Back in 2007, US intelligence officials -- fearing an overestimation of WMD capabilities similar to Iraq circa 2002 -- severely lowballed their analysis of Iran's nuclear weapons program. Their product, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, put the Bush administration on the defensive and claimed that the Iranians had stopped work on the development of a nuclear warhead. Two years later, vindication comes from a most unlikely source: German intelligence.
President Obama has committed to trying diplomacy to stop the Iranian bomb. Time, though, is on the mullahs' side, not least because so much of it was wasted after the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate made the improbable case that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. This assessment not only contradicted previous U.S. intelligence consensus but -- as recent court documents show -- also the conclusions of a key U.S. ally with excellent sources in Iran -- Germany.
The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, has amassed evidence of a sophisticated Iranian nuclear weapons program that continued beyond 2003. This usually classified information comes courtesy of Germany's highest state-security court. In a 30-page legal opinion on March 26 and a May 27 press release in a case about possible illegal trading with Iran, a special national security panel of the Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe cites from a May 2008 BND report, saying the agency "showed comprehensively" that "development work on nuclear weapons can be observed in Iran even after 2003."
Iran still clings to the lie that their program exists for peaceful purposes. But even a disinterested observer can draw the obvious connections between their aggressive development of atomic weaponry and the near identical behavior of neophyte nuclear power, North Korea. Both booted UN weapon inspectors a few years prior to their program reaching full maturation, both initially claimed that they wanted nuclear power, not nuclear bombs. Both are laboring intensively to develop a delivery system capable of reaching targets as far away as the continental United States and both have easily circumvented UN sanctions designed to halt bomb construction.
Just like the 2007 NIE, the North Korean nuclear program during the 1990s had its share of intelligence community naysayers. President Obama, with his strategy of diplomatic engagement, is traveling down the same road as President Clinton without differentiating between the intentions of the two nations. The Norks wanted a bomb to extort regional power players into sustaining their dying regime, a successful strategy during the Clinton and Bush years. The Iranians, however, have guarded their weapon program with furious secrecy and don't need UN sanctions scrubbed to survive. That's evidence enough that they have no intention of trading away their program at President Obama's bargaining table.
