The agencies’ caginess continued into last month. A congressional official privy to a secret briefing in November said that the assessment that Iran shut down its weapons program four years ago was obscure, compared with the way it ultimately appeared in the NIE. At a Nov. 15 White House briefing, analysts laid out the new intelligence in detail for senior officials including national-security adviser Stephen Hadley and a highly skeptical Vice President Dick Cheney. Even then, the official said, analysts did not fully outline what they thought the new information meant. A final verdict did not come until Nov. 27; President Bush was briefed the next day. Republicans on congressional intelligence committees are now vowing to do their own examination of the NIE’s underlying intelligence, while conservative hard-liners, such as former U.N. envoy John Bolton, are worried that the U.S. agencies had been snookered by Iranian disinformation. Not so, said a senior intelligence official. “We stand by our analysis and tradecraft.”
