Backlash shows limits to intelligence reform.

[maddezmom]

Iran report, meant to restore U.S. credibility, was picked apart


By GREG MILLER
Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON — As head of analysis for all U.S. spy agencies, Thomas Fingar was making final edits last summer on a long-awaited intelligence report on Iran.

The draft concluded that Tehran was still pursuing a nuclear bomb, a finding that echoed previous assessments and would have bolstered Bush administration hawks. Then, just weeks before the report was to be delivered to the White House, new intelligence surfaced indicating Tehran's nuclear weapons work had stopped.

Fingar was acutely aware of the stakes. Five years earlier, grave errors helped start a war in Iraq that most Americans now regret. "This was a WMD (weapons of mass destruction) issue in the country adjacent to Iraq," Fingar said of the Iran intelligence. "We wanted to get this right."

But Fingar would learn that getting it right did not mean he could avert the conflict between politics and intelligence in the nation's capital, and his Iran report only underscored the limitations of urgent efforts to reform the U.S. spy system.

In several interviews, Fingar offered new insight into the last-minute reversal of the Iran intelligence estimate, and the controversy that has continued to reverberate.

more:http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/5786868.html