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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]

Robin Wright at the Washington Post and David Sanger at the New York Times are reporting that CIA Director Michael Hayden and other intelligence officials will brief the House and Senate Intelligence, Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees on the Box-on-the-Eurphrates.

The centerpiece of the briefing is a video [presentation showing two still photographs of] a reactor core inside similar to the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon.

Well, finally, some evidence.

• David Sanger reports that it contains “what appears to be the construction of a reactor vessel inside the building that Israel later destroyed.”

• Robin Wright reports that “shows that the Syrian reactor core’s design is the same as that of the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon, including a virtually identical configuration and number of holes for fuel rods.”

Above are two images of the top of the Yongbyon reactor core (both from the IAEA, the color one via ISIS). I can imagine that a [picture] showing that would cause some consternation. If the Administration makes the Syria video public, we can do a little comparison.

Assuming the provenance, interpretation and timing are all square, I would think the presumption now shifts to “it was a reactor” — which is not to say that hitting it was a sensible foreign policy decision or that the Six Party process should stall.

Martha Raddatz gets credit, in retrospect, for her story saying that Israel had photographs. I was skeptical and some of the details were certainly wrong in retrospect, but the main point seems more solid today.

I confess I am a little surprised. An agent inside with a video camera is a littler more 24 or Alias than typical clandestine operations. I am not sure how or why the Syrians let a video camera into the facility in the first place.

***

There are still tons of unanswered questions, but I suspect folks will ask those in the Congressional briefings:

• Who took the [pictures], when and why? How did the Israelis get a copy?

• Where are the fuel fabrication and reprocessing facilities? I would be surprised if Syria would be willing to depend on foreign fuel and, even more, on foreign reprocessing services.

• Why weren’t Administration officials willing to call it a reactor, even off-the-record?

Update: As you can see from the changes to the post (clearly marked, of course), apparently what we have are two still photographs inside the BOE.

Comment [66]

I was on a panel today at a CNS lunch to discuss Hugh Gusterson’s article in The Nonproliferation Review, entitled Paranoid Potbellied Stalinist Gets Nuclear Weapons: How the U.S. Print Media Cover North Korea.

As you might imagine, Hugh is pretty tough on the media, particularly the New York Times and Washington Post, for relying on “stereotypes, assumptions, and narrative frames” that “depict Korea in a metaphorical funhouse mirror.”

On the panel, along with Jon Wolfsthal and my own bloggin’ self, were David Sanger, Glenn Kessler and Jonathan Landay.

At times it was, um, tense. (I will link to the audio when CNS posts it in a week or so.)

Although I am tend to agree with Hugh’s criticisms, I genuinely respect Glenn Kessler and David Sanger for appearing.

***

I won’t go into the blow-by-blow, but I do want to make one correction for the record. There was a discussion of when the media started to question seriously administration claims that North Korea about North Korea’s uranium enrichment program.

As I wrote a while back in The Incredible Shrinking HEU Program, the media started to questioned the claims in March 2007 after Joe DeTrani and Chris Hill testified that the intel on what we now call the UEP was sketchy.

Four reporters wrote stories critical of the HEU claims before that date:

• Mark Hibbs, writing in in Nuclear Fuel in October 2002, cited intelligence data to suggest that North Korea “may not have made needed technical breakthroughs in its secret uranium enrichment effort, and may even have reached a critical impasse leading Pyongyang to effectively terminate the program …”

• Barbara Slavin and John Diamond, writing in USA Today in November 2003, described CIA officials as being “not certain there even is” a uranium-enrichment plant.

• Paul Kerr, writing in October 2005 in Arms Control Today and here, reported that “the Bush administration has never presented any ‘credible evidence’ to relevant congressional staff that North Korea has ever sought to advance its enrichment efforts beyond a research and development program.”

During this period, the Times and the Post were asserting the debate was not if, but when, North Korea would enrich enough uranium for a bomb, as this in January 2004 story makes clear:

Although the Bush administration has been deeply divided over how to respond to the North Korean crisis, there is little disagreement inside the government over the intelligence indicating North Korea has been secretly building uranium enrichment capability in violation of the 1994 accord. The main question has been when the program would be fully functioning and capable of making fissile material, with the Energy Department and Defense Intelligence Agency estimating the end of this year and the CIA and State Department providing a more conservative forecast of 2006 or 2007.

Comment [13]

A week or so ago, the Washington Post printed a story by Joby Warrick and Colum Lynch about Olli Heinonen’s briefing to the IAEA Board of Governors on weaponization work in Iran. Warrick and Lynch, apparently, had the notes of diplomat who attended.

I asked “what else is in those notes?” Apparently, quite a lot about the “administrative interconnections” that keep me up at night. (Or is that the jet lag? Or Rusek picking up rounds at the Raven?)

Anywho, Warrick writes today about Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was first outed as Iran’s would-be AQ Khan by Warrick’s colleague Dafna Linzer in 2006 and sanctioned in 2007. (Although the sanctions list ain’t exactly science)

Warrick writes:

Iranian nuclear engineer Mohsen Fakhrizadeh lectures weekly on physics at Tehran’s Imam Hossein University. Yet for more than a decade, according to documents attracting interest among Western governments, he also ran secret programs aimed at acquiring sensitive nuclear technology for his government.

Experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have repeatedly invited Fakhrizadeh to tea and a chat about Iran’s nuclear work. But for two years, the government in Tehran has barred any contact with the scientist, who U.S. officials say recently moved to a new lab in a heavily guarded compound also off-limits to U.N. inspectors.

The exact nature of his research — past and present — remains a mystery, as does the work of other key Iranian scientists whose names appear in documents detailing what U.N. officials say is a years-long, clandestine effort to expand the country’s nuclear capability. The documents, which were provided to the IAEA, the U.N. nuclear agency, in recent months by two countries other than the United States, partly match information in a stolen Iranian laptop turned over by Washington.

IAEA officials say these documents identify Fakhrizadeh and other civilian scientists as central figures in a secret nuclear research program that operated as recently as 2003. So far, however, Iran is refusing to shed light on their work or allow U.N. officials to question them. After being presented with copies of some of the new documents, Tehran denied that some of the scientists exist.

[snip]

Fakhrizadeh is prominent in several of the documents, according to two officials who have seen them. A personnel chart listed him as the senior authority overseeing all the research projects. Another paper, purportedly signed by Fakhrizadeh, establishes spending guidelines for the research programs, while a third sets rules for communication among scientists, suggesting, for example, that researchers avoid putting their names on correspondence that might eventually become public, according to a Europe-based diplomat who viewed the documents.

Fakhrizadeh, 47, who became a Revolutionary Guard Corps member after the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979, is a former leader of the Physics Research Center, which U.N. officials say was heavily involved in drawing up plans and acquiring parts for Iran’s first uranium enrichment plant. He was among eight Iranians placed under international travel and financial restrictions under the terms of a U.N. resolution adopted last year because of his alleged ties to “nuclear or ballistic missile” research, U.N. records show.

This is a really good story. Warrick is particularly careful with the caveats.

This blog has spent a lot of time batting around the NIE’s definition of “weaponization” which seemed to hint that the clandestine program was defined by the administrative links:

… by “nuclear weapons program” we mean Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.

Replace “we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment” with “and all the other sketchy stuff Fakhrizadeh was up to.”

Housekeeping

Before I left for Singapore, a couple of other stories appeared on Heinonen’s talk:

• “That is what allowed Mr. Heinonen to make at least part of his presentation last Monday. He knew the most compelling aspect was the video of the work for designing a nuclear warhead to fit atop the Shahab 3, Iran’s most advanced missile. European capitals are within its range, which helps explain the new enthusiasm by France and Germany to lead the charge against Iran.”

Bill Broad and David Sanger, “Meeting on Arms Data Reignites Iran Debate,” New York Times, March 3, 2008. link

• “U.N. investigators want Iran to explain an organizational chart linking projects to process uranium, test explosives and modify a missile cone for a nuclear payload, diplomats briefed on the matter say.

“They said a top U.N. nuclear watchdog official last week gave a detailed presentation of intelligence alleging illicit atomic “weaponization studies” by Iran and naming the man who ran them for the Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics.

“In a written summary given to Reuters of the presentation, they said Iran had refused to let inspectors interview Mohsen Fakrizadeh or visit sites where the experiments took place.”

Mark Heinrich and Louis Charbonneau, “IAEA unveils allegations of Iranian arms work,” Reuters, March 2, 2008.

Comment [2]

DNI has posted 721 Reports from 2005 and 2006.

• January 1 – December 31, 2006: Unclassified Report to Congress on the Acquisition of Technology Relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction and Advanced Conventional Munitions

• January 1 – December 31, 2005: Unclassified Report to Congress on the Acquisition of Technology Relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction and Advanced Conventional Munitions

Apart from expanded sections on Iran that seem to draw from IAEA reports, I don’t see much new.

Maybe its the jet lag. (Seriously, I am sitting wide awake at 5 am in some Kimono-like thing listening to TLRx.)

Will try to read the DOD report on the Chinese Military Power en route to Singapore.

Comment [1]

© John Locker

AP’s Eileen Sullivan quotes government officials stating that a US spy satellite “has lost power and could hit the Earth in late February or early March…”

The satellite, which no longer can be controlled, could contain hazardous materials, and it is unknown where on the planet it might come down, they said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is classified as secret. It was not clear how long ago the satellite lost power, or under what circumstances.

Speculation among visual satellite observers centers on USA 193 — a US Radarsat that malfunctioned shortly after it was launched in December 2006. (Friend of Wonk Jonathan McDowell has a couple of choice quotes in the New York Times about USA 193.)

Reuters’ Andrea Shalal-Esa had a pretty decent story on USA 193 in March 2007:

The experimental L-21 classified satellite, built for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, was launched successfully on Dec. 14 but has been out of touch since reaching its low-earth orbit.

Limited data received from the satellite indicated that its on-board computer tried rebooting several times, but those efforts failed, said one official, who is knowledgeable about the program and spoke on condition of anonymity.

John Locker has been watching this sucker steadily lose altitude, posting images of the satellite like the one adorning this post. “193 has come down about 30 km in the last 3 months, so by spring we should be able to get even better resolution,” Locker noted in December 2007, “but it begs the question , will the operators let it continue to fall …”?

For more on NRO’s troubles, I recommend the links my posts FIA joins Misty on SpySat Budget Scaffold, FIA Autopsy and Sayonara, Misty, especially:

• Robert Kohler (One Officer’s Perspective: The Decline of the National Reconnaissance Office Studies in Intelligence 46:2, 2002) warns that “the NRO today is a shadow of its former self. Its once outstanding expertise in system engineering has drastically eroded.”

• Jeffrey Richelson (The Satellite Gap, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 59:1, January/February 2003 pp. 48-54) predicted a major gap that could develop in our all-weather radar imagery coverage if the FIA Radarsat was delayed, and

• Philip Taubman (In Death of Spy Satellite Program, Lofty Plans and Unrealistic Bids, New York Times, November 11, 2007) noted that the failure of USA 193 has delayed the FIA’s radar satellite.

The fact that USA 193 is coming down is not a surprise; but it reminds us of the real problems that have plagued NRO for too long now.

Comment [44]

So says the 1974 Special National Intelligence Assessment, “Prospects for further proliferation of nuclear weapons,” declassified the other day by the Bush administration. Avner Cohen and William Burr were able to get a portion of the document released in early 2006 under the Freedom of Information Act, but now the whole shebang is public.

I haven’t been able to find the text, but Haaretz has the best coverage so far of this breaking story.

Update: The document is available on the CIA’s FOIA page (thanks Allen!). It’s the fifth document down. I’ve also taken the liberty of converting the document to a .pdf file so it can be saved and downloaded.

Later Update, from Jeffrey As usual, the National Security Archive has been on top of the story since I was a child.

Comment [7]

McClatchy Newspapers’ Kevin G. Hall puts the final nail in the myth attributing “supernotes” — almost perfect counterfeit $100 bills — to North Korea.

In an article titled “U.S. counterfeiting charges against N. Korea based on shaky evidence,” Hall identifies and demolishes the central role played by defector testimony:

However, a 10-month McClatchy investigation on three continents has found that the evidence to support Bush’s charges against North Korea is uncertain at best and that the claims of the North Korean defectors cited in news accounts are dubious and perhaps bogus. One key law enforcement agency, the Swiss federal criminal police, has publicly questioned whether North Korea is even capable of producing “supernotes,” counterfeit $100 bills that are nearly perfect except for some practically invisible additions.

Many of the administration’s public allegations about North Korean counterfeiting trace to North Korea “experts” in South Korea who arranged interviews with North Korean defectors for U.S. and foreign newspapers. The resulting news reports were quoted by members of Congress, researchers and Bush administration officials who were seeking to pressure North Korea.

The defectors’ accounts, for example, were cited prominently in a lengthy July 23, 2006, New York Times magazine story that charged North Korea with producing the sophisticated supernotes.

The McClatchy investigation, however, found reason to question those sources. One major source for several stories, a self-described chemist named Kim Dong-shik, has gone into hiding, and a former roommate, Moon Kook-han, said Kim is a liar out for cash who knew so little about American currency that he didn’t know whose image is printed on the $100 bill. (It’s Benjamin Franklin.)

The Secret Service, the Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department all declined repeated requests for interviews for this story.

The story has a whole bunch of good stuff, including stories by Tim Johnson and government documents such as the 2004 indictment of Sean Garland, leader of an IRA-splinter group, for counterfeiting.

Comment [4]