Key defector source was known to be unreliable, possibly coached
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE , WASHINGTON
Sunday, Feb 08, 2004,Page 1
An Iraqi military defector identified as unreliable by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) provided some of the information that went into US intelligence estimates that Iraq had stockpiles of biological weapons at the time of the US invasion last March, senior government officials said on Friday.
A classified "fabrication notification" about the defector, a former Iraqi major, was issued by the DIA to other US intelligence agencies in May 2002, but it was then repeatedly overlooked, three senior intelligence officials said. Intelligence agencies use such notifications to alert other agencies to information they consider unreliable because its source is suspected of making up or embellishing information.
Because the warning went unheeded, the officials said, the defector's claims that Iraq had built mobile research laboratories to produce biological weapons were mistakenly included in, among other findings, the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which concluded that Iraq most likely had significant biological stockpiles.
Intelligence officers from the DIA interviewed the defector twice in early 2002 and circulated reports based on those debriefings. They concluded he had no firsthand information and might have been coached by the Iraqi National Congress, the officials said. That group, headed by Ahmad Chalabi, who had close ties to the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney, had introduced the defector to US intelligence, the officials said.
Nevertheless, because of what the officials described as a mistake, the defector was among four sources cited by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his presentation to the UN Security Council last February as having provided "eyewitness accounts" about mobile biological weapons facilities in Iraq, the officials said. The defector had described mobile biological research laboratories, as distinct from the mobile biological production factories mounted on trailers that were described by other sources.
The intelligence about the mobile facilities was central to the prewar conclusion that Iraq was producing biological arms, senior intelligence officials have said. No such arms or production facilities have been found in Iraq since the war, and David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector, has said he believes that Iraq never produced large stockpiles of the weapons during the 1990s.
Soon after the invasion, US troops in Iraq discovered suspicious trailers that were initially described by the CIA as having been designed as factories for biological weapons. But most analysts have since concluded that they were used to make hydrogen for weather balloons.
Kay reported in October that American inspectors had found "a network of laboratories and safe houses controlled by Iraqi intelligence and security services" that contained equipment for chemical and biological research. But US officials have not described any discovery of the mobile laboratories described by the Iraqi major.
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