NEW YORK TIMES: On the hawkish end is the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, the Defense Intelligence Agency, which fears that North Korea could threaten American troops with a nuclear weapon on a crude missile. On the skeptical end is the State Department, which has more doubts about Pyongyang’s capabilities. And somewhere in the middle is the Central Intelligence Agency.
Those contrasting views are vying with one another in the intelligence community, and a hint of those differences came into rare public view on Thursday when an assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency that it has “moderate confidence” that North Korea has the ability to shrink a nuclear weapon and fit it into a missile warhead surfaced at a Congressional hearing. That conclusion was disputed by James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, who issued a statement later in the day saying that it did not reflect “the consensus” of the nation’s intelligence community… (more)
