WASHINGTON, 30 November 2003 — More than 10 years’ work by US and British intelligence agencies on Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons or programs has “major gaps and serious intelligence problems,” according to a new study by Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East and intelligence expert who is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“Even a cursory review” of charges the US and British administrations made in white papers released before the Iraq war “shows that point after point that was made was not confirmed during the war or after the first (six) months of effort following the conflict,” Cordesman found in his study.
Although the United States has the world’s most sophisticated technical systems for collecting and analyzing intelligence, Cordesman found, the Iraq experience shows that US intelligence is “not yet adequate to support grand strategy and tactical operations against proliferating powers or to make accurate assessments of the need to pre-empt.” Pre-emption, or waging war to prevent an enemy from attacking, is a key part of the Bush war on terrorism policy.
Another new non-governmental report, on the Bush administration’s controversial claim that Iraq was seeking specialized aluminum tubes to use in a centrifuge to create nuclear weapons material, raises questions about whether senior policy-makers ignored technically qualified critics to promote the Iraqi threat.
Together, the two reports track what congressional sources described as many of the tentative findings of investigations by House and Senate committees.
The second study finds shortcomings in the way the US intelligence community handled technical questions involving the tubes.
The Bush administration’s strategies of using pre-emption or preventing countries from obtaining weapons of mass destruction “depend critically on reliable intelligence on highly technical matters,” wrote physicist David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security and a consultant to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Albright has been working with Iraqi scientists since serving in the 1990s on the first United Nations inspections in that country; his study is to be released on the ISIS Web site next week.
In the fall of 2002, while polls were showing that the US public and Congress were not convinced of the case for invading Iraq, administration spokesmen including Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice were making statements that the tubes were for nuclear weapons. Such statements, Albright wrote, were made before a fierce debate within the intelligence community over whether Iraq intended to use them for rockets or centrifuges. The issue was decided in October 2002 by a vote in which those intelligence agencies with “no technical (centrifuge) expertise outnumbered those that did,” according to Albright.
The process, he wrote, “exposed a fallible intelligence community that developed and adjudicated its technical disputes poorly.”
Cordesman’s and Albright’s conclusions reflect many of the draft findings of inquiries under way by the House and Senate intelligence committees, according to congressional sources. Those committees aren’t expected to report their findings until next year, after reviewing the findings of the Iraq Survey Group, the 1,400-person US and British search for weapons and evidence of weapons programs in Iraq. David Kay, director of the survey group, said in October that he didn’t expect to make another report for 60 to 90 days.
Cordesman’s study says the intelligence weaknesses shown so far with Iraq raise serious questions about how to deal with weapons proliferation overseas.
“No one who focuses on the specific case of the Iraq war can afford to ignore the fact that future threats of proliferation posed by states or terrorist movements may again seem so great that it may not be possible to wait to take military action until many key uncertainties are resolved,” it says.
President Bush, for example, said in October 2002 that “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists.” In his London speech two weeks ago, he said, “The greatest threat of our age is nuclear, chemical or biological weapons in the hands of terrorists and the dictators who aid them.”
Nothing has been uncovered in Iraq to support the notion that Saddam Hussein had such weapons or entertained any such weapons transfer. In fact, both US and British intelligence analysts reported that such a weapons transfer — if Baghdad had such weapons — would take place only when the Iraqi leader faced annihilation, and did so as his final act.
Cordesman’s study says one weakness in gathering intelligence on weapons proliferation is that research can be done on legitimate civilian projects, mixing “highly secret covert programs with open civil or dual-use programs.” It adds that in reviewing the collection of such material, “far too little analysis is subjected to technical review by those who have actually worked on weapons development.” In addition, it says, analysts often overlook problems in system integration, which “often are the real-world limiting factors in proliferation.” The result, it says, is “to push analysis toward exaggerating the probable level of proliferation.”
One of Kay’s major findings in his October report illustrates that. He reported finding “a clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) containing equipment that was subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW (chemical and biological weapons) research.”
Kay doesn’t support the allegation of illegal laboratories with evidence. He reports that records were destroyed and IIS officials have been questioned, and that “we are still working on determining the extent to which this network was tied to large-scale military efforts or BW (biological weapons) terror weapons.” Still, he reported that “this clandestine capability was suitable for preserving BW expertise, BW-capable facilities and continuing R&D (research and development) — all key elements for maintaining a capability for resuming BW production.”
A senior UN weapons expert said recently that a lot of laboratory equipment such as that cited in Kay’s findings in IIS offices might be used for weapons work, but was more likely to have been used for criminal work or even food testing. Before they were withdrawn from Iraq in 1998, UN inspectors found that Iraqis often failed to report laboratory equipment, because reading the Security Council Resolution 1441 narrowly could include every piece of laboratory equipment in every school in the country.
Cordesman’s study says that another intelligence problem is that “the intelligence effort tends to produce estimates of the maximum size of the possible current holdings of weapons and WMD materials.”
In 1991, Iraq was required to declare its stocks and capabilities in the chemical, biological and nuclear fields, and that the number of weapons it reported was in the tens of thousands and stocks in the tons. Much of that was destroyed or disabled by UN inspectors or the Iraqis, but Saddam’s government was often caught in lies and inexplicable gaps.
But intelligence analysts, the study notes, believed that Saddam was obsessed with record-keeping and lied, and assumed “that little or no destruction had occurred” whenever UN agencies reported unexplained issues. Another major weakness, stressed in the past by the House and Senate intelligence committees, was in the inability to develop “a reliable mix of redundant human intelligence sources within the system or as defectors,” Cordesman found.
