Top Spies Toughen Their Thinking About Iran's Secret Nuclear Ambitions, Newsweek

The country's top spy has begun to acknowledge publicly that U.S. intelligence agencies are changing their beliefs about Iran's secret efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

The country's top spy has begun to acknowledge publicly that U.S. intelligence agencies are changing their beliefs about Iran's secret efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

In an annual worldwide "threat assessment" presented Tuesday to the Senate Intelligence Committee, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair said that Iran is "keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons." Blair told the committee that since 2007, Iran has more than doubled the number of centrifuges in its main uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz. The country has also stockpiled around 1,800 kilograms of low-enriched uranium, an essential precursor for making bomb-grade fissile material. In his testimony, Blair elaborated on last year's revelation that Iran has been building a secret underground uranium-enrichment plant near the holy city of Qom. The plant, Blair noted, is "too small to produce regular fuel reloads for civilian nuclear power plants, but is large enough for weapons purposes...."

There is a striking difference between Blair's testimony this week and testimony he gave to the same committee just a year ago. In his Feb. 12, 2009, presentation to the senators, he did not mention the centrifuges or the underground Qom facility (then unknown to the public). He said only that Iran was continuing its efforts "to develop uranium-enrichment technology" that could be used for both peaceful and military applications. Last year, he pointed up possible peaceful aims of the Iranian nukes program, saying that Tehran had been pursuing "research and development projects with commercial and conventional military applications, some of which would be of limited use for nuclear weapons."

Last year, Blair was still touting the intel community's controversial National Intelligence Estimate from 2007, which concluded that Tehran had "halted its nuclear weapons design and weaponization activities" in 2003. European and Israeli intelligence agencies have long disputed this claim, believing that Iran has been secretly pursuing nuclear weapons all along. Even so, the U.S. intelligence community has stuck by this analysis.

Until now. In his latest presentation to the Senate, Blair conspicuously avoided mentioning the 2007 report's assertion that Iran's nuclear ambitions are on hold.

Blair did not concede any error on the part of the intel community. Instead, he steered the senators to another part of the 2007 report, telling the committee that Iran's technical and industrial progress "lead us to reaffirm our judgment from the 2007 NIE that Iran is technically capable of producing enough [highly-enriched uranium] for a weapon in the next few years, if it chooses to do so. "To reinforce this point, Blair continued, "We continue to assess Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons by developing various nuclear capabilities that bring it closer to being able to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons."

The new, tougher stance on Iran to appear in a forthcoming update to the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that the intel agencies are writing now. But you won't get to read it any time soon. The Obama administration will almost certainly keep the report classified.