Obama suppressed Iran nuclear intel to get deal, U.S. counterspy says

NEWS AND ANALYSIS:

The CIA suppressed secrets from inside Iran during the Obama administration showing efforts by Tehran to build a nuclear weapon were more advanced than suspected, according to a former National Security Agency counterintelligence official.

The intelligence, however, was blocked to avoid upsetting efforts by the administration and a group of world powers to reach the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka the nuclear deal with Iran, said John Schindler, the former NSA counterspy.

Mr. Schindler revealed in a report published this week that a pro-U.S. intelligence service more than a decade ago recruited a defector in place with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who had obtained startling secrets regarding the nuclear program.

At a conference of security and intelligence experts in central Europe 12 years ago, Mr. Schindler said he was passed a packet of documents from the IRGC mole.

The documents turned out to be a dossier of top-secret IRGC material that contained technical data on Iran’s centrifuge program, the key element of the nuclear program, he stated in the post in his newsletter, “Top Secret Umbra.” The nation that ran the mole was not identified other than specifying that it was not Israel, he said.

Israel reportedly relied on help from recruited agents within the IRGC for the recent assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

“The agent inside the IRGC was a true golden source, a senior officer who had access to nuclear secrets,” Mr. Schindler said. “He knew a great deal about the true status of Iran’s program to develop ‘the bomb.’”

The documents showed that Iran’s progress on building nuclear arms was further along than U.S. intelligence community assessments and more advanced than the Obama administration publicly asserted at the time, Mr. Schindler said.

The intelligence was unwelcome news for the administration, which was promoting the nuclear deal in Congress, with the public and among other nations.

The Trump administration pulled the U.S. out of the multilateral deal in 2018, citing concerns the agreement was only providing Tehran a pathway to obtain nuclear arms. Iran said at the time it was abiding by the deal’s restrictions on its nuclear programs.

Mr. Schindler said he told his contact “Great, just pass this package to my guys” in the U.S. intelligence community.

The friend became “ashen” and explained that his service had formally notified the Americans of the IRGC dossier but that the CIA seemed uninterested.

The intelligence official then met in person with the CIA station chief who he had known and explained that intelligence value of the documents. The official said the foreign spy service was willing to work with the CIA in sharing intelligence from its Iranian mole, including a possible meeting.

Instead, the CIA station chief “appeared wholly nonchalant and bluntly explained that he couldn’t take the dossier. Since the [chief of station] and M. knew each other, the CIA official explained in hush-hush fashion that he had orders ‘from higher up’ not to take possession of the IRGC’s nuclear secrets,” Mr. Schindler said, adding that the CIA official insisted he was “just following orders.”

Mr. Schindler said he then acted on his own and passed on the dossier, which found its way into U.S. intelligence channels. He was assured that senior analysts were studying its contents.

“In retrospect, I believe that the dossier was placed in a back room of a classified warehouse somewhere in Northern Virginia, if it wasn’t immediately burn-bagged,” he said. “That detailed IRGC dossier was the ’wrong narrative’ as far as the Obama administration was concerned. It might jeopardize their precious Iran Deal, thus it had to not exist. Therefore, it never existed. Until I went whistleblower right here,” he said.

A CIA spokesman said the agency “takes extremely seriously its commitment to remain apolitical and to provide US policymakers with impartial, fact-based intelligence and analysis.”

“That was the case during the negotiation of the JCPOA and remains the case today,” the spokesman said. “For decades and across administrations, CIA has been focused on Iran and its nuclear program, and has been and remains committed to pursuing critical information, regardless of the policy impact of that information.”

Spokesmen for the House and Senate intelligence committees did not respond to emails asking if the apparent politicization of intelligence has been or would be investigated.

Mr. Schindler said the handling of the Iranian nuclear intelligence was a serious breach of intelligence policy and “political influence on intelligence collection.

“’Don’t bring us intelligence we don’t want to see, at any level: that’s an order,’” is how he characterized the reaction. “As far as I know — as a spook but also historian who’s read (and authored) highly classified internal histories of CIA, NSA, and other U.S. intelligence agencies never seen by the public, I think I would know — no other White House has done this,” he said.

The 2015 Iran nuclear deal was the centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s pro-Iran policies. The accord was killed by the Trump administration over concerns its lack of verification and other provisions effectively provided Iran with a pathway to eventually building nuclear weapons.

The Biden administration sought unsuccessfully to revive the nuclear deal and enlisted the help of several people Mr. Schindler suggested were pro-Iranian officials working inside government. Iran’s recently elected new president has also said he wants to renew talks with Washington on a new nuclear deal.

Mr. Schindler noted that the Trump administration was also accused of politicizing intelligence.

“Only Obama did this,” he said. “Which makes Barack Obama a worse abuser of American intelligence than Donald Trump — or any other president. A dozen years ago I learned, to my horror, that the fix was in. The fix was always in.”

Former analyst decries CIA politicization 

Politicization of intelligence at the CIA reached new levels of activism under President Biden, according to an academic analysis of recent political influence within the agency.

John A. Gentry, a former CIA analyst who has written extensively on the topic, stated in a recent journal article that the problem accelerated during the Trump administration when current and former intelligence officials worked to undermine Mr. Trump and his presidency through leaks and public statements.

Mr. Gentry compared current politicization at the CIA to three past periods: the debate over the Vietnam War, the Reagan administration in the 1980s and the George W. Bush administration in 2003 and 2004.

“In summary, the recent wave was much larger, lasted longer, and differed qualitatively in important ways from earlier episodes,” Mr. Gentry wrote in the current issue of the journal Comparative Strategy. “The overt activism of the Trump years receded soon after President Biden, … but the re-engineered CIA culture remains untouched. It simply is now quiet. Indeed, Biden’s actions seem to have strengthened it appreciably.”

Political activism by current and former CIA employees has shocked many American intelligence officers and people generally, he said.

Overt, intelligence-rationalized partisanship was quietly opposed by many professional intelligence officers but applauded by others who regarded it as a needed counter to Mr. Trump and his policies, Mr. Gentry said.

Former President Barack Obama was blamed by the former CIA analyst for setting in motion the current politicization through personnel diversity policies that Mr. Gentry said favored race and gender considerations over merit. The CIA under John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also faced criticism for allegedly promoting political activism among spies and analysts.

Past politicization included “cooking the books” for intelligence analysis to alter policies, and politicians who twisted intelligence to influence policy.

The current activism involves a stronger version of the first type, with intelligence critics invoking their credentials to rationalize partisan policy advocacy, that Mr. Gentry says violates the traditional approach of apolitical intelligence.

“The Obama/Clapper/Brennan strategy of politicizing the [intelligence community], as part of the broader, publicly stated program to change the federal workforce and the country, successfully altered both the demography and the organizational culture of CIA in politically significant ways,” Mr. Gentry wrote. “In sharp contrast, all previous senior [intelligence] leaders sought to keep the agencies apolitical, meaning they strenuously opposed the kind of politicization that Obama and his subordinates promoted.”

President Biden then “re-energized and expanded Obama-era personnel polices throughout the federal government by issuing a series of aggressive executive orders to push an expanded ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ agenda,” he said.

Mr. Gentry said the era when an apolitical CIA served all presidents impartially is over: “Whatever may occur in the future, it is now clear that the CIA is a radically different agency than the one that served the country generally well for many decades before 2011.”

China demands U.S. adopt ’correct’ views

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan is making his first visit to China this week for talks with Chinese officials and state-run media revealed he is expected to be pressed to buy into several Chinese demands.

The Chinese Communist Party-controlled Global Times said Mr. Sullivan and the United States must adopt a “correct understanding” of China and its interests. The outlet said Mr. Sullivan must “know how to listen” for better relations.

The official Xinhua news agency said stabilizing “deep-seated tensions” in U.S.-China relations will require America to give up “misguided perceptions” that China is a strategic competitor.

The United States must also halt “detrimental actions,” including trade restrictions, technology decoupling and military maneuvers in the Asia-Pacific region, Xinhua said. “To move forward, Washington should break away from its outdated Cold War mentality,” the outlet stated, using the Chinese euphemism for U.S. anti-communism.

Mr. Sullivan and Chinese top foreign affairs official Wang Yi on Wednesday agreed to set up a phone call between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in the coming weeks, according to reports, and Beijing also agreed to resume phone calls between senior theater military commanders on both sides in “the near future.”

• Contact Bill Gertz on X @BillGertz.