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According to David Sanger in the NYT, some folks in the Administration are thinking very carefully about the intelligence problem in interdiction:

Pentagon officials are clearly not eager to confront the Kang Nam 1. The intelligence about what is on board is typically murky. Some say they suspect small arms, which are banned by the United Nations resolution but hardly a major threat. Members of Mr. Obama’s team who served in the Clinton administration remember past embarrassments, including the interception of a Chinese ship suspected of carrying chemical precursors in the early 1990s. When the ship was finally cornered, the cargo turned out to be benign.

That’s the Yinhe incident, for those of you keeping score at home.

X-posted from TW.

Comment [4]

I’d bet on it. But a recent statement by the ODNI is raising all sorts of eyebrows:

The U.S. Intelligence Community assesses that North Korea probably conducted an underground nuclear explosion in the vicinity of P’unggye on May 25, 2009. The explosion yield was approximately a few kilotons. Analysis of the event continues. [emphasis added]

The statement does not explain the use of the hedge-word “probably,” but we can make an educated guess about it.

First, it is an established practice of the National Intelligence Council to use words like “probably” or “likely” to convey degrees of certainty about analytic judgments. See, for example, the fifth page of this memorable release from December 2007. Nothing’s ever completely certain.

Second, none of the usual telltale radionuclides were detected after the test, according to this and this. Although this phenomenon is not unheard of, it does at least admit the possibility that the seismic event actually involved a heapin’ helpin’ of conventional explosives, rather than a nuclear explosive.

But merely because it’s possible doesn’t make it plausible. This scenario was discussed at a recent scientific convention on CTBT verification in Vienna and basically dismissed.

One thing is (virtually) certain. If North Korea had been trucking 2,000 tons of TNT up a mountain and packing it into a deep hole, everyone would have noticed.

Comment [13]

That’s the “does not equal” sign up there.

I overlooked something important earlier when discussing what the U.S. government knew about North Korea’s nuclear test preparations and when they knew it:

There are two possibilities. Either A) the Obama Administration saw some advantage to keeping mum, and turns out to be awfully good at keeping mum, or B) someone missed something they should not have missed.

There is an option C) as well: the intel collectors saw all the signs, but the higher-ups failed to draw the proper conclusions.

There was a scattering of leaks in the days ahead of the test, possibly from South Korean intelligence. And afterward, we learned that the IC was watching the preparations intently:

The official said that U.S. intelligence agencies monitoring the test facility had witnessed significant activity in the days before the explosion. The United States had positioned an array of high-tech equipment to monitor the test, including Pentagon aircraft equipped to collect atmospheric samples of any nuclear plume.

I believe it. But the Administration took none of the public steps one would expect to happen in advance of a test, not so much to deter the North Koreans as to build international support for a response after the fact. That led some observers to conclude that the timing of the test came as a surprise. Marcus Noland, for example:

“As much as they understood this was going to be an issue, they weren’t ready for a nuclear test in May,” Marcus Noland, an expert on North Korea at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said of Mr. Obama and his advisers. “They’re in a situation now where they have to contain and manage a crisis.”

As noted previously, there appears to have been a firm and widely held conviction that North Korea would not test again until it had more plutonium in hand. Potential indications of an imminent test may have been discounted on that basis.

One possible result: the U.S. apparently did not inform anyone in Japan that a test was imminent. Whoops.

For just a moment, let’s turn this blog over to the learned Prof. Richard Betts, ca. 1982:

The principal cause of surprise is not the failure of intelligence but the unwillingness of political leaders to believe intelligence or to react to it with sufficient dispatch.

You see, it pays to be mindful of the classics.

X-posted from TW.

Comment [5]

[Cross-posted from TotalWonkerr.com. Yep, it’s back up.]

What should we expect from North Korea?

A good place to start might be the Foreign Ministry statement of April 29:

In case the UNSC does not make an immediate apology [for the presidential statement condemning the launch of the Unha-2], such actions will be taken as:

Firstly, the DPRK will be compelled to take additional self-defensive measures in order to defend its supreme interests.

The measures will include nuclear tests and test-firings of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Secondly, the DPRK will make a decision to build a light water reactor power plant and start the technological development for ensuring self-production of nuclear fuel as its first process without delay.

Emphasis added.

We are now at one nuclear test and counting.

(Why) Did It Come as a Surprise?

In light of the foregoing statement, today’s test cannot have come as a surprise to anyone. But people who follow this subject intently were taken aback by how soon it happened. One would assume that the preparations were in motion even before April 29, yet we saw nothing in the papers about it. That’s awfully interesting, since the last time a nuclear test was announced to the world as a fait accompli — I’m relying on memory here, so please correct me if I’m wrong — was the first of India’s two rounds of testing in 1998, widely considered in the United States to have been an intelligence failure.

There are two possibilities. Either A) the Obama Administration saw some advantage to keeping mum, and turns out to be awfully good at keeping mum, or B) someone missed something they should not have missed. If it’s the latter, the results may be no more than mildly embarrassing, but it’s still a little disconcerting.

Update: Chosun Ilbo reports that the U.S. and South Korea were keeping a weather eye on the test site. But it’s not clear that they had good indications on timing.

Further update: Thanks to the contributions of readers here and here, it’s clear that Option A, above, is the correct answer. There were a few leaks, but nothing that the community of wonks picked up on the time. Perhaps Option B applies to us. We’ll have to do better, next time.

I had not seen it widely discussed, but would venture that the tacit consensus, expressed earlier by Sig Hecker, was that North Korea was unlikely to test again before completing a reprocessing campaign. Perhaps not, after all.

Now might be a good time to revisit what North Korea is doing on ICBMs and the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle.

Comment [12]

Of the many reasons I have a soft spot for the intelligence community, one is this: imagine how hard it is to produce a document that is both precise and readable.

That’s the same challenge I face on the blog, but the IC can’t include gratuituous jokes of a certain kind just to liven things up. (It also helps that you, dear readership, tend to be a couple of standard deviations above the mean when it comes to technical facility.)

I was amused by a chart that our intern — the talented Alex Kahan, who New America shares with Brookings — found in an old China DIE (PRC Strategic Forces: How Much is Enough? DIE FE 7-74, 3 December 1974 . Thanks to Bill Burr, who actually provided us with the copy.)

Look familiar? Here is a chart from the 2007 NIE, Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities

It is fascinating to see that earlier generations faced the same challenges and how little the basic structure of the language has changed. You could use the 1974 chart to decipher the 2007 NIE without too much confusion.

The one change, of course, has been the post-politicization effort to make analysts express confidence levels, which I don’t think are independent of the estimative language.

What does it mean, for example, to have “low confidence that Iran probably has imported at least some weapons-usable fissile material …” How can evidence in which you have little confidence or no confidence, that lead you to conclude that something is not merely plausible, but probable?

Maybe its just my pet peeve, but such language seems mostly to serve as a permission slip for the Doug Feith’s of the world to disregard the estimate.

Comment [10]

I meant to add that Richard Clarke’s most recent book, Your Government Failed You has a fantastic account about tracking Russian nuclear weapons deployments.

The story, which involves the great Dennis Gormley, centers on Soviet units called “Mobile Technical Rocket Bases” (PTRB in the Russian acronym) that would ferry nuclear warheads to mobile missile units in the field:

The Soviets claimed to have no nuclear warheads in Germany and derided America for having put several thousand atomic warheads on German soil. Nonetheless, U.S. photography revealed that the Soviets had built well-guarded nuclear weapons bunkers in Germany. If a war started, we planned to destroy the bunkers quickly. My friend Dennis Gormley reminded me recently of what had happened in the late 1980s when he was running a small consulting firm. A young Russian soldier swam across the Oder River and defected. His captain, he said, had driven over the motorbike for which he had saved for years. It was more than the youth could take. So he defected and was quickly debriefed by U.S. intelligence and found to know nothing of value. The report on him said little but noted that he had worked in some sort of transportation unit called a PRTB.

Gormley had just explained to me his own work on trying to find PRTBs, the Russian acronym for Mobile Technical Rocket Base. Gormley believed that PRTBs actually placed the nuclear warheads on top of the Soviets’ mobile missiles in Europe. The warheads were stored separately to prevent some renegade officer from starting a nuclear war. In the event of an authorized war, the missiles would meet up with the warheads in predesignated clearings in the German woods. Along would come the PRTB and mate the warhead to the missiles. I told Gormley about the defector, and with Dennis’s help, the defector was debriefed again. His explanation of what a PRTB did was exactly what Gormley had guessed. And he was happy to locate his PRTB for us. He also noted that, of course, the nuclear warheads were not in the nuclear warhead storage areas. The storage sites were empty. They were just there for the Americans to bomb and think they had destroyed the threat. The real storage areas were hidden.

Years later after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Professor Gormley went to the East German site where the defector said the weapons had been. He found an abandoned base with “Keep Out” signs noting a radiation hazard. Police chased him away.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the Chinese have the same procedure. At least one article on the Xinhua site, as Li Bin argues in Science and Gobal Security, described an exercise with a mobile ballistic missiles that was very similar. Here is Li’s description:

Another article on Xinhua News Agency’s website describes details of an exercise of patrol and retaliation of the Chinese strategic nuclear force. According to this article, the surviving missile TELs began their patrol after absorbing nuclear attacks; the missiles carried nuclear warheads and the warheads were put on the missiles on the fifth day in bad weather after the patrol began; the missile was simulated to be launched on the eighth day.

Conversations about a recent news report in the Dutch paper De Telegraaf — that Netherlands has recalled a spy/saboteur from Iran’s nuclear program in fear of an impending attack — are filling my inbox.

Here is the crucial bit of the story:

AMSTERDAM – De Nederlandse inlichtingendienst AIVD heeft de afgelopen jaren een ultrageheime operatie laten uitvoeren in Iran met als doel infiltratie en sabotage van de wapenindustrie in de islamitische republiek.

[znippe]

Een van de betrokken agenten, die onder supervisie van de AIVD wist te infiltreren in de Iraanse industrie, is recent teruggeroepen omdat in de VS de beslissing zou zijn genomen binnen enkele weken met onbemande vliegtuigen Iran aan te vallen. Tot de potentiële doelwitten behoren naar verluidt niet alleen nucleaire fabrieken, maar ook militaire installaties die mede door toedoen van de AIVD in kaart zijn gebracht. Informatie uit de AIVD-operatie is de afgelopen jaren gedeeld met de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst CIA, aldus bronnen.

Ook konden diverse leveranties worden gesaboteerd en tegengehouden. Het ging om onderdelen voor raketten en lanceerinstallaties.

The basic details are that a Dutch agent infiltrated the Iranian “industry” — apparently in the missile and space launch sector. The activities of this individual extend from sabotage to reconnaissance. The Dutch believe that a decision will be made in the next few weeks about an airstrike (with UAVs?). Fearing that an airstrike using intelligence obtained from this individual would compromise his/her safety, the Dutch have recalled the agent.

Fars has a translation.

I don’t think an airstrike is imminent, but the rest of the story seems plausible. Whattya think?

Comment [28]

People often ask me why, as a philosophy major, I ended up in this particular field. I was an epistemologist — someone who studied knowledge and justified belief. The art of intelligence is, in that way, a massive exercise in practical epistemology.

Today, Erroll Morris — a wonderful film-maker who shares my epistemological predilections — continues his wonderful discussion begun last month of the doctored Shahab-3 images, including a brief commentary on Colin Powell’s execrable UN presentation:

ERROL MORRIS: No. Not that I’m aware of. But doctored photographs are the least of our worries. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.

[The photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003 provide several examples. Photographs that were used to justify a war. And yet, the actual photographs are low-res, muddy aerial surveillance photographs of buildings and vehicles on the ground in Iraq. I’m not an aerial intelligence expert. I could be looking at anything. It is the labels, the captions, and the surrounding text that turn the images from one thing into another.⁶

Photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003.Photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003. (U.S. Department of State)

Powell was arguing that the Iraqis were doing something wrong, knew they were doing something wrong, and were trying to cover their tracks. Later, it was revealed that the captions were wrong. There was no evidence of chemical weapons and no evidence of concealment.

Morris’s mockery of the sweeping interpretations made in Powell’s photographs.Reinterpretation of photographs presented by Colin Powell, by Daniel Mooney.

There is a larger point. I don’t know what these buildings were really used for. I don’t know whether they were used for chemical weapons at one time, and then transformed into something relatively innocuous, in order to hide the reality of what was going on from weapons inspectors. But I do know that the yellow captions influence how we see the pictures. “Chemical Munitions Bunker” is different from “Empty Warehouse” which is different from “International House of Pancakes.” The image remains the same but we see it differently.⁷

Change the yellow labels, change the caption and you change the meaning of the photographs. You don’t need Photoshop. That’s the disturbing part. Captions do the heavy lifting as far as deception is concerned. The pictures merely provide the window-dressing. The unending series of errors engendered by falsely captioned photographs are rarely remarked on. – E.M.]

⁶ The Times a year later ruefully admitted that the “intelligence” was in error. “According to the interviews conducted by The New York Times, the administration’s argument that Iraq was producing biological weapons was based almost entirely on human intelligence of unknown reliability. When mobile trailers were found by American troops, the White House and C.I.A. rushed out a white paper reporting that the vehicles were used to make biological agents. But later, an overwhelming majority of intelligence analysts concluded the vehicles were used to manufacture hydrogen for weather balloons or possibly to produce rocket fuel…” Powell’s Case, a Year Later: Gaps in Picture of Iraq Arms, by Douglas Jehl and David E. Sanger, The New York Times, Feb. 1, 2004.

⁷ Powell’s words before the United Nations provide little justification beyond various appeals to authority:

“Let me say a word about satellite images before I show a couple. The photos that I am about to show you are sometimes hard for the average person to interpret, hard for me. The painstaking work of photo analysis takes experts with years and years of experience, poring for hours and hours over light tables. But as I show you these images, I will try to capture and explain what they mean, what they indicate, to our imagery specialists. Let’s look at one. This one is about a weapons munitions facility, a facility that holds ammunition at a place called Taji. This is one of about 65 such facilities in Iraq. We know that this one has housed chemical munitions. In fact, this is where the Iraqis recently came up with the additional four chemical weapons shells… Let me give you a closer look. Look at the image on the left. On the left is a close-up of one of the four chemical bunkers. The two arrows indicate the presence of sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions. The arrow at the top that says ’security’ points to a facility that is a signature item for this kind of bunker. Inside that facility are special guards and special equipment to monitor any leakage that might come out of the bunker. The truck you also see is a signature item. It’s a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong. This is characteristic of those four bunkers. The special security facility and the decontamination vehicle will be in the area, if not at any one of them or one of the other, it is moving around those four and it moves as needed to move as people are working in the different bunkers.”

Comment [10]

Golly, I had no idea that Qatar Airlines has an entire premium Terminal for First and Business class patrons. Wow.

The other day a reader, Tom, asked about rumors that one of Pakistan’s nuclear tests in 1998 involved North Korean supplied plutonium:

Weren’t there credible allegations that at least one of Pakistan’s May 1998 nuclear tests involved a Plutonium based weapon which used (allegedly) North Korean supplied Plutonium?

There doesn’t seem to have been much revisiting of the issue lately that I can find.

Does anyone have anything that can elaborate on or discredit those allegations?

As far as I can tell, like a lot of things in life, it is complicated. I don’t buy it, though obviously it is worth verifying in the Six Party process or maybe wringing out of AQ Khan.

Pakistan claims to have tested six nuclear devices in 1998 — five on May 28 and one on May 30, all using highly enriched uranium.

About a year later — in January 1999, Dana Priest published an article in the Washington Post about a dispute between Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. (“U.S. Labs at Odds on Whether Pakistani Blast Used Plutonium,” January 17, 1999, A2, full text).

Priest claimed that:

• A US aircraft — presumably a WC-135 — collected an air sample that contained plutonium shortly after Pakistan’s May 30 test.

• Los Alamos National Laboratory conducted the preliminary analysis and concluded that Pakistan had tested a device involving plutonium. Given that Pakistan did not have a plutonium production capability in May 1998, North Korea was an obvious suspect.

• Analysts at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory disagreed with the Los Alamos conclusion, “alleging that Los Alamos contaminated and then lost the air sample from the
  Pakistan blast.” One official confessed to Priest (sorry, couldn’t help it) “there is some disagreement here, and experts at the labs need to sort it out.”

• A second sample existed. Officials disputed whether it was “identical” — whatever that means — but the bottom line, according to Priest, was “scientists believe it will be possible to positively determine whether the initial analysis was faulty.”

This all leaked because it was included in a briefing materials prepared for President Clinton’s December 1998 meeting with then-Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in Washington.

About a year after that — presumably enough time for the second sample to be examined — Mark Hibbs (subscription only; full text) reported that the source of the plutonium in the air sample was from one of the Indian tests.

But on Feb. 3 U.S. officials close to the matter confirmed instead information from other sources suggesting that, when analysts at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the National Nonproliferation Center of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) obtained the raw data collected in Pakistan, a battle broke out among experts on how to evaluate it. Since then, sources said, the report that Pakistan used plutonium in its devices has been discredited.

Sources said it is currently believed that the plutonium found in the environmental samples in Pakistan was instead of Indian origin, and that comparative isotopic analysis suggests the plutonium was vented to the atmosphere by the explosions at Pokaran carried out two weeks before. One official said that meteorological data corroborated the hypothesis that small amounts of plutonium which were dispersed by an Indian blast out of the test shaft were transported by air currents to the area surrounding the Pakistan test site, which is located about 500 miles northwest of Pokaran.

(Vented Indian Plutonium Deemed Source of Reports Pakistan Tested Pu Weapons, Nuclear Fuel, February 7, 2000.)

I figured that pretty much settled the matter. Apparently, folks at LANL didn’t agree. So, when A.Q. Khan copped to assisting North Korea in 2004, someone called the New York Times.

David Sanger and Bill Broad reported in February 2004 “the old argument has been reignited in the United States’ national laboratories” (” Pakistan May Have Aided North Korea A-Test,” February 27, 2004).

In a clash between old rivals, the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory raised questions, claiming Los Alamos had erred, experts familiar with the dispute said. The problem was inadvertent contamination of the sample by American researchers, Livermore experts said. Eventually, a consensus emerged that the plutonium did come from Pakistan.

In April 2004, Sanger would repeat the claim in another story about Khan (“Pakistani Says He Saw North Korean Nuclear Devices,” April 13, 2004).

The problem, of course, is that the claim given to Hibbs was not contamination by American researchers (though Priest raised that possibility) but debris that vented from the Indian test.

As far as I can tell we have two assertions that are at odds — Hibbs reports a consensus that the plutonium was from India; Sanger and Broad report a consensus that the plutonium was from Pakistan.

I suppose we don’t know who is right — Los Alamos or Livermore, Sanger and Broad or Hibbs.

But perhaps the North Korean declaration will shed some light on the issue. And, of course, if any of my readers with appropriate zip codes feel chatty, you know how to reach me.

Comment [11]

From a reader.

Update: Since the full text is now online at the DNI website, I have moved the full text to the comments.

Comment [33]