As a former intelligence officer, I'm not sure what to make of the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concluding "with high confidence" that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003. This is wonderful news, but is it true?

NIEs are estimates, not established facts. They are educated guesses, and are sometimes spectacularly wrong. In fact, if this NIE is correct, then the one about Tehran's nuclear intentions published in 2005 — the one that assessed "with high confidence" that Iran was determined to develop nuclear weapons — was one of those spectacularly wrong assessments. I hardly need to mention our other recent foray into estimating the capabilities and intentions of another nearby Middle Eastern country's WMD program, and just how wrong that one turned out to be.

Why would the Iranians halt their nuclear weapons program? The NIE says that this was "probably" due to "international pressure," but the ayatollahs have not been overly concerned with international pressure in the past. Even the drafters of the NIE admit that this explanation has only a "better-than-even chance" of being right. Another explanation that might have a better-than-even chance of being right is that the Iranians abandoned one covert weapons program when it was exposed, and started a new one under the cover of their nuclear power program. After all, with its immense oil and natural gas reserves, Iran is hardly in need of nuclear reactors.

I'm not entirely sure how our intelligence community came to its remarkable conclusion, because I have read only the unclassified summary released to the public. As usual, The New York Times seems to know the entire contents of this secret document, and reports that the NIE is based on intercepts of communications from senior Iranian officers and a laptop that found its way into our hands. Good intelligence practice would be to corroborate this reporting with other sources, such as clandestine agents or satellite imagery, and that probably occurred here. The problem is that all of these sources are extremely vulnerable to deception. While the NIE drafters have obviously weighed and discounted the possibility that Tehran's apparent abandonment of its nuclear weapons program is not a deception, it is axiomatic in successful deception operations that the target is unaware that he is being deceived.

In some circles, the publication of an NIE that is clearly at odds with the Bush administration's hostility toward Tehran has been celebrated as a sign that the intelligence community has reasserted its independent voice. After all, as the late David Halberstam wrote, "great intelligence officers often have the melancholy job of telling their superiors things they don't want to hear." There hasn't been much of that lately, but this NIE seems to be just that. Yet this new NIE suggests that the intelligence community fails to understand a fundamental professional ethic. It recommends "some combination of threats of intensified international security and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige and goals for regional influence." That may be a very fine policy indeed, but it is certainly not the job of intelligence professionals to advocate it. Intelligence officers must never recommend or support a policy, because we lose our objectivity when we become advocates. I can't help but wonder if things haven't changed at all, and if the Bush administration, finally recognizing that a preemptive war with Iran is simply not possible, came up with a new policy and tasked the NIE's drafters to find the intelligence to justify it.

It is easy to criticize intelligence estimates. Divining the capabilities and intentions of an adversary is art, not science, and it is a damned difficult art at that. The question every intelligence officer hates to answer is "If you had to make a guess based on what you know today, what is it and how confident are you that you're right?" That is what the intelligence community has done by publishing this NIE. I just wish I was as confident as they are.

Thomas D. Farrell, a retired colonel, served as an Army intelligence officer during a 30-year career, including a tour in Iraq from June 2005 to May 2006. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.

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