In March of this year, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said that the intelligence community "continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003."

Speaking only days ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel had no choice but to attack Iran, because the Iranian nuclear weapons program had advanced to the stage where Tehran was on the brink of fielding operational nuclear weapons.

“If we don’t attack, then it’s 100% that we will die,” Netanyahu said in a video statement. “We decided we couldn’t wait anymore. We are at midnight.” Netanyahu added that he had given the order to destroy Iran’s nuclear program in November 2024 based on the intelligence Israel had in its possession at that time. The attack was originally scheduled for April 2025 but was delayed for unspecified reasons.

Somebody is wrong. If the Iranians are in fact on the brink of having operational nuclear weapons, then essentially everything DCI Gabbard said in March was wrong, and the entire American Intelligence Community missed the mark widely on Iran’s nuclear weapons work. If Gabbard is right, then the Israelis are either lost in a labyrinth of lies or they are deliberately misleading us and the world.

Unfortunately, I am betting the Israelis have it right, and it is our intelligence that is lacking.

The latest information in the press suggests that Iran recently conducted successful experiments that left it at most weeks away from being able to produce functioning nuclear weapons. When this information was presented to Israeli political leaders, they were also informed that things had now reached the stage where it would be impossible to track future developments precisely. In short, if Israel did not act, it might well find that it was too late, and Iran had already gone nuclear.

According to the intelligence provided to Netanyahu and his cabinet, Iran’s nuclear weapons efforts went into overdrive in late 2023. Those efforts were divided among separate secure teams. This work proceeded in parallel to uranium enrichment efforts with the goal of having a device ready when sufficient HEU had been produced.

This approach mirrors that seen in all other nuclear weapons programs. No one waits until they have the HEU in hand to begin building the bomb into which the HEU will be placed. When China went nuclear, it took them a total of 72 hours from the time the HEU was available in its final form until they had an assembled device. According to an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report at the end of May, Iran’s stockpile of uranium, if enriched further, was enough to build nine nuclear weapons.

This critical intelligence led Israel to conclude that time had run out. They had to act, and they had to destroy not only nuclear sites but also attempt to eliminate the body of knowledge Iran had amassed after years of research and testing. A senior Israeli military official said Saturday that “all the scientists eliminated in the opening strikes had, over the years, been involved in developing the nuclear detonation device.”

At least nine such scientists are now believed to have been killed by Israel in the strikes ordered by Netanyahu. According to the Times of Israel, they are: “Fereydoon Abbasi, expert in nuclear engineering; Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, expert in physics; Akbar Motalebi Zadeh, expert in chemical engineering; Saeed Barji, expert in materials engineering; Amir Hassan Fakhahi, expert in physics; Abd al-Hamid Minoushehr, expert in reactor physics; Mansour Asgari, expert in physics; Ahmad Reza Zolfaghari Daryani, expert in nuclear engineering; and Ali Bakhouei Katirimi, expert in mechanics.”

“All the scientists and experts who were eliminated were significant sources of knowledge in the Iranian nuclear project, and had decades of cumulative experience in the development of nuclear weapons,” the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement.

American intelligence gets tasked to collect on a wide range of topics. When I was operating in the field, we were deluged with requirements, and we could never service all of them. Not all requirements are equal, however, and they are, in fact, formally designated with grades that tell you which are priorities and deserve immediate and sustained attention.

Suffice it to say that right up at the top of the list of requirements for anybody operating anywhere near Iran would be the Iranian nuclear weapons program. This is the kind of target against which the CIA, for example, should be making a maximum effort all day, every day. It has been the position of the United States for decades that we will not accept a nuclear-armed Iran.

It is staggering then to think that we could be so blind, so devoid of sources of intelligence inside Iran, that we would be telling the DCI, and the President, that there was no Iranian nuclear weapons program, even as the Israelis were tracking the precise status of that program, identifying by name all of the key people building the bomb and ascertaining their precise whereabouts so they could be eliminated by strikes on their personal residences and places of work.

The world is a dangerous place. The Iranian nuclear weapons program is a threat. There are many, many more. Chinese scientists are smuggling dangerous biological organisms into the United States. Al Qaida has reconstituted itself in Afghanistan and is as dangerous as ever. ISIS is resurgent. Pakistan and India are staggering along on the brink of war. There are Iranian hit teams still inside the United States working day and night to kill President Trump and key members of his first administration. China may invade Taiwan tomorrow. The war in Ukraine may yet spark World War III.

It would be a really good thing to have an Intelligence Community that was capable of providing the necessary clarity on these threats to help keep us all alive. If we don’t have such an Intelligence Community right now, we better figure out why in a hurry and start making the necessary changes on a crash basis before we run out of time.

Somebody was very, very wrong about the status of the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Unfortunately, I am betting it was us.

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