WASHINGTON, 15 June 2003 — The US Central Intelligence Agency has reassigned two senior officials who oversaw its analysis of Iraq and its suspected weapons of mass destruction, The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday.
The newspaper said the officials, whose names have not been revealed, had served in senior positions, in which they were deeply involved in assembling and assessing the intelligence on Iraq’s alleged stocks of chemical and biological arms.
More than two months after the fall of Baghdad, the Pentagon and CIA failed to discover the suspected Iraqi arsenal that President George W. Bush used as his primary rationale for invading Iraq.
One of the officials was reassigned last week to the CIA’s personnel department after spending the last several months heading the Iraq Task Force, a special unit set up to provide 24-hour support to military commanders during the war, The Times reported.
The other, a longtime analyst who had led the agency’s Iraq Issue Group that is responsible for analysis of all US intelligence on the country, was dispatched on an extended mission to Iraq, the paper said.
