This article is based on interviews with analysts and policymakers
inside and outside the U.S. government, and access to internal
documents and technical evidence not previously made public.
The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice
President Cheney and their subordinates -- in public and behind the
scenes -- made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as
more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the
data they had would support.
On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not
conform to their views.
The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of
confidence in information upon which it had previously relied:
Two senior policymakers, who supported the war, said in unauthorized
interviews that the administration greatly overstated Iraq's near-term
nuclear potential.
In its later stages, the draft white paper coincided with production
of a National Intelligence Estimate and its unclassified summary.
But the WHIG, according to three officials who followed the white
paper's progress, wanted gripping images and stories not available in
the hedged and austere language of intelligence.
The fifth draft of the paper was obtained by The Washington Post.
White House spokesmen dismissed the draft as irrelevant because Rice
decided not to publish it.
Wilkinson said Rice and Joseph felt the paper "was not strong enough."
The document offers insight into the Bush administration's priorities
and methods in shaping a nuclear message.
The white paper was assembled by some of the same team, and at the
same time, as the speeches and talking points prepared for the
president and top officials.
A senior intelligence official said last October that the president's
speechwriters took "literary license" with intelligence, a phrase
applicable to language used by administration officials in some of the
white paper's most emotive and misleading assertions elsewhere.
The draft white paper precedes other known instances in which the Bush
administration considered the now-discredited claim that Iraq "sought
uranium oxide, an essential ingredient in the enrichment process, from
Africa."
For a speechwriter, uranium was valuable as an image because anyone
could see its connection to an atomic bomb.
Despite warnings from intelligence analysts, the uranium would return
again and again, including the Jan. 28 State of the Union address and
three other Bush administration statements that month.
Other errors and exaggerations in public White House claims were
repeated, or had their first mention, in the white paper.
Much as Blair did at Camp David, the paper attributed to U.N. arms
inspectors a statement that satellite photographs show "many signs of
the reconstruction and acceleration of the Iraqi nuclear program."
Inspectors did not say that.
The paper also quoted the first half of a sentence from a Time
magazine interview with U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix:
"You can see hundreds of new roofs in these photos."
The second half of the sentence, not quoted, was: "but you don't know
what's under them."
As Bush did, the white paper cited the IAEA's description of Iraq's
defunct nuclear program in language that appeared to be current.
The draft said, for example, that "since the beginning of the
nineties, Saddam has launched a crash program to divert nuclear
reactor fuel for . . . nuclear weapons."
The crash program began in late 1990 and ended with the war in January
1991.
The reactor fuel, save for waste products, is gone.
From The Washington Post, 8/10/03:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39500-2003Aug9.html
IRAQ'S NUCLEAR FILE : Inside the Prewar Debate Depiction of Threat
Outgrew Supporting Evidence
By Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 10, 2003; Page A01
His name was Joe, from the U.S. government.
He carried 40 classified slides and a message from the Bush
administration.
An engineer-turned-CIA analyst, Joe had helped build the U.S.
government case that Iraq posed a nuclear threat.
He landed in Vienna on Jan. 22 and drove to the U.S. diplomatic
mission downtown.
In a conference room 32 floors above the Danube River, he told United
Nations nuclear inspectors they were making a serious mistake.
At issue was Iraq's efforts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes.
The U.S. government said those tubes were for centrifuges to enrich
uranium for a nuclear bomb.
But the IAEA, the world's nuclear watchdog, had uncovered strong
evidence that Iraq was using them for conventional rockets.
Joe described the rocket story as a transparent Iraqi lie.
According to people familiar with his presentation, which circulated
before and afterward among government and outside specialists, Joe
said the specialized aluminum in the tubes was "overspecified,"
"inappropriate" and "excessively strong."
No one, he told the inspectors, would waste the costly alloy on a
rocket.
In fact, there was just such a rocket.
According to knowledgeable U.S. and overseas sources, experts from
U.S. national laboratories reported in December to the Energy
Department and U.S. intelligence analysts that Iraq was manufacturing
copies of the Italian-made Medusa 81.
Not only the Medusa's alloy, but also its dimensions, to the fraction
of a millimeter, matched the disputed aluminum tubes.
A CIA spokesman asked that Joe's last name be withheld for his safety,
and said he would not be made available for an interview.
The spokesman said the tubes in question "are not the same as the
Medusa 81" but would not identify what distinguishes them.
In an interview, CIA Director George J. Tenet said several different
U.S. intelligence agencies believed the tubes could be used to build
gas centrifuges for a uranium enrichment program.
The Vienna briefing was one among many private and public forums in
which the Bush administration portrayed a menacing Iraqi nuclear
threat, even as important features of its evidence were being
undermined.
There were other White House assertions about forbidden weapons
programs, including biological and chemical arms, for which there was
consensus among analysts.
But the danger of a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein, more potent as an
argument for war, began with weaker evidence and grew weaker still in
the three months before war.
This article is based on interviews with analysts and policymakers
inside and outside the U.S. government, and access to internal
documents and technical evidence not previously made public.
The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice
President Cheney and their subordinates -- in public and behind the
scenes -- made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as
more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the
data they had would support.
On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not
conform to their views.
The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of
confidence in information upon which it had previously relied:
----- Bush and others often alleged that President Hussein held
numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, but did not disclose
that the known work of the scientists was largely benign. Iraq's three
top gas centrifuge experts, for example, ran a copper factory, an
operation to extract graphite from oil and a mechanical engineering
design center at Rashidiya.
----- The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002 cited
new construction at facilities once associated with Iraq's nuclear
program, but analysts had no reliable information at the time about
what was happening under the roofs. By February, a month before the
war, U.S. government specialists on the ground in Iraq had seen for
themselves that there were no forbidden activities at the sites.
----- Gas centrifuge experts consulted by the U.S. government said
repeatedly for more than a year that the aluminum tubes were not
suitable or intended for uranium enrichment. By December 2002, the
experts said new evidence had further undermined the government's
assertion. The Bush administration portrayed the scientists as a
minority and emphasized that the experts did not describe the
centrifuge theory as impossible.
----- In the weeks and months following Joe's Vienna briefing,
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others continued to describe
the use of such tubes for rockets as an implausible hypothesis, even
after U.S. analysts collected and photographed in Iraq a virtually
identical tube marked with the logo of the Medusa's Italian
manufacturer and the words, in English, "81mm rocket."
----- The escalation of nuclear rhetoric a year ago, including the
introduction of the term "mushroom cloud" into the debate, coincided
with the formation of a White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, a task force
assigned to "educate the public" about the threat from Hussein, as a
participant put it.
Two senior policymakers, who supported the war, said in unauthorized
interviews that the administration greatly overstated Iraq's near-term
nuclear potential.
"I never cared about the 'imminent threat,' " said one of the
policymakers, with directly relevant responsibilities.
"The threat was there in [Hussein's] presence in office. To me, just
knowing what it takes to have a nuclear weapons program, he needed a
lot of equipment. You can stare at the yellowcake [uranium ore] all
you want. You need to convert it to gas and enrich it. That does not
constitute an imminent threat, and the people who were saying that, I
think, did not fully appreciate the difficulties and effort involved
in producing the nuclear material and the physics package."
No White House, Pentagon or State Department policymaker agreed to
speak on the record for this report about the administration's nuclear
case.
Answering questions Thursday before the National Association of Black
Journalists, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said she is
"certain to this day that this regime was a threat, that it was
pursuing a nuclear weapon, that it had biological and chemical
weapons, that it had used them."
White House officials referred all questions of detail to Tenet.
In an interview and a four-page written statement, Tenet defended the
NIE prepared under his supervision in October.
In that estimate, U.S. intelligence analysts judged that Hussein was
intent on acquiring a nuclear weapon and was trying to rebuild the
capability to make one.
"We stand behind the judgments of the NIE" based on the evidence
available at the time, Tenet said, and "the soundness and integrity of
our process."
The estimate was "the product of years of reporting and intelligence
collection, analyzed by numerous experts in several different
agencies."
Tenet said the time to "decide who was right and who was wrong" about
prewar intelligence will not come until the Iraqi Survey Group, the
CIA-directed, U.S. military postwar study in Iraq of Hussein's weapons
of mass destruction programs is completed.
The Bush administration has said this will require months or years.
Facts and Doubts
The possibility of a nuclear-armed Iraq loomed large in the Bush
administration's efforts to convince the American public of the need
for a preemptive strike.
Beginning last August, Cheney portrayed Hussein's nuclear ambitions as
a "mortal threat" to the United States.
In the fall and winter, Rice, then Bush, marshaled the dreaded image
of a "mushroom cloud."
By many accounts, including those of career officials who did not
support the war, there were good reasons for concern that the Iraqi
president might revive a program to enrich uranium to weapons grade
and fabricate a working bomb.
He had a well-demonstrated aspiration for nuclear weapons, a
proficient scientific and engineering cadre, a history of covert
development and a domestic supply of unrefined uranium ore.
Iraq was generally believed to have kept the technical documentation
for two advanced German centrifuge designs and the assembly diagrams
for at least one type of "implosion device," which detonates a nuclear
core.
What Hussein did not have was the principal requirement for a nuclear
weapon, a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium or plutonium.
And the U.S. government, authoritative intelligence officials said,
had only circumstantial evidence that Iraq was trying to obtain those
materials.
But the Bush administration had reasons to imagine the worst.
The CIA had faced searing criticism for its failures to foresee
India's resumption of nuclear testing in 1998 and to "connect the
dots" pointing to al Qaeda's attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Cheney, the administration's most influential advocate of a worst-case
analysis, had been powerfully influenced by his experience as defense
secretary just after the Persian Gulf War of 1991.
Former National Security Council official Richard A. Clarke recalled
how information from freshly seized Iraqi documents disclosed the
existence of a "crash program" to build a bomb in 1991.
The CIA had known nothing of it.
"I can understand why that was a seminal experience for Cheney,"
Clarke said.
"And when the CIA says [in 2002], 'We don't have any evidence,' his
reaction is . . . 'We didn't have any evidence in 1991, either. Why
should I believe you now?' "
Some strategists, in and out of government, argued that the
uncertainty itself -- in the face of circumstantial evidence -- was
sufficient to justify "regime change."
But that was not what the Bush administration usually said to the
American people.
To gird a nation for the extraordinary step of preemptive war -- and
to obtain the minimum necessary support from allies, Congress and the
U.N. Security Council -- the administration described a growing, even
imminent, nuclear threat from Iraq.
'Nuclear Blackmail'
The unveiling of that message began a year ago this week.
Cheney raised the alarm about Iraq's nuclear menace three times in
August.
He was far ahead of the president's public line.
Only Bush and Cheney know, one senior policy official said, "whether
Cheney was trying to push the president or they had decided to play
good cop, bad cop."
On Aug. 7, Cheney volunteered in a question-and-answer session at the
Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, speaking of Hussein, that "left to
his own devices, it's the judgment of many of us that in the
not-too-distant future, he will acquire nuclear weapons."
On Aug. 26, he described Hussein as a "sworn enemy of our country" who
constituted a "mortal threat" to the United States.
He foresaw a time in which Hussein could "subject the United States or
any other nation to nuclear blackmail."
"We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear
weapons," he said.
"Among other sources, we've gotten this from firsthand testimony from
defectors, including Saddam's own son-in-law."
That was reference to Hussein Kamel, who had managed Iraq's special
weapons programs before defecting in 1995 to Jordan.
But Saddam Hussein lured Kamel back to Iraq, and he was killed in
February 1996, so Kamel could not have sourced what U.S. officials
"now know."
And Kamel's testimony, after defecting, was the reverse of Cheney's
description.
In one of many debriefings by U.S., Jordanian and U.N. officials,
Kamel said on Aug. 22, 1995, that Iraq's uranium enrichment programs
had not resumed after halting at the start of the Gulf War in 1991.
According to notes typed for the record by U.N. arms inspector Nikita
Smidovich, Kamel acknowledged efforts to design three different
warheads, "but not now, before the Gulf War."
'Educating the Public'
Systematic coordination began in August, when Chief of Staff Andrew H.
Card Jr. formed the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, to set strategy
for each stage of the confrontation with Baghdad.
A senior official who participated in its work called it "an internal
working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each
part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities."
In an interview with the New York Times published Sept. 6, Card did
not mention the WHIG but hinted at its mission.
"From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in
August," he said.
The group met weekly in the Situation Room.
Among the regular participants were Karl Rove, the president's senior
political adviser; communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary
Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio;
and policy advisers led by Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley,
along with I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.
The first days of September would bring some of the most important
decisions of the prewar period: what to demand of the United Nations
in the president's Sept. 12 address to the General Assembly, when to
take the issue to Congress, and how to frame the conflict with Iraq in
the midterm election campaign that began in earnest after Labor Day.
A "strategic communications" task force under the WHIG began to plan
speeches and white papers.
There were many themes in the coming weeks, but Iraq's nuclear menace
was among the most prominent.
'A Mushroom Cloud'
The day after publication of Card's marketing remark, Bush and nearly
all his top advisers began to talk about the dangers of an Iraqi
nuclear bomb.
Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair conferred at Camp David that
Saturday, Sept. 7, and they each described alarming new evidence.
Blair said proof that the threat is real came in "the report from the
International Atomic Energy Agency this morning, showing what has been
going on at the former nuclear weapon sites."
Bush said "a report came out of the . . . IAEA, that they [Iraqis]
were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more
evidence we need."
There was no new IAEA report.
Blair appeared to be referring to news reports describing curiosity at
the nuclear agency about repairs at sites of Iraq's former nuclear
program.
Bush cast as present evidence the contents of a report from 1996,
updated in 1998 and 1999.
In those accounts, the IAEA described the history of an Iraqi nuclear
weapons program that arms inspectors had systematically destroyed.
A White House spokesman later acknowledged that Bush "was imprecise"
on his source but stood by the crux of his charge.
The spokesman said U.S. intelligence, not the IAEA, had given Bush his
information.
That, too, was garbled at best. U.S. intelligence reports had only one
scenario for an Iraqi bomb in six months to a year, premised on Iraq's
immediate acquisition of enough plutonium or enriched uranium from a
foreign source.
"That is just about the same thing as saying that if Iraq gets a bomb,
it will have a bomb," said a U.S. intelligence analyst who covers the
subject.
"We had no evidence for it."
Two debuts took place on Sept. 8: the aluminum tubes and the image of
"a mushroom cloud."
A Sunday New York Times story quoted anonymous officials as saying the
"diameter, thickness and other technical specifications" of the tubes
-- precisely the grounds for skepticism among nuclear enrichment
experts -- showed that they were "intended as components of
centrifuges."
No one knows when Iraq will have its weapon, the story said, but "the
first sign of a 'smoking gun,' they argue, may be a mushroom cloud."
Top officials made the rounds of Sunday talk shows that morning.
Rice's remarks echoed the newspaper story.
She said on CNN's "Late Edition" that Hussein was "actively pursuing a
nuclear weapon" and that the tubes -- described repeatedly in U.S.
intelligence reports as "dual-use" items -- were "only really suited
for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs."
"There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can
acquire nuclear weapons," Rice added, "but we don't want the smoking
gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Anna Perez, a communications adviser to Rice, said Rice did not come
looking for an opportunity to say that.
"There was nothing in her mind that said, 'I have to push the nuclear
issue,' " Perez said, "but Wolf [Blitzer] asked the question."
Powell, a confidant said, found it "disquieting when people say things
like mushroom clouds."
But he contributed in other ways to the message.
When asked about biological and chemical arms on Fox News, he brought
up nuclear weapons and cited the "specialized aluminum tubing" that
"we saw in reporting just this morning."
Cheney, on NBC's "Meet the Press," also mentioned the tubes and said
"increasingly, we believe the United States will become the target" of
an Iraqi nuclear weapon.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on CBS's "Face the Nation,"
asked listeners to "imagine a September 11th with weapons of mass
destruction," which would kill "tens of thousands of innocent men,
women and children."
Bush evoked the mushroom cloud on Oct. 7, and on Nov. 12 Gen. Tommy R.
Franks, chief of U.S. Central Command, said inaction might bring "the
sight of the first mushroom cloud on one of the major population
centers on this planet."
'Literary License'
In its initial meetings, Card's Iraq task force ordered a series of
white papers.
After a general survey of Iraqi arms violations, the first of the
single-subject papers -- never published -- was "A Grave and Gathering
Danger: Saddam Hussein's Quest for Nuclear Weapons."
Wilkinson, at the time White House deputy director of communications
for planning, gathered a yard-high stack of intelligence reports and
press clippings.
Wilkinson said he conferred with experts from the National Security
Council and Cheney's office.
Other officials said Will Tobey and Susan Cook, working under senior
director for counterproliferation Robert Joseph, made revisions and
circulated some of the drafts.
Under the standard NSC review process, they checked the facts.
In its later stages, the draft white paper coincided with production
of a National Intelligence Estimate and its unclassified summary.
But the WHIG, according to three officials who followed the white
paper's progress, wanted gripping images and stories not available in
the hedged and austere language of intelligence.
The fifth draft of the paper was obtained by The Washington Post.
White House spokesmen dismissed the draft as irrelevant because Rice
decided not to publish it.
Wilkinson said Rice and Joseph felt the paper "was not strong enough."
The document offers insight into the Bush administration's priorities
and methods in shaping a nuclear message.
The white paper was assembled by some of the same team, and at the
same time, as the speeches and talking points prepared for the
president and top officials.
A senior intelligence official said last October that the president's
speechwriters took "literary license" with intelligence, a phrase
applicable to language used by administration officials in some of the
white paper's most emotive and misleading assertions elsewhere.
The draft white paper precedes other known instances in which the Bush
administration considered the now-discredited claim that Iraq "sought
uranium oxide, an essential ingredient in the enrichment process, from
Africa."
For a speechwriter, uranium was valuable as an image because anyone
could see its connection to an atomic bomb.
Despite warnings from intelligence analysts, the uranium would return
again and again, including the Jan. 28 State of the Union address and
three other Bush administration statements that month.
Other errors and exaggerations in public White House claims were
repeated, or had their first mention, in the white paper.
Much as Blair did at Camp David, the paper attributed to U.N. arms
inspectors a statement that satellite photographs show "many signs of
the reconstruction and acceleration of the Iraqi nuclear program."
Inspectors did not say that.
The paper also quoted the first half of a sentence from a Time
magazine interview with U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix:
"You can see hundreds of new roofs in these photos."
The second half of the sentence, not quoted, was: "but you don't know
what's under them."
As Bush did, the white paper cited the IAEA's description of Iraq's
defunct nuclear program in language that appeared to be current.
The draft said, for example, that "since the beginning of the
nineties, Saddam has launched a crash program to divert nuclear
reactor fuel for . . . nuclear weapons."
The crash program began in late 1990 and ended with the war in January
1991.
The reactor fuel, save for waste products, is gone.
'Footnotes and Disclaimers'
A senior intelligence official said the White House preferred to avoid
a National Intelligence Estimate, a formal review of competing
evidence and judgments, because it knew "there were disagreements over
details in almost every aspect of the administration's case against
Iraq."
The president's advisers, the official said, did not want "a lot of
footnotes and disclaimers."
But Bush needed bipartisan support for war-making authority in
Congress.
In early September, members of the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence began asking why there had been no authoritative estimate
of the danger posed by Iraq.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) wrote Sept. 9 of his "concern that the
views of the U.S. intelligence community are not receiving adequate
attention by policymakers in both Congress and the executive branch."
When Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), then committee chairman, insisted on an
NIE in a classified letter two days later, Tenet agreed.
Explicitly intended to assist Congress in deciding whether to
authorize war, the estimate was produced in two weeks, an
extraordinary deadline for a document that usually takes months.
Tenet said in an interview that "we had covered parts of all those
programs over 10 years through NIEs and other reports, and we had a
ton of community product on all these issues."
Even so, the intelligence community was now in a position of giving
its first coordinated answer to a question that every top national
security official had already answered.
"No one outside the intelligence community told us what to say or not
to say," Tenet wrote in reply to questions for this article.
The U.S. government possessed no specific information on Iraqi efforts
to acquire enriched uranium, according to six people who participated
in preparing for the estimate.
It knew only that Iraq sought to buy equipment of the sort that years
of intelligence reports had said "may be" intended for or "could be"
used in uranium enrichment.
Richard J. Kerr, a former CIA deputy director now leading a review of
the agency's intelligence analysis about Iraq, said in an interview
that the CIA collected almost no hard information about Iraq's weapons
programs after the departure of IAEA and U.N. Special Commission, or
UNSCOM, arms inspectors during the Clinton administration.
He said that was because of a lack of spies inside Iraq.
Tenet took issue with that view, saying in an interview, "When
inspectors were pushed out in 1998, we did not sit back. . . . The
fact is we made significant professional progress."
In his written statement, he cited new evidence on biological and
missile programs, but did not mention Hussein's nuclear pursuits.
The estimate's "Key Judgment" said:
"Although we assess that Saddam does not yet have nuclear weapons or
sufficient material to make any, he remains intent on acquiring them.
Most agencies assess that Baghdad started reconstituting its nuclear
program about the time that UNSCOM inspectors departed -- December
1998."
According to Kerr, the analysts had good reasons to say that, but the
reasons were largely "inferential."
Hussein was known to have met with some weapons physicists, and
praised them as "nuclear mujaheddin."
But the CIA had "reasonably good intelligence in terms of the general
activities and whereabouts" of those scientists, said another analyst
with the relevant clearances, and knew they had generally not
reassembled into working groups.
In a report to Congress in 2001, the agency could conclude only that
some of the scientists "probably" had "continued at least low-level
theoretical R&D [research and development] associated with its nuclear
program."
Analysts knew Iraq had tried recently to buy magnets, high-speed
balancing machines, machine tools and other equipment that had some
potential for use in uranium enrichment, though no less for
conventional industry.
Even assuming the intention, the parts could not all be made to fit a
coherent centrifuge model.
The estimate acknowledged that "we lack specific information on many
key aspects" of the program, and analysts presumed they were seeing
only the tip of the iceberg.
'He Made a Name'
According to outside scientists and intelligence officials, the most
important factor in the CIA's nuclear judgment was Iraq's attempt to
buy high-strength aluminum tubes.
The tubes were the core evidence for a centrifuge program tied to
building a nuclear bomb.
Even circumstantially, the CIA reported no indication of uranium
enrichment using anything but centrifuges.
That interpretation of the tubes was a victory for the man named Joe,
who made the issue his personal crusade.
He worked in the gas centrifuge program at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory in the early 1980s.
He is not, associates said, a nuclear physicist, but an engineer whose
work involved the platform upon which centrifuges were mounted.
At some point he joined the CIA.
By the end of the 1990s, according to people who know him casually, he
worked in export controls.
Joe played an important role in discovering Iraq's plans to buy
aluminum tubes from China in 2000, with an Australian intermediary.
U.N. sanctions forbade Iraq to buy anything with potential military
applications, and members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a voluntary
alliance, include some forms of aluminum tubing on their list of
equipment that could be used for uranium enrichment.
Joe saw the tubes as centrifuge rotors that could be used to process
uranium into weapons-grade material.
In a gas centrifuge, the rotor is a thin-walled cylinder, open at both
ends, that spins at high speed under a magnet.
The device extracts the material used in a weapon from a gaseous form
of uranium.
In July 2001, about 3,000 tubes were intercepted in Jordan on their
way to Iraq, a big step forward in the agency's efforts to understand
what Iraq was trying to do.
The CIA gave Joe an award for exceptional performance, throwing its
early support to an analysis that helped change the agency's mind
about Iraq's pursuit of nuclear ambitions.
"He grabbed that information early on, and he made a name for
himself," a career U.S. government nuclear expert said.
'Stretches the Imagination'
Doubts about Joe's theory emerged quickly among the government's
centrifuge physicists.
The intercepted tubes were too narrow, long and thick-walled to fit a
known centrifuge design.
Aluminum had not been used for rotors since the 1950s.
Iraq had two centrifuge blueprints, stolen in Europe, that were far
more efficient and already known to work.
One used maraging steel, a hard steel alloy, for the rotors, the other
carbon fiber.
Joe and his supporters said the apparent drawbacks were part of Iraq's
concealment plan.
Hussein's history of covert weapons development, Tenet said in his
written statement, included "built-in cover stories."
"This is a case where different people had honorable and different
interpretations of intentions," said an Energy Department analyst who
has reviewed the raw data.
"If you go to a nuclear [counterproliferation official] and say I've
got these aluminum tubes, and it's about Iraq, his first inclination
is to say it's for nuclear use."
But the government's centrifuge scientists -- at the Energy
Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and its sister institutions
-- unanimously regarded this possibility as implausible.
In late 2001, experts at Oak Ridge asked an alumnus, Houston G. Wood
III, to review the controversy.
Wood, founder of the Oak Ridge centrifuge physics department, is
widely acknowledged to be among the most eminent living experts.
Speaking publicly for the first time, Wood said in an interview that
"it would have been extremely difficult to make these tubes into
centrifuges. It stretches the imagination to come up with a way. I do
not know any real centrifuge experts that feel differently."
As an academic, Wood said, he would not describe "anything that you
absolutely could not do."
But he said he would "like to see, if they're going to make that
claim, that they have some explanation of how you do that. Because I
don't see how you do it."
A CIA spokesman said the agency does have support for its view from
centrifuge experts.
He declined to elaborate.
In the last week of September, the development of the NIE required a
resolution of the running disagreement over the significance of the
tubes.
The Energy Department had one vote.
Four agencies -- with specialties including eavesdropping, maps and
foreign military forces -- judged that the tubes were part of a
centrifuge program that could be used for nuclear weapons.
Only the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research joined
the judgment of the Energy Department.
The estimate, as published, said that "most analysts" believed the
tubes were suitable and intended for a centrifuge cascade.
Majority votes make poor science, said Peter D. Zimmerman, a former
chief scientist at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
"In this case, the experts were at Z Division at Livermore [Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory] and in DOE intelligence here in town,
and they were convinced that no way in hell were these likely to be
centrifuge tubes," he said.
Tenet said the Department of Energy was not the only agency with
experts on the issue; the CIA consulted military battlefield rocket
experts, as well as its own centrifuge experts.
Unravelings
On Feb. 5, two weeks after Joe's Vienna briefing, Powell gave what
remains the government's most extensive account of the aluminum tubes,
in an address to the U.N. Security Council.
He did not mention the existence of the Medusa rocket or its Iraqi
equivalent, though he acknowledged disagreement among U.S.
intelligence analysts about the use of the tubes.
Powell's CIA briefers, using data originating with Joe, told him that
Iraq had "overspecified" requirements for the tubes, increasing
expense without making them more useful to rockets.
That helped persuade Powell, a confidant said, that Iraq had some
other purpose for the tubes.
"Maybe Iraqis just manufacture their conventional weapons to a higher
standard than we do, but I don't think so," Powell said in his speech.
He said different batches "seized clandestinely before they reached
Iraq" showed a "progression to higher and higher levels of
specification, including in the latest batch an anodized coating on
extremely smooth inner and outer surfaces. . . . Why would they
continue refining the specification, go to all that trouble for
something that, if it was a rocket, would soon be blown into shrapnel
when it went off?"
An anodized coating is actually a strong argument for use in rockets,
according to several scientists in and out of government.
It resists corrosion of the sort that ruined Iraq's previous rocket
supply.
To use the tubes in a centrifuge, experts told the government, Iraq
would have to remove the anodized coating.
Iraq did change some specifications from order to order, the
procurement records show, but there is not a clear progression to
higher precision.
One tube sample was rejected because its interior was unfinished, too
uneven to be used in a rocket body.
After one of Iraq's old tubes got stuck in a launcher and exploded,
Baghdad's subsequent orders asked for more precision in roundness.
U.S. and European analysts said they had obtained records showing that
Italy's Medusa rocket has had its specifications improved 10 times
since 1978.
Centrifuge experts said in interviews that the variations had little
or no significance for uranium enrichment, especially because the
CIA's theory supposes Iraq would do extensive machining to adapt the
tubes as rotors.
For rockets, however, the tubes fit perfectly.
Experts from U.S. national labs, working temporarily with U.N.
inspectors in Iraq, observed production lines for the rockets at the
Nasser factory north of Baghdad.
Iraq had run out of body casings at about the time it ordered the
aluminum tubes, according to officials familiar with the experts'
reports.
Thousands of warheads, motors and fins were crated at the assembly
lines, awaiting the arrival of tubes.
"Most U.S. experts," Powell asserted, "think they are intended to
serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium."
He said "other experts, and the Iraqis themselves," said the tubes
were really for rockets.
Wood, the centrifuge physicist, said "that was a personal slam at
everybody in DOE," the Energy Department.
"I've been grouped with the Iraqis, is what it amounts to. I just felt
that the wording of that was probably intentional, but it was also not
very kind. It did not recognize that dissent can exist."
........................................................................................
Staff writers Glenn Kessler, Dana Priest and Richard Morin and staff
researchers Lucy Shackelford, Madonna Lebling and Robert Thomason
contributed to this report.
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Harry
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