There are emerging indicators about what U.S. intelligence officials knew about Iran’s nukes while maintaining that Tehran wasn’t actively building a nuke.

Jim’s Jolt today fills in some vital gaps regarding what our government and Israel’s have known since last summer, if not earlier, regarding a surge in Iran’s nuclear weapons development activity, probably since 2024 skirmishes with Israel exposed Iran’s military weaknesses and resulted in diminished Iranian air defenses (which obviously weren’t very effective even when at full strength).

I raised this issue in mid-August 2024, contending that it should be a major issue in the presidential campaign:

Last month, in a post about national-security concerns. . . . I related that the Biden–Harris ODNI had failed to produce a statutorily required report on Iran’s nuclear activities, and that Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines had provided no explanation for this dereliction. This was especially alarming in light of (a) the International Atomic Energy Agency’s recent censure of Iran for escalating enrichment activities and dodging IAEA inspectors; (b) Iran’s enrichment of uranium up to 60 percent purity, from which it is not difficult to get to weapons grade; (c) Iran’s stockpile of 313.3 pounds of this fuel, which might be enough for two nuclear bombs; and (d) the Biden–Harris administration’s pressure on the IAEA and European allies not to censure Iran, which it only eased after the allies stood firm.

I thus opined that the administration was stonewalling Congress, four months prior to the election, because it did not want questions about

President Biden’s vow — for example, in the Oval Office on June 28, 2021 — that Iran would “never get a nuclear weapon on my watch.” If we were given an accurate assessment of Iran’s progress, the Biden-Harris administration would have to do something serious about it. The administration doesn’t intend to do anything meaningful.

Under pressure from Senator Lindsay Graham (R., S.C.), DNI Haines finally produced a report, the unclassified public version of which is very brief. It ought to be among the main topics of discussion in the 2024 presidential campaign[.] . . .

As recounted by the Wall Street Journal editorial board and a valuable analysis it cites by former IAEA Iran inspector David Albright and researcher Sarah Burkard (both now at the Institute for Science and International Security), it has for years been customary for the ODNI to insist that Iran was not “currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities that would be necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.” The July 2024 report, however, marks a shift. The ODNI concedes that Iran has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.” [Emphasis added.]

Significantly, as Albright and Burkhard elaborate, the ODNI narrowly focuses on statements by Iranian officials and “old news” about the regime’s enrichment capabilities, “while continuing to avoid any type of public discussion on what nuclear weaponization activities Iran may be undertaking.” [Emphasis added.]

That is, the ODNI refrains from describing the “activities” Iran has carried out to facilitate nuclear-weapons production. [Emphasis added.] As Iran gets closer, the Biden–Harris administration hews to its default position that “Iran does not have an active military nuclear program,” as an ODNI official stated in spinning the new report to WSJ reporters. (See my post on Monday.)

To be charitable, one might have abided such delusional thinking back when Iran was believed to be so far behind in enrichment capability that we could assume we’d have several months of notice before it was on the brink of producing an atomic weapon. (I cannot be that charitable. We now know the U.S. intelligence community was unaware of Iran’s Fordow enrichment facility when it generated the 2007 NIE [which absurdly claimed that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003], and Israeli intelligence’s 2018 acquisition of Iran’s nuclear records proved the regime’s years of lies and feverish production activity. Ergo, how can the ODNI’s proclaimed insights about Iran’s capabilities and intentions be taken seriously?)

Now, however, self-delusion is intolerable. Given how close Iran is to producing weapons-grade fuel (if it is not there already), there must be scrutiny of its weaponization activities. Without that, it is not possible to assess how close the regime is to “break-out.”

The Biden–Harris administration won’t provide any such scrutiny, at least for public consumption, because “some uncomfortable truths would come out,” Albright and Burkhard explain. Namely: If it started today, Iran could produce a testable nuclear device “way too quickly.” The initial activities necessary to build a bomb would be hard to detect. If Iran has already completed all or most of them, it is now so close to weapons-grade fuel that it could actually produce a device before our bull-headed government finally, grudgingly conceded that it was trying to produce a device.

In the Jolt, Jim excerpts a new report from The Economist about the intel that induced Israel to launch the ongoing combat operations against Iran. It explains:

To my mind, there is reason to believe that at least some of these developments were known to the ODNI last summer, and that’s why it (a) changed the standard wording of its disclosures to reflect that Iran had “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so,” yet (b) declined to describe what those activities were. I believe the ODNI dragged its feet about producing a statutorily required report and then provided incomplete disclosure because timely and comprehensive disclosure would have hurt the Democrats’ chances in the 2024 election. That is, it would have given Trump a club with which to hammer Biden and Harris, whose administration said it would prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons but was unwilling to do anything about it — indeed, the Biden-Harris administration was laboring to revive Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, which put Tehran on a glide path to becoming a nuclear weapons power.

If I am right about that, it would render even more jaw-dropping Trump National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard’s March 2025 testimony that our intelligence agencies “continue[] to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and supreme leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.” (No wonder the president asserted, “I don’t care” what his national intelligence director said, countering that he believe Iran was “very close” to a nuclear weapon.)

Congress should be asking hard questions about DNI Gabbard’s testimony, and about what the ODNI and other U.S. spy agencies clearly knew but withheld from the public during the 2024 presidential campaign.