Secretary of State John Kerry implied on June 16 that it was not essential to have Iran come clean with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about the past possible military dimensions (PMD) of its nuclear activities before full sanctions relief:
We’re not fixated on Iran specifically accounting for what they did at one point in time or another…It’s critical to us to know that going forward, those activities have been stopped, and that we can account for that in a legitimate way.
Resolving the Iranian PMD concerns with the IAEA has long been understood as a requirement for fully implementing a comprehensive nuclear agreement. It is not just about getting a mea culpa from the Supreme Leader and holding Iran accountable for nuclear weapons research that ran until at least 2003. The international community needs to have a complete baseline understanding of Tehran’s past nuclear activities. Otherwise inspectors would not have confidence they could detect any significant changes or violations in Iran’s program.
Why would the Untied States be in any way comfortable with making this concession? Kerry argues that US intelligence has a “clear picture” of previous Iranian weapons research, even if the IAEA does not:
We have no doubt. We have absolute knowledge with respect to the certain military activities they were engaged in.
This is not his first such promise. On May 3, Kerry said on Israeli television that he:
Absolutely guarantee[s] that in the future we will have the ability to know what they are doing so that we can still stop them if they decided to move to a bomb.
Even setting aside Kerry’s propensity to define things in “absolute” terms, these are some dramatic assertions. He is backed up by the president, though. Obama made a similar claim on April 2 in his Rose Garden speech announcing the interim nuclear deal, stating unequivocally “If Iran cheats [on the agreement], the world will know it.”
If anyone outside of Iran knows the extent of their nuclear program, it is the US intelligence community. I have confidence the information we have on their alleged weapons research activities is very strong. The members of the P5+1 would not have held together over the past 10 years to impose the sanctions regime and conduct the current negotiations if the evidence of Iran’s intent to achieve a nuclear weapon was not solid. I also have no doubt that the IAEA, the United States, and our allies are well-positioned to monitor Iranian activities at their declared nuclear sites.
The problem is those places we do not know about. Little if anything of the Iranian nuclear program was voluntarily declared. Rather, Tehran’s secret work was exposed through defectors and intelligence efforts. To think we no longer run the risk of missing covert nuclear activities inside Iran is naïve.
The United States considers Iran to be a ‘hard target’—like Russia, China, and North Korea—meaning the country is very difficult to penetrate and analyze effectively through means of human, communications, or technical intelligence. We have a long history of getting it wrong on these states’ weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs, or of being surprised by their technical innovations. Iraq WMD and our larger intelligence failures in the Middle East go without saying.
This legacy demands humility in our assessments and realism in the limits of our intelligence capabilities. No intelligence professional would ever (or should ever) say they have absolute confidence in their knowledge on any subject, let alone on an adversary’s nuclear program. But the president and the secretary appear to be expecting exactly that of our intelligence officers. Moreover, they are basing the legitimacy and success of a nuclear agreement on it. Expecting the US intelligence community to have “absolute knowledge” of a subject is unprecedented, and frankly absurd. It is an especially disturbing and surprising proposition given how much our current president ran on never repeating the largest mistake of his predecessor: basing major Middle East policy decisions on supposedly “slam dunk” intelligence.
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