Iraq was still one of the hardest intelligence targets.
Another former intelligence official said: "Iran is the hardest intelligence target there is.
Is this a tale of hard intelligence being distorted for political advantage?
In the absence of hard intelligence, it is incumbent on the intelligence chief to try to imagine the unimaginable.
They described this assessment as based on hard intelligence, presumably telephone intercepts.
The New Yorkers also lacked hard intelligence about a presidential bid.
Not every line in the document is hard intelligence work, though.
"It's the hardest intelligence target we have," one senior American official said, "much harder than Iraq".
But outside the walls of Camp Hollywood hard intelligence is impossible to come by: for the good reason that, in the immortal words of William Goldman, nobody knows anything.
Some of our intelligence evaluators are making the same mistake as last time, interpreting their abysmal lack of hard intelligence as evidence of no nuclear weapons development.
