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Tenet Defends U.S. Intelligence on Iraq By Joe Fiorill WASHINGTON — Calling for patience in the Iraqi WMD hunt and rejecting the notion that the absence of WMD stockpiles in Iraq has been established, the U.S. central intelligence director today laid out a detailed defense of analysts’ assessments on Iraq before last year’s war (see GSN, Feb. 4). Speaking here at his alma mater, Georgetown University, George Tenet repeatedly criticized and contradicted former Iraq Survey Group head David Kay, who testified last week before Congress that intelligence analysts “were all wrong, probably,” in thinking Iraq had chemical and biological weapon stockpiles (see GSN, Jan. 29). “The search must continue, and it will be difficult,” Tenet said. “Despite some public statements,” Tenet said of Kay’s recent assertions, “We are nowhere near 85 percent finished. The men and women who work in that dangerous environment are adamant about that fact. Any call that I make today is necessarily provisional. Why? Because we need more time and we need more data.” Tenet said current intelligence indicates that U.S. analysts “may have overestimated” Iraq’s nuclear weapon program, that Iraq “intended to develop biological weapons” and that Iraq “had the intent and capability to quickly convert civilian industry to chemical weapons production” even though the United States has “not yet found the weapons.” Tenet expressed dislike for speaking on policy matters and did not criticize or support President George W. Bush’s decision to go to war. He rejected charges that the Bush administration pressured analysts to exaggerate the Iraqi threat and disagreed with criticisms suggesting intelligence agencies are ultimately to blame for unmet expectations that WMD stockpiles would be found in Iraq. Tenet said analysts “never said there was an imminent threat” from now-captive former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein but “painted an objective assessment for our policy-makers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programs that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests.” The Bush administration has defended the war by citing a wide array of intelligence indicating Iraqi WMD programs were a threat to U.S. and international security. Asked May 7 of last year whether Iraq constituted an “imminent threat,” Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer replied, “Absolutely.” “To understand a difficult topic like Iraq,” Tenet said today, “takes patience and care. Unfortunately, you rarely hear a patient, careful or thoughtful discussion of intelligence these days. But these times demand it, because the alternative ― politicized, haphazard evaluation without the benefit of time and facts ― may well result in an intelligence community that is damaged and a country that is more at risk.” Tenet fiercely defended his analysts’ assessments, including a widely criticized October 2002 national intelligence estimate that experts ― notably at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which last month published a much-discussed report on the matter (see GSN, Jan. 8) ― have cited as evidence of a sudden, possibly politically motivated shift in U.S. assessments on Iraq. Like Kay, Tenet sought to portray the assessment of Iraqi capabilities over the past decade as a continuous process, not one marked by a sharp shift in 2002. U.S. intelligence, Tenet said, was influenced by Hussein’s history of deception and of using weapons of mass destruction, by the inability of the United Nations and of Hussein to account for all Iraq’s WMD programs and by intelligence gathered after U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998 that suggested Baghdad was reviving WMD programs. Tenet detailed prewar and postwar U.S. intelligence on Iraqi missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles and nuclear, chemical and biological weapon programs. For each area, he offered a “provisional bottom line” based on information available so far. Tenet called prewar intelligence on Iraq’s missiles “generally on target,” saying, “Since the war, we have found an aggressive Iraqi missile program concealed from the international community.” In particular, he mentioned “plans and advanced design work” for missiles with ranges of up to 1,000 kilometers and “secret negotiations with North Korea to obtain some of its most dangerous missile technology.” With respect to unmanned aerial vehicles, which prewar intelligence indicated Iraq could ultimately use for a WMD attack on a neighbor or even the United States, Tenet said, “We detected development of prohibited and undeclared unmanned aerial vehicles, but the jury is still out on whether Iraq intended to use its newer, smaller unmanned aerial vehicle to deliver biological weapons.” The October 2002 national intelligence estimate, Tenet said, indicated Hussein “wanted nuclear weapons” but “probably would have been unable to make one until 2007 to 2009.” He said analysts never expected to find a uranium enrichment program in Iraq and are still arguing over whether aluminum tubes found in Iraq could have been intended for enrichment. “My provisional bottom line today: Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon; he still wanted one; and Iraq intended to reconstitute a nuclear program at some point; but we have not yet found clear evidence that the dual-use items Iraq sought were for nuclear reconstitution. We do not yet know if any reconstitution efforts had begun, but we may have overestimated the progress Saddam was making,” Tenet said today. With respect to the national intelligence estimate’s charge that Hussein had biological weapon stockpiles and active biological weapon programs, Tenet said more time is needed to determine the accuracy of the estimate. He said Kay’s group has found “a network of laboratories and safe houses, controlled by Iraqi intelligence and security services, that contained equipment for chemical and biological research, and a prison laboratory complex possibly used in human testing for biological weapons agents that were not declared to the United Nations.” “It also appears that Iraq had the infrastructure and the talent to resume production, but we have yet to find that it actually did so, nor have we found weapons,” Tenet said. Commenting on controversy that has surrounded repeated Bush administration claims that trailers found in Iraq were mobile biological weapon laboratories, Tenet said, “There is no consensus within our intelligence community today over whether the trailers were for that use or if they were used for the production of hydrogen. Everyone agrees that they are not ideally configured for either process, but could be made to work in either mode.” The assertion directly contradicts testimony by Kay, who said last week, “I think the consensus opinion is that when you look at those two trailers, while they had capabilities in many areas, their actual intended use was not for the production of biological weapons.” “We need more time,” Tenet said, to determine whether Iraq had chemical weapons. He said U.S. intelligence before the war indicating “with high confidence” that Iraq had chemical weapon stocks has not been borne out by any weapon finds. He added, though, that Hussein “had the intent and capability to quickly convert civilian industry to chemical weapons production.” “Finding things in Iraq is always very tough,” Tenet said in summing up his “provisional” assessment of what has been found in the country. “My new special adviser, [Kay replacement] Charlie Duelfer, will soon be in Iraq to join Maj. Keith Dayton, commander of the Iraqi Survey Group, to continue our effort to learn the truth, and when the truth emerges, we will report it to the American people, no matter what,” Tenet said. CIA Chief Responds to Manipulation Charges“No one told us what to say or how to say it,” Tenet said of accusations that the Bush administration pressured intelligence analysts to provide justification for a war. The CIA chief was categorical when asked by a student about alleged administration attempts to circumvent standard intelligence input, including by the creation of the Defense Department-based Office of Special Plans. “I am the director of central intelligence. The president of the United States sees me six days a week ― every day. I tell him what the American intelligence community believes. … I can tell you with certainty that the president of the United States gets his intelligence from one person and one community ― me ― and he has told me firmly and directly that he’s wanted it straight and he’s wanted it honest, and he’s never wanted the facts shaded,” he said. Tenet said the decision to go to war lay with policy-makers but that the intelligence it was based on was sound. “This is a policy decision. … How long do you let material breach, deception and denial go on before you’re risked with the kind of surprise that I can never fully and 100 percent predict? This is the question we were faced with,” he said. Although most of his speech focused on Iraq, Tenet also took time to rebut a flurry of recent charges, including by Kay, that U.S. intelligence has been ill-served in recent years by a lack of attention to traditional human intelligence. “To be sure, we had difficulty penetrating the Iraqi regime with human sources,” he said, but “I want to be very clear about something. A blanket indictment of our human intelligence around the world is dead wrong. We have spent the last seven years rebuilding our clandestine service. As director of central intelligence, this has been my highest priority.” Tenet also weighed in on charges that U.S. intelligence failed to accurately assess the extent of illicit programs acknowledged recently by Iran and Libya. He called Libya in particular “an intelligence success,” saying “only” U.S. and British intelligence agencies knew what the country was developing because the agencies “had penetrated Libya’s foreign supplier network.” “It was only when we convinced them [Libyan officials] that we knew Libya’s nuclear program was a weapons program that they showed us their weapons design. As should be clear to you, intelligence was the key that opened the door to Libya’s clandestine programs,” Tenet said. Tenet welcomed reviews of prewar intelligence, listing questions intelligence agencies must ask themselves in the wake of the Iraq war: “Did the history of our work, Saddam’s deception and denial, his lack of compliance with the international community and all that we know about this regime cause us to minimize or ignore alternative scenarios? Did the fact that we missed how close Saddam came to acquiring a nuclear weapon in the early 1990s cause us to overestimate his nuclear or other programs in 2002? Did we carefully consider the absence of information flowing from a repressive and intimidating regime, and would it have made any difference in our bottom-line judgments? Did we clearly tell policy-makers what we knew, what we didn’t know, what was not clear, and identify the gaps in our knowledge?”
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