Transcript: CIA Director Defends Iraq Intelligence
TENET: What do we know today?
The work done so far shows a story similar to that of his biological weapons program. Saddam had rebuilt a dual-use industry. David Kay reported that Saddam and his son Uday wanted to know how long it would take for Iraq to produce chemical weapons.
However, while some sources indicate Iraq may have conducted some experiments related to developing chemical weapons, no physical evidence has yet been uncovered. We need more time.
My provisional bottom line today: Saddam had the intent and capability to quickly convert civilian industry to chemical weapons production. However, we have not yet found the weapons we expected.
I have now given you my provisional bottom lines, but it is important to remember that estimates are not written in a vacuum. Let me tell you some of what was going on in the fall of 2002.
Several sensitive reports crossed my desk from two sources characterized by our foreign partners as established and reliable. The first from a source who had direct access to Saddam and his inner circle said Iraq was not in the possession of a nuclear weapon. However, Iraq was aggressively and covertly developing such a weapon.
Saddam had recently called together his nuclear weapons committee, irate that Iraq did not yet have a weapon because money was no object and they possessed the scientific know-how. The committee members assured Saddam that once fissile material was in hand, a bomb could be ready in 18 to 24 months. The return of U.N. inspectors would cause minimal disruption because, according to the source, Iraq was expert at denial and deception.
The same source said that Iraq was stockpiling chemical weapons and that equipment to produce insecticides under the oil-for-food program had been diverted to covert chemical weapons production.
The source said that Iraq's weapons of last resort were mobile launchers armed with chemical weapons which would be fired at enemy forces in Israel; that Iraqi scientists were dabbling with biological weapons with limited success, but the quantities were not sufficient to constitute a real weapons program.
A stream of reporting from a different sensitive source with access to senior Iraqi officials said he believed production of chemical and biological weapons was taking place, that biological agents were easy to produce and hide, and that prohibited chemicals were also being produced at dual-use facilities.
The source stated that a senior Iraqi official in Saddam's inner circle believed, as a result of the U.N. inspections, Iraq knew the inspectors' weak points and had to take advantage of them.
TENET: The source said that there was an elaborate plan to deceive inspectors and ensure prohibited items would never be found.
Now, did this information make any difference in my thinking? You bet it did.
As this information and other sensitive information came across my desk, it solidified and reinforced the judgments that we had reached in my own view of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein and I conveyed this view to our nation's leaders.
Could I have ignored or dismissed such reports? Absolutely not.
Now, I'm sure you're all asking, "Why haven't we found the weapons?" I've told you the search must continue and it will be difficult.
As David Kay reminded us, the Iraqis systematically destroyed and looted forensic evidence before, during and after the war. We have been faced with organized destruction of documentary and computer evidence in a wide range of offices, laboratories and companies suspected of weapons of mass destruction work. The pattern of these efforts is one of deliberate, rather than random, acts. Iraqis who have volunteered information to us are still being intimidated and attacked.
Remember, finding things in Iraq is always very tough. After the first Gulf War, the U.S. Army blew up chemical weapons without knowing it. They were mixed in with conventional weapons in Iraqi ammo dumps.
My new special adviser, Charlie Duelfer, will soon be in Iraq to join Major 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.
As director of central intelligence, I also have an important responsibility. I have a responsibility to evaluate our performance, both our operational work and our analytical tradecraft.
So what do I think about all this today? Based on an assessment of the data we collected over the past 10 years, it would have been difficult for analysts to come to any different conclusions than the ones reached in October of 2002.
However, in our business simply saying this is not good enough. We must constantly review the quality of our work. For example, the National Intelligence Council is reviewing the estimate line by line.
Six months ago, we also commissioned an internal review to examine the tradecraft of our work on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. And through this effort we are finding ways to improve our processes.
For example, we recently discovered that relevant analysts in the community missed the notice that identified a source that we had cited as providing information that in some cases was unreliable and in other cases fabricated.
TENET: We have acknowledged this mistake.
In addition to these internal reviews, I asked Dick Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, and a team of retired senior analysts to evaluate the estimate.
Among the questions that we as a community must ask are: 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?
We are in the process of evaluating just such questions. And while others will express the views on these issues sooner, we ourselves must come to our own bottom lines patiently.
I will say that our judgments were not single-threaded. U.N. inspection served as a base line and we had multiple strands of reporting from signals, imagery and human intelligence.
After the U.N. inspectors left in 1998, we made an aggressive effort to penetrate Iraq. Our record was mixed. While we had voluminous reporting, the major judgments reached were based on a narrower band of data. That's not unusual in our business.
There was by necessity a strong reliance on technical data which. to be sure, was very valuable, particularly in the imagery of military and key dual-use facilities, on missile and unmanned aerial vehicle developments, and in particular on the efforts of Iraqi front companies to falsify and deny us the ultimate destination and use of dual-use equipment.
We did not have enough of our own human intelligence. We did not ourselves penetrate the inner sanctum.
TENET: Our agents were on the periphery of WMD activities, providing some useful information. We had access to emigres and defectors with more direct access to these programs. And we had a steady stream of reporting with access to the Iraqi leadership come to us from a trusted foreign partner.
Other partners provided important information. What we did not collect ourselves, we evaluated as carefully as we could.
Still, the lack of direct access to some of these sources created some risk. Such is the nature of our business.
To be sure, we had difficulty penetrating the Iraqi regime with human sources. And 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.
When I came to the CIA in the mid-'90s, our graduating class of case officers was unbelievably low. Now, after years of rebuilding, our training programs and putting our best efforts to recruit the most talented men and women, we are graduating more clandestine officers than at any time in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency.
It will take an additional five years to finish the job of rebuilding our clandestine service, but the results so far have been obvious.
A CIA spy led us to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11th attacks.
© 2004 FDCH E-Media
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