US claims on North Korea prompted nuclear race

The United States appears to have made a major intelligence blunder over North Korea's nuclear weapons program, one that may have exacerbated tensions with Pyongyang over the past four years and goaded Kim Jong-Il into pressing ahead with last October's live nuclear test, intelligence and Bush administration officials have said. The blunder does not concern the plutonium-based bomb technology that North Korea used in its test and has clearly been developing for decades. Rather it concerns the assessment, in a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report to Congress in November 2002, that North Korea was also pursuing a parallel uranium enrichment program capable of providing the raw material for two or more nuclear weapons a year, starting "mid-decade." That prompted the US to cut off oil supplies to Pyongyang, to which North Korea responded by throwing out international weapons inspectors and ratcheting up its plutonium bomb program. But now many intelligence officials doubt whether the North Koreans have a viable uranium enrichment program, and administration officials have begun wondering if they could not have handled the North Korean crisis much more wisely if they had been in less of a hurry to become confrontational. On Feb. 27, a veteran intelligence official called Joseph DeTrani told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that the government's certainty about the program's existence was only at "the mid-confidence level." Under the intelligence agencies' own definitions, that level "means the information is interpreted in various ways, we have alternative views" or it is not fully corroborated. John E. McLaughlin, a former director of central intelligence and the deputy CIA director in 2002, defended the initial North Korean findings as accurate. "At the time we reported this, we had confidence that they were acquiring materials that could give them the capability to do this down the road," he said in an interview. But no one, he added, "said they had anything up and running. We also made clear that we did not have a confident understanding of how far along they were." On Feb. 28, the Director of National Intelligence declassified a report on North Korea which stated: "The degree of progress towards producing enriched uranium remains unknown." In other words, while the agencies were certain of the initial purchases, confidence in the program's overall existence appears to have dropped over the years–apparently from high to moderate. It is unclear why the new assessment is being disclosed now. But some officials suggested that the timing could be linked to North Korea's recent agreement to reopen its doors to international arms inspectors. As a result, these officials have said, the intelligence agencies are facing the possibility that their assessments will once again be compared to what is actually found on the ground. "This may be preventative," one US diplomat said. Non-government weapons experts including David Kay and David Albright–both veterans of the Iraq intelligence fiasco–see such statements as the beginning of a full retraction and an admission that the CIA and other agencies jumped to conclusions based on insufficient evidence. "The evidence doesn't support the extrapolation," Albright, now president of the private Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, told The New York Times. "The extrapolation went too far." The extrapolation was based, principally, on seemingly solid evidence that North Korea obtained about 20 centrifuges for the production of enriched uranium from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the "father" of Pakistan's atom bomb, in 2000. When it transpired that North Korea was also buying aluminum tubes–not unlike the aluminum tubes so widely mentioned in connection with Iraq's (non-existent) nuclear program–the CIA and the Bush administration saw a "smoking gun" that convinced them the enriched uranium program was up and running. Albright said administration analysts were right in thinking that Dr. Khan had sold North Korea about 20 centrifuges. Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president, confirmed that in a memoir published last year. But, he said, intelligence agencies overstated whether North Korea had used those few machines as models to construct row upon row of carbon copies. Albright's report zeroed in on thousands of aluminum tubes that the North Koreans bought and tried to buy in the early 2000s. The CIA and the Bush administration, the report said, pointed to these tubes as the "smoking gun" for construction of a large-scale North Korean plant for the enriching of uranium. It was assessments about the purpose of aluminum tubes that were at the center of the flawed Iraq intelligence. In the North Korea case, intelligence analysts saw the tubes as ideal for centrifuges. But Albright said the relatively weak aluminum tubes were suitable only for stationary outer casings–not central rotors, which have to be very strong to keep from flying apart while spinning at tremendous speeds. Moreover, he added, the aluminum tubes were "very easy to get and not controlled" by global export authorities because of their potentially harmless nature. So that purchase, by itself, Albright added, was "not an indicator" of clandestine use for nuclear arms. Albright said he has seen no compelling evidence that North Koreans obtained enough equipment to begin large-scale uranium enrichment, and that there are alternative scenarios for what happened in 2001 with the unraveling of Khan's network, which sought to aid the nuclear ambitions of nations like North Korea. "The simplest one is that they (the North Koreans) couldn't make it. They gave up. Khan got caught. And all the suppliers were vigilant about what North Korea was up to," Albright said, adding that another scenario is that the North bought the tubes for Pakistan rather than itself. The US intelligence assertions are about to be put to the test. Under a deal signed last month in Beijing, North Korea must list within 60 days all of its nuclear programs, including any effort to enrich uranium, in exchange for energy and financial aid and security guarantees. Whether North Korea comes clean to the Bush administration's satisfaction may determine whether the new disarmament deal comes apart or goes ahead with Pyongyang taking steps toward abolishing its nuclear programs.