Skewed Intelligence Data in March to War in Iraq
By David Barstow, William J. Broad, and Jeff Gerth
The New York Times
Sunday 03 October 2004
In 2002, at a crucial juncture on the path to war, senior members
of the Bush administration gave a series of speeches and interviews in
which they asserted that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear
weapons program.
In a speech to veterans that August, Vice President ***** Cheney
said Mr. Hussein could have an atomic bomb "fairly soon." The next
month, Mr. Cheney told a group of Wyoming Republicans the United
States had "irrefutable evidence" - thousands of tubes made of
high-strength aluminum, tubes that the Bush administration said were
destined for clandestine Iraqi uranium centrifuges, before some were
seized at the behest of the United States.
The tubes quickly became a critical exhibit in the
administration's brief against Iraq. As the only physical evidence the
United States could brandish of Mr. Hussein's revived nuclear
ambitions, they gave credibility to the apocalyptic imagery invoked by
President Bush and his advisers. The tubes were "only really suited
for nuclear weapons programs," Condoleezza Rice, the president's
national security adviser, asserted on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002. "We don't
want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Before Ms. Rice made those remarks, though, she was aware that the
government's foremost nuclear experts had concluded that the tubes
were most likely not for nuclear weapons at all, an examination by The
New York Times has found. Months before, her staff had been told that
these experts, at the Energy Department, believed the tubes were
probably intended for small artillery rockets.
But Ms. Rice, and other senior administration officials, embraced
a disputed theory about the tubes first championed in April 2001 by a
new analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. Senior scientists
considered the theory implausible, yet in the months after 9/11, as an
administration built a case for confronting Iraq, the theory gained
currency as it rose to the top of the government.
"She was aware of the differences of opinion" the senior
administration official said of Ms. Rice in an interview authorized by
the White House. "She was also aware that at the highest level of the
intelligence community, there was great confidence that these tubes
were for centrifuges."
Ms. Rice's alarming description on CNN was in keeping with the
administration's overall treatment of the tubes. Senior administration
officials repeatedly failed to fully disclose the contrary views of
America's leading nuclear scientists, The Times found. They sometimes
overstated even the most dire intelligence assessments of the tubes,
yet minimized or rejected the strong doubts of their own experts. They
worried privately that the nuclear case was weak, but expressed sober
certitude in public.
The result was a largely one-sided presentation to the public that
did not convey the depth of evidence and argument against the
administration's most tangible proof of a revived nuclear weapons
program in Iraq.
In response to questions last week about the tubes, administration
officials emphasized two points: First, they said they had relied on
the repeated assurances of George J. Tenet, then the director of
central intelligence, that the tubes were in fact for centrifuges.
Second, they noted that the intelligence community, including the
Energy Department, largely agreed that Mr. Hussein had revived his
nuclear program.
"We understood from intelligence briefings that the aluminum tubes
were a part of the case" for nuclear reconstitution, Kevin Kellems,
director of communications for Mr. Cheney, said in a statement. But
"there were a number of other important pieces of evidence."
Furthermore, he said, the concerns about Mr. Hussein's nuclear
capabilities "followed the tenor of the intelligence we had been
hearing for some time."
It is not known when the president learned of the doubts that had
been raised about the tubes. Sean McCormack, a spokesman for Mr. Bush,
said yesterday that the president relied on the intelligence community
to assess the tubes' significance. "These judgments sometimes require
members of the intelligence community to make tough assessments about
competing interpretations of facts," he said.
Mr. Tenet declined to be interviewed. But in a statement, he said
he "made it clear" to the White House "that the case for a possible
nuclear program in Iraq was weaker than that for chemical and
biological weapons." Regarding the tubes, Mr. Tenet said "alternative
views were shared" with the administration after the intelligence
community drafted a new National Intelligence Estimate in late
September 2002.
Today, 18 months after the invasion of Iraq, investigators there
have found no evidence of hidden centrifuges or a revived nuclear
weapons program. The absence of unconventional weapons in Iraq is now
widely seen as evidence of a profound intelligence failure, of an
intelligence community blinded by "group think," false assumptions and
unreliable human sources.
Yet the tale of the tubes, pieced together through records and
interviews with senior intelligence officers, nuclear experts,
administration officials and Congressional investigators, reveals a
different failure.
Far from "group think," American nuclear and intelligence experts
argued bitterly over the tubes. A "holy war" is how one Congressional
investigator described it. But if the opinions of the nuclear experts
were seemingly disregarded at every turn, an overwhelming momentum
gathered behind the C.I.A. assessment. It was a momentum built on a
pattern of haste, secrecy, ambiguity, bureaucratic maneuver and a
persistent failure in the Bush administration and even among Democrats
in Congress to ask hard questions. That momentum gave urgency to the
call for action against Iraq.
"We have a tendency - I don't know if it's part of the American
character - to say, 'Well, we'll sit down and we'll evaluate the
evidence, we'll draw a conclusion,' " Mr. Cheney said as he discussed
the tubes in September 2002 on the NBC News program "Meet the Press."
"But we always think in terms that we've got all the evidence.
Here, we don't have all the evidence. We have 10 percent, 20 percent,
30 percent. We don't know how much. We know we have a part of the
picture. And that part of the picture tells us that he is, in fact,
actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."
Joe Raises the Tube Issue
Throughout the 1990's, United States intelligence agencies were
deeply preoccupied with the status of Iraq's nuclear weapons program,
and with good reason.
After the Persian Gulf war in 1991, arms inspectors discovered
that Iraq had been far closer to building an atomic bomb than even the
worst-case estimates had envisioned. And no one believed that Saddam
Hussein had abandoned his nuclear ambitions. To the contrary, in one
secret assessment after another, the agencies concluded that Iraq was
conducting low-level theoretical research and quietly plotting to
resume work on nuclear weapons.
But at the start of the Bush administration, the intelligence
agencies also agreed that Iraq had not in fact resumed its nuclear
weapons program. Iraq's nuclear infrastructure, they concluded, had
been dismantled by sanctions and inspections. In short, Mr. Hussein's
nuclear ambitions appear to have been contained.
Then Iraq started shopping for tubes.
According to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, the
agencies learned in early 2001 of a plan by Iraq to buy 60,000
high-strength aluminum tubes from Hong Kong.
The tubes were made from 7075-T6 aluminum, an extremely hard alloy
that made them potentially suitable as rotors in a uranium centrifuge.
Properly designed, such tubes are strong enough to spin at the
terrific speeds needed to convert uranium gas into enriched uranium,
an essential ingredient of an atomic bomb. For this reason,
international rules prohibited Iraq from importing certain sizes of
7075-T6 aluminum tubes; it was also why a new C.I.A. analyst named Joe
quickly sounded the alarm.
At the C.I.A.'s request, The Times agreed to use only Joe's first
name; the agency said publishing his full name could hinder his
ability to operate overseas.
Joe graduated from the University of Kentucky in the late 1970's
with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, then joined the
Goodyear Atomic Corporation, which dispatched him to Oak Ridge, Tenn.,
a federal complex that specializes in uranium and national security
research.
Joe went to work on a new generation of centrifuges. Many European
models stood no more than 10 feet tall. The American centrifuges
loomed 40 feet high, and Joe's job was to learn how to test and
operate them. But when the project was canceled in 1985, Joe spent the
next decade performing hazard analyses for nuclear reactors, gaseous
diffusion plants and oil refineries.
In 1997, Joe transferred to a national security complex at Oak
Ridge known as Y-12, his entry into intelligence work. His assignment
was to track global sales of material used in nuclear arms. He retired
after two years, taking a buyout with hundreds of others at Oak Ridge,
and moved to the C.I.A.
The agency's ability to assess nuclear intelligence had markedly
declined after the cold war, and Joe's appointment was part of an
effort to regain lost expertise. He was assigned to a division
eventually known as Winpac, for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation
and Arms Control. Winpac had hundreds of employees, but only a dozen
or so with a technical background in nuclear arms and fuel production.
None had Joe's hands-on experience operating centrifuges.
Suddenly, Joe's work was ending up in classified intelligence
reports being read in the White House. Indeed, his analysis was the
primary basis for one of the agency's first reports on the tubes,
which went to senior members of the Bush administration on April 10,
2001. The tubes, the report asserted, "have little use other than for
a uranium enrichment program."
This alarming assessment was immediately challenged by the Energy
Department, which builds centrifuges and runs the government's nuclear
weapons complex.
The next day, Energy Department officials ticked off a long list
of reasons why the tubes did not appear well suited for centrifuges.
Simply put, the analysis concluded that the tubes were the wrong size
- too narrow, too heavy, too long - to be of much practical use in a
centrifuge.
What was more, the analysis reasoned, if the tubes were part of a
secret, high-risk venture to build a nuclear bomb, why were the Iraqis
haggling over prices with suppliers all around the world? And why
weren't they shopping for all the other sensitive equipment needed for
centrifuges?
All fine questions. But if the tubes were not for a centrifuge,
what were they for?
Within weeks, the Energy Department experts had an answer.
It turned out, they reported, that Iraq had for years used
high-strength aluminum tubes to make combustion chambers for slim
rockets fired from launcher pods. Back in 1996, inspectors from the
International Atomic Energy Agency had even examined some of these
tubes, also made of 7075-T6 aluminum, at a military complex, the
Nasser metal fabrication plant in Baghdad, where the Iraqis
acknowledged making rockets. According to the international agency,
the rocket tubes, some 66,000 of them, were 900 millimeters in length,
with a diameter of 81 millimeters and walls 3.3 millimeters thick.
The tubes now sought by Iraq had precisely the same dimensions - a
perfect match.
This finding was published May 9, 2001, in the Daily Intelligence
Highlight, a secret Energy Department newsletter published on
Intelink, a Web site for the intelligence community and the White
House.
Joe and his Winpac colleagues at the C.I.A. were not persuaded.
Yes, they conceded, the tubes could be used as rocket casings. But
this made no sense, they argued in a new report, because Iraq wanted
tubes made at tolerances that "far exceed any known conventional
weapons." In other words, Iraq was demanding a level of precision
craftsmanship unnecessary for ordinary mass-produced rockets.
More to the point, these analysts had hit on a competing theory:
that the tubes' dimensions matched those used in an early uranium
centrifuge developed in the 1950's by a German scientist, Gernot
Zippe. Most centrifuge designs are highly classified; this one,
though, was readily available in science reports.
Thus, well before Sept. 11, 2001, the debate within the
intelligence community was already neatly framed: Were the tubes for
rockets or centrifuges?
Experts Attack Joe's Case
It was a simple question with enormous implications. If Mr.
Hussein acquired nuclear weapons, American officials feared, he would
wield them to menace the Middle East. So the tube question was
critical, yet none too easy to answer. The United States had few spies
in Iraq, and certainly none who knew Mr. Hussein's plans for the
tubes.
But the tubes themselves could yield many secrets. A centrifuge is
an intricate device. Not any old tube would do. Careful inquiry might
answer the question.
The intelligence community embarked on an ambitious international
operation to intercept the tubes before they could get to Iraq. The
big break came in June 2001: a shipment was seized in Jordan.
At the Energy Department, those examining the tubes included
scientists who had spent decades designing and working on centrifuges,
and intelligence officers steeped in the tricky business of tracking
the nuclear ambitions of America's enemies. They included Dr. Jon A.
Kreykes, head of Oak Ridge's national security advanced technology
group; Dr. Duane F. Starr, an expert on nuclear proliferation threats;
and Dr. Edward Von Halle, a retired Oak Ridge nuclear expert. Dr.
Houston G. Wood III, a professor of engineering at the University of
Virginia who had helped design the 40-foot American centrifuge,
advised the team and consulted with Dr. Zippe.
On questions about nuclear centrifuges, this was unambiguously the
A-Team of the intelligence community, many experts say.
On Aug. 17, 2001, weeks before the twin towers fell, the team
published a secret Technical Intelligence Note, a detailed analysis
that laid out its doubts about the tubes' suitability for centrifuges.
First, in size and material, the tubes were very different from
those Iraq had used in its centrifuge prototypes before the first gulf
war. Those models used tubes that were nearly twice as wide and made
of exotic materials that performed far better than aluminum. "Aluminum
was a huge step backwards," Dr. Wood recalled.
In fact, the team could find no centrifuge machines "deployed in a
production environment" that used such narrow tubes. Their walls were
three times too thick for "favorable use" in a centrifuge, the team
wrote. They were also anodized, meaning they had a special coating to
protect them from weather. Anodized tubes, the team pointed out, are
"not consistent" with a uranium centrifuge because the coating can
produce bad reactions with uranium gas.
In other words, if Joe and his Winpac colleagues were right, it
meant that Iraq had chosen to forsake years of promising centrifuge
work and instead start from scratch, with inferior material built to
less-than-optimal dimensions.
The Energy Department experts did not think this made much sense.
They concluded that using the tubes in centrifuges "is credible but
unlikely, and a rocket production is the much more likely end use for
these tubes." Similar conclusions were being reached by Britain's
intelligence service and experts at the International Atomic Energy
Agency, a United Nations body.
Unlike Joe, experts at the international agency had worked with
Zippe centrifuges, and they spent hours with him explaining why they
believed his analysis was flawed. They pointed out errors in his
calculations. They noted design discrepancies. They also sent reports
challenging the centrifuge claim to American government experts
through the embassy in Vienna, a senior official said.
Likewise, Britain's experts believed the tubes would need
"substantial re-engineering" to work in centrifuges, according to
Britain's review of its prewar intelligence. Their experts found it
"paradoxical" that Iraq would order such finely crafted tubes only to
radically rebuild each one for a centrifuge. Yes, it was theoretically
possible, but as an Energy Department analyst later told Senate
investigators, it was also theoretically possible to "turn your new
Yugo into a Cadillac."
In late 2001, intelligence analysts at the State Department also
took issue with Joe's work in reports prepared for Secretary of State
Colin L. Powell. Joe was "very convinced, but not very convincing,"
recalled Greg Thielmann, then director of strategic, proliferation and
military affairs in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
By year's end, Energy Department analysts published a classified
report that even more firmly rejected the theory that the tubes could
work as rotors in a 1950's Zippe centrifuge. These particular Zippe
centrifuges, they noted, were especially ill suited for bomb making.
They were a prototype designed for laboratory experiments, operating
as single units. To produce enough enriched uranium to make just one
bomb a year, Iraq would need up to 16,000 of them working in concert,
a challenge for even the most sophisticated centrifuge plants.
Iraq had never made more than a dozen centrifuge prototypes. Half
failed when rotors broke. Of the rest, one actually worked to enrich
uranium, said Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, who once ran Iraq's centrifuge
program.
The Energy Department team concluded it was "unlikely that anyone"
could build a centrifuge site capable of producing significant amounts
of enriched uranium "based on these tubes." One analyst summed it up
this way: the tubes were so poorly suited for centrifuges, he told
Senate investigators, that if Iraq truly wanted to use them this way,
"we should just give them the tubes."
Enter Cheney
In the months after Sept. 11, 2001, as the Bush administration
devised a strategy to fight Al Qaeda, Vice President ***** Cheney
immersed himself in the world of top-secret threat assessments. Bob
Woodward, in his book "Plan of Attack," described Mr. Cheney as the
administration's new "self-appointed special examiner of worst-case
scenarios," and it was a role that fit.
Mr. Cheney had grappled with national security threats for three
decades, first as President Gerald R. Ford's chief of staff, later as
secretary of defense for the first President Bush. He was on intimate
terms with the intelligence community, 15 spy agencies that frequently
feuded over the significance of raw intelligence. He knew well their
record of getting it wrong (the Bay of Pigs) and underestimating
threats (Mr. Hussein's pre-1991 nuclear program) and failing to
connect the dots (Sept. 11).
As a result, the vice president was not simply a passive recipient
of intelligence analysis. He was known as a man who asked hard,
skeptical questions, a man who paid attention to detail. "In my office
I have a picture of John Adams, the first vice president," Mr. Cheney
said in one of his first speeches as vice president. "Adams liked to
say, 'The facts are stubborn things.' Whatever the issue, we are going
to deal with facts and show a decent regard for other points of view."
With the Taliban routed in Afghanistan after Sept. 11, Mr. Cheney
and his aides began to focus on intelligence assessments of Saddam
Hussein. Mr. Cheney had long argued for more forceful action to topple
Mr. Hussein. But in January 2002, according to Mr. Woodward's book,
the C.I.A. told Mr. Cheney that Mr. Hussein could not be removed with
covert action alone. His ouster, the agency said, would take an
invasion, which would require building a convincing public case that
Iraq posed a threat to the United States.
The evidence for that case was buried in classified intelligence
files. Mr. Cheney and his aides began to meet repeatedly with analysts
who specialized in Iraq and unconventional weapons. They wanted to
know about any Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda and Baghdad's ability to make
unconventional weapons.
"There's no question they had a point of view, but there was no
attempt to get us to hew to a particular point of view ourselves, or
to come to a certain conclusion," the deputy director of analysis at
Winpac told the Senate Intelligence Committee. "It was trying to
figure out, why do we come to this conclusion, what was the evidence.
A lot of questions were asked, probing questions."
Of all the worst-case possibilities, the most terrifying was the
idea that Mr. Hussein might slip a nuclear weapon to terrorists, and
Mr. Cheney and his staff zeroed in on Mr. Hussein's nuclear ambitions.
Mr. Cheney, for example, read a Feb. 12, 2002, report from the
Defense Intelligence Agency about Iraq's reported attempts to buy 500
tons of yellowcake, a uranium concentrate, from Niger, according to
the Senate Intelligence Committee report. Many American intelligence
analysts did not put much stock in the Niger report. Mr. Cheney
promptly pressed for more information.
At the same time, a senior intelligence official said, the agency
was fielding repeated requests from Mr. Cheney's office for
intelligence about the tubes, including updates on Iraq's continuing
efforts to procure thousands more after the seizure in Jordan.
"Remember," Dr. David A. Kay, the chief American arms inspector
after the war, said in an interview, "the tubes were the only piece of
physical evidence about the Iraqi weapons programs that they had."
In March 2002, Mr. Cheney traveled to Europe and the Middle East
to build support for a confrontation with Iraq. It is not known
whether he mentioned Niger or the tubes in his meetings. But on his
return, he made it clear that he had repeatedly discussed Mr. Hussein
and the nuclear threat.
"He is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time," Mr. Cheney
asserted on CNN.
At the time, the C.I.A. had not reached so firm a conclusion. But
on March 12, the day Mr. Cheney landed in the Middle East, he and
other senior administration officials had been sent two C.I.A. reports
about the tubes. Each cited the tubes as evidence that "Iraq currently
may be trying to reconstitute its gas centrifuge program."
Neither report, however, mentioned that leading centrifuge experts
at the Energy Department strongly disagreed, according to
Congressional officials who have read the reports.
What White House is Told
As the Senate Intelligence Committee report made clear, the
American intelligence community "is not a level playing field when it
comes to the competition of ideas in intelligence analysis."
The C.I.A. has a distinct edge: "unique access to policymakers and
unique control of intelligence reporting," the report found. The
Presidential Daily Briefs, for example, are prepared and presented by
agency analysts; the agency's director is the president's principal
intelligence adviser. This allows agency analysts to control the
presentation of information to policy makers "without having to
explain dissenting views or defend their analysis from potential
challenges," the committee's report said.
This problem, the report said, was "particularly evident" with the
C.I.A.'s analysis of the tubes, when agency analysts "lost objectivity
and in several cases took action that improperly excluded useful
expertise from the intelligence debate." In interviews, Senate
investigators said the agency's written assessments did a poor job of
describing the debate over the intelligence.
From April 2001 to September 2002, the agency wrote at least 15
reports on the tubes. Many were sent only to high-level policy makers,
including President Bush, and did not circulate to other intelligence
agencies. None have been released, though some were described in the
Senate's 511-page report.
Several senior C.I.A. officials insisted that those reports did
describe at least in general terms the intelligence debate. "You don't
go into all that detail but you do try to evince it when you write
your current product," one agency official said.
But several Congressional and intelligence officials with access
to the 15 assessments said not one of them informed senior policy
makers of the Energy Department's dissent. They described a series of
reports, some with ominous titles, that failed to convey either the
existence or the substance of the intensifying debate.
Over and over, the reports restated Joe's main conclusions for the
C.I.A. - that the tubes matched the 1950's Zippe centrifuge design and
were built to specifications that "exceeded any known conventional
weapons application."
They did not state what Energy Department experts had noted - that
many common industrial items, even aluminum cans, were made to
specifications as good or better than the tubes sought by Iraq. Nor
did the reports acknowledge a significant error in Joe's claim - that
the tubes "matched" those used in a Zippe centrifuge.
The tubes sought by Iraq had a wall thickness of 3.3 millimeters.
When Energy Department experts checked with Dr. Zippe, a step Joe did
not take, they learned that the walls of Zippe tubes did not exceed
1.1 millimeters, a substantial difference.
"They never lay out the other case," one Congressional official
said of these C.I.A.'s assessments.
The Senate report provides only a partial picture of the agency's
communications with the White House. In an arrangement endorsed by
both parties, the Intelligence Committee agreed to delay an
examination of whether White House descriptions of Iraq's military
capabilities were "substantiated by intelligence information." As a
result, Senate investigators were not permitted to interview White
House officials about what they knew of the tubes debate and when they
knew it.
But in interviews, C.I.A. and administration officials disclosed
that the dissenting views were repeatedly discussed in meetings and
telephone calls.
One senior official at the agency said its "fundamental approach"
was to tell policy makers about dissenting views. Another senior
official acknowledged that some of their agency's reports "weren't as
well caveated as, in retrospect, they should have been." But he added,
"There was certainly nothing that was hidden."
Four agency officials insisted that Winpac analysts repeatedly
explained the contrasting assessments during briefings with senior
National Security Council officials who dealt with nuclear
proliferation issues. "We think we were reasonably clear about this,"
a senior C.I.A. official said.
A senior administration official confirmed that Winpac was indeed
candid about the differing views. The official, who recalled at least
a half dozen C.I.A. briefings on tubes, said he knew by late 2001 that
there were differing views on the tubes. "To the best of my knowledge,
he never hid anything from me," the official said of his counterpart
at Winpac.
This official said he also spoke at least once to senior officials
at the Department of Energy about the tubes, and a spokeswoman for the
department said in a written statement that the agency "strongly
conveyed its viewpoint to senior policy makers."
But if senior White House officials understood the department's
main arguments against the tubes, they also took into account its
caveats. "As far as I know," the senior administration official said,
"D.O.E. never concluded that these tubes could not be used for
centrifuges."
A Referee is Ignored
Over the summer of 2002, the White House secretly refined plans to
invade Iraq and debated whether to seek more United Nations
inspections. At the same time, in response to a White House request in
May, C.I.A. officials were quietly working on a report that would lay
out for the public declassified evidence of Iraq's reported
unconventional weapons and ties to terror groups.
That same summer the tubes debate continued to rage. The primary
antagonists were the C.I.A. and the Energy Department, with other
intelligence agencies drawn in on either side.
Much of the strife centered on Joe. At first glance, he seemed an
unlikely target. He held a relatively junior position, and according
to the C.I.A. he did not write the vast majority of the agency's
reports on the tubes. He has never met Mr. Cheney. His one trip to the
White House was to take his family on the public tour.
But he was, as one staff member on the Senate Intelligence
Committee put it, "the ringleader" of a small group of Winpac analysts
who were convinced that the tubes were destined for centrifuges. His
views carried special force within the agency because he was the only
Winpac analyst with experience operating uranium centrifuges. In
meetings with other intelligence agencies, he often took the lead in
arguing the technical basis for the agency's conclusions.
"Very few people have the technical knowledge to independently
arrive at the conclusion he did," said Dr. Kay, the weapons inspector,
when asked to explain Joe's influence.
Without naming him, the Senate Intelligence Committee's report
repeatedly questioned Joe's competence and integrity. It portrayed him
as so determined to prove his theory that he twisted test results,
ignored factual discrepancies and excluded dissenting views.
The Senate report, for example, challenged his decision not to
consult the Energy Department on tests designed to see if the tubes
were strong enough for centrifuges. Asked why he did not seek their
help, Joe told the committee: "Because we funded it. It was our
testing. We were trying to prove some things that we wanted to prove
with the testing." The Senate report singled out this comment for
special criticism, saying, "The committee believes that such an effort
should never have been intended to prove what the C.I.A. wanted to
prove."
Joe's superiors strongly defend his work and say his words were
taken out of context. They describe him as diligent and professional,
an open-minded analyst willing to go the extra mile to test his
theories. "Part of the job of being an analyst is to evaluate
alternative hypotheses and possibilities, to build a case, think of
alternatives," a senior agency official said. "That's what Joe did in
this case. If he turned out to be wrong, that's not an offense. He was
expected to be wrong occasionally."
Still, the bureaucratic infighting was now so widely known that
even the Australian government was aware of it. "U.S. agencies differ
on whether aluminum tubes, a dual-use item sought by Iraq, were meant
for gas centrifuges," Australia's intelligence services wrote in a
July 2002 assessment. The same report said that the tubes evidence was
"patchy and inconclusive."
There was a mechanism, however, to resolve the dispute. It was
called the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, a secret body
of experts drawn from across the federal government. For a half
century, Jaeic (pronounced jake) has been called on to resolve
disputes and give authoritative assessments about nuclear
intelligence. The committee had specifically assessed the Iraqi
nuclear threat in 1989, 1997 and 1999. An Energy Department expert was
the committee's chairman in 2002, and some department officials say
the C.I.A. opposed calling in Jaeic to mediate the tubes fight.
Not so, agency officials said. In July 2002, they insist, they
were the first intelligence agency to seek Jaeic's intervention. "I
personally was concerned about the extent of the community's
disagreement on this and the fact that we weren't getting very far," a
senior agency official recalled.
The committee held a formal session in early August to discuss the
debate, with more than a dozen experts on both sides in attendance. A
second meeting was scheduled for later in August but was postponed. A
third meeting was set for early September; it never happened either.
"We were O.B.E. - overcome by events," an official involved in the
proceedings recalled.
White House Makes a Move
"The case of Saddam Hussein, a sworn enemy of our country,
requires a candid appraisal of the facts," Mr. Cheney said on Aug. 26,
2002, at the outset of an address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars
national convention in Nashville.
Warning against "wishful thinking or willful blindness," Mr.
Cheney used the speech to lay out a rationale for pre-emptive action
against Iraq. Simply resuming United Nations inspections, he argued,
could give "false comfort" that Mr. Hussein was contained.
"We now know Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear
weapons," he declared, words that quickly made headlines worldwide.
"Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons
fairly soon. Just how soon, we cannot really gauge. Intelligence is an
uncertain business, even in the best of circumstances."
But the world, Mr. Cheney warned, could ill afford to once again
underestimate Iraq's progress.
"Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop
10 percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be
expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of
a great portion of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten
America's friends throughout the region, and subject the United States
or any other nation to nuclear blackmail."
A week later President Bush announced that he would ask Congress
for authorization to oust Mr. Hussein. He also met that day with
senior members of the House and Senate, some of whom expressed concern
that the administration had yet to show the American people tangible
evidence of an imminent threat. The fact that Mr. Hussein gassed his
own people in the 1980's, they argued, was not sufficient evidence of
a threat to the United States in 2002.
President Bush got the message. He directed Mr. Cheney to give the
public and Congress a more complete picture of the latest intelligence
on Iraq.
In his Nashville speech, Mr. Cheney had not mentioned the aluminum
tubes or any other fresh intelligence when he said, "We now know that
Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." The one
specific source he did cite was Hussein Kamel al-Majid, a son-in-law
of Mr. Hussein's who defected in 1994 after running Iraq's chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons programs. But Mr. Majid told American
intelligence officials in 1995 that Iraq's nuclear program had been
dismantled. What's more, Mr. Majid could not have had any insight into
Mr. Hussein's current nuclear activities: he was assassinated in 1996
on his return to Iraq.
The day after President Bush announced he was seeking
Congressional authorization, Mr. Cheney and George J. Tenet, director
of the C.I.A., traveled to Capitol Hill to brief the four top
Congressional leaders. After the 90-minute session, J. Dennis Hastert,
the House speaker, told Fox News that Mr. Cheney had provided new
information about unconventional weapons, and Fox went on to report
that one source said the new intelligence described "just how
dangerously close Saddam Hussein has come to developing a nuclear
bomb."
Tom Daschle, the South Dakota Democrat and Senate majority leader,
was more cautious. "What has changed over the course of the last 10
years, that brings this country to the belief that it has to act in a
pre-emptive fashion in invading Iraq?" he asked.
A few days later, on Sept. 8., the lead article on Page 1 of The
New York Times gave the first detailed account of the aluminum tubes.
The article cited unnamed senior administration officials who insisted
that the dimensions, specifications and numbers of tubes sought showed
that they were intended for a nuclear weapons program.
"The closer he gets to a nuclear capability, the more credible is
his threat to use chemical and biological weapons, " a senior
administration official was quoted as saying. "Nuclear weapons are his
hole card."
The article gave no hint of a debate over the tubes.
The White House did much to increase the impact of The Times'
article. The morning the article was published, Mr. Cheney went on the
NBC News program "Meet the Press" and confirmed when asked that the
tubes were the most alarming evidence behind the administration's view
that Iraq had resumed its nuclear weapons program. The tubes, he said,
had "raised our level of concern." Ms. Rice, the national security
adviser, went on CNN the same day and said the tubes "are only really
suited for nuclear weapons programs."
Neither official mentioned that the nation's top nuclear design
experts believed overwhelmingly that the tubes were poorly suited for
centrifuges.
Mr. Cheney, who has a history of criticizing officials who
disclose classified information, typically refuses to comment when
asked about secret intelligence. Yet on this day, with a Gallup poll
showing that 58 percent of Americans did not believe President Bush
had done enough to explain why the United States should act against
Iraq, Mr. Cheney spoke openly about one of the closest held secrets
regarding Iraq. Not only did Mr. Cheney draw attention to the tubes;
he did so with a certitude that could not be found in even the
C.I.A.'s assessments. On "Meet the Press," Mr. Cheney said he knew
"for sure" and "in fact" and "with absolute certainty" that Mr.
Hussein was buying equipment to build a nuclear weapon.
"He has reconstituted his nuclear program," Mr. Cheney said
flatly.
But in the C.I.A. reports, evidence "suggested" or "could mean" or
"indicates" - a word used widely in a report issued just weeks
earlier. Little if anything was asserted with absolute certainty. The
intelligence community had not yet concluded that Iraq had indeed
reconstituted its nuclear program.
Mr. Kellems, Mr. Cheney's spokesman, said, "The vice president's
public statements have reflected the evolving judgment of the
intelligence community."
The C.I.A. routinely checks presidential speeches that draw on
intelligence reports. This is how intelligence professionals pull
politicians back from factual errors. One such opportunity came soon
after Mr. Cheney's appearance on "Meet the Press." On Sept. 11, 2002,
the White House asked the agency to clear for possible presidential
use a passage on Iraq's nuclear program. The passage included this
sentence: "Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength
aluminum tubes used in centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear
weapons."
The agency did not ask speechwriters to make clear that
centrifuges were but one possible use, that intelligence experts were
divided and that the tubes also matched those used in Iraqi rockets.
In fact, according to the Senate's investigation, the agency suggested
no changes at all.
The next day President Bush used virtually identical language when
he cited the aluminum tubes in an address to the United Nations
General Assembly.
Dissent, but to Little Effect
The administration's talk of clandestine centrifuges, nuclear
blackmail and mushroom clouds had a powerful political effect,
particularly on senators who were facing fall election campaigns.
"When you hear about nuclear weapons, this is the national security
knock-out punch," said Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon who
sits on the Intelligence Committee and ultimately voted against
authorizing war.
Even so, it did not take long for questions to surface over the
administration's claims about Mr. Hussein's nuclear capabilities. As
it happened, Senator Dianne Feinstein, another Democratic member of
the Intelligence Committee, had visited the International Atomic
Energy Agency in Vienna in August 2002. Officials there, she later
recalled, told her they saw no signs of a revived nuclear weapons
program in Iraq.
At that point, the tubes debate was in its 16th month. Yet Mr.
Tenet, of the C.I.A., the man most responsible for briefing President
Bush on intelligence, told the committee that he was unaware until
that September of the profound disagreement over critical evidence
that Mr. Bush was citing to world leaders as justification for war.
Even now, committee members from both parties express baffled
anger at this possibility. How could he not know? "I don't even
understand it," Olympia Snowe, a Republican senator from Maine, said
in an interview. "I cannot comprehend the failures in judgment or
breakdowns in communication."
Mr. Tenet told Senate investigators that he did not expect to
learn of dissenting opinions "until the issue gets joined" at the
highest levels of the intelligence community. But if Mr. Tenet's lack
of knowledge meant the president was given incomplete information
about the tubes, there was still plenty of time for the White House to
become fully informed.
Yet so far, Senate investigators say, they have found little
evidence the White House tried to find out why so many experts
disputed the C.I.A. tubes theory. If anything, administration
officials minimized the divide.
On Sept. 13, The Times made the first public mention of the tubes
debate in the sixth paragraph of an article on Page A13. In it an
unnamed senior administration official dismissed the debate as a
"footnote, not a split." Citing another unnamed administration
official, the story reported that the "best technical experts and
nuclear scientists at laboratories like Oak Ridge supported the C.I.A.
assessments."
As a senior Oak Ridge official pointed out to the Intelligence
Committee, "the vast majority of scientists and nuclear experts" in
the Energy Department's laboratories in fact disagreed with the
agency. But on Sept. 13, the day the article appeared, the Energy
Department sent a directive forbidding employees from discussing the
subject with reporters.
The Energy Department, in a written statement, said that it was
"completely appropriate" to remind employees of the need to protect
nuclear secrets and that it had made no effort "to quash dissent."
In closed hearings that month, though, Congress began to hear
testimony about the debate. Several Democrats said in interviews that
secrecy rules had prevented them from speaking out about the gap
between the administration's view of the tubes and the more benign
explanations described in classified testimony.
One senior C.I.A. official recalled cautioning members of Congress
in a closed session not to speak publicly about the possibility that
the tubes were for rockets. "If people start talking about that and
the Iraqis see that people are saying rocket bodies, that will
automatically become their explanation whenever anyone goes to Iraq,"
the official said in an interview.
So while administration officials spoke freely about the agency's
theory, the evidence that best challenged this view remained almost
entirely off limits for public debate.
In late September, the C.I.A. sent policymakers its most detailed
classified report on the tubes. For the first time, an agency report
acknowledged that "some in the intelligence community" believed
rockets were "more likely end uses" for the tubes, according to
officials who have seen the report.
Meanwhile, at the Energy Department, scientists were startled to
find senior White House officials embracing a view of the tubes they
considered thoroughly discredited. "I was really shocked in 2002 when
I saw it was still there," Dr. Wood said of the centrifuge claim. "I
thought it had been put to bed."
Members of the Energy Department team took a highly unusual step:
They began working quietly with a Washington arms-control group, the
Institute for Science and International Security, to help the group
inform the public about the debate, one team member and the group's
president, David Albright, said.
On Sept. 23, the institute issued the first in series of lengthy
reports that repeated some of the Energy Department's arguments
against the C.I.A. analysis, though no classified ones. Still, after
more than 16 months of secret debate, it was the first public airing
of facts that undermined the most alarming suggestions about Iraq's
nuclear threat.
The reports got little attention, partly because reporters did not
realize they had been done with the cooperation of top Energy
Department experts. The Washington Post ran a brief article about the
findings on Page A18. Many major newspapers, including The Times, ran
nothing at all.
Scrambling for an 'Estimate'
Soon after Mr. Cheney's appearance on "Meet the Press," Democratic
senators began pressing for a new National Intelligence Estimate on
Iraq, terrorism and unconventional weapons. A National Intelligence
Estimate is a classified document that is supposed to reflect the
combined judgment of the entire intelligence community. The last such
estimate on Iraq had been done in 2000.
Asked when Mr. Cheney became aware of the disagreements over the
tubes, Mr. Kellems, his spokesman, said, "The vice president knew
about the debate at about the time of the National Intelligence
Estimate."
Most estimates take months to complete. But this one had to be
done in days, in time for an October vote on a war resolution. There
was little time for review or reflection, and no time for Jaeic, the
joint committee, to reconcile deep analytical differences.
This was a potentially thorny obstacle for those writing the
nuclear section: What do you do when the nation's nuclear experts
strongly doubt the linchpin evidence behind the C.I.A.'s claims that
Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear weapons program?
The Energy Department helped solve the problem. In meetings on the
estimate, senior department intelligence officials said that while
they still did not believe the tubes were for centrifuges, they
nonetheless could agree that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear
weapons capability.
Several senior scientists inside the department said they were
stunned by this stance; they saw no compelling evidence of a revived
nuclear program. Some laboratory officials blamed time pressure and
inexperience. Thomas S. Ryder, the department's representative at the
meetings, had been acting director of the department's intelligence
unit for only five months. "A heck of a nice guy but not savvy on
technical issues," is the way one senior nuclear official described
Mr. Ryder, who declined comment. Mr. Ryder's position was more
alarming than prior assessments from the Energy Department. In an
August 2001 intelligence paper, department analysts warned of
suspicious activities in Iraq that "could be preliminary steps" toward
reviving a centrifuge program. In July 2002 an Energy Department
report, "Nuclear Reconstitution Efforts Underway?", noted that several
developments, including Iraq's suspected bid to buy yellowcake uranium
from Niger, suggested Baghdad was "seeking to reconstitute" a nuclear
weapons program.
According to intelligence officials who took part in the meetings,
Mr. Ryder justified his department's now firm position on nuclear
reconstitution in large part by citing the Niger reports. Many C.I.A.
analysts considered that intelligence suspect, as did analysts at the
State Department.
Nevertheless, the estimate's authors seized on the Energy
Department's position to avoid the entire tubes debate, which was now
relegated to a 10-page annex. The estimate would instead emphasize
that the C.I.A. and the Energy Department both agreed that Mr. Hussein
was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program. Only the closest reader
would see that each agency was basing its assessment in large measure
on evidence the other considered suspect.
On Oct. 2, nine days before the Senate vote on the war resolution,
the new National Intelligence Estimate was delivered to the
Intelligence Committee. The most significant change from past
estimates dealt with nuclear weapons; the new one agreed with Mr.
Cheney that Iraq was in aggressive pursuit of the atomic bomb.
Today, the Intelligence Committee's report makes clear, that
estimate stands as one of the most flawed documents in the history of
American intelligence. The committee concluded unanimously that almost
every major finding in the estimate was wrong, unfounded or overblown.
This was especially true of the nuclear section.
Estimates express their most important findings with high,
moderate or low confidence levels. This one claimed "moderate
confidence" on how fast Iraq could have a bomb, but "high confidence"
that Baghdad was rebuilding its nuclear program. And the tubes were
the leading and most detailed evidence cited.
According to the committee, the passages on the tubes, which
adopted much of the C.I.A. analysis, were misleading and riddled with
factual errors. The estimate, for example, included a chart intended
to show that the dimensions of the tubes closely matched a Zippe
centrifuge. Yet the chart omitted the dimensions of Iraq's
81-millimeter rocket, which precisely matched the tubes.
The estimate cited Iraq's alleged willingness to pay top dollar
for the tubes, up to $17.50 each, as evidence they were for secret
centrifuges. But Defense Department rocket engineers told Senate
investigators that 7075-T6 aluminum is "the material of choice for
low-cost rocket systems."
The estimate also asserted that 7075-T6 tubes were "poor choices"
for rockets. In fact, similar tubes were used in rockets from several
countries, including the United States, and in an Italian rocket, the
Medusa, which Iraq had copied.
Beyond tubes, the estimate cited several other "key judgments"
that supported its assessment. The committee found this intelligence
just as flawed.
The estimate, for example, pointed to Iraq's purchases of magnets,
balancing machines and machine tools, all of which could be used in a
nuclear program. But each item also had legitimate non-nuclear uses,
and there was no credible intelligence whatsoever showing they were
for a nuclear program.
The estimate said Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission was building new
production facilities for nuclear weapons. The Senate found this claim
was based on a single operative's report, which described how the
commission had constructed one headquarters building and planned "a
new high-level polytechnic school."
Finally, the estimate stated that many nuclear scientists had been
reassigned to the A.E.C. The Senate found nothing to back this
conclusion. It did, though, discover a 2001 report in which a
commission employee complained that Iraq's nuclear program "had been
stalled since the gulf war."
Such "key judgments" are supposed to reflect the very best
American intelligence. (The Niger intelligence, for example, was
considered too shaky to be included as a key judgment.) Yet as they
studied raw intelligence reports, those involved in the Senate
investigation came to a sickening realization. "We kept looking at the
intelligence and saying, 'My God, there's nothing here,' " one
official recalled.
The Vote for War
Soon after the National Intelligence Estimate was completed, Mr.
Bush delivered a speech in Cincinnati in which he described the "grave
threat" that Iraq and its "arsenal of terror" posed to the United
States. He dwelled longest on nuclear weapons, reviewing much of the
evidence outlined in the estimate. The C.I.A. had warned him away from
mentioning Niger.
"Facing clear evidence of peril," the president concluded, "we
cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in
the form of a mushroom cloud."
Four days later, on Oct. 11, the Senate voted 77-23 to give Mr.
Bush broad authority to invade Iraq. The resolution stated that Iraq
posed "a continuing threat" to the United States by, among other
things, "actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability."
Many senators who voted for the resolution emphasized the nuclear
threat.
"The great danger is a nuclear one," Senator Feinstein, the
California Democrat, said on the Senate floor.
But Senator Bob Graham, then chairman of the Intelligence
Committee, said he voted against the resolution in part because of
doubts about the tubes. "It reinforced in my mind pre-existing
questions I had about the unreliability of the intelligence community,
especially the C.I.A.," Mr. Graham, a Florida Democrat, said in an
interview.
At the Democratic convention in Boston this summer, Senator John
Kerry pledged that should he be elected president, "I will ask hard
questions and demand hard evidence." But in October 2002, when the
Senate voted on Iraq, Mr. Kerry had not read the National Intelligence
Estimate, but instead had relied on a briefing from Mr. Tenet, a
spokeswoman said. "According to the C.I.A.'s report, all U.S.
intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons," Mr.
Kerry said then, explaining his vote. "There is little question that
Saddam Hussein wants to develop nuclear weapons."
The report cited by Mr. Kerry, an unclassified white paper, said
nothing about the tubes debate except that "some" analysts believed
the tubes were "probably intended" for conventional arms.
"It is common knowledge that Congress does not have the same
access as the executive branch," Brooke Anderson, a Kerry spokeswoman,
said yesterday.
Mr. Kerry's running mate, Senator John Edwards, served on the
Intelligence Committee, which gave him ample opportunity to ask hard
questions. But in voting to authorize war, Mr. Edwards expressed no
uncertainty about the principle evidence of Mr. Hussein's alleged
nuclear program.
"We know that he is doing everything he can to build nuclear
weapons," Mr. Edwards said then.
On Dec. 7, 2002, Iraq submitted a 12,200-page declaration about
unconventional arms to the United Nations that made no mention of the
tubes. Soon after, Winpac analysts at the C.I.A. assessed the
declaration for President Bush. The analysts criticized Iraq for
failing to acknowledge or explain why it sought tubes "we believe
suitable for use in a gas centrifuge uranium effort." Nor, they said,
did it "acknowledge efforts to procure uranium from Niger."
Neither Energy Department nor State Department intelligence
experts were given a chance to review the Winpac assessment, prompting
complaints that dissenting views were being withheld from policy
makers.
"It is most disturbing that Winpac is essentially directing
foreign policy in this matter," one Energy Department official wrote
in an e-mail message. "There are some very strong points to be made in
respect to Iraq's arrogant noncompliance with U.N. sanctions. However,
when individuals attempt to convert those 'strong statements' into the
'knock out' punch, the Administration will ultimately look foolish -
i.e., the tubes and Niger!"
The U.N. Inspectors Return
For nearly two years Western intelligence analysts had been trying
to divine from afar Iraq's plans for the tubes. At the end of 2002,
with the resumption of United Nations arms inspections, it became
possible to seek answers inside Iraq. Inspectors from the
International Atomic Energy Agency immediately zeroed in on the tubes.
The team quickly arranged a field trip to the Nasser metal
fabrication factory, where they found 13,000 completed rockets, all
produced from 7075-T6 aluminum tubes. The Iraqi rocket engineers
explained that they had been shopping for more tubes because their
supply was running low.
Why order tubes with such tight tolerances? An Iraqi engineer said
they wanted to improve the rocket's accuracy without making major
design changes. Design documents and procurement records confirmed his
account.
The inspectors solved another mystery. The tubes intercepted in
Jordan had been anodized, given a protective coating. The Iraqis had a
simple explanation: they wanted the new tubes protected from the
elements. Sure enough, the inspectors found that many thousands of the
older tubes, which had no special coating, were corroded because they
had been stored outside.
The inspectors found no trace of a clandestine centrifuge program.
On Jan. 10, 2003, The Times reported that the international agency was
challenging "the key piece of evidence" behind "the primary rationale
for going to war." The article also reported that officials at the
Energy Department and State Department had suggested the tubes might
be for rockets.
The C.I.A. theory was in trouble, and senior members of the Bush
administration seemed to know it.
Also that January, White House officials who were drafting what
would become Secretary Powell's speech to the Security Council sent
word to the intelligence community that they believed "the nuclear
case was weak," the Senate report said. In an interview, a senior
administration official said it was widely understood all along at the
White House that the evidence of a nuclear threat was piecemeal and
weaker than that for other unconventional arms.
But rather than withdraw the nuclear card - a step that could have
undermined United States credibility just as tens of thousands of
troops were being airlifted to the region - the White House cast about
for new arguments and evidence to support it.
Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
asked the intelligence agencies for more evidence beyond the tubes to
bolster the nuclear case. Winpac analysts redoubled efforts to prove
that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium from Africa. When rocket
engineers at the Defense Department were approached by the C.I.A. and
asked to compare the Iraqi tubes with American ones, the engineers
said the tubes "were perfectly usable for rockets." The agency
analysts did not appear pleased. One rocket engineer complained to
Senate investigators that the analysts had "an agenda" and were trying
"to bias us" into agreeing that the Iraqi tubes were not fit for
rockets. In interviews, agency officials denied any such effort.
According to the Intelligence Committee report, the agency also
sought to undermine the I.A.E.A.'s work with secret intelligence
assessments distributed only to senior policy makers. Nonetheless, on
Jan. 22, in a meeting first reported by The Washington Post, the
ubiquitous Joe flew to Vienna in a last-ditch attempt to bring the
international experts around to his point of view.
The session was a disaster.
"Everybody was embarrassed when he came and made this
presentation, embarrassed and disgusted," one participant said. "We
were going insane, thinking, 'Where is he coming from?' "
On Jan. 27, the international agency rendered its judgment: it
told the Security Council that it had found no evidence of a revived
nuclear weapons program in Iraq. "From our analysis to date," the
agency reported, "it appears that the aluminum tubes would be
consistent with the purpose stated by Iraq and, unless modified, would
not be suitable for manufacturing centrifuges."
The Powell Presentation
The next night, during his State of the Union address, President
Bush cited I.A.E.A. findings from years past that confirmed that Mr.
Hussein had had an "advanced" nuclear weapons program in the 1990's.
He did not mention the agency's finding from the day before.
He did, though, repeat the claim that Mr. Hussein was trying to
buy tubes "suitable for nuclear weapons production." Mr. Bush also
cited British intelligence that Mr. Hussein had recently sought
"significant quantities" of uranium from Africa - a reference in 16
words that the White House later said should have been stricken,
though the British government now insists the information was
credible.
"Saddam Hussein," Mr. Bush said that night, "has not credibly
explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide. The dictator
of Iraq is not disarming."
A senior administration official involved in vetting the address
said Mr. Bush did not cite the I.A.E.A. conclusion of Jan. 27 because
the White House believed the agency was analyzing old Iraqi tubes, not
the newer ones seized in Jordan. But senior officials in Vienna and
Washington said the international group's analysis covered both types
of tubes.
The senior administration official also said the president's words
were carefully chosen to reflect the doubts at the Energy Department.
The crucial phrase was "suitable for nuclear weapons production." The
phrase stopped short of asserting that the tubes were actually being
used in centrifuges. And it was accurate in the sense that Energy
Department officials always left open the possibility that the tubes
could be modified for use in a centrifuge.
"There were differences," the official said, "and we had to
address those differences."
In his address, the president announced that Mr. Powell would go
before the Security Council on Feb. 5 and lay out the intelligence on
Iraq's weapons programs. The purpose was to win international backing
for an invasion, and so the administration spent weeks drafting and
redrafting the presentation, with heavy input from the C.I.A., the
National Security Council and I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney's chief of
staff.
The Intelligence Committee said some drafts prepared for Mr.
Powell contained language on the tubes that was patently incorrect.
The C.I.A. wanted Mr. Powell to say, for example, that Iraq's
specifications for roundness were so exacting "that the tubes would be
rejected as defective if I rolled one under my hand on this table,
because the mere pressure of my hand would deform it."
Intelligence analysts at the State Department waged a quiet battle
against much of the proposed language on tubes. A year before, they
had sent Mr. Powell a report explaining why they believed the tubes
were more likely for rockets. The National Intelligence Estimate
included their dissent - that they saw no compelling evidence of a
comprehensive effort to revive a nuclear weapons program. Now, in the
days before the Security Council speech, they sent the secretary
detailed memos warning him away from a long list of assertions in the
drafts, the Intelligence Committee found. The language on the tubes,
they said, contained "egregious errors" and "highly misleading"
claims. Changes were made, language softened. The line about "the mere
pressure of my hand" was removed.
"My colleagues," Mr. Powell assured the Security Council, "every
statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These
are not assertions."
He made his way to the subject of Mr. Hussein's current nuclear
capabilities.
"By now," he said, "just about everyone has heard of these tubes,
and we all know there are differences of opinion. There is controversy
about what these tubes are for. Most U.S. experts think they are
intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium.
Other experts and the Iraqis themselves argue that they are really to
produce the rocket bodies for a conventional weapon, a multiple rocket
launcher."
But Mr. Powell did not acknowledge that those "other experts"
included many of the nation's most authoritative nuclear experts, some
of whom said in interviews that they were offended to find themselves
now lumped in with a reviled government.
In making the case that the tubes were for centrifuges, Mr. Powell
made claims that his own intelligence experts had told him were not
accurate. Mr. Powell, for example, asserted to the Security Council
that the tubes were manufactured to a tolerance "that far exceeds U.S.
requirements for comparable rockets."
Yet in a memo written two days earlier, Mr. Powell's intelligence
experts had specifically cautioned him about those very same words.
"In fact," they explained, "the most comparable U.S. system is a
tactical rocket - the U.S. Mark 66 air-launched 70-millimeter rocket -
that uses the same, high-grade (7075-T6) aluminum, and that has
specifications with similar tolerances."
In the end, Mr. Powell put his personal prestige and reputation
behind the C.I.A.'s tube theory.
"When we came to the aluminum tubes," Richard A. Boucher, the
State Department spokesman, said in an interview, "the secretary
listened to the discussion of the various views among intelligence
agencies, and reflected those issues in his presentation. Since his
task at the U.N. was to present the views of the United States, he
went with the overall judgment of the intelligence community as
reflected by the director of central intelligence."
As Mr. Powell summed it up for the United Nations, "People will
continue to debate this issue, but there is no doubt in my mind these
illicit procurement efforts show that Saddam Hussein is very much
focused on putting in place the key missing piece from his nuclear
weapons program: the ability to produce fissile material."
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Go to Original
C.I.A.-White House Tensions Are Being Made Public to Rare Degree
By Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Saturday 02 October 2004
Washington - James L. Pavitt spent 31 years at the Central
Intelligence Agency, the last five as head of the clandestine service,
before retiring in August. But never, Mr. Pavitt said Friday, does he
recall anything like "the viciousness and vindictiveness" now playing
out in a battle between the White House and the C.I.A.
The tensions have simmered for years, mostly over intelligence
about Iraq, including whether Iraq posed a threat. But in the last few
weeks, they have surged into the open in a remarkable way, in a
struggle in which both sides believe they have much at stake.
Already, the contents of classified intelligence estimates about
Iraq have been leaked by people sympathetic to the C.I.A., to the
considerable embarrassment of the White House. In response, the White
House associated the documents' authors with "pessimists and
naysayers," and President Bush initially dismissed one particularly
damaging forecast as nothing more than a guess. And in newspaper
columns in recent days, Republican partisans have variously described
what is now afoot as part of an insurgency or vendetta being waged by
the C.I.A. against the White House.
"Wars bring things out in people that sometimes other disputes
don't," said R. James Woolsey, a former director of central
intelligence. "But even with the passions of war, I think you ought to
keep it within channels." A third former intelligence official was
more critical of the C.I.A. "The agency's role is to tell the
administration what it thinks, not to criticize its policies," the
official said.
Of course, the most urgent threat to the agency lies in the effort
now under way in Congress to restructure American intelligence
agencies under the command of a new national intelligence director.
Those efforts were recommended by the Sept. 11 commission, but the
agency's now infamous prewar misjudgments on Iraq and its illicit
weapons were an important factor in prompting the calls for change.
In defense, the agency's allies have clearly been trying, as they
see it, to set the record straight, by calling attention to what they
regard as the more prescient judgments by the C.I.A. that the Bush
administration dismissed. In an election year that is very much about
the war in Iraq, the overlapping streams of self-preservation and
politics have elevated the intelligence agencies to unusual
prominence.
"My opponent looked at the same intelligence I looked at,"
President Bush said several times in his debate with Senator John
Kerry on Thursday night, alluding to the C.I.A.'s prewar blunder in
asserting that Iraq possessed illicit weapons. But Mr. Kerry replied
that it was the White House, not the C.I.A., that sent the country to
war in Iraq.
In a telephone conversation on Friday, Mr. Pavitt made an argument
that echoed that others have sounded in recent weeks. "There was
nothing in the intelligence that was a casus belli," Mr. Pavitt said.
The C.I.A. may have been wrong about Iraq and its weapons, he
acknowledged, but it was on the mark in issuing prewar warnings about
the obstacles that an American occupying force would face in postwar
Iraq.
Mr. Pavitt's career whose spanned the Church Committee
revelations, in the mid-1970s, of C.I.A. improprieties, the sharp
downsizing of the C.I.A. under President Jimmy Carter, the Iran-Contra
scandal, and the repeated intelligence failures of recent years,
including those related to the Sept. 11 attacks.
As deputy director of operations, Mr. Pavitt headed human spying
operations, and was the day-to-day tactical commander of the
clandestine war on terrorism. He worked closely with the White House,
and said he has no sympathy with those in the government who may have
leaked the contents of classified documents to make a political point.
"The agency is not out to undermine this president," Mr. Pavitt said.
At the C.I.A. and the White House, officials dismissed the idea
that the institutions were at odds. An intelligence official said the
notion of an institutional battle between the White House and the
C.I.A. was "simply not the case."
Sean McCormack, a spokesman for the National Security Council,
said that the White House believed "that the men and women of our
intelligence community and the C.I.A. are doing a terrific job in
helping to defend the country, and are working tirelessly day and
night."
But Mr. Pavitt was not alone among former intelligence officials
in describing what is now unfolding as extraordinary. In interviews,
several other former high-ranking officials, including those from the
C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies, said that while C.I.A. and
White House were continuing to work closely and professionally
together, they had rarely seen tensions so high among their allies and
other partisans on both sides.
As for what may lie ahead, the shape and fate of any intelligence
overhaul still remains far from certain. The terms of possible
legislation are still being debated by the House and Senate, and it is
unclear whether new legislation will be passed before Election Day.
But all of the changes under consideration threaten to strip the
C.I.A. from the position of preeminence among American intelligence
agencies that it has enjoyed for more than 50 years.
"I think this has much more to do with intelligence reform than
with Iraq," said the former senior C.I.A. official. "People are just
very angry and worried and on the defensive about what they think
might happen to the agency." (Like most others interviewed for this
story, the former official would not allow his name to be used, saying
that to do so would jeopardize his professional and business
relationships.)
Whatever the motivation, the steps taken by people sympathetic to
the C.I.A. allies to call attention to intelligence successes on Iraq
have been notable. They included the disclosure in mid-September by
government officials to The New York Times of details of a classified
National Intelligence Estimate prepared for President Bush in July
2004 and distributed in late August. Its gloomy assessment of the
challenges facing Iraq said that an environment of tenuous stability
was the best-case outcome the country could expect through the end of
2005.
Other disclosures by government officials early this week have
included specific new details contained in two other classified
documents, prewar assessments on Iraq that were issued by the National
Intelligence Council in January 2003. As described by the government
officials, the postwar challenges identified in the documents included
a surge in anti-Americanism in the Muslim world and the possibility of
an anti-American insurgency in Iraq. The intelligence warnings
appeared to have been much sharper than was acknowledged in the more
upbeat forecasts provided before the war by Mr. Bush and top deputies
including Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary.
From some conservative voices, including the editorial page of The
Wall Street Journal, the response has been furious. An editorial
published by the Journal on Wednesday under the heading of "The
C.I.A.'s Insurgency" said that Mr. Bush "now has two insurgencies to
defeat: the one that the C.I.A. is struggling to help put down in
Iraq, and the other inside Langley against the Bush administration."
"Rather than keep this dispute in-house," it said, "the dissenters
have taken their objections to the public, albeit usually through
calculated and anonymous leaks that are always spun to make the agency
look good and the Bush administration look bad."
An op-ed article published on Friday in the Washington Times by
John B. Roberts II, a conservative commentator on national security
affairs, reiterated that message. "When the president cannot trust his
own C.IA.," it warned, "the nation faces dire consequences."
Mr. Pavitt, the recently retired C.I.A. official, said such a
suggestion was offensive. "This President has been served extremely
well by intelligence," he said.
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