Authors: Matthew M. Aid
The National Security Agency also devotes a significant amount of its SIGINT intercept resources to listening to Iranian military and internal security communications networks every day of the week. For example, NSA and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), keep a sizable number of Farsi linguists at the huge NSA listening post at Menwith Hill in northern England listening around the clock to Iranian communications. U.S. Navy and Air Force reconnaissance aircraft based in the Persian Gulf States of Bahrain and Qatar, and Air Force U-2 spy planes and Global Hawk high altitude reconnaissance drones based at Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, fly daily SIGINT and imagery collection missions along Iran's borders with Iraq and Afghanistan and along Iran's Persian Gulf coastline. Without live sources on the ground inside Iran, however, these technical intelligence sources are limited in terms of what they can tell us about what the Iranian regime is up to.
The need to know what the Iranian government's intentions are has never been greater, as the U.S. intelligence community has become increasingly concerned about the direction that Iran is headed. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Iran has rapidly become a regional political and military power whose influence is seen to be on the rise. According to three Middle Eastern intelligence officials interviewed in 2009 and 2010, Iran, as a matter of national policy, is exporting instability throughout the Middle East, the Near East, and South Asia through coercive tactics, such as its continuing lavish support of terrorist groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
According to Lt. General Ronald L. Burgess Jr., the director of the
DIA, “Iran uses terrorism to pressure or intimidate other countries and more broadly to serve as a strategic deterrent.”
Iran is also continuing to provide clandestine support to a number of extremist Shiite groups in Iraq
. The U.S. intelligence community has a substantial volume of reliable intelligence showing that not only are the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) and Iran's covert intelligence organization, the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, running massive intelligence-gathering operations inside Iraq, but, according to leaked State Department cables, Iran is also providing weapons and money to extremist Shiite political and militia groups in Iraq opposed to the continuing U.S. military presence in that country.
There is some circumstantial evidence that Iran has covertly become involved in the war in Afghanistan. In September 2007, British forces in Afghanistan captured a shipment of Iranian-made advanced IEDs destined for Taliban fighters in Helmand Province. The British intelligence community's evaluation of the matter, according to a leaked State Department cable, was that it demonstrated that Iranian intelligence operators belonging to the Quds Force were now engaged in the same sort of mischief in Afghanistan that they had exported to Iraq for years. But the British report left open the question of whether the Iranian government knew what the Quds Force operatives were up to, quoting a senior British official as saying that the Quds Force “
may have attempted to conceal its activities from other branches of the Iranian government
.”
The best that the U.S. intelligence community could conclude at the time, according to a DNI briefing, was that it was “likely” that the Iranian intelligence services were supporting the Taliban because they were the “
enemy of my enemy
,” that is to say, the United States. Now the U.S. intelligence community believes that the Iranians were just being prudent, supporting both sides in the conflict to ensure that they have a seat at the table regardless of who wins the war in Afghanistan. As a matter of policy, Iran has consistently opposed the Taliban, whom Tehran clearly views as an equal threat to its security as the American military presence in Afghanistan, if not a greater one. According to a little-noticed presentation to Congress made by DNI Denny Blair in February 2009, “
Iran has opposed Afghan reconciliation talks with the Taliban
as risking an increase in the group's influence and legitimacy ⦠Iran distrusts the Taliban and opposes its return to power but uses the provision of lethal aid [to the Taliban] as a way to pressure Western forces, gather intelligence, and build ties that could protect Iran's interests if the Taliban regain control of the country.”
The Iranian government has gone out of its way to maintain friendly relations with Afghan president Hamid Karzai and his closest advisers. According to U.S. intelligence sources, CIA surveillance of the activities of senior Iranian diplomats and intelligence officers in Kabul has revealed not only that the Iranian ambassador in Kabul, Feda Hussein Maliki, is a frequent visitor to Karzai's presidential palace but also that the ambassador has for years been giving Karzai's chief of staff, Mohammad Daudzai, a plastic bag filled with cash once a month. The sums involved have never been specified, but according to the
New York Times
, the payments over the years have totaled in the millions of dollars.
Senior U.S. intelligence officials believe that Tehran's motive in making these large cash payments to Karzai is to drive a wedge between Washington and the Afghan government. According to these officials, Tehran has also been making comparable payments to two other members of Karzai's kitchen cabinet, Information and Culture Minister Abdul Karim Khoram, and Education Minister Farooq Wardak, who are infamous in Kabul diplomatic circles for their attempts to use their positions of influence to push Karzai away from his alliance with the United States.
According to a leaked State Department cable, these three men
“provide [Karzai] misleading advice and conspire to isolate Karzai from more pragmatic (and pro-Western) advisors in a purposeful effort to antagonize Western countries, especially the United States.”
But it has been Iran's extremely controversial nuclear weapons development program that has dominated the U.S. intelligence community's interest in Iran since it began working on the project back in 1985. The CIA's “Iran station” in Dubai has covertly tried to disrupt Tehran's nuclear program for more than a decade by tracking Iranian clandestine purchases of nuclear-related technology from countries such as the People's Republic of China and North Korea using money held in Iranian government bank accounts in Dubai. Thanks to cooperation from the UAE intelligence services, the U.S. intelligence community has been able to interdict some of these clandestine nuclear shipments, but American officials admit that most of these shipments have managed to get through despite their best efforts.
Information provided by an Iranian dissident group in 2002 led to the discovery of a secret underground uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, located halfway between the cities of Isfahan and Kashan in central Iran. According to U.S. intelligence sources, the discovery of Natanz led the CIA in 2004 and 2005 to use its Predator unmanned drones to conduct secret reconnaissance overflight missions over the facility and the deployment sites for Iran's long-range ballistic missile units. Some of these drone missions were conducted from Balad Air Base in Iraq; others were launched from Karshi-Khanabad Air Base in Uzbekistan. The Iranians formally protested these overflights, but the U.S. government refused to confirm or deny that it was behind these secret flights.
Five years later in 2007, intelligence information provided by the NSA revealed that a team of Iranian engineers, led by a shadowy figure named Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, had been diligently working on designs for a nuclear weapon to be carried by one of Iran's new generation of long-range ballistic missiles, but that this work had been ordered halted in 2003 shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
This new information formed the basis for a controversial November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate
on the Iranian nuclear program, which concluded, “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.”
But two years later, according to senior American intelligence sources, the intelligence community had to reverse many of its 2007 findings after an Iranian nuclear physicist named Shahram Amiri defected in May 2009 while making the pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Sources confirm that Amiri's defection was entirely voluntary, facilitated by the cooperation the CIA received from the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate.
The information Amiri brought with him was deemed so important that the CIA offered him a $5 million cash reward. The CIA leaked his name to the press in March 2010, describing his defection as “an intelligence coup.” But in July 2010, Amiri returned to Iran without the $5 million in cash that the CIA had given him, claiming that he had been kidnapped by CIA officers in Saudi Arabia. The CIA formally denied the allegation, claiming that Amiri had been a willing defector whose information had significantly enhanced the U.S. intelligence community's knowledge of the Iranian nuclear program.
In the U.S. intelligence community, the Amiri re-defection was a huge embarrassment, the latest in a string of high-level defectors dating back to the 1970s who later chose to return home. In the eyes of some intelligence officials, Amiri's re-defection was a stark reminder of the peril innate in placing one's faith in human agents with all their foibles.
Despite doubts about Amiri's reliability, the U.S. intelligence community stuck by the information he provided. Based in part on the information provided by Amiri, as well as information provided by the Mossad, on September 27, 2009, President Obama and the leaders of Great Britain and France publicly accused Iran of building a secret underground uranium enrichment facility one hundred miles south of Tehran on the grounds of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base at Fordow, located outside the holy city of Qom. At the time of the announcement, the Qom site was far from complete, but the analysts believed that at the rate construction was going it would be ready by 2010.
The discovery of the secret uranium enrichment facility outside Qom dramatically changed how the U.S. intelligence community assessed the Iranian nuclear program. What it boiled down to was this: All of the intelligence indicated that the Iranians were not being truthful when they said that their nuclear program was intended solely for civilian purposes. Rather, the intelligence indicated that the Iranians had built just enough centrifuges at Natanz and Qom to process enriched uranium for use in a nuclear weapon, but not anywhere near enough for a civilian nuclear power reactor.
In August 2010, the National Intelligence Council issued a draft National Intelligence Estimate that essentially reversed most of the conclusions of the November 2007 estimate on the Iranian nuclear program. Based in part on information provided by Amiri, the 2010 intelligence estimate concluded that Iran was indeed developing nuclear weapons components and secretly enriching nuclear material that could be used in a nuclear weapon. But the estimate added that it was not known whether the Iranian government had made the decision to go one step further and actually build a nuclear weapon.
According to a 2011 interview with Michael Eisenstadt, the director of military and security studies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Iranians currently have enough enriched uranium for three to four nuclear weapons, but they would probably like to have a stockpile of uranium sufficient for about one hundred bombs, even if they do not actually move ahead and build the weapons themselves. Just having the raw materials on hand along with a viable bomb design would be as sufficient a deterrent as having the bombs themselves.
Deep differences remain within the U.S. intelligence community as to whether Iran has resumed work on building an atomic bomb. When asked in late 2010 for his opinion as to whether Iran was actively working on a nuclear weapon, one senior American intelligence official could only shrug his shoulders and say, “Your guess is as good as mine.”
Arguably the toughest target that the U.S. intelligence community currently faces is the hypersecretive North Korean regime, which Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., one of the leading experts on the North Korean military outside of the U.S. government, has described as “the most closed and security-conscious society in the world.”
The military threat posed by North Korea today is perhaps greater than at any time since the end of the Korean War in 1953. With an estimated 1.2 million men under arms, the North Korean military is a major threat not only to South Korea, where 28,000 U.S. combat troops are currently stationed, but also to Japan and other nearby Asian nations. The North Korean military has almost one thousand ballistic missiles in its inventory and is developing and building new missile systems at an alarming rate, including one missile, called the Taepodong-2, which can reach targets in the U.S.
But it is North Korea's nuclear weapons stockpile that gives American intelligence analysts the most cause for concern. North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon in October 2006. By 2009, U.S. intelligence officials believed that North Korea possessed somewhere between six and twelve low-yield nuclear weapons in its arsenal. Since then, the North Koreans have restarted plutonium production at their nuclear reactor complex at Yongbyon, which had been temporarily shut down in 2008. Pyongyang was believed at the time to be pursuing uranium nuclear weapons designs, but the intelligence community thought that North Korea was still years away from being able to produce the enriched uranium needed for these weapons.
However, the nature of the intelligence business is to be continually surprised by one's enemies. In November 2010, the North Koreans showed a delegation of foreign scientists led by a former head of the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory, Siegfried S. Hecker, a massive new underground uranium enrichment facility that they had just secretly constructed, forcing the U.S. intelligence community to scrap its previous estimates on the North Korean nuclear arsenal. Intelligence officials admit that they do not know how many uranium enrichment facilities the North Koreans have or how much material they are producing. But one thing is now clear to the analysts: Pyongyang might soon possess a much larger arsenal of nuclear weapons with significantly greater destructive power than previously believed.