WASHINGTON OBSERVED
CIA muscles in on WMD search
Jun 20
David Cloud, The Wall Street Journal
The search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is kicking into a higher gear, amid rising tensions between military officials conducting the search and civilian and intelligence officials who are increasingly taking control.
A new team of United States investigators is setting up operations at Baghdad airport to intensify the search for banned weapons. The Iraq Survey Group, a Pentagon office that assumed responsibility for the weapons search this month, is sending in dozens of investigators, Arabic translators and specialists in Iraqi weapons programs from the US, Britain and Australia.
The stepped-up activity comes amid mounting political pressure on the Bush administration to explain its prewar declarations that US intelligence proved the Saddam Hussein regime had chemical and biological weapons. The clamour for answers is adding to the internal tensions.
Some civilian officials in the Bush administration are increasingly worried that military commanders overseeing the search have not made it a high enough priority, and did not have the expertise to penetrate layers of Iraqi deception.
Relations between the military and Central Intelligence Agency personnel in Baghdad have been strained. <font color=red> Some officials complain privately that military commanders have given priority to achieving stability and protecting US troops, rather than the weapons search. <font color=black>
CIA director George Tenet is assuming a growing role in resolving the mystery. Increasingly, officials are inclined to think the answers about Iraq's weapons program are more likely to be found in newly discovered documents and interrogations of Iraqi scientists and officials, rather than searches of suspected weapon sites.
Intelligence officials complain that so far, military interrogations of former senior regime officials have yielded little, while co-operative Iraqis who came forward claiming to have leads have received comparatively little attention. The military's failure to prevent looting at some suspected weapons-program centres, such as the Tuwaitha nuclear facility, has angered some officials in Washington.
For their part, several hundred military-weapons search teams that have been operating in Iraq since the end of the war have found nothing at suspected weapons sites - a failure they blame on poor intelligence. Likewise, officials at the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency were angered last month when the CIA released a report, without notifying them, about two trailers that the US contends were Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories.
The task of sorting through the evidence now falls to the Iraq Survey Group, which is being given more support to tackle the job. At a US military base in Qatar, technicians are attempting to unravel the kinks in a computer program that officials say is critical for scanning thousands of captured Iraqi documents for clues. In Washington, a special intelligence unit has been established to analyse discoveries from Iraq and send back directions for the searchers.
The arrival of the survey group in Baghdad this month was meant to quell some of the rivalry. Pentagon officials say that the substantial resources devoted to the Iraq Survey Group reflects the high priority being given to the weapons search.
Its commander, Major General Keith Dayton, says more use would be made of the CIA's help. His team, which includes former UN weapons inspectors who worked in Iraq during the 1990s, will dispense with the strategy of searching sites and be guided more by intelligence derived from interviews with friendly Iraqis and from captured documents.
As the new process unfolds, the CIA is seeking to exert more influence over it. CIA officials, including Tenet, have grown concerned that the agency was being blamed for exaggerated prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs but was taking a back seat to the military in the conducting the postwar search.
Tenet last week named former United Nations weapons inspector David Kay as an adviser charged with "refining the overall approach for the search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction", according to a statement issued by the CIA director. In a sign of the civilian leadership's concern, a senior intelligence official said that Kay's appointment had been approved by President George Bush and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and reflected growing impatience with the military's approach.
Yet Kay's appointment surprised survey group officials in Iraq and left some confusion about the chain of command. Kay, who returned to the US last month from a lengthy visit to Baghdad, will be based in Iraq and report to Tenet. Dayton reports to Rumsfeld and remains in charge of the group, officials say. But intelligence officials say that Tenet has won assurances that he will be responsible for deciding the survey group's approach, with Kay as his representative.
The CIA director has been able to carve out a larger role because many of the personnel attached to the survey group fall under his control as overall head of the US intelligence community.
Pentagon officials have stressed that it might take months or years to develop an accurate picture of Iraq's covert weapons programs.
[<font color=red>Yes, probably right after the 2004 election!<font color=black>]
One official notes that the search is complicated by the fact that, in addition to searching for weapons, the Iraq Survey Group has been given responsibility for investigating war crimes by former Iraqi officials, as well as the regime's connections to terrorist groups.
"The process is still oriented toward finding a smoking gun," says David Albright, a former weapon inspector in Iraq. "Giving the CIA and Kay more of a role is a good thing. They essentially want information, not just to look for a smoking gun."
One survey group official, disputing criticism of current efforts, says military officials have the same goals as their intelligence counterparts: to develop a broad picture of how Iraqi weapons programs operated, and where and how they obtained their supplies.
In some ways, Kay seems an unusual choice to be at the centre of the effort. His views on Iraq's weapons programs are less alarmist than those of some senior Bush administration officials, who continue to insist that Iraq possessed banned weapons up until the war.
In a recent interview before his appointment, Kay speculated that Saddam Hussein may have ordered the destruction of chemical and biological stockpiles months, or even years, ago.
Finding out for certain will require more effort to locate and interview thousands of Iraqi scientists and bureaucrats who worked within the former regime's vast state-run weapons and scientific research sector. Even that may not provide the hard evidence the US wants, but it could help resolve whether the White House wildly exaggerated the Iraqi threat. |
