stopped work on the nuclear weapon itself and whatever secret enrichment was being done at military facilities,” Mr. Hayden said. “That judgment was based on the evidence of absence, not the absence of evidence. Of course, hidden in that conclusion was the reality that, until 2003, Iran was indeed doing all those things. They lied about it then, and they are lying about it now.”

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  Iran deal revives heated dispute over 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, LIFE, WorldTribune.com