WASHINGTON, 2 August 2005 — A former employee has charged the Central Intelligence Agency was told by an informant in the spring of 2001 that Iraq had abandoned a major element of its nuclear weapons program, The New York Times reported yesterday.
But the newspaper said the agency did not share the information with other agencies or with senior policy makers.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court here in December, the former CIA officer, whose name remains secret, said that the informant told him that Iraq’s uranium enrichment program had ended years earlier and that centrifuge components from the scuttled program were available for examination and even purchase, the report said.
The officer, an employee at the agency for more than 20 years, was fired in 2004.
In his lawsuit, he says his dismissal was punishment for his reports questioning the agency’s assumptions on a series of weapons-related matters, according to The Times.
He also charged that he had been the target of retaliation for his refusal to go along with the agency’s intelligence conclusions.
While the existence of the lawsuit has previously been reported, details of the case have not been made public because the documents in his suit have been heavily censored by the government and the substance of the claims was classified, the paper said.
Several people with detailed knowledge of the case provided information about his allegations to The Times.
The former officer’s lawyer, Roy Krieger, likened his client’s situation to that of Valerie Plame, the clandestine CIA officer whose role was leaked to the press after her husband publicly challenged some administration conclusions about Iraq’s nuclear ambitions, the report said.
“In both cases, officials brought unwelcome information on WMD in the period prior to the Iraq invasion, and retribution followed,” Krieger was quoted in the report as saying.
The former officer has been accused of having sex with a female contact and diverting to his own use money earmarked for payments to informants. He denies both charges, according to The Times.
