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Fingar: Iran Nuclear Assessment Strong, Framing Of Argument Wasn't

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee: Thomas Fingar, Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis; Chairman of the National Intelligence Council
Interviewer: Greg Bruno, Staff Writer

March 19, 2008

The December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) Iran’s nuclear-weapons capabilities has been criticized as inadequate, poorly written, and narrowly focused. But Thomas Fingar, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which produced the Iran NIE, stands by the document’s conclusions. “This was not orchestrated disinformation” by the Iranians, Fingar says. “It was information on a very wide spectrum of nuclear-related activities—activities and intentions—that had to be checked against what we already knew.” But Fingar says his office never believed the NIE’s conclusions would become public. “If we thought for a minute they would be released, which we didn’t, we would have framed them somewhat differently.” He says he hopes future NIE documents remain classified.

In terms of reforming national intelligence, you’ve talked about outreach and transparency. I wonder if you could explain just a little bit further what you’re doing to get the ball rolling in terms of transparency across the intelligence community.

On transparency, we have my analytic-integrity-and-standards component [which] has had the lead in developing the foremost standards that are used to evaluate community products. Those same standards are now being incorporated into agency-specific evaluation programs. By the end of this year, both the intention and the expectation is that every agency will have its own analytic evaluation program.

Second is directive with respect to sourcing that specifies in some detail how items are to be footnoted. And it’s not just the citation, but some judgments made about the reliability of it: How much confidence do you have in it? Did you consider alternatives? So that it’s there—the homework is there if people want to see them.

Training program: We established a program which we call Analysis 101.

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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.