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Copyright � 2001 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
Who Fired Up the Missile Threat? Republicans in Congress Know
Michael Dobbs Washington Post Service
Tuesday, January 15, 2002
WASHINGTON Until 1998, it was an article of faith for the U.S.
intelligence community that no potentially hostile country - apart
from Russia or China - would pose a long-range missile threat to the
United States before 2010, at the earliest.
Scarcely a year later, CIA analysts were saying something entirely
different: They predicted that North Korea, one of the world's last
surviving hard-line Communist states, could test an intercontinental
ballistic missile capable of hitting U.S. territory "at any time."
According to a September 1999 intelligence forecast, Iran could test such a missile
"in the next few years."
This abrupt shift in thinking was prompted, in part, by a series of troubling events,
including missile tests in North Korea and Iran, nuclear tests in India and Pakistan,
and reports of Russian scientists selling their s
ervices. But there is also evidence that the new intelligence forecasts were a result
of something else: a concerted campaign by the Republican-dominated Congress,
supported by Israel, to focus attention on the leakage of
missile technology from Russia to Iran. The government of then-Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu feared that Israel could soon become a target of Iranian missiles.
Congressional Republicans wanted to build public support
for a national missile defense system.
"It was the largest turnaround ever in the history of the intelligence agency, and I
was part of making it happen," said Representative Curt Weldon, Republican of
Pennsylvania, who is a leading critic of what he often cal
led the Clinton administration's "misguided" approach to Russia in the late 1990s. Mr.
Weldon, a champion of missile defense, was openly scornful of pre-1999 CIA estimates
of the missile threat from such nations as Iran a
nd North Korea.
Mr. Weldon and other conservatives said the intelligence shift was a necessary
corrective to what they viewed as politically skewed intelligence forecasts during the
Clinton years. They were particularly upset by a 1995 n
ational intelligence estimate that flatly stated that "no country, other than the
major declared nuclear powers, will develop or otherwise acquire a ballistic missile
in the next 15 years that could threaten the contiguou
s 48 states and Canada." By contrast, Joseph Cirincione, director of the
nonproliferation program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the
1995 intelligence estimate "holds up pretty well in hindsight."
He accused Mr. Weldon and other Republicans of mounting a "conscious political
strategy" to attack the intelligence assessment because "it stood in the way of a
passionate belief in missile defense."
"Intelligence analysts have learned to give the Congress what they want, while
preserving the integrity of the analysis," said Mr. Cirincione, a former Democratic
staffer on Capitol Hill.
"What happens is that you get assessments that include all possible worst cases," he
said. CIA officials argue that the post-1998 estimates are the result of "improved
tradecraft." They say the agency reviewed its procedu
res following publication of a 1998 report on the ballistic missile threat by a
bipartisan commission headed by a former (and future) defense secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld, and began to consult a wide range of independent ex
perts from industry and academia.
Some consumers of intelligence within the government say the shifting forecasts of the
ballistic missile threat are a case study of how an ostensibly objective intelligence
process can be buffeted by conflicting political
pressures, from home and abroad.
"Nobody believes the CIA estimates," said a longtime counterproliferation expert from
another government department. Another analyst said that "nuances" tended to get taken
out of the estimates as they proceed up the bure
aucratic ladder.
The argument over the 1995 intelligence estimate got under way even before its
publication. According to Capitol Hill sources, the Clinton administration leaked
details of the still-secret document to congressional Democr
ats, who used it to argue the case against missile defense.
As chairman of the House Armed Services Committee's subcommittee on military research
and development, Mr. Weldon assumed responsibility for countering the Democratic
offensive. He did so by staging a dramatic showdown wi
th a CIA analyst, David Osias, who had been dispatched to Capitol Hill to give him and
other committee members a briefing on the intelligence finding in a secure
fourth-floor conference room. Mr. Weldon said he "went ball
istic" after Mr. Osias insisted that there would be no hostile missile threat to the
continental United States for at least 15 years. "I said, 'Do you mean to tell me that
the unrest in Russia represents no additional thr
eat?'"
The congressman said he was also furious that the CIA study excluded Alaska and Hawaii
from its threat assessment. (A North Korean missile would have to travel nearly 6,000
miles, or 9,650 kilometers, to hit California, b
ut only 3,700 miles to hit Alaska.)
"This is over, this is (expletive), this is a politicized process!" Mr. Weldon
recalled yelling, before bringing down the gavel on the closed-door session.
Intelligence sources confirmed that Mr. Osias was subjected to a
severe grilling at the secret hearing.
The debate over the 1995 estimate coincided with an aggressive Israeli campaign to
alert the Clinton administration to what Mr. Netanyahu's advisers saw as a growing
missile threat from Iran, a radical Islamic state that
has often threatened to destroy Israel. Israel had information that Iran was working
on a scaled-up Soviet Scud missile, known as the Shahab-3, that would theoretically be
able to hit Tel Aviv from launching pads in weste
rn Iran.
Israel had intelligence that Russian missile experts were traveling to Tehran and
giving advice to the Iranians. Former Israeli officials said they were greeted with
skepticism from Clinton administration officials who we
re reluctant to strain relations with President Boris Yeltsin of Russia, who was then
seen in Washington as the symbol of Moscow's fledgling democracy.
The Israeli allegations of technology transfers between Moscow and Tehran became the
basis of a series of congressional hearings in 1997 and 1998, and Republican calls for
economic sanctions against any state that provide
d missile technology to Iran. The confrontation came to a head in June 1998 when the
Republican-dominated Congress passed the Iran Missile Proliferation Sanctions Act,
which would have imposed mandatory sanctions on any c
ountry selling missile technology to Iran. The legislation was promptly vetoed by
President Bill Clinton. Administration officials scrambled to enlist Israeli support
to get Congress to back down and accept a diluted vers
ion of the legislation, rather than override the president's veto. Against their own
judgment, congressional conservatives allowed the presidential veto to stand. But they
soon acquired fresh ammunition against the 1995 i
ntelligence estimate.
The first serious attempt by congressional Republicans to persuade the CIA to revise
its estimate of the long-range missile threat ended in failure. A blue-ribbon panel
headed by the former CIA director Robert Gates repor
ted to Congress in December 1996 that the technical case against "rogue states"
acquiring intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, in the foreseeable future was
even "stronger" than that presented in 1995.
Unhappy with the conclusions of the Gates committee, Congress appointed a new
commission, this one headed by Mr. Rumsfeld. The Rumsfeld report, delivered in July
1998, predicted that a rogue state would be able to "inflic
t major destruction" on the United States "within about five years" of a decision to
develop an ICBM. For several of those years, the report added, "the U.S. might not be
aware that such a decision had been made." Accordi
ng to commission members, the five-year estimate was based largely on briefings from
missile engineers at major U.S. defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin and
Boeing. The commission asked the American rocket buil
ders how long it would take them to build an ICBM, from the starting point of a Third
World country such as Iran. "The answer was five years or less than five years,"
recalled Barry Blechman, chairman of the Henry L. Stim
son Center, a research organization in Washington.
The political impact of the Rumsfeld report was strengthened by the fact that its
conclusions were unanimous. The Democrats had been allowed to appoint three members of
the nine-member panel, so it was difficult for them
to argue that the report was politically tainted.
The Rumsfeld Commission's conclusions remain highly controversial, even within the
government.
The State Department's intelligence unit, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, has
long taken a less alarmist view of North Korean and Iranian capabilities than has the
CIA or the Pentagon.
A new national intelligence estimate on the missile threat, issued
this month, publicly enshrined the State Department's dissenting
views for the first time, even though the declassified version
referred only to an unidentified "agency."
Copyright � 2001 The International Herald Tribune
End<{{{
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