Global Security Newswire

U.S. intelligence analysts have improved their methods following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, lending credence to their assessments of Iranian and Syrian nuclear ambitions, CIA Director Michael Hayden said yesterday (see GSN, Feb. 5).

He praised his agency's success in detecting U.S. adversaries that have sought to acquire weapons of mass destruction, but warned that determining the existence of such programs can be difficult.

"The very fact that someone is interested in nuclear, chemical or biological technology is not enough to prove they are interested in weapons," Hayden said in a speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.  "A WMD program fundamentally centers on political intent."

U.S. intelligence agencies were embarrassed when troops and investigative teams uncovered no active WMD programs in Iraq after the invasion, despite the assertion in prewar national intelligence estimates that Baghdad posed a threat to U.S. security with its unconventional weapons capabilities.

Since then, the agency has toned down its assessment of Iran's nuclear ambitions, declaring late last year that Tehran had stopped work on weaponization activities in 2003 (see GSN, Dec. 3, 2007).  "Tehran at a minimum is keeping open its option to develop nuclear weapons," Hayden said.

With much more substantive evidence, the agency also called out Syria for building a suspected nuclear reactor near al-Kibar that was destroyed last year by an Israeli air strike (see GSN, Aug. 11).

"The intelligence community as a whole has taken great strides since the prewar NIE on Iraq to strengthen our tradecraft, and I think it shows with both the Iranian estimate and the al-Kibar effort," according to Hayden.

At a nonstate level, Hayden cautioned that al-Qaeda remains committed to acquiring weapons of mass destruction (see GSN, Sept. 16).

Using intent as a measure, "there is no greater national security threat facing the United States than al-Qaeda and its associates," he said.

Hayden did, however, temper that warning.

"We are fortunate that those with the clearest intent to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction are also the least capable of developing them," he said (Greg Webb, Global Security Newswire, Sept. 17).