ON A FRIGID Monday in Vienna in late February 2008, Olli Heinonen summoned ambassadors and experts from dozens of countries into the boardroom of the International Atomic Energy Agency, posting guards outside the doors.
For two months, Heinonen had watched as political leaders around the world had seized on the ambiguities of the Bush administration's National Intelligence Estimate on Iran for their own purposes. As the agency's chief inspector, Heinonen and his team had spent several years of their lives trying to extract answers from the Iranians, and he understood better than anyone what questions they had promised to answer and then avoided. He kept a list in his head of the obfuscations they had generated when presented with specific evidence that they were designing warheads, or that military units appeared involved in what the Iranians insisted was a completely civilian effort to produce nuclear power.
Every few weeks, Heinonen's inspectors were visiting Iran to track the construction of each new “stand” of centrifuges used to enrich uranium. It was clear that 2008 was a breakthrough year. The summer before, Heinonen had predicted that by the end of 2008, the Iranians would likely be running upward of 4,000 of the high-speed machines—enough to make a bomb's worth of uranium in a year's time if they chose to enrich to bomb-grade purity. His prediction proved just about right.
Now in his early sixties, Heinonen had been in the nuclear inspection business for a quarter of a century. It had all started as something of a lark. At thirty-five, he was eager for a new challenge, and could no longer stand Helsinki, where he was employed at Finland's Technical Research Centre. “The winter was endless,” he told me one night, relaxing over a beer in the Stadtpark, one of the perfectly groomed parks in downtown Vienna. “Snow, horrible weather, I was ready to get out.” But the job did offer him an opportunity to get around a bit, and during a free day while attending a nuclear conference in Austria, he signed up for a river cruise in Hungary. Along the way, Heinonen happened upon a flyer advertising openings for “safeguards inspectors” at the IAEA, the sleepy United Nations outpost in Vienna that was responsible for monitoring all of the world's nuclear facilities. He knew little about the agency, but most of the jobs it posted were for assignments in the Far East, a region of the world that he had always dreamed of traveling around. This seemed the perfect match of nuclear expertise and opportunity for wanderlust. He returned to Helsinki, where a messy mix of snow and rain the following Monday convinced him to apply for the job. Soon Heinonen and his wife and daughter were settling into the quiet Tokyo neighborhood of Shiroganedai, a district of tiny streets, ancient Japanese gardens, and a few surviving old wooden houses, where the “Yakimo man,” a seller of sweet potatoes, still came through with his cart now and again, a reminder of a faraway time.
Heinonen loved it. His job was to inspect Japan's nuclear industry, one of the largest in the world. It was in Tokyo that he learned much about the process of making nuclear fuel. It was also a fast lesson in nuclear realities: Heinonen discovered how easy it would be for a determined country to use the same technology—even the same machinery—to go the extra few steps necessary to turn reactor fuel into bomb fuel. The Japanese never took that step—or insisted they had never taken it. But he left viewing the country and others that possessed similarly sensitive technologies as “virtual” nuclear-weapons states. There was plenty of anecdotal evidence that Japanese engineers had drawn out, with their usual precision, exactly what it would take to make a weapon if the country ever decided that it could no longer depend on the American nuclear umbrella. No one who had ever visited Japanese laboratories believed it would take very long, if Japan ever decided to do so, for the nation that invented the Walkman to design a warhead.
After three years Heinonen was posted back to the headquarters in Vienna. His adventure over, he was preparing to quit the IAEA and return to his old, less-exciting life in Helsinki. That is, until he settled his children into school, found an apartment, and then discovered that it would require him to give up a prized possession.
“It was a Saab,” he said. “A thing of beauty.” He had bought it in Vienna, and had planned to take it to Finland tax-free. But that required a waiting period of a year—and his former boss told him that if he wanted his old job at the Technical Research Centre, he had to show up within six months. When Heinonen said he needed more time, he got a stiff letter from the company's legal department telling him to show up on schedule or the offer would disappear. Angry, he never responded. He stayed in Vienna. As it turned out, his decision to stick with the Saab changed his life—and, years later, the course of the West's confrontation with Iran.
By October 1986, Heinonen was in Iraq for the first time, examining Saddam Hussein's civilian nuclear program—the program that the agency discovered, after the Gulf War in 1991, had come perilously close to building an atomic weapon. Later he was in North Korea, trolling through the grim nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. These were his first entanglements with two of the world's most complex covert nuclear weapons projects. The combination of Hussein's megalomania and North Korea's use of its nuclear program as a bargaining chip for state survival got him hooked. He rose slowly through the ranks, until he was selected by the IAEA's Egyptian-born director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, to run all of the agency's “safeguards” program—the gentle name used for the division that is responsible for ensuring that countries are not trying to build a bomb. It is a job that puts Heinonen in the interesting position of assessing the quality of the estimates that the world's intelligence agencies drop at his doorstep. And, with varying degrees of candor, everyone from the CIA to German intelligence to the Mossad all share what they have learned—because Heinonen has the legal right to ask questions and demand answers of every country that is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But the IAEA's relationship with its member countries is always rife with tension.
ElBaradei spent most of his tenure at war with Washington. And Heinonen will never forget the Bush administration's willingness to skew intelligence to fit its political agenda. At that dinner in Stadtpark in 2007, the conversation turned to evidence the CIA had provided to the IAEA on Iraq in the last months before the war in 2003. He was still angry at the contempt that Dick Cheney heaped on the agency, which the vice president had portrayed as a group of incompetent fools who wouldn't recognize a nuclear program if it was dropped in the courtyard of their headquarters. Of course it was the IAEA that quickly determined that the most important single piece of evidence supporting Bush's allegation that Saddam Hussein was “seeking uranium in Africa” was an obvious forgery. As ElBaradei rarely tired of mentioning, the IAEA was right and Cheney was wrong.
ElBaradei and Heinonen got the last laugh when the Egyptian nuclear chief and his staff won the Nobel Peace Prize. But in 2007 Washington and Vienna were at war again, this time over Iran. ElBaradei, concerned that Bush might be setting the pretext for war with Iran, decided to take diplomacy into his own hands. He negotiated a separate agreement with Iran, a “work plan” for the Iranians to answer questions they had long ignored—with the implicit promise that if they complied, ElBaradei would give the country a clean bill of health. Bush and Rice were outraged: The IAEA chief was overstepping his bounds and undercutting the Security Council's sanctions against Iran, they said. Rice complained that ElBaradei and his agency were supposed to be inspectors, not negotiators; other administration officials charged, as two of my colleagues wrote, that ElBaradei was “drunk with the power of his Nobel.”1 Even some of ElBaradei's own staff worried he was naïve in cutting his deal with the Iranians—Tehran would string him out, they feared, and never answer all the questions.
But at the beginning of 2008, the tables had turned. Suddenly, Heinonen worried that the American-produced intelligence estimate was so muddled that the Bush administration was actually taking the pressure off the Iranians.
The timing of the American intelligence report could not have been worse. It came out just as the deadline was approaching for Iran's negotiators to answer all the outstanding questions the IAEA had put to it—about documents that seemed to involve crude bomb designs and about evidence of work on warheads. Few of the answers ever arrived in Vienna; the Iranians sensed that the pressure was off. Neither the Americans nor the Europeans could threaten harsher sanctions against a country that was judged to have suspended its weapons design, even if it was still violating UN resolutions. Ahmadinejad had claimed victory, saying that the NIE was a “declaration of surrender” by the United States.
Heinonen's inspectors felt the effects. When they visited Iran, their freedom was more limited than ever. Iran had backed away from its commitment to ratify an “additional protocol” that allowed the inspectors to demand to see just about anything in the country they wanted. They could no longer visit sites that Iran had not declared to be part of the nuclear program—which cut out a long list of suspected facilities. It was exactly those kinds of inspections that, five years before, had revealed the secret centrifuge-making facilities behind a false wall in a clock-making factory in downtown Tehran and raised questions about a host of military sites.
“We are going blind,” Heinonen complained. And that was the point. The Iranians knew that as long as they could keep playing three-card monte with the inspectors, they could profit from the ambiguities about their program. The Russians and the Chinese were eager to preserve their lucrative oil and natural gas contracts with the Iranians; if the Americans thought active weapons work halted in 2003, what was the case for sanctions? The Europeans disbelieved the American report, but their plan to get their banks and other financial institutions to cut off more of Iran's access to the world's credit markets fell apart the moment the American intelligence estimate was published.
“I'm sure this is part of a brilliant American strategy,” a senior French diplomat told R. Nicholas Burns, the State Department's former negotiator on Iran, his voice dripping with sarcasm, when they discussed the intelligence findings. “Would you mind letting us know what it is?”
The Arab states, who were as alarmed as the Israelis by the prospect of a nuclear Iran, could not believe Bush allowed the report to be published. As Rice later noted, the Arab countries “never heard of an independent intelligence community, because almost none of them have one.” While Iran's Arab neighbors were saying little publicly, privately they were asking Bush administration officials when they were going to solve this problem for them. For one of the rare moments in the history of Arab-Israeli conflict, the Arabs and the Israelis were on the same side.
HEINONEN HAD CALLED the meeting in the boardroom because he felt he had no choice but to create new pressure on the Iranians. So, in a forum where he knew the evidence would quickly leak, he presented a detailed accounting of the most intriguing, incriminating evidence the Iranians refused to talk about. Now, with more than a hundred representatives of different governments sitting in hushed silence, he asked for the lights to be lowered. On the giant screen at one end of the room, images from his treasure trove of evidence appeared. For most of those present—except the Americans and some of the Europeans—these were Iranian documents and drawings they had never seen before. Nor had the Iranian delegation seen them; for months the Iranians had declared that all the evidence consisted of “fabrications,” and they refused even to look at it, much less answer questions about it.
For two long hours, Heinonen talked his audience through documents and sketches that appeared to come from Iran's military laboratories—the same laboratories that had been the target of the American spy agency's intercepts of computer traffic.2 In his oral report, Heinonen discussed the mysterious role of Mohsen Fakrizadeh, the Iranian military scientist sitting atop the entire nuclear project. Heinonen laid out the organization of Fakrizadeh's empire, and described how the Iranian academic taught a few classes, but reported directly to the Iranian ministry of defense.
There, on the screen, were memorandums from Fakrizadeh. Some were budget documents. But others were memos to the various Iranian nuclear projects that reported to him, chastising them for putting the names of real employees in their reports. Those were to be stricken from all future memos, Fakrizadeh insisted. He was clearly obsessed with secrecy. That did not prove anything, Heinonen said, but it was suspicious.
Then Heinonen delved into the operations of Fakrizadeh's organization. There was Project 5, he said, a sprawling effort to mine uranium and convert it to gas that can be turned into nuclear fuel. There was Project 110, he continued, responsible for what appeared to be an effort to design a warhead. He showed sketches that diagrammed a “spherical device” that could be detonated using a complex system of high explosives. It was a classic “nuclear trigger.” Anticipating Iran's response—that there are industrial applications for conducting controlled explosions, including for drilling—Heinonen looked out over the crowd and told them that the specific design work he was showing them was “not consistent with any application other than the development of a nuclear weapon.”
He saved Project 111 for last. Here, he said, was “some of the information that the agency had wanted to show Iran but that they had not been in a position to see.” The members of the Iranian delegation, who had already been jeering at Heinonen, suddenly began looking at one another. Realizing that some detailed Iranian memorandums about Project 111 were about to be thrown onto the screen, they whipped out their cell phone cameras to take photographs and video; back in Tehran, people would want to see exactly what Heinonen possessed, and presumably try to figure out how it leaked.
The first slide was a “status report” on Project 111, written in Farsi. The opening page bore an epigraph, which Heinonen's staff had translated: “Fate changes no man, unless he changes fate.” The remainder of the slides, also in Farsi, detailed work on how to design a warhead so that it could be placed in the nose cone of Iran's most sophisticated long-range missile, the Shahab-3. The cramped space inside the nose cone looked as if it was designed to accommodate a sphere like the one the diplomats had just seen, the one surrounded by detonators. But it was unclear exactly how the two projects related, and nowhere in the documents was there any reference to a nuclear warhead. That was the implication, but the Iranians could argue that this was just a conventional weapon—and thus none of the IAEA's business.
Heinonen told the group that he had a lot of questions for Mr. Fakrizadeh. But so far the Iranians had come up with a string of excuses about why he was not available to be interviewed—and never would be available.
The Iranians in the room had seen enough. Ali Asghar Soltanieh, the head of the Iranian delegation to the IAEA, stood up and told Heinonen he was headed down “a very dangerous road.” Later, other Iranians yelled, “The work plan is over,” a threat that they would abandon entirely the plan that ElBaradei had painstakingly negotiated with the Iranians to get answers to outstanding questions.
Heinonen looked unperturbed by Soltanieh's outburst. He had come to expect it; brinkmanship was all part of the Iranian strategy. He continued to display other documents from the same vault of evidence, which he assured the audience of diplomats came from several countries and several sources—his way of saying he wasn't shilling for the CIA. One of the hardest documents for the Iranians to explain was a chronology showing the arc of a missile's flight. It indicated when the altitude meters would be switched on, when the detonators in the warhead would be fired, and it showed the warhead exploding at about 600 meters above the ground.
There was silence in the room.
Heinonen's message was clear: No one would detonate a conventional weapon at that height; it would be a wasted boom, doing no damage. But as any nuclear weapons designer would attest, that is roughly the height at which an atomic bomb, detonated over a city, can do the most damage. (The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was an airburst, at a similar altitude.)
Warming to his subject, the Finn ended with a video animation—another Iranian production, he said. It appeared to have been designed for dignitaries visiting Project 111. It showed a warhead from all angles, and preparations to test it. As the lights came up, Soltanieh insisted again that it was all a fraud.
Heinonen had stopped just short of accusing the Iranians of making a bomb. These documents were the basis of questions, he said, questions that the Iranians had promised to answer, but had long ignored. Their “file,” he added, would not be closed until satisfactory answers were delivered. The diplomats filed out, raced back to their offices, and cabled home. Within hours, the news of the briefing leaked, just as Heinonen knew it would.
HEINONEN'S PRESENTATION surprised everyone in the room that day—including the Americans. Much of the evidence they knew about, of course; some of it had come from the laptop. But this was the first time they heard public discussion of the role of Mohsen Fakrizadeh. For more than two years the Iranian engineer's name had been plastered all over classified briefings to Bush, Cheney, Rice, Hadley, and Gates, among others. As Iranian scientists go, he was not hard to find—he lectured every week at the Imam Hossein University in downtown Tehran. He had also once headed the Physics Research Center, where he'd helped develop the country's first project to enrich uranium. The academic work, American intelligence officials believed, was real, but also a perfect cover for experiments that were far more interesting to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, of which Fakrizadeh appeared to have been a member as a young man after the 1979 revolution.
To this day American officials have never talked publicly about his suspected role in the nuclear program, though his name was included among those of a number of military commanders and nuclear officials designated for travel bans and other sanctions in a 2007 United Nations resolution. In July 2008, his name was added to a list of Iranian officials whose assets in the United States were ordered frozen—though there was no evidence he had any here. Heinonen made no mention of it during his presentation, but it was Fakrizadeh's unit that had been the subject of the intense American intelligence scrutiny that showed weapons-development work had been ordered halted in 2003. (Curiously, some of the documents Heinonen showed ran through January 2004.)
There was no question that the American effort to understand Iran's intentions focused intently—though not exclusively—on Fakrizadeh and his staff and their links to the Iranian military. “These guys are target number one,” one senior official told me.
While Fakrizadeh's name does not appear in the declassified “key judgments” of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, he is a central figure in the classified chapters. Those chapters are filled with accounts of his role in Projects 110 and 111 and document his close links with the Iranian military. But the report makes clear that Fakrizadeh is more like the Robert Oppenheimer of the mullahs’ Manhattan Project—he is running the operation, not deciding when and whether to build a weapon.
In fact, like the Americans, Heinonen could not prove Fakrizadeh and his colleagues were making a bomb. He could prove only that at some point, engineers in Projects 110 and 111 had tackled the most difficult problems any bomb designer faces sooner or later: how to make a warhead small enough to fit atop a missile, and how to time its detonation. But the Iranians are hardly the only country to play out those issues on paper—or to stop short of constructing a weapon. As the Iranians liked to point out, the IAEA could put together a pretty good slide show about Israel, too.
WITH LESS THAN a year remaining in the Bush presidency, the fierce internal debate about what should—and could—be done to stop the Iranian program went into overdrive. By this point, Bush and his top advisers felt they had tried all the classic incentives and disincentives. They needed something new. The arguments were familiar. Some officials surrounding Cheney and other hawks were still talking about reviving the Pentagon's well-honed plans to bomb the facility. At the State Department, Nicholas Burns had left in frustration, never once permitted to engage the Iranians in a real, one-on-one, diplomatic conversation. Though he had spent three years in charge of American strategy toward Iran, he was part of that large generation of American diplomats who had never been permitted to set foot in the country, let alone meet with an Iranian in an official capacity where he could engage in the give-and-take of diplomacy. He had argued, time and time again, for the chance. Each time the same answer came back: It would legitimize the Iranian government to meet them. It would be a victory for the Holocaust-denying Ah-madinejad. It would undercut Israel. Burns believed the arguments were shortsighted. “If you fear that there could be a confrontation,” he told me after he left the State Department, “it's our moral responsibility to do everything we can—everything we can—to head it off.”
The moment to engage in that kind of direct diplomacy was in 2005 and 2006, when the Iranians had assembled only a small number of centrifuges at an “experimental” facility at Natanz. At the time, the Iranians had lots of ambitions, lots of plans, and lots of new facilities— but they had barely produced any uranium. The mullahs had little negotiating leverage: They could not yet threaten, as they can today, that they would pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and turn their reactor fuel into bomb fuel. But Bush felt bogged down in Iraq, and Rice feared that even an experimental stand of centrifuges was unacceptable. “The problem isn't the number that they have,” she told me. “The problem is that they have them. The problem is that they're experimenting and learning.”
The administration's reluctance ran deeper, though. Cheney and others had yet to give up on the dream of regime change in Iran. Some lived in the fantasy that the Iranians would bow to escalating economic pressure and do what the Libyans had done—surrender it all for the prospect of a good relationship with Washington.
But the cases were not analogous. As the price of oil rose, Washington's leverage diminished. The Iranians correctly calculated that there were limits to the Europeans’ willingness to impose sanctions; they would never go along with actions that could prompt a severe backlash. As Dennis Ross, the longtime Middle East negotiator, put it, “the pace of Iran's nuclear development outstripped the pace of the sanctions.”
Now time was short. For the past year or two the Bush administration had focused on the Iranians’ biggest vulnerability, their failing economy. Iranian oil output was declining; they were operating at 300,000 barrels a day below the production quota that OPEC had set for Iran. They simply could not meet the target, and it was costing them tens of millions of dollars every day. Even Ahmadinejad's acolytes were upset about his mismanagement of the economy. Oil accounts for 85 percent of the government's revenue—and the Bush administration had successfully dissuaded many countries from allowing their firms to strike new oil and gas agreements with Iran, or to provide the financing for them. Using squeeze techniques honed in isolating North Korea, the treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, exerted leverage on Iran by making it dangerous for banks and financial institutions to lend the country money. To ratchet the pressure a little higher, he warned of “the extraordinary risks that accompany those who do business with Iran,” making it clear it could affect their own access to American markets. Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad was dealing with a restive populace, unhappy with inflation, shortages of commodities, and sporadic government services. For a populist, he wasn't delivering much.
Condoleezza Rice insisted that the sanctions strategy was working; the Iranians were hurting. She was right, they were hurting. But no matter how much the Americans and the Europeans tightened the noose, even cutting off access to bank credits, the Iranians simply would not slow down the nuclear program. To the contrary, they sped up. “There was a moment when we discussed cutting off their supplies of refined gasoline,” one former administration official who was in on these discussions told me later. But the Pentagon responded that the Iranians had what strategists called “escalation dominance”—they could inflict more pain on American consumers than we could inflict on the Iranian government. “The fear was that oil might shoot up to eighty dollars a barrel—that doesn't sound like much now, but it did then,” one official said to me. “And there were all kinds of models under which this led to military confrontation in the Straits,” he said, referring to the Strait of Hormuz, where the Iranians were patrolling more vigilantly than ever. Tied up in Iraq, the Pentagon chiefs told Bush that the last thing they could handle was a conflict with a country twice as populous and far more powerful than the nation they were already trying to pacify.
Ahmadinejad responded to the economic pressure by appealing to Iranian nationalistic sentiment. Give the Americans our centrifuges, he said, and they will soon want the rest of the country. “If we would take one step back in our confrontation with the arrogant powers regarding our nuclear program,” he argued, “we would have to keep taking more and more steps back till the very end.”3
By the last year of the Bush presidency, even the hawks inside the White House had shut up about regime change in Iran. “I haven't heard that discussed for a long time,” one of Bush's aides told me one day. But they had also given up on the strategy of seeking ever-escalating Security Council resolutions. Each resolution required an enormous diplomatic effort and yielded very minimal results. The Iranians had ignored them anyway, and just kept building their centrifuges. Bush needed another option.
“The administration is in real disarray,” said David A. Kay, the nuclear specialist who led the fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the invasion and who famously declared when he got home that “we were all wrong.” A former senior official in the first term who was talking to the White House about Iran put it this way: “The hawks—Cheney and his boys—haven't fully given up the dream of just taking out the nuclear program. But they haven't figured out a way to do it, or a way to handle what happens next.”
On most days, the debate about attacking Iran was well hidden— not only from the public, but from members of Congress, from European allies, often from the State Department's own negotiators. Periodically, stories appeared about rumors of a new plan for a military strike, but when you dug into them, you usually discovered that the Pentagon was updating old plans.
Those plans had been on the table for a long, long time—well back into Rumsfeld's tenure at the Department of Defense. As one senior administration official put the choice to me back in January 2006, when I first wrote about those options, “Could we do it? Sure. Could we manage the aftermath? I doubt it.” That calculus has not changed.
The obvious targets for airstrikes were the big nuclear facilities that everyone knew about. The Air Force's main target would be Natanz, where 4,000 centrifuges were spinning away at 80 percent of their capacity, according to IAEA inspectors. If that pace continued, Iran could accumulate enough material for a single bomb by the time Bush left office, though it would have to send its uranium through additional enrichment before it could be used for a weapon. American intelligence estimates indicate it will be 2010 to 2012 before Iran has enough material to make a few weapons, but that is educated guesswork.
Under the Air Force's carefully honed plan, there would also be strikes on the nuclear complex at Isfahan, where uranium ore mined from Project 5 was turned into gas, one of the steps in creating fuel for nuclear weapons. Presumably, other targets would include Bushehr, where the Russians were completing Iran's civilian nuclear reactors; if those reactors went into production, the Iranians would have a supply of spent fuel to produce plutonium, the route the North Koreans took to the bomb. And there was a new reactor under construction at Arak, which will eventually be capable of producing plutonium.
Military experts who have studied the options say an airstrike could be devastating. But it wouldn't be quick, like the Israeli attack a quarter of a century ago on Osirak, Saddam Hussein's reactor in the Iraqi desert. An air attack in this case would more closely resemble all-out war. “You are talking about something in the neighborhood of a thousand strike sorties,” W. Patrick Lang, the former head of intelligence for the Middle East and South Asia at the Defense Intelligence Agency, told me. “And it would take all kinds of stuff—air, cruise missiles, multiple restrikes—to make sure you've got it all.”4 After each day's bombing, satellite photos would be taken to figure out if the destruction had gone deep enough underground. New attacks would have to be launched—and of course, after the first one, the Iranians would be ready. Doing an airstrike right, by some estimates, would take a week or two. The Iranians would almost certainly lash out in retaliation, either through the Quds Force—their most elite unit—or through terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. The targets could include American forces in Iraq, as well as Lebanon and Israel.
Would a preemptive strike be worth it? Even inside the Bush administration, I found few who thought so. Most of the internal estimates at the Pentagon and the Energy Department—where the nuclear expertise is located—suggested that an attack would set Iran's program back by two years or so. In other words, it might delay the day that Iran built a weapon to 2015, or even a year or two later. But the political cost would be huge. Even the young, educated, Westernized, visa-desperate generation would likely be radicalized.
That was certainly the view of Robert Gates, who, a generation after his first encounter with the Iranians in Algeria, found himself at the center of the new debate about whether to attack the country. At his confirmation hearing as secretary of defense, he laid out his view with words never before heard from a Bush administration official. “I think that we have seen, in Iraq, that once war is unleashed, it becomes unpredictable,” Gates told the committee. “And I think that the consequences of a military conflict with Iran could be quite dramatic.” If asked by Bush, he said, “I would counsel against military action except as a last resort and if we felt our vital interests were threatened.”5
Once in office, Gates made the same argument, even more forcefully. Because of his status as a former CIA director, he integrated both intelligence reports and the military's conclusions to buttress his points. “This was done very differently in the second term,” said one official who had seen Gates's behind-the-scenes work. “He knew he had an authority on these issues that few defense secretaries have ever had. He pressed the case hard.”
Grudgingly, even some of the hawks in the Bush White House came to the conclusion that Gates was correct in his analysis of the issue. Attacking the nuclear facilities might be a satisfying last act, they acknowledged, but it would probably rally support around an unpopular theocracy and an economically incompetent president. “There are some people who think Ahmadinejad is actually trying to goad us into an attack,” one cabinet official told me at the end of Bush's presidency, “because it's the best way for him to save his own skin.” In the end, the official said, “I think that's the argument that registered with President Bush.”
But there was also a more practical argument against a strike, one that President Obama will undoubtedly confront soon after he takes office. It is the problem that military and intelligence officials brought to Bush in 2008: After years of intelligence reviews, of spy-satellite photographs and reports from insiders, neither the Pentagon nor the intelligence agencies can identify with assurance what targets in Iran should be destroyed.
A whole chapter of the classified version of the NIE, according to several who have read it, is filled with descriptions of other suspected nuclear sites in Iran—far from Natanz, far from the facilities visited by Olli Heinonen's inspectors. (There is a brief reference to those sites in the unclassified version, but nothing that suggests the detailed treatment of the subject in the classified version.)
The official who had cautioned me that “I'm not telling you that we saw centrifuges spinning on the Caspian” made the point that a covert program would be enormously appealing to the Iranians. They saw what the Israelis did at Osirak in 1981 and in Syria in 2007. Those attacks were Exhibits A and B, he said, of “the dangers of assembling a nuclear program all in one place.” The Iranians made clear to IAEA inspectors that parts for centrifuges had been spread out in stockpiles and small factories around the country. They were insurance, it seemed, against losing the whole program at once. The message to the United States and Israel was clear: If you hit Natanz, we're ready to speed up elsewhere.
FACED WITH NO good options, Bush did what many presidents do in the absence of a workable military plan: He turned to the CIA.
In the spring of 2008, Bush notified the heads of the intelligence committees and leaders in Congress that he was issuing a “finding” authorizing covert action in Iran aimed at its nuclear program. Such findings are highly classified, and while those familiar with the documents would not discuss the details, they said that the wording was maddeningly vague. “My understanding is that it would allow the president to do a lot of things and come back later and say, ‘That's covered in the finding,’” said one former official who had been consulted on the issue.
The bulk of the efforts appeared to focus on disrupting Natanz and other sites. This was, in reality, an effort to revive old programs that dated back to the Clinton era, when the CIA used Russian scientists in a series of efforts that ultimately failed to slow the Iranian program.6 If the past is any indication, that means efforts to interfere with the power supply to nuclear facilities—something that can sometimes be accomplished by tampering with computer code, and getting power sources to blow up. Some of the programs focused on ways to destabilize the centrifuges, in hopes they would shut down or spin out of control and explode.
Several of the efforts were coordinated with European intelligence agencies, and several with the Israelis. There have been periodic reports, hard to confirm, of U.S. Special Forces teams being inserted briefly into Iran, but Bush's program does not appear to have focused on putting many people on the ground. Instead, the plan was largely to penetrate the supply chain that the Iranians were relying on for their nuclear programs. One person familiar with the planning called these efforts “science experiments,” and another argued that it was a little late in the game for Bush to be re-focusing on sabotage. “It was not until the last year that they began to get really imaginative about what one could do to screw up the system,” one official told me. “None of these are game changers.”
Naturally, Bush's top aides would not discuss what the president had or had not authorized. But I thought the reaction of one of those officials was revealing, during an interview early in the summer of 2008.
I asked whether prudence dictated allowing the Iranians to go ahead with a low level of uranium enrichment—not enough to produce a weapon, but enough to serve as a salve to Iranian pride. In return, the United States would insist on regular, rigorous inspections, including restored rights for the IAEA inspectors to travel to any suspect sites. If the inspectors were blocked, or thrown out of the country, Iran's actions would be ample evidence of “breakout”—its intention to build a bomb. Moreover, this approach would leave the next administration with a diplomatic process rather than an immediate confrontation.
The official, who rarely got riled, stood up and started pacing around the office. “All of you who think you want to leave Iran with a route to a nuclear weapon, please raise your hand,” he said, talking to an imaginary audience of incoming officials. There ought to be a serious national debate, he said, about whether America could afford to drop the demand that Iran agree to halt all uranium production before the United States engages in real negotiations.
“If you say now you're going to drop that precondition and you're going to go talk to them, you are telling the Iranians and everybody else in the international community, ‘They are going to end up with an enrichment program.’ And that means they end up with a path to the bomb.”
He started pacing faster and faster. “And you better tell the Egyptians and the Saudis and all the rest of them that right now so they can start their bomb programs, too. I mean, let's get real about this.”
AT THE END of September 2008, American military officials quietly deployed a high-powered radar—called X-band—in Israel as part of an effort to put together a joint defense against any missile attacks by Iran.
The system was the same kind that had already been installed in northern Japan to warn of a missile attack from North Korea. This was no experiment, the United States said; the radar was there for good.
The radar installation was written about in the military trade press, but it didn't exactly make big news. In fact, the radar was a small part of a much bigger request that the Israelis sent to Washington in the spring of 2008—a request that made many in the administration believe that the prospect of an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities was significantly more likely. By this time, Bush had become so risk averse that he was intent on quashing any Israeli threat.
Except for the radar, the core of Israel's request was kept secret in both capitals. A series of delegations sent to Washington had asked for precision-guided bunker-busting bombs from the U.S. arsenal, according to American officials who described Israel's interchanges with the administration. The Israelis already possess some bunker-busters, American officials told me, but they knew that in addition to its traditional arsenal, the United States had a limited number of specially produced, conventional weapons that were specifically designed to pierce underground nuclear sites—like those in North Korea and Iran.
The Israelis had another request: They wanted overflight rights in Iraq so that Israeli fighters and bombers could hit Iran's facilities. The Israeli aircraft have only limited range, and without the overflight rights, an attack on Natanz or other facilities would border on the impossible. “The chief of the Air Force says they can do it even without overflight [of Iraq],” one senior American official told me. “We're not convinced.” The defense radars were all about planning for the Iranian response: If Iran launched missiles toward Israel with conventional warheads atop them, the Israelis wanted to see them coming.
Bush stalled, saying neither yes nor no. The additional bunker-busters were never delivered, but as a consolation prize the Americans stepped up discussions with Israeli intelligence about covert operations that might achieve the same end—slowing down the Natanz project—without a highly visible attack that would almost certainly provoke a response, if not a war. The most problematic issue for the White House was the threat that Israel might try to overfly Iraq on its way to Natanz. The United States still controlled Iraqi airspace. On this issue, American officials say they gave a firm “no” to the Israelis. The reaction in Iraq, they feared, would be overwhelming. It would likely force Iraqi politicians of all stripes to condemn the United States—exactly the kind of split Bush was desperately hoping to avoid. It could drive Iraqi politicians into the arms of the Iranians. And it might be used by the Iranians as an excuse to make a major incursion into Iraq—setting up a confrontation with the United States.
Inside the White House, there was a deeper concern. What if the Israelis flew over Iraq anyway, without Washington's permission? Would the American military be ordered to shoot them down? Not likely. So, by the time the first bomb dropped, Washington would be accused of being complicit in the Israeli attack, whether the United States was part of it or not. “This one is a nightmare,” one national security official told me.
TAKEN TOGETHER, Bush's decision to start up additional covert actions against Iran so late in his presidency and the Israeli effort to prepare an attack or try to convince Washington that one was coming, were signs that the Bush administration had run out of gas on Iran. Bush had spent years assembling sanctions, to little avail. He had put together some modest incentives to try to induce the Iranians to give up their nuclear program, but nothing that pointed toward a big, strategic change in the relationship—nothing that would lead young Iranians to pressure their ossified government to embrace a vastly new relationship with the United States.
The arrival of a new administration creates that opportunity. It may be too late; the Iranians may be so close to a bomb—a few screwdriver turns away—that there is no hope of stopping the country from becoming nuclear capable. But if there is hope, it lies in using what Dennis Ross, the Mideast negotiator, calls vastly bigger carrots and vastly bigger sticks.
Barack Obama adopted that approach—but deliberately stopped short of explaining it in detail—in the 2008 campaign. He tangled with his opponent, Senator John McCain, on the question of whether he would negotiate with the Iranians “without preconditions,” and McCain used the exchange to try to portray Obama as naïve. But the real issue isn't whether to negotiate, it is whether the United States has leverage to change Iran's behavior. And now, there is reason to hope that we might.
Ahmadinejad is on the ropes; his popularity has plummeted, and at the end of 2008 he appeared on the verge of physical collapse. Some Iranians seized on his weakness to suggest he should not run for reelection. He was humiliated by his own parliament, which removed a member of his cabinet. Whatever happens, the new president should try to make Iranian elections about one issue: whether Iran wants to continue to be a revolutionary republic, defying the world at great economic cost to its own citizens, or whether it wants to become a normal nation.
The best way to influence the outcome is to spell out to the Iranians exactly what they have to gain: diplomatic recognition, a lifting of all sanctions, visas for Iranian students. The more public the offer, the tougher the pressure on the Iranian regime. The Iranian people have to hear the American message, and they should hear it directly from the new American president.
That would set the stage for a real negotiation, one in which the “bigger sticks” could also be described. At the opening session, the secretary of state would not only sit at the table; the Americans should be at the head of the table. That would send the signal that we respect the Iranian people, and we are prepared to deal with their government.
But the message would also have to be clear that America has leverage again. With the war in Iraq beginning to wind down and oil prices dipping, at least temporarily, the United States is finally in a position to threaten Iran with far greater economic pain. Obama talked in his campaign about taking the step that Bush rejected: cutting off the fuel that keeps Iranian daily life going. “If we can prevent them from importing the gasoline that they need,” he said in one presidential debate, “and the refined petroleum products, that starts changing their cost-benefit analysis.” The threat sounded strong on the campaign trail, but in reality it would mean preparing for a violent Iranian reaction. The new president will have to show that if his “grand bargain” fails, he is committed to far harsher sanctions than Bush ever threatened. And he would have to be willing to make it clear to our European allies that if the Iranians failed to negotiate a grand bargain, every European investment in the Iranian oil industry will have to stop, every loan will have to cease. The gasoline cutoff— the ultimate sanction—will have to be enforced by everyone, including NATO. Countries that balk will risk their relationship with Washington, and with the new president in whom they have invested so many hopes. It will be a huge test of whether, with Bush gone, America's influence is on the rebound.
At first the Iranians would likely reject a grand bargain and claim that the West was seeking its destruction. But the pressure might well build, particularly after Iran's own elections. Bigger sticks and bigger carrots might not work. But what we've tried for the past eight years has clearly failed. If we stay on the current path, Iran is getting the Bomb.