Iran Assessment Creates an Israeli Headache
By Tim McGirk/Jerusalem Time Thursday, Dec. 06, 2007
www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1691682,00.html

Israeli officials were shocked and disappointed by the U.S. intelligence
agencies' report downgrading the risk of Iran building nuclear weapons.
That's because not only do some of the key conclusions of the latest
National Intelligence Estimate undercut some of Israel's own assessments,
they also seem to dim the likelihood of the U.S. taking military action
against Iran's nuclear facilities - a step the Israelis had been quietly
urging the White House should sanctions fail to stop Iran's uranium
enrichment program. With the new U.S. assessment, one Israeli cabinet
official told TIME, "It looks like this ends the military option against
Iran for now. Israel won't attack alone. Iran's facilities are too many and
spread too far apart."

At the Annapolis peace talks last month, the Israeli team - Prime MInister
Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak -
didn't have high expectations for making headway on the Palestinian issue,
but they were confident of pressing their case on Iran to a receptive White
House. Instead, Barak was taken aside by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert
Gates, and told that new intelligence persuaded the Americans that Iran
wasn't such a big threat after all.

The Israelis politely disagreed. As Barak later told Israeli Army Radio, "It
seems Iran in 2003 halted for a certain period of time its military nuclear
program, but as far as we know it has probably since revived it." He added:
"We are talking about a specific track connected with their weapons building
program, to which the American [intelligence] connection, and maybe that of
others, was severed." The Israeli defense minister implied that the new U.S.
assessment was "made in an environment of high uncertainty."

Israeli intelligence sources told Time that for the past five years, Mossad,
Israel's equivalent of the CIA, had made spying on Iran its top priority,
and that its assessment is that Iran would be weapons-ready by 2009.

Israeli officials believe their intelligence services are privy to all the
information on Iran gathered by their American counterparts, and vice versa.
"We stand naked in front of each other, hiding nothing," claimed one Israeli
intelligence officer, adding that the two nations' spy agencies often work
in tandem to avoid any overlap. Israelis believe the U.S. has reached
different conclusions from the same information because it does not feel the
threat of Iran's missiles as acutely as Israel does.

Ephraim Halevy, ex-chief of Mossad and now an academic, tells TIME that what
hasn't changed, is that the view - reiterated in the NIE - that Iran is
"capable of producing a nuclear weapon." He adds, "You put that together
with Iran's devious ways and evasive tactics with the U.N. atomic
inspectors, and you have a very real threat." Dr. Ephraim Kam, Deputy
Director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University,
concurs. "Even if it's true that Iran has shut down its military nuclear
program, it can start it up at any time," he says.

Israeli intelligence officials plan to ask Washington for clarifications
about the NIE report. "It has many inner contradictions," says one cabinet
official
involved in intelligence matters. Israeli officials don't want to disagree
too openly or publicly with the Americans, but they also don't want world
opinion to dismiss the threat of Iran becoming a nuclear power. Foreign
Minister Livni has instructed Israeli embassies to maintain a focus on the
menace that she says Iran poses to Israel and the West.

For Israel, Iran remains enemy Number 1. As the cabinet official put it, "
It's not as if Iran has become Switzerland, only making chocolate. The
Iranians still have missiles that can hit us, and they still support
Hezballah and Hamas, and they are still calling for the destruction of
Israel." That's why Washington's new assessment of Iran's capabilities and
intentions is unlikely to reassure those responsible for Israel's security.