The former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq issued a broad critique of U.S. intelligence gathering Wednesday, saying that the U.S. government was simply “wrong” to conclude before the war that Iraq was maintaining major stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, David Kay said that contrary to earlier claims by President Bush and his Cabinet, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein did not possess “large stockpiles” of chemical and biological weapons, and was not actively pursuing nuclear weapons.
“There’s a long record here of being wrong,” Kay said, adding that he believed that Bush and other U.S. officials, as well as U.S. allies, had based their beliefs on flawed intelligence. “It turns out we were all wrong,” he said.
Kay said the errors raise serious questions about intelligence-gathering methods. “We’ve got a much more fundamental problem of understanding what went wrong.”
U.S. charges that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was developing nuclear weapons were frequently cited by Bush and his top advisers as justification for the invasion of Iraq last March.
But Kay said Wednesday that the U.S. had failed to develop valid human intelligence sources inside Iraq during the past decade, relying instead on information gathered by United Nations weapons inspectors from 1991 to 1998 and from other governments that shared information in what are called “liaison” arrangements. Their findings, he said, proved incorrect.
“I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they had estimated,” Kay said of his intelligence colleagues. “Reality on the ground differed.”
Kay said he, too, once believed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, but that the work of the Iraq Survey Group, which he directed until his resignation Friday, convinced him that Hussein had destroyed his weapons caches several years ago.
Those stockpiles, Kay said, were destroyed when Hussein realized they made him vulnerable to Western scrutiny. The Iraqi leader, he said, instead plotted to retain the scientists and equipment to quickly revive his weapons programs once scrutiny had eased.
The prewar claims about Iraq’s weapons, and the gravity of the threat Iraq posed to the U.S. and Middle East, have increasingly become a point of contention between Bush and Democrats in Congress and in the presidential primaries.
Until Kay began to discuss his findings in the past week, the White House had insisted that the search in Iraq would produce evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
Bush backing off
On Tuesday, however, Bush began to back off assurances that such weapons would one day be unearthed in Iraq. Instead, the president said the war was justified because Hussein posed a growing threat.
In response to Kay’s Senate testimony, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Wednesday: “It’s important that we let the Iraq Survey Group complete their work and gather all the facts they can. Then we can . . . compare what we knew before the war with what we’ve learned since.”
Kay said he gave a daylong briefing to CIA Director George Tenet recently.
One U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity took issue with Kay’s claims, especially his contention that 85 percent of the search work was done.
“We think it’s premature for anyone to come to any such conclusions,” the official said. “There’s much more than 15 percent of that work to be done.”
The sensitive nature of Kay’s claims was apparent at Wednesday’s hearing, as senators from both parties tried to frame the findings in a way that would either hurt or help Bush’s re-election prospects.
Democrats, led by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), suggested that the administration had shaded intelligence reports to justify U.S. actions in Iraq.
“It’s difficult to draw a conclusion that it wasn’t . . . used selectively, and in many instances manipulated to carry on a policy decision,” Kennedy said of the prewar intelligence.
Levin questioned Vice President Dick Cheney’s statement last week that two truck trailers containing chemical equipment were mobile weapons laboratories. Kay said he and others in the intelligence field did not agree with Cheney’s claim.
“I think the consensus opinion is that . . . their actual intended use was not for the production of biological weapons,” Kay said.
Kay also said his inspectors had found no evidence to support the administration’s assertion that Iraq shared weapons or information with Al Qaeda.
Hold off, senator says
But Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), the committee’s chairman, noted that the Iraq Survey Group could still turn up evidence of banned weapons.
“Maybe we better not pronounce `We’re all wrong’ yet,” Warner said.
Kay was appointed by the CIA to direct the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the invading U.S. forces failed to turn up direct evidence of their existence. He hinted early that he fully expected that his team of intelligence and military personnel would discover the suspected weapons caches.
But his opinion changed, he said Wednesday, as the weapons search, analysis of Iraqi records and interviews with former Iraqi scientists progressed.
“By November,” he said, “I think if asked–and I have been asked internally–I kept saying, `I think we’ve got a program here that looks different than the estimate with regard to assembled weapons.'”
At its height, Kay’s team included 130 intelligence analysts, 30 to 40 case officers and 300 to 400 translators who combed over hundreds of thousands of documents, he said. But the Pentagon and CIA decided last fall to reassign nearly half of the survey group to combat a growing insurgency in Iraq.
“They wanted to redirect resources and the activities of the ISG to the looming political insecurity crisis that was Baghdad,” Kay said. “I perfectly understood the difficulty we were having. I lived there. I knew how hazardous it was. I just thought the ISG and those resources were inappropriate for it. By November, I had lost that battle.”
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said, “You know, if you have a real priority, you figure out how to meet that priority. And I think that the administration’s decision to divert resources and personnel speaks volumes about what they really thought was at stake.”
The failure to uncover even small stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons has prompted reviews by the House and Senate select committees on intelligence.
Some Republicans who have been supportive of the war effort have begun to break ranks with the White House.
“I am deeply troubled by what appears to be a colossal failure by our intelligence agencies,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). “And I would note that this failure spans agencies, it spans years, but it also spans countries. It really is a global intelligence failure.”
Some senators have called for an independent inquiry into the use of intelligence on Iraq, a notion that Kay said he supports.
