Shrub WMD Intelligence Sketchy At Best

In Sketchy Data, White House Sought Clues to Gauge Threat
By James Risen, David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker for the NY Times.
(William J. Broad and Don Van Natta Jr. also contributed to this article.)

"Once the inspectors were gone, it was like losing your G.P.S. guidance," added a Pentagon official, invoking as a metaphor the initials of the military's navigational satellites. "We were reduced to dead reckoning. We had to go back to our last fixed position, what we knew in '98, and plot a course from there. With dead reckoning, you're heading generally in the right direction, but you can swing way off to one side or the other."

Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, said today that the question of new evidence versus old was beside the point. "The question of what is new after 1998 is not an interesting question," she said. "There is a body of evidence since 1991. You have to look at that body of evidence and say what does this require the United States to do? Then you are compelled to act.

"To my mind, the most telling and eye-catching point in the judgment of five of the six intelligence agencies was that if left unchecked, Iraq would most likely have a nuclear weapon in this decade. The president of the United States could not afford to trust Saddam's motives or give him the benefit of the doubt," she said.

In a series of recent interviews, intelligence and other officials described the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House as essentially blinded after the United Nations inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq in 1998. They were left grasping for whatever slivers they could obtain, like unconfirmed reports of attempts to buy uranium, or fragmentary reports about the movements of suspected terrorists.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/worldspecial/20WEAP.html

In Sketchy Data, White House Sought Clues to Gauge Threat
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

his article was reported and written by James Risen, David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker.

WASHINGTON, July 19 — Beginning last summer, Bush administration officials insisted that they had compelling new evidence about Iraq's prohibited weapons programs, and only occasionally acknowledged in public how little they actually knew about the current status of Baghdad's chemical, biological or nuclear arms.

Some officials belittled the on-again, off-again United Nations inspections after the Persian Gulf war of 1991, suggesting that the inspectors had missed important evidence. "Even as they were conducting the most intrusive system of arms control in history, the inspectors missed a great deal," Vice President Dick Cheney said last August, before the inspections resumed.

In the fall, as the debate intensified over whether to have inspectors return to Iraq, senior government officials continued to suggest that the United States had new or better intelligence that Iraq's weapons programs were accelerating — information that the United Nations lacked.

"After 11 years during which we have tried containment, sanctions, inspections, even selected military action, the end result is that Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons and is increasing his capabilities to make more," President Bush declared in a speech in Cincinnati last October. "And he is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon."

"Clearly, to actually work, any new inspections, sanctions, or enforcement mechanisms will have to be very different," he added.

Now, with the failure so far to find prohibited weapons in Iraq, American intelligence officials and senior members of the administration have acknowledged that there was little new evidence flowing into American intelligence agencies in the five years since United Nations inspectors left Iraq, creating an intelligence vacuum.

"Once the inspectors were gone, it was like losing your G.P.S. guidance," added a Pentagon official, invoking as a metaphor the initials of the military's navigational satellites. "We were reduced to dead reckoning. We had to go back to our last fixed position, what we knew in '98, and plot a course from there. With dead reckoning, you're heading generally in the right direction, but you can swing way off to one side or the other."

Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, said today that the question of new evidence versus old was beside the point. "The question of what is new after 1998 is not an interesting question," she said. "There is a body of evidence since 1991. You have to look at that body of evidence and say what does this require the United States to do? Then you are compelled to act.

"To my mind, the most telling and eye-catching point in the judgment of five of the six intelligence agencies was that if left unchecked, Iraq would most likely have a nuclear weapon in this decade. The president of the United States could not afford to trust Saddam's motives or give him the benefit of the doubt," she said.

In a series of recent interviews, intelligence and other officials described the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House as essentially blinded after the United Nations inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq in 1998. They were left grasping for whatever slivers they could obtain, like unconfirmed reports of attempts to buy uranium, or fragmentary reports about the movements of suspected terrorists.

President Bush has continued to express confidence that evidence of weapons programs will be found in Iraq, and the administration has recently restructured the weapons hunt after the teams dispatched by the Pentagon immediately after the war confronted an array of problems on the ground and came up mostly empty-handed.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld offered a nuanced analysis to Congress last week about the role that American intelligence played as the administration built its case against Mr. Hussein.

page 2

Reuters
"He is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon."
President Bush

ARTICLE TOOLS

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
"It is a case grounded in current intelligence."
Paul D. Wolfowitz

Agence France-Presse
Intelligence "comes to us from credible and reliable sources."
George J. Tenet

WHAT THEY KNEW | THE HUNT FOR EVIDENCE
In Sketchy Data, White House Sought Clues to Gauge Threat

(Page 2 of 4)

"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass murder," he said. "We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light, through the prism of our experience on Sept. 11."

Richard Kerr, who headed a four-member team of retired C.I.A. officials that reviewed prewar intelligence about Iraq, said analysts at the C.I.A. and other agencies were forced to rely heavily on evidence that was five years old at least.

Intelligence analysts drew heavily "on a base of hard evidence growing out of the lead-up to the first war, the first war itself and then the inspections process," Mr. Kerr said. "We had a rich base of information," he said, and, after the inspectors left, "we drew on that earlier base."

"There were pieces of new information, but not a lot of hard information, and so the products that dealt with W.M.D. were based heavily on analysis drawn out of that earlier period," Mr. Kerr said, using the shorthand for weapons of mass destruction.

Even so, just days before President Bush's State of the Union address in January, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, described the intelligence as not only convincing but up-to-date.

"It is a case grounded in current intelligence," he told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, "current intelligence that comes not only from sophisticated overhead satellites and our ability to intercept communications, but from brave people who told us the truth at the risk of their lives. We have that; it is very convincing."

George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, in February expressed confidence in much of the intelligence about Iraq, saying it "comes to us from credible and reliable sources."

It was Mr. Cheney who, last September, was clearest about the fact that the United States had only incomplete information. But he said that should not deter the country from taking action.

It is in the American character, he said, "to say, `Well, we'll sit down and we'll evaluate the evidence; we'll draw a conclusion.' " He added, "But we always think in terms that we've got all the evidence. Here, we don't have all the evidence. We have 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent. We don't know how much. We know we have a part of the picture. And that part of the picture tells us that he is, in fact, actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."

But within the White House, the intelligence agencies, the Defense Department and the State Department, the shortage of fresh evidence touched off a struggle. Officials in the National Security Council and the vice president's office wanted to present every shred of evidence against Mr. Hussein. Those working for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, and some analysts in the intelligence agencies, insisted that that all the dots must be connected before the United States endorsed the evidence as the predicate for war.

That struggle, several officials said, explains the confusion about how the administration assembled its case, and how some evidence could be interpreted differently in public presentations before the war.

New Evidence Grows Scarce

An internal C.I.A. review of prewar intelligence on Iraq, recently submitted to the agency's director, Mr. Tenet, has found that the evidence collected by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies after 1998 was mostly fragmentary and often inconclusive.

In a series of interviews, officials said both the Bush administration and Congressional committees were aware of the decline in hard evidence collected on Iraq's weapons programs after 1998.

In part, the officials said, that was a result of the embarrassment of 1991, when it turned out that the C.I.A. had greatly underestimated the progress Mr. Hussein had made in the nuclear arena. Mr. Cheney often cited that experience as he pressed for firmer conclusions. So has President Bush, who recalled that intelligence failing again on Thursday, as, in a news conference with Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair, he defended his decision to go to war.

Analysts say the cost of overestimating the threat posed by Mr. Hussein was minimal, while the cost of underestimating it could have been incalculable.

page three

In Sketchy Data, White House Sought Clues to Gauge Threat

(Page 3 of 4)

The arguments over evidence spilled into public view during the debate about whether the United Nations inspectors should be sent back to Iraq at all. Mr. Cheney had declared in August that returning them to Iraq would be dangerous, that it would create a false sense of security. When the inspectors returned in November, senior administration officials were dismissive of their abilities.

They insisted that American intelligence agencies had better information on Iraq's weapons programs than the United Nations, and would use that data to find Baghdad's weapons after Mr. Hussein's government was toppled. In hindsight, it is now clear just how dependent American intelligence agencies were on the United Nations weapons inspections process.

The inspections aided intelligence agencies directly, by providing witnesses' accounts from ground level and, indirectly, by prodding the Iraqis and forcing them to try to move and hide people and equipment, activities that American spy satellites and listening stations could monitor.

Several current and former intelligence officials said the United States did not have any high-level spies in Mr. Hussein's inner circle who could provide current information about his weapons programs. That weakness could not be fixed quickly.

According to Mr. Kerr, the former C.I.A. analyst, "It would have been very hard for any group of analysts, looking at the situation between 1991 through 1995, to conclude that the W.M.D. programs were not under way." Once the inspectors left, he added, "it was also hard to prove they weren't under way."

Powell's Caution

By the time Mr. Powell arrived in the conference room at the Central Intelligence Agency on Friday, Jan. 31, three days after the State of the Union address, the presentation he was scheduled to make at the United Nations in just five days was in tatters.

Mr. Powell's chief of staff had called his boss the day before to warn that "we can't connect all the dots" in the intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs. Mr. Powell's staff had discovered that statements in intelligence assessments did not always match up with the exhibits Mr. Powell had insisted on including in his presentation.

Apart from some satellite photographs of facilities rebuilt after they were bombed during the Clinton administration in 1998, the only new pieces of evidence indicating that Mr. Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear program focused on what he was trying to buy.

While the National Intelligence Estimate, which was published in October and declassified on Friday, clearly stated that Mr. Hussein "probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade," Mr. Powell's own intelligence unit, in a dissenting view, said "the activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case" that Iraq was pursuing what it called "an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons."

So Mr. Powell wended a careful path, focusing on Iraq's acquisition efforts for centrifuge parts, needed to turn the dross of uranium into the gold of nuclear fuel. But when discussing, for example, the aluminum tubes Iraq had ordered in violation of United Nations penalties, he did not go as far as Ms. Rice, who said in September that the equipment was "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." (She was more cautious in later statements.)

Mr. Powell, at the United Nations, acknowledged that the findings about the tubes were disputed. But he did not quote his own intelligence unit, which in that same dissent in the National Intelligence Estimate wrote that it "considers it far more likely that the tubes are intended for another purpose, most likely the production of artillery rockets."

Curiously, as he prepared for his presentation, Mr. Powell rejected advice that he hold up such a tube during his speech. Asked about that decision in a recent interview, he joked that the tube would block his face, and then said, "Why hold up the most controversial thing in the pitch?"

page four

(Page 4 of 4)

Similarly, Mr. Powell was more cautious than Mr. Bush was in describing Mr. Hussein's meetings with what the president, in his Cincinnati speech, had called Iraq's "nuclear mujahedeen." Mr. Powell was urged by some in the administration to cite those meetings, and to illustrate it with a picture of one of the sessions.

"Now tell me who these guys are," he asked a few nights before his presentation, when the C.I.A. showed him the picture, a participant in the conversation recalled.

Advertisement

"Oh, we're quite sure this is his nuclear crowd," came the response.

"How do you know?" Mr. Powell pressed. "Prove it. Who are they?" No one could answer the question.

"There were a lot of cigars lit," Mr. Powell recalled, referring to the evidence. "I didn't want any going off in my face or the president's face."

The C.I.A. also had scant new evidence about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but specialists began working on the issue under the direction of Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy. Those analysts did not develop any new intelligence data, but looked at existing intelligence reports for possible links between Iraq and terrorists that they felt might have been overlooked or undervalued.

An aide to Mr. Rumsfeld suggested that the defense secretary look at the work of the analysts on Mr. Feith's staff. At a Pentagon news conference last year, Mr. Rumsfeld said: "I was so interested in it, I said, `Gee, why don't you go over and brief George Tenet?' So they did. They went over and briefed the C.I.A.. So there's no — there's no mystery about all this."

At the C.I.A., analysts listened to the Pentagon team, nodded politely, and said, "Thank you very much," said one government official. That official said the briefing did not change the agency's reporting or analysis in any substantial way.

Several current and former intelligence officials have said analysts at the C.I.A. felt pressure to tailor reports to conform to the administration's views, particularly the theories Mr. Feith's group developed.

Once the war began, some suspected that Iraq might use chemical weapons, but again the intelligence was sketchy. Just days before American-led forces captured the Iraqi capital, military commanders were warned that Mr. Hussein might have drawn "red lines" around the approach to Baghdad that, when crossed, would prompt Iraqi forces to launch artillery or missiles tipped with chemical or germ weapons.

Senior administration and intelligence officials now confirm that they had a single informant on what was not so much a circle but a series of landmarks — literally, dots that could be connected to outline a potential danger zone.

In their public statements on the red lines, both Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Powell said the intelligence was unclear. "We knew how little we knew," said one official who was briefed on the intelligence report.

"Intelligence doesn't necessarily mean something is true," Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon news briefing after major combat ended in Iraq. "You know, it's your best estimate of the situation. It doesn't mean it's a fact. I mean, that's not what intelligence is."

William J. Broad and Don Van Natta Jr. contributed to this article.

Posted by Lisa at July 22, 2003 06:56 PM | TrackBack