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Kay: Recent Iran NIE Recalls Erroneous 2003 Iraq Estimate

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee: David Kay, Senior Research Fellow, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor

February 11, 2008

David Kay, a veteran arms inspector, led the Iraq Survey Group that looked in vain for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2003 after the U.S. defeat of Iraq. Kay’s Iraq mission ended with the conclusion that these weapons, the primary rationale for the war, simply did not exist. Today, says Kay, the debate over Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and in particular the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran publicly released in November 2007, recalls the flawed logic that preceded the Iraq war. The NIE declared that Iran had “halted its nuclear weapons program” in 2003. Kays says that is seriously flawed. “I cannot believe that anyone who worked on nuclear proliferation for any period of time would make a statement like that,” he says, noting that Iran is going ahead with its uranium-enrichment program and at any time could decide to build nuclear weapons.

You were recently a part of a panel discussing the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear capacity that was issued at the end of November. That declassified version began by saying: ”We judge with high confidence that in the fall of 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear-weapons program.” That of course got enormous attention around the world and led people to think that either intelligence agencies were trying to undercut the bellicose members of the Bush administration who would like to do something against Iran or were just trying make up for mistakes made in the Iraq intelligence estimates about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which were issued in 2002 and 2003. What did you think of that Iran NIE?

That first line brought me up sharp. There was a footnote to it that a lot of people missed if they were reading just the press reports of it.

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Copyright 2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.