What is the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)?

A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on any given subject is produced under the supervision of the Director of National Intelligence with the consensus of the 16 intelligence agencies that make up the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the Council includes the CIA, FBI, and intelligence agencies within the Departments of Defense, Justice, State, and Treasury, there are 16 in all.

Click here to see the full list.

What did the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran say?

The big news in the 2007 NIE on Iran is that the consensus of the 16 agencies that make up the Council is that;

*    Iran had a secret nuclear weapons program that was suspended 2003 as a result of international pressure.
*    Iran may resume its nuclear program if it perceives it is in its self interest.
*    Iran will not be technically capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium or uranium for weapons before 2015.

Read the actual document here.

What do we know about how this new intelligence gathered?  How was it evaluated?

According to a number of sources the intelligence community has drastically changed its operations under the reconstruction suggested by the 9-11 Commission.  Standards for transparency and corroboration of sources have become more stringent.   Unlike the flawed Iraq NIE, rushed to completion in 20 days and relying on questionable sources, the NIEs on Iran in 2005 and 2007 were crafted and debated over several months and had much higher degrees of confidence in the various estimates.  Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), also urged the agencies to challenge their initial assumptions when new information didn't support them and be willing to change course, allowing the available intelligence to inform the investigation.    

Joe Klein from Time Magazine has an interesting piece on where some of the new information came from.  

"A special CIA Iran-analysis group, which calls itself "Persia House," was split off from the agency's Middle East regional analysts. A major effort was made to recruit human intelligence sources inside Iran. And then, in June and July, the new Iran assets began to pay off. Some of the information may have come from an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps general named Ali Reza Asghari, who defected to Turkey in February. But a senior U.S. intelligence official assured me, "It was multiple collection streams. You don't get a 'high' degree-of-probability assessment without multiple sources."

"In August, National Intelligence Director McConnell ordered CIA Director Michael Hayden to have ready by Labor Day a new intelligence estimate reflecting the latest information. Hayden said he needed more time. [This, it would seem, is when McConnell met with the President, to tell him changes might be afoot.] McConnell set a Nov. 30 deadline. Because some of the information sources were new, Hayden decided to launch a "red team" counter-intelligence operation to make sure that the U.S. wasn't falling for Iranian disinformation

"The National Intelligence Board met and reached its conclusions on Tuesday, Nov. 27."The meeting took a little more than two hours," a senior intelligence official told me. "There have been times when it has taken multiple meetings that went on for hours and hours to reach a consensus, especially when dealing with one of Iran's neighbors."

How does this change what we previously understood from the 2005 NIE?

The information concerning the timeline for the creation of nuclear weapons is consistent with the 2005 NIE.   The major change is that the NSC came across evidence that the Iranians did in fact have a secret program and that it they had suspended it.  The timeline for the prediction for the actual development of nuclear weapons is similar.

What did President Bush and others in the Administration know and when?

It defies any credibility that the Administration was unaware of the strong possibility that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons programs.   Over a period of 6 months or more sixteen agencies within the federal government charged with gathering and analyzing intelligence we debating this very question.  The Iranian question was arguable the #2 foreign policy issue for the Administration, intelligence briefings are prepared daily for the President.  He knew.   He just didn't officially know until the presentation.

While his language has been bellicose over the last several months he did start to nuance his rhetoric in September.  He reframed the problem from Iran attaining nuclear weapons to Iran attaining the knowledge to create nuclear weapons.  
Bush and Cheney could have asked that the release of the NIE be postponed, they did not.  Vice President Cheney, unlike other hardliners has said that he has no reason to question the intelligence.

NPR has a good four year timeline that gives a bigger picture on how the Administration has dealt with the Iranian question since 2003 but for the issue about when the administration officially learned the new intelligence highlighting what was said and known about the program since early 2003:

Spring 2007: A National Intelligence Estimate on Iran was expected to be delivered to Congress during this period, but is repeatedly postponed as intelligence agencies re-assess information about Iran's nuclear program.

August 2007: President Bush says, "Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust." The latest National Intelligence Estimate says, "we assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007."

September 2007: U.S. intelligence officials, including CIA Director Michael Hayden, begin a reassessment of their information on Iran, according to unnamed officials quoted in the New York Times. The newspaper says White House officials knew at the time that the intelligence agencies were reviewing their conclusions, but did not know until later that those conclusions were drastically being changed.

October 2007: President Bush says, "we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

November 2007: A final draft of the National Intelligence Estimate is presented to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. It concludes that Iran stopped its weapons program in late 2003 and since then has shown no signs of resuming it.

December 2007: A day after the NIE is made public; President Bush says he was first told by Director of Intelligence Michael McConnell in August that there was new intelligence about Iran's nuclear program, but that he wasn't told what that new intelligence was at the time. President Bush, in a press conference, says he still regards Iran as "dangerous." He asks reporters, "What's to say they couldn't start another covert nuclear weapons program?"

What is the International Community Saying?

The release of the NIE came only days after major players in the UN Security Council negotiated new sanctions on Iran.  The timing is very strange.  Secretary Rice first move was to encourage the major powers to start to look at ways to make Iran account for what it was doing before the 2003 program was suspended.  Basically, our ability to leverage a third round of sanctions by the UN is limited given the response of key players on the Security Council.

Russia
Russia, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council with veto power, has said that Russian intelligence has no evidence Iran had an atomic arms program before 2003. But they added that they were struggling to understand why the United States chose to issue the report just two days after the six powers involved in negotiating with Iran -- the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany -- had decided to press ahead with a new Security Council resolution before the report was released.

Europe
European and U.N. officials said that the U.S. report bolsters their argument for negotiations and that the world should not walk away from years of talks with an often-defiant Tehran that is openly enriching uranium for uncertain ends.

E.U. and U.S. officials insist, nevertheless, that they will press ahead with efforts to agree on new sanctions in the U.N. Security Council. But, conceded one official on condition of anonymity, "The sense of urgency has gone."

Israel
Israeli officials say their intelligence forces believe Iran is still working aggressively to build nuclear arms despite the new U.S. conclusion about Iran. The Islamic regime in Tehran is strongly opposed to Israel's existence and frequently boasts of its ability to strike the Jewish state with long-range missiles.

Arab States
Officials there have been clear that they will only go so far in supporting US efforts at sanctioning Iran, acknowledging Tehran's key role in the region's economy. The Gulf Cooperation Council, an economic grouping of the six Arab Gulf countries, recently started negotiating a free-trade pact with Iran.
At a GCC summit this week, after the release of the U.S. intelligence report, other Gulf officials backed away from further economic sanctions. "We cannot afford to follow certain international strategies that could harm our interests," Qatari Prime Minister Shaikh Hamad Bin Jasem Al Thani told reporters at the close of a GCC summit Tuesday.

China
"I think the council members will have to consider that, because I think we all start from the presumption that now things have changed," Chinese U.N. Ambassador Wang Guangya said Tuesday when asked whether the release of the intelligence estimate made the prospect of new U.N. sanctions less likely.