Missed Clues, Dropped balls
A scathing report on the CIA--and a big pass for the White House
Either way, the Senate committee's report is a scathing portrait of a dysfunctional CIA caught up in its own web of secrecy. Perhaps most stunning is the revelation of how little information the CIA had about Iraq, which had been one of its top priorities since the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. In fact, the CIA did not have a single human source--or spy--of its own with access to Iraq's weapons programs after 1998. Instead, much of the analysis was based on historical knowledge and extrapolation from fragmentary scraps of questionable information.
Some of the harshest criticism is reserved for the CIA's analysts. The main complaint: They did not challenge the conventional wisdom prevalent inside the intelligence community that Saddam Hussein was vigorously pursuing WMD. The report concluded: "This groupthink dynamic led intelligence community analysts, collectors, and managers to interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD program, as well as ignore or minimize evidence that Iraq did not have active and expanding weapons of mass destruction programs."
Intelligence officials, for their part, defended their analysis, saying that with the available information, it would have been almost impossible to have come to any conclusions other than the ones they issued. "There were very few people around the world in the intelligence community that questioned the basic assumption that weapons of mass destruction existed," said the CIA's acting director, John McLaughlin.
Still, the October NIE was notable inside the community for going beyond previous conclusions when it came to the status of Saddam's nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs. In each case, the Senate committee concluded that the intelligence community issued more alarming conclusions than before, based mostly on a single piece of evidence in each case. For example, the NIE concluded that Saddam's biological weapons program was more active and larger than before the Gulf War. But this was mostly based on a report--from a single source of questionable credibility to whom U.S. officials almost never had direct access--that Saddam was using mobile biological trailers.
The story of this defector--an Iraqi design engineer with the code name Curveball--is revealing. Reports from Curveball, who had defected and was in German hands, were the prime reason the CIA had concluded that Iraq had developed mobile biological labs. Intelligence analysts trusted his reports, even though the only American official to meet him before the Iraq war was worried because the day they met, Curveball was severely hung over. Indeed, there were numerous inconsistencies in his reports, compounded by the confusion of translating his Arabic into German before rendering it in English. It was only after the Iraq war, however, that Pentagon officials re-examined Curveball's reports and issued several corrections. The most damning: Curveball was not a scientist or even a biological weapons expert, and he might never have claimed that the project he was working on was used to produce biological agents.
Tubular confusion. A failure to share information was the fatal flaw in the tangled tale of a covert shipment of aluminum tubes in 2001--a finding that formed the basis for judging that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear program. The CIA's conclusion--that the tubes were intended for centrifuges that could be used to enrich uranium--was largely based on the judgment of a single weapons expert and a set of faulty comparisons to other weapons systems, according to the report. Experts at the Department of Energy had disagreed with the CIA, saying the tubes were more likely for use in conventional rocket systems.
The report reveals that when the CIA decided to test the tubes, it did so unilaterally. "We were trying to prove something that we wanted to prove with the testing," a CIA analyst told the committee. The tests were run without the knowledge of scientists at the Energy Department's national laboratories, who later said the tests were conducted improperly.
Even worse, when the NIE was declassified and released to the public as a White Paper, a disagreement was acknowledged, but there was no specific reference to the strong and lengthy dissent by the nuclear scientists at the Energy Department.
The latter problem was part of a larger pattern, where the unclassified White Paper in October 2002 was stripped of most of the caveats, footnoted dissensions, and carefully couched language of the classified version. This meant that the public version sounded much more confident about its findings than the one being read by senior officials.
With Julian E. Barnes, Angie Cannon and Angie C. Marek
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