So Much For The WMD

By Michael Duffy/Washington

CIA Chief George Tenet was certain David Kay was the best bloodhound to set loose in Iraq last summer to sniff for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Tenet reasoned that if anyone could find the stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and biological arms on which the Bush Administration had predicated its unprecedented, pre-emptive attack on Saddam Hussein's regime, it was Kay. The Texan had spent 20 years as an international weapons inspector, with several tours in Iraq. Hard-nosed and fiercely independent, Kay, 63, had a vast network of friends at the Pentagon and the CIA--and among Iraqis in Baghdad. A political conservative, he sent the Bush campaign a check for $200 not long after Bush began his quest for the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 1999, and he supported a tough line on Saddam. When Tenet tapped Kay as the "ideal person" to lead a 1,400-strong WMD search party last June, Kay sounded neither daunted nor doubtful. "I'm confident," he told NBC, "that we will reach the goal of understanding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, including where weapons are, where weapons may have been moved and the exact status of that program at the time the war commenced."

Ideal is about the last word anyone on Team Bush is using to describe what Kay is saying now. After his Iraq Survey Group spent seven months visiting hundreds of sites, interviewing thousands of Iraqis and sifting through millions of documents, Kay announced last week that it had uncovered no WMD in Iraq and was "highly unlikely" to turn up any in the future.

In two separate turns before Senate committees, Kay politely shredded some of the Administration's most resilient--and repeated--claims of Saddam's vaunted weapons programs, fingered flawed analysis at the CIA and only halfheartedly encouraged his colleagues to keep looking for the mystery arms. "Let me begin by saying, we were almost all wrong," said Kay. "It is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed militarized chemical and biological weapons there."

Kay's findings were far more sweeping than the Administration had anticipated--and had several unsettling effects. They raised new doubts about the Administration's conduct in the weeks leading up to a war that cost hundreds of American lives and billions of dollars and alienated many allies. They sparked a new round of finger pointing between the CIA and the White House about who ginned up the weapons that apparently never existed--and why. They put new pressure on Tenet, who has survived in his post longer than many might have imagined and may no longer be able to write his own exit lines. And they revived plans, long abandoned, of a badly needed reform of the nation's numerous, mysterious, overlapping and often quarrelsome intelligence agencies. Bush had shelved the idea of a massive, one-time overhaul after 9/11, lest the undertaking distract the nation's spooks from their job of protecting the country from further calamity. But if the resulting work has not been effective, as Kay's findings suggest, there's little reason to put off a fix much longer.

Kay is not the only CIA employee to unload on the agency. Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director who just completed an internal review of the Iraq intelligence at Tenet's request, told TIME, "We may have relied too heavily on our prior knowledge and were not as careful as we should [have been]." Kerr spent six months looking at the secret U.S. intelligence on Saddam's WMD, including the crown jewels presented every morning to Bush and his top advisers--the President's daily brief. Kerr said one problem may have been that the CIA tried to distill complex matters too simply in the top-secret brief, with the result that its claims about Saddam's arsenal were not always adequately conditioned and caveated. "You're trying to make an argument--you often are caught up in that," he said. Looking at the Iraq intelligence in general, "you can find places where they're fairly careful and cautious," Kerr told TIME, "and other times where they carried the argument probably farther than they had evidence for...There can clearly be some improvements."

Tenet may hope Kerr's internal review will take some of the steam out of an even more scathing review, expected this week, by the Senate Intelligence Committee. That panel, controlled by Republicans, has worked for weeks on its own 300-page confidential draft report on the prewar WMD intelligence. Knowledgeable sources tell TIME that the Senate report will probably tag the agency for failing to conduct a zero-based assessment of Saddam's arsenal--that is, a brand-new study with no underlying assumptions about his weapons. Such a review was performed in 1991 before the first Gulf War, but not this time around. The product of 175 interviews by staff members on the panel, the Senate committee report is expected to take particular aim at Tenet, sources said, for giving lawmakers his personal assurance in closed-door hearings that WMD stocks would be found in Iraq. "He was telling the senior people in the Administration," said one source, "that the weapons were absolutely there, that they were certain the stuff was there." Tenet, as a result, "is locked in. He has nowhere to go." A senior intelligence official said Tenet will be perfectly comfortable telling the Senate committee that the Iraq Survey Group is still at work and that it is premature to come to any conclusions about WMD in Iraq.

The impending cascade of critiques from several quarters may have been one reason Kay decided to move so suddenly late last month to put his conclusions on the record: he didn't want to be overshadowed. Kay, after all, had been charged with finding the weapons by Tenet last summer, when the public outcry about the gap between rhetoric and reality first seemed to peak. Instead of hunting for weapons, Kay and his staff set about interviewing Saddam's weapons scientists, engineers and doctors, working in part from U.N.-compiled lists going back several years. The names on Kay's roster ran into the thousands. Some were dead, and some refused to talk, but after the team had spoken to 75% of the experts, Kay was "perplexed that not a single thing had shown up." Kay joked, "Knowing Iraqi efficiency, it seemed hard to believe that they'd scrubbed everything so cleanly. A number of us were getting really concerned."

By late June Kay thought that perhaps Saddam had a modern, just-in-time delivery system for WMD and had been able to dispose of both weapons and raw materials quickly when the U.S. invaded. But then he realized that Saddam wasn't "even that organized." Looking back on it, Kay said, "this wasn't a blinding flash. It was a slow accretion of evidence that was all pointing in the same direction." Kay was struck that he couldn't find any sign of the logistical network of trucks, drivers and construction workers required of a sophisticated weapons program. "If that stuff doesn't exist,'' he said, "it means the stuff you're looking for doesn't exist."

Still, Kay's team kept looking. Some agency analysts had predicted that a number of mysterious mobile trailers found in Iraq were for the manufacture of biological weapons. These staff members were shipped out to the field to prove their hunch. Kay reported that several returned deeply upset from the trailers, which, it turned out, were for manufacturing hydrogen for use in weather balloons. "They said to me, 'I'm sorry we can't find what we told you existed,'" Kay recalled. Yet some analysts would not give up the fight. Kay told of a months-long tug-of-war between those back in Washington who believed and those in the field who could see with their own eyes. Kay tried to rotate the former into the field because, as he put it, "the people who stuck to their guns the longest" were the ones who never went to Iraq.

What CIA analysts imagined to be dispositive evidence of Saddam's nuclear ambitions turned out, in Kay's judgment, to be proof of plain, old-fashioned greed. For months the Administration claimed that finely machined aluminum tubes, imported with ever higher tolerances--that is, precision in their specifications--were part of a campaign to produce gas centrifuges for the production of weapons-grade nuclear fuel. But after examining the tubes and talking to the scientists who procured and used them, Kay became convinced that the increasing tolerances were to meet not technical requirements but financial ones. The ever changing tolerances meant new purchases, which in turn meant that the engineers who were working on Saddam's missile programs, for which the tubes were in fact destined, had continuing contracts from which to skim money. Kay concluded, "An analyst looks for rational explanations and usually finds them in the technical realm they're used to, but Iraq was almost like a parallel universe. The explanations were driven not by technical reasons but by the moral and personal depravity engendered by the regime. A rational person would look at it one way, and it would be completely wrong, because in this parallel universe there was a different set of rules."

Tales of machine-shop graft make clear that Saddam had a variety of secret ambitions, and, Kay said repeatedly last week, the Iraqis were doing all kinds of things in violation of international law. But the unspannable gap between the Administration's vast prewar claims and a thin postwar reality has irritated some members of Congress. Democrats complain that they had been duped, and in private some Republicans say they feel the same. Ohio Senator Mike DeWine, a Republican on the Intelligence Committee, told the Columbus Dispatch that he was not sure he would vote to authorize war with Iraq if he had to do it all over again. Others, including John McCain, are calling for a bipartisan investigation of who zoomed whom in the walk-up to the war.

Even when an election is not months away, such probes mean different things to different people. To Democrats, a blue-ribbon panel would discover whether Administration hard-liners shopped around for intelligence that fit their war aims. "The Administration made a conscious decision to cherry-pick the intelligence and to make the most aggressive case possible ... based upon its belief that [ousting Saddam] was the right thing to do," says Indiana's Evan Bayh, a Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. "The caveats were in there from the beginning, but they became increasingly less emphasized and then finally were dropped altogether in public pronouncements...You have the President and the Vice President and the Secretary of State using words like 'we know'--as opposed to 'we believe'--and 'there can be no doubt.'" Pat Roberts, a Republican Senator from Kansas, whose panel will distribute its secret draft report to committee Republicans and Democrats this week, said the Intelligence Committee should be given a chance to explain the intelligence failings before a commission is considered. Still, some Republicans seem to think some kind of commission is inevitable. "We need to set up a mechanism of some type that reviews our intelligence capability in the world as it is today," says House Intelligence Committee chairman Porter Goss. "It's just a question of the how and the when."

A senior White House official told TIME that Bush might go along with a blue-ribbon panel, though the President wants to let the Iraq Survey Group continue its work. With Kay having resigned his post, the group is now under the leadership of Charles Duelfer, another veteran arms inspector. Bush, the official said, continues to stand by Tenet, in part because foreign intelligence agencies also missed the WMD. Besides, the source added, Bush is "very willing to go out and discuss why [war] was the right thing to do. He is as sure of this as he is of anything."

Kay's tale is a reminder that there is no substitute for on-the-ground human intelligence--the very kind that U.S. spymasters have lacked in Iraq and elsewhere for years. The U.S. overestimated the current WMD program in Iraq, but it underestimated WMD operations in Iraq before the 1991 war and, more recently, in Libya, Iran and perhaps North Korea. The shortfall in humint is everyone's fault. Administrations going back to the mid-1970s have favored more technical means of eavesdropping over sending spies into danger.

For years a bipartisan group of spooks and ex-spooks has advocated overhauling the U.S.'s massive, $35 billion-a-year intelligence bureaucracy and putting it under a single, all-powerful director, a scheme that has met with ferocious bureaucratic blockades. Kay noted last week that "closed orders and secret societies, whether they be religious or governmental, are the groups that have the hardest time reforming themselves in the face of failure without outside input." But as U.S. intelligence failures pile up--notably relating to 9/11 and Iraq--it may be that the war on terrorism can't be won until the spy agencies find the courage to change themselves. --Reported by Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper, Mark Thompson and Adam Zagorin/Washington

With reporting by Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper, Mark Thompson and Adam Zagorin/Washington