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How the CIA Got It Wrong on Iran's Nukes
(Wall Street Journal) Edward J. Epstein - In a stunning departure from a decade of assessments, the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran declared: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." Unfortunately, as the Obama administration has now acknowledged, the NIE's conclusion was dead wrong, costing us precious time in dealing with a serious threat. What caused such a disastrous mistake? As James Risen, the New York Times national security reporter, explains in his book State of War, in 2004, a CIA communications officer accidentally included data in a satellite transmission to an agent in Iran that could be used to identify "virtually every spy the CIA had in Iran." This disastrous error was compounded because the recipient of the transmission turned out to be a double-agent controlled by the Iranian security service. This allowed the Iranian security service to control the information these agents provided the CIA, which may have been vulnerable to receiving misleading secret intelligence that Tehran had abandoned its nuclear ambitions.