Contradictory intel assessments before the US strikes Iran
Did President Donald Trump just bomb three Iranian nuclear sites, potentially bringing the U.S. into a future forever war despite JD Vance claiming “limited scope,” based on reliable intelligence?
“I am not put off by this decision,” ret. Gen. Frank McKenzie, former Commander of Central Command, told me Sunday afternoon while we were both on the road. “Sooner or later, we were gonna have to do something. So in my world, this is not an irrational thing to do right now.”
I called him because there were two contradictory intelligence assessments about Iran’s nuclear intentions: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said, “It was absolutely clear that [Iranians] were working on a secret plan to weaponize the uranium.” IDF Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, said that Iran has been “building for years a clear plan to destroy the state of Israel.”
But in March, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told lawmakers that the U.S. intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”
Trump swiftly cast Gabbard’s remarks aside this week. “I don’t care what she said, I think they were very close to having them,” the president said on Air Force One.
Beyond intent, estimates of how long Iran would need to develop a nuclear bomb have also varied, along with tolerance levels for these breakout times.
So did the president see U.S. intelligence as optional — as he did in Helsinki when he sided with Vladimir Putin over his own intel community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election — or did he know something that maybe even American intel agencies did not? (In recent days, I have heard other senior officials flat-out reject other assessments, such as the National Intelligence Council’s assessment that Venezuela’s government has likely not directed Tren de Aragua in the United States.)
“I think we have very good knowledge of what goes on in Iran in all dimensions,” Gen. McKenzie told me. But he was not sure why the intelligence differed. “Sensitive intelligence is often contradictory. I’ve been a consumer of extremely sensitive intelligence, I’m used to it. It can be very contradictory.”
Some countries are hard targets, but not Iran, he said. “Iran has terrible operational security. Exhibit one would be that its entire senior leadership is dead with the exception of [Ayatollah] Khamenei himself.” And Iran has always been leaky, he added. “They don’t respect the technology and they don’t understand its capabilities. But more so with human penetration, you have people who have been disaffected with the regime.”
How did other experts explain the divergent assessments on what Iran was really doing?
“The Israelis got burned by a CIA officer last year,” said Jeff Rogg, intelligence historian and fellow at the University of South Florida’s Global and National Security Institute. He was referring to Asif William Rahman, a former CIA analyst who last year leaked classified documents about Israel’s plans to strike Iran. Days ago, Rahman was sentenced to 37 months in prison for stealing and divulging classified information.
“That makes the Israelis less likely to share really sensitive intelligence with the agency or even the intelligence community,” Jeff went onto say. “The other piece is, who is Israel most concerned with convincing? Trump. So is it possible that Bibi or his intel chieftains just went directly to the highest level of the administration and shared intelligence with the political leadership, rather than the intelligence leadership?”
A former senior U.S. intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, described a key difference between Israeli and American intelligence. “We have global responsibilities. Iran and its affiliates have always been Israel’s number one thing, just like for the Australians, China is their number one thing.”
Both Jeff and the former intel official also pointed out how Israel has demonstrated phenomenal human intelligence capabilities when it comes to Iran and its proxies. Recall the pager incident last year, whereby Mossad dealt an unprecedented blow to Hezbollah through a series of pagers and walkie-talkie explosions in Lebanon and Syria.
“You can’t get the kind of fidelity about where the [assassinated] IRGC commander was at the beginning of the war without real, serious human intelligence,” the former official said. “I’m fairly certain we do not have that level of intelligence inside Iran.”
The former official also said that Trump does not believe Gabbard is relevant, and that his rejection of the intelligence community assessment was “personal to her and potentially the ODNI,” of whose continued existence Trump has questioned.
It is unclear exactly what Israel’s intelligence assessments stated, outside of Netanyahu’s assertions about them. According to the Wall Street Journal, Israel told the U.S. that Tehran’s nuclear weapons research included an explosive triggering system. “They described ‘a multi-point initiation system,’ a technique used to detonate multiple simultaneous explosions that is used in nuclear bombs, the officials and aides said. The Israelis also mentioned Iran’s work on neutron particles to generate a chain reaction — a critical part of nuclear fission — as well as on plastic explosives and on integration of fissile material in an explosive device.”
I also spoke with ret. Col. Itai Shapira, who served for more than 25 years in the Israeli Defense Intelligence (Aman), as he prepared for more sirens to sound in Tel Aviv on Sunday. “This is Israel’s strategic culture of preventing existential threats from materializing, especially nuclear projects,” he told me.
He said that Netanyahu has unveiled intelligence as a strategy to tell the world what Iran is doing. In 2018, Mossad agents infiltrated a secret warehouse in southern Tehran, seizing thousands of documents. Netanyahu said it showed that Iran had been secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons program called Project Amad — despite its claims of peaceful pursuits. He delivered the news in a speech in English, complete with visual aids and at military headquarters in Tel Aviv. Trump was serving his first term at the time, and he later pulled the U.S. out of the nuclear accord.
Itai sees a convergence between Iran’s nuclear goals and its ballistic missiles program — believing the missile program is meant to deter Israeli airstrikes and protect Tehran’s nuclear program.
I am also hearing that Israel is using its intelligence to dictate operational concepts. Identifying targets — people, places, and products — to create bottlenecks for the future. Clearly, that is why military leaders and nuclear scientists were assassinated. And as the IDF prepares for a long campaign, with or without more strikes launched by the United States, Israeli intelligence officers are now hunting down missile launchers in Western Iran.
Would it all have happened without Hamas’ attack in 2023? It was a gruesome day that led to questions and investigations on intelligence failures. But Netanyahu saw a window to eliminate Israel’s most dangerous foes. Or, as one person put it to me, “to wash the sheen of October 7th off of him.”
thank you, good stuff