The latest US National Intelligence Estimate [NIE] on Iran has been widely reported. What we might usefully do here is look at why it has shaken up the governments of America's allies far more than it has disturbed the general voting public. The public seems not to be particularly surprised by the findings.

We might also look at whether we might be seeing the end of an era in which the few make increasingly forlorn and destructive attempts to manipulate the perceptions of the many.

The Embarrassment of 'European' Officials

'European' officials who adopt a 'strong' Atlanticist vision of the West have been seriously embarrassed. They talked up the Iranian threat to press for US sanctions imperatives amongst their own sceptical business communities. 

Many business interests who trade in the region are convinced that their Governments are not representing their interests and they will seize on this new information. The NIE cut the ground from under diplomats' feet.

'European' diplomats have also been spinning like tops to persuade the Chinese and the Russians to work on a new wave of sanctions. They have been claiming to be brokers, able to work up something acceptable to a ‘hawkish’ US in order to avoid war. Again, the ground has shifted from under their feet.

Is it really possible that the British and their conservative Arab allies (be under no doubt that these are both driving forces in their own right for soft power operations against Iran) had no idea that the struggle in Washington between 'hawks' and realists might actually go the way of the realists? Can they have been so dim?

It is far more likely that the 'Europeans' were not honest brokers at all, but were actively complicit, against the instincts of their own peoples, in promoting the 'hawk' position. They gambled that President Bush and his circle would never slip from a position that stated that Iran was a current rather than a potential nuclear threat. They lost.

Stooges or Manipulators?

The Russians certainly and the Chinese probably are going to feel irritated and manipulated. The 'Europeans' have been claiming exclusive access to authoritative intelligence about a threat that just does not stand up to scrutiny any longer.

The 'rest of the West' is no longer looking like an independent broker but more like an American stooge (which, in fact, is what it was in part) but not so much a stooge of America as a stooge of just one faction within American politics.

There is another more conspiratorial view. Far from being stooges, the British and other security services have been highly complicit, perhaps in part initiatory, of operations that have not been in the American interest at all.

Under this scenario, some are still playing games that owe more to Cold War thinking about the Russian bear than anyone of us dare admit to ourselves. But let us park such subversive thoughts in the X-Files for the moment.

So, the timing of the NIE could not have been much worse for 'European' diplomats. They really believed that they were on the edge of ensuring UN-SC unity over tough sanctions and now the rather delayed arrival of some basic American common sense has changed the rules of the game.

Russian and Chinese Responses

The Russians and Chinese may still play ball and may wish, for their own reasons, to keep Iran under scrutiny but they have now 'gone home to give the matter more thought' and the Iranians have been given a bit more breathing space.

First signs are that the Russians have seized on the NIE findings to call for more dialogue with Iran. The Iranian Foreign Minister is expected to be in Moscow to discuss the Bushehr nuclear plant on 13/14 December.

As for China, after all the past week’s ‘spin’ that China was ‘on side’ with increased sanctions, 9 December saw the signing of a $2bn oil deal between Iran and Sinopec of China. This was a strong signal that if the West won’t get in on one of the most lucrative energy export markets in the world, the new emerging players will not be so shy.

More to the point, this is not (like Total’s deal) one of those cases where the deal is signed and then the non-Iranian party can choose to hedge their bets while the US decides whether to bomb or not: the Iranian Oil Minister claimed that “implementation … will start immediately” and sounded confident in doing so.

US sanctions were partly predicated on a calculation that lack of access to investment would mean an energy crisis in Iran in the second half of the next decade. Although only the first such deal (and something that could, in fact, be reversed for effect back in Beijing), recent US strategy now looks rather wobbly, especially as talk of crisis in the Iranian economy (designed to drive votes into the Iranian moderate camp) seems premature.

Total, Royal Dutch Shell and Repsol have already been given an ultimatum by Iran that they are to be either in or out of the world’s largest gas field [South Pars] by June 2008 – so the critical period for Western-Iranian relations is almost certainly this coming Spring, much as it is for Pakistan-Afghanistan.

Cross-linking Crises

There may even be a connection between the crises. If (as we believe) extirpating extreme Sunni Islam is a priority for the US, then the Spring of 2008 is the decisive period in West Asia.

Provoking Iran after the March 2008 elections in the midst of the American Primary Season may not be very 'realistic', especially if the progress of sanctions was (even before the NIE announcement) more talk than substance. 

Sanctions were and are squeezing Iran but not on the necessary timetable for influencing the March 2008 Parliamentary Elections.  The original 'Rafsanjani strategy', designed to get the Iranian people to turn on Ahmedinejad, is looking fairly ropey at the moment

Similarly, the Iraqi situation appears to be stabilising and Iranian interference has been reduced to position-taking against Saudi rather than American influence - that is, if the Bahrain intervention of the Iraq National Security Adviser Al-Rubbaie is to be taken at face value. 

With the US and the Saudis co-exploring how to defeat 'Al-Qaeda' in two theatres on either side of Iran, wise counsel might suggest that Iranian 'neutrality' should be encouraged.

The New American Realism

Europe is now adjusting to the politics of the NIE in Washington. If reports are correct, Cheney was overruled on an attempt to block its publication. Gates and Rice wanted to play it straight – perhaps understanding that ‘trust’ for America in the world is now needed against global insurgency. The damn thing would be leaked eventually in any case.

Despite some negative press reports, Bush's Press Conference on the NIE showed a man confident in his brief, able to answer most questions well and able to put forward a cogent national interest position in Iran without feeling he needed to fall back on the hysteria of World War III or talk of Islamo-fascism. 

It took him seven years to get there but he is now in the real world. If his research has shown him that the American and global publics are starting to discount hysteria, then this is the beginning of the end of a dark period during which political warfare had taken over from traditional national interest policy-making. 

Some day someone will write the definitive history of how ideological politics intruded too far into the State's functioning but it may be many years a-coming. 

One ideological transatlantic network's entire raison d'etre derives from the idea that America must never go it alone but must be bound into its European alliances. If this means replacing the Soviet threat with a manufactured Islamist threat, then so be it.

On the other hand, military thinking in the US is moving far away from worrying about Europe towards a global perspective in which 'European civilisation' is not really of such intrinsic interest. The police look for motive alongside means in a crime and the motives for 'hawkishness' reside as much within one particular vision of European security as American.

One victim of the new American realism may be allied attempts to manage and manipulate Washington into hawkish stances in ways that cause opprobrium to fall on the US rather than on the Atlanticist factions within the rest of the West. If so, this might result in a new realism within Europe and not before time.

Spookery - Factional Politics and the NIE

The Sunday Times (always closely linked to the neo-con/Atlanticist faction) has already begun to spin that US intelligence is being undermined from within in an NIE context. 

An implication of the charge that the NIE was a politically-inspired document may be that ‘realist’ officials have appreciated that they had reached an impasse with Iran and now need to prepare the ground for a negotiated solution. The 'turning' of Libya has shown what may be possible.

Black ops against the authors of the NIE has started but is unlikely to get far. The widespread interpretation (whether true or not) that Fingar, Brill and Van Diepen were politically ‘engaged’ themselves will simply assume that this engagement was limited to anger at the politicization of the intelligence services. Although this or that unnamed US intelligence official may be reported as considering the report ‘crap’, the fact is that all 16 US intelligence agencies backed it.

Our own sources have consistently advised us of mid-level professional security sector anger at the misuse of intelligence for political purposes. It has undermined trust and morale to the extent that it now actually aids the enemies of democracy.

There are also interesting details emerging surrounding the original provision of data concerning Iranian nuclear intentions. The Sunday Times reveals that, in 2004, the Ukrainian Secret Service played a major role in briefing the US and MI6 about alleged Iranian requests for nuclear technology.

What is does not say is that the contacts took place in February 2004 and that the Orange Revolution took place between November 2004 and January 2005. The Orange Revolution is now widely seen as something in which Western funds and organisation attempted to overturn the Ukrainian Government and transfer it from the Russian to the Western sphere of influence.

Wikipedia then puts the security aspect succinctly: "Ukrainian security agencies played an unusual role in the Orange Revolution, with a KGB successor agency in the former Soviet state providing qualified support to the political opposition.”

There are mysteries here beyond the ken of mere bloggers but, given that factions of the siloviki consistently play highly ambiguous roles in former Russian imperial affairs at the best of time, it does not need the mind of a thriller writer to see that a faction, that might want aid and assistance for some planned outcome, might seek to trade what it believes the other side wants.

Something similar seems to have happened with information trading involved in Iraq before 2003, with a particular faction providing some very convenient material that was unquestioned by an intelligence network that seems to have become either stupid or politicised

The Politicisation of Intelligence

The Sunday Times says that the declassified summary of the NIE “flew in the face of accepted facts among western intelligence agencies” but it is equally possible that, post the Cold War, all intelligence agencies, not just the siloviki, have entered the political process as players in support of an ideology and/or their self interest.

The wider intelligence community, at some point, probably long before the arrival of President Bush into office, came to see information as an internationally traded currency rather than as a store of value to be drawn on when needed.

From this perspective, the Americans may have started as the villains of the current global crisis but, under the new realist imperative, they may very well end up as the heroes if they do something that should have been done a long time – place the security services of all types in a box marked: “under State if not democratic control” and restore respect for intelligence as a tool for the political class instead of as a rival player within the political game.

There are repeated hints, for example. that it has been the British who have been talking up the US military threat amongst Arab allies and in the media, badly frightening some of the smaller Gulf States.

Certainly, we have seen what we long considered to be an absurd degree of belief in the inevitability of an American strike against Iran amongst senior Arab figures in London who are otherwise very well informed. The new American realism may simply be calling a halt to such manipulations from within and without.

A Critical Approach to Security Briefings of the Media

One of the great mysteries in analysing media coverage surrounding the Middle East is the precise role of Israel. Much of the evidence seems to point to Israel as source of much disinformation and yet we remain cautious.

Many sources for information turn out to be operatives who claim particular bona fides and yet there is no way of checking. It was an old 'spook' trick to have a message appear to come from a source that had not originated it. The 'smoke and mirrors' involved in contemporary political warfare suggests that nothing should be taken at face value.

It is possible for someone a) to claim unwarranted security status and still concoct a cover story to appear to endorse it, and b), more seriously, to use some real security status to work to an unofficial or unapproved agenda.

We expect to see a court case in the UK next year in which a Foreign Office official allegedly leaked documentation for internal political purposes and this is not uncommon in Western politics. Recently, a prominent source on terrorism for the US media appears to have been unmasked as having a partially faked identity and interesting links to the security services of a power with a strong interest in promoting the existence of an Islamo-Fascist ideology.

Back in 2002, I recall at a conference, an intelligence analyst complaining vigorously and in public that there were personalities operating around London at that time claiming to represent Western intelligence agencies and briefing the media with pro-war black propaganda but who had no such official status.

It is quite possible that it is not so much Israel or the UK or the US or Russia that is saying this or saying that but out-of-control politicized factions of the intelligence services within these countries or even politically motivated and funded parallel organizations.

The Possibility of Intelligence Parallelism

Let us get back into X-Files country to close this piece. Those who watch the nonsensical but enjoyable BBC series ‘Spooks’ will recognise the anti-American operation Yalta in this model.

Globalisation has, in fact, permitted the emergence of quasi-independent political warfare operations with ideological agenda that are trans-national and can claim former 'spooks' as employees. 

These are not an entirely new phenomena - Congressional constraints on US publicly funded activity resulted in 'work-arounds' that repeated the ethical errors of the early Cold War but without any chance of effective legislative scrutiny.

It was the early history of US intelligence and the 'work-arounds' through such units as the legendary Safari Club that have dragged the reputation of the West, even amongst its own peoples, from its high point in 1945 into its current position as distrusted hypocrite capable of state terror, kidnapping and torture.

The late Litvinenko also represents a new type of former agent, set adrift as budget cuts and political factionalism bring conventional corporate politics into the security community and trying to find employment in business intelligence.

Such types often get drawn into conspiracy theory or into political warfare operations either as participants or as 'useful idiots'. There are also amateurs and so-called ‘investigative journalists’ running around, playing life as if it was scripted by Deighton or Le Carre (or Fleming if they are supremely deluded).

This is not to let Israel (say) off the hook by any means, but ‘people who know’ remain sceptical that Israel (rather than certain politically inspired alleged sympathisers with Israel) is responsible for every single bit of black propaganda dumped in the marketplace.

If Israel or the US or the UK or Russia are at fault, it is in not monitoring and exposing unauthorised political use of their country brands - i.e. basic reputation management!

What Journalists Can Do

A central problem is one of credentials. The media get so excited at being on the inside of 'secret' stories that they are not asking the critical questions, not only about the information provided but the authority of the information provider.

For example, you will regularly read in the Financial Times that (say) a ‘European intelligence official’ had said or revealed something. This term must cover dozens of agencies and yet the value of the information can only be adequately assessed if the public is told which national agency and of which type is doing the 'spin'.

There has even been a pattern in the media in general - comparing past newspaper reports - for a rather obviously British source in (say) 2005 to be redefined as European by 2007 (stating the basic line of the same story) as if to cast an even longer shadow over the information. The same source but made to look even vaguer over time - we are moving backwards.

Some of the most arrant nonsense in mainstream papers designed to be read in the Iranian Foreign Ministry comes from such sources.

The Financial Times is probably ahead of the rest in only working with accredited official resources but it would be good to be assured that material from (say) a US Treasury official had been endorsed by MI6 (without names of operatives) so that we can decide whether to trust both - and punish them with our distrust when they tell us a lie or half-truth to get a message out to some foreign ministry official on the other side of the world.

The point is not to accuse the media of bad journalism but only to ask them for better or more critical journalism. With luck and a fair wind, the NIE on Iran may help to trigger a new era in which we see less cack-handed manipulation from the security services and more critical questioning of sources by the media.

If, alongside improved State and legislative scrutiny of the security and intelligence community and a radical reduction in over-simplified propaganda, we see a growth in trust for the authorities, then, perhaps, we can have adult and intelligent political discussion of appropriate policies in dangerous situations.

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