Double double toil and trouble in spy business

Joseph Weisberg:

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran appears to rely heavily on notes from a discussion between Iranian military officials involved in that country's nuclear weapons development program. What if, instead of such easily manipulated documentary evidence, the CIA's National Clandestine Service had been able to recruit a spy at the highest reaches of the Iranian government, someone who could just tell us what the country's nuclear capabilities and plans were?

It wouldn't have made any difference.

Ever since the inception of the CIA, the operational side of the agency has both believed in and spread the fantasy that foreign agents can provide vital secret intelligence that will clear up great mysteries, change the outcome of wars or prevent terrorist attacks. But this view of intelligence is a myth. To understand why, it's useful to look at what happened the last time the United States desperately needed a spy to get to the bottom of a covert weapons program and what happened when we actually got one.

According to statements by Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA's European operations, the CIA entered into a clandestine relationship with Iraq's then-foreign minister, Naji Sabri, in mid-2002. Drumheller has claimed that Sabri provided the CIA with documentary evidence that Iraq did not have an active program to pursue weapons of mass destruction.

But Sabri's information had no influence whatsoever on U.S. policy. Nor did it alter the CIA's own assessment of Iraqi weapons capabilities. This is because Sabri, like virtually every other CIA asset, could not possibly have been trusted. So any intelligence he provided was useless.

Intelligence from almost all CIA assets is unreliable for the simple reason that so many of them are double agents, meaning that the CIA recruited them but that they are being controlled by their own countries' intelligence services. When I worked at CIA headquarters in the early 1990s, I once suggested to a friend who worked in counterintelligence that up to a third of all CIA agents could be doubles. He said the number was probably much higher.

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The problem with evidence like that from Sabri is that it was contradicted by the actions of Iraq which indicated both deception and a country with something to hide. Had Saddam not been such a jerk with the inspectors and opened up with them instead, then Sabri's information would have been more credible. The same think is happening with Iran now. Despite the new information indicating that Iran has abandoned its nuclear weapons program, its other conduct suggest otherwise. That is why there is so much skepticism about the new NIE. Iran is rapidly building feedstock that can be used for a bomb or as fuel for generating capacity it does not need. It is at the same time developing a delivery system for a bomb it says it is not building. Perhaps it is playing the same bluff Saddam did, but why would it want to repeat that mistake when it could open up and show what is under its skirt and avoid sanctions?