Iraq's WMD
Programs: Culling Hard Facts from Soft
Myths
A Message from Stuart A. Cohen
Vice
Chairman, National Intelligence
Council
28 November 2003
The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate
(NIE) on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) has
been dissected like no other product in the history of
the US Intelligence Community. We have reexamined every
phrase, line, sentence, judgment and alternative view in
this 90-page document and have traced their genesis
completely. I believed at the time the Estimate was
approved for publication, and still believe now, that we
were on solid ground in how we reached the judgments we
made.
I remain convinced that no reasonable person
could have viewed the totality of the information that
the Intelligence Community had at its disposal—literally
millions of pages—and reached any conclusions or
alternative views that were profoundly different from
those that we reached. The four National Intelligence
Officers who oversaw the production of the NIE had over
100 years' collective work experience on weapons of mass
destruction issues, and the hundreds of men and women
from across the US Intelligence Community who supported
this effort had thousands of man-years invested in
studying these issues.
Let me be clear: The NIE judged with high
confidence that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons
as well as missiles with ranges in excess of the 150 km
limit imposed by the UN Security Council, and with
moderate confidence that Iraq did not have
nuclear weapons. These judgments were essentially the
same conclusions reached by the United Nations and by a
wide array of intelligence services—friendly and
unfriendly alike. The only government in the world that
claimed that Iraq was not working on, and did not have,
biological and chemical weapons or prohibited missile
systems was in Baghdad. Moreover, in those cases where
US intelligence agencies disagreed, particularly
regarding whether Iraq was reconstituting a uranium
enrichment effort for its nuclear weapons program, the
alternative views were spelled out in detail. Despite
all of this, ten myths have been confused with facts in
the current media frenzy. A hard look at the facts of
the NIE should dispel some popular myths making the
media circuit.
Myth #1: The Estimate favored going to
war:
Intelligence judgments, including NIEs, are
policy neutral. We do not propose policies and the
Estimate in no way sought to sway policymakers toward a
particular course of action. We described what we judged
were Saddam's WMD programs and capabilities and how and
when he might use them and left it to policymakers, as
we always do, to determine the appropriate course of
action.
Myth #2: Analysts were pressured to
change judgments to meet the needs of the Bush
Administration:
The judgments presented in the October 2002 NIE
were based on data acquired and analyzed over fifteen
years. Any changes in judgments over that period were
based on new evidence, including clandestinely collected
information that led to new analysis. Our judgments were
presented to three different Administrations. And the
principal participants in the production of the NIE from
across the entire US Intelligence Community have sworn
to Congress, under oath, that they were NOT pressured to
change their views on Iraq WMD or to conform to
Administration positions on this issue. In my particular
case, I was able to swear under oath that not only had
no one pressured me to take a particular view but that I
had not pressured anyone else working on the Estimate to
change or alter their reading of the intelligence
information.
Myth #3: NIE judgments were news to
Congress:
Over the past fifteen years our assessments on
Iraq WMD issues have been presented routinely to six
different congressional committees including the two
oversight committees, the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, and the House Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence. To the best of my knowledge, prior to
this NIE, these committees never came back to us with a
concern of bias or an assertion that we had gotten it
wrong.
Myth #4: We buried divergent views and
concealed uncertainties:
Diverse agency views, particularly on whether
Baghdad was reconstituting its uranium enrichment effort
and as a subset of that, the purposes of attempted Iraqi
aluminum tube purchases, were fully vetted during the
coordination process. Alternative views presented by the
Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the Department of
State, the Office of Intelligence in the Department of
Energy, and by the US Air Force were
showcased in the National Intelligence
Estimate and were acknowledged in unclassified papers on
the subject. Moreover, suggestions that their
alternative views were buried as footnotes in the text
are wrong. All agencies were fully exposed to these
alternative views, and the heads of those organizations
blessed the wording and placement of their alternative
views. Uncertainties were highlighted in the Key
Judgments and throughout the main text. Any reader would
have had to read only as far as the second paragraph of
the Key Judgments to know that as we said: "We lacked
specific information on many key aspects of Iraq's WMD
program."
Myth #5: Major NIE judgments were based
on single sources:
Overwhelmingly, major judgments in the NIE on WMD
were based on multiple sources–often from human
intelligence, satellite imagery, and communications
intercepts. Not only is the allegation wrong, but it is
also worth noting that it is not even a valid measure of
the quality of intelligence performance. A single human
source with direct access to a specific program and
whose judgment and performance have proven reliable can
provide the "crown jewels"; in the early 1960s Colonel
Oleg Penkovskiy, who was then this country's only
penetration of the Soviet high command, was just such a
source. His information enabled President Kennedy to
stare down a Soviet threat emanating from Cuba, and his
information informed US intelligence analysis for more
than two decades thereafter. In short, the charge is
both wrong and meaningless.
Myth #6: We relied too much on United
Nations reporting and were complacent after UN
inspectors left in 1998:
We never accepted UN reporting at face value. I
know, because in the mid 1990s I was the coordinator for
US intelligence support to UNSCOM and the IAEA. Their
ability to see firsthand what was going on in Iraq,
including inside facilities that we could only peer at
from above, demanded that we pay attention to what they
saw and that we support their efforts fully. Did we ever
have all the information that we wanted or required? Of
course not. Moreover, for virtually any critical
intelligence issue that faces us the answer always will
be "no." There is a reason that the October 2002 review
of Iraq's WMD programs is called a National Intelligence
ESTIMATE and not a National Intelligence FACTBOOK. On
almost any issue of the day that we face, hard evidence
will only take intelligence professionals so far. Our
job is to fill in the gaps with informed analysis. And
we sought to do that consistently and with vigor. The
departure of UNSCOM inspectors in 1998 certainly did
reduce our information about what was occurring in
Iraq's WMD programs. But to say that we were blind after
1998 is wrong. Efforts to enhance collection were
vigorous, creative, and productive. Intelligence
collection after 1998, including information collected
by friendly and allied intelligence services, painted a
picture of Saddam's continuing efforts to develop WMD
programs and weapons that reasonable people would have
found compelling.
Myth # 7: We were fooled on the Niger
"yellowcake" story—a major issue in the NIE:
This was not one of the reasons
underpinning our Key Judgment about nuclear
reconstitution. In the body of the Estimate, after
noting that Iraq had considerable low-enriched and other
forms of uranium already in country—enough
to produce roughly 100 nuclear weapons—we included the
Niger issue with appropriate caveats, for the sake of
completeness. Mentioning, with appropriate caveats, even
unconfirmed reporting is standard practice in NIEs and
other intelligence assessments; it helps consumers of
the assessment understand the full range of possibly
relevant intelligence.
Myth #8: We overcompensated for having
underestimated the WMD threat in 1991:
Our judgments were based on the evidence we
acquired and the analysis we produced over a 15-year
period. The NIE noted that we had underestimated key
aspects of Saddam's WMD efforts in the 1990s. We were
not alone in that regard: UNSCOM missed Iraq's BW
program and the IAEA underestimated Baghdad's progress
on nuclear weapons development. But, what we learned
from the past was the difficulty we have had in
detecting key Iraqi WMD activities. Consequently, the
Estimate specified what we knew and what we believed but
also warned policymakers that we might have
underestimated important aspects of Saddam's program.
But in no case were any of the judgments "hyped" to
compensate for earlier underestimates.
Myth #9: We mistook rapid mobilization
programs for actual weapons:
There is practically no difference in threat
between a standing chemical and biological weapons
capability and one that could be mobilized quickly with
little chance of detection. The Estimate acknowledged
that Saddam was seeking rapid mobilization capabilities
that he could invigorate on short notice. Those who find
such programs to be less of a threat than actual weapons
should understand that Iraqi denial and deception
activities virtually would have ensured our inability to
detect the activation of such efforts. Even with "only"
rapid mobilization capabilities, Saddam would have been
able to achieve production and stockpiling of chemical
and biological weapons in the midst of a crisis, and the
Intelligence Community would have had little, if any,
chance of detecting this activity, particularly in the
case of BW. In the case of chemical weapons, although we
might have detected indicators of mobilization activity,
we would have been hard pressed to accurately interpret
such evidence. Those who conclude that no threat existed
because actual weapons have not yet been found do not
understand the significance posed by biological and
chemical warfare programs in the hands of tyrants.
Myth #10: The NIE asserted that there
were "large WMD stockpiles" and because we haven't found
them, Baghdad had no WMD:
From experience gained at the end of Desert Storm
more than ten years ago, it was clear to us and should
have been clear to our critics, that finding WMD in the
aftermath of a conflict wouldn't be easy. We judged that
Iraq probably possessed one hundred to five hundred
metric tons of CW munitions fill. One hundred metric
tons would fit in a backyard swimming pool; five hundred
could be hidden in a small warehouse. We made no
assessment of the size of Iraq's biological weapons
holdings but a biological weapon can be carried in a
small container. (And of course, we judged that Saddam
did not have a nuclear weapon.) When the Iraq Survey
Group (ISG), led by David Kay, issued its interim report
in October, acknowledging that it had not found chemical
or biological weapons, the inspectors had then visited
only ten of the 130 major ammunition depots in Iraq;
these ammunition dumps are huge, sometimes five miles by
five miles on a side. Two depots alone are roughly the
size of Manhattan. It is worth recalling that after
Desert Storm, US forces unknowingly
destroyed over 1,000 rounds of chemical-filled munitions
at a facility called Al Kamissiyah. Baghdad sometimes
had special markings for chemical and biological
munitions and sometimes did not. In short, much remains
to be done in the hunt for Iraq's WMD.
We do not know whether the ISG ultimately will be
able to find physical evidence of Iraq's chemical and
biological weapons or confirm the status of its WMD
programs and its nuclear ambitions. The purposeful,
apparently regime-directed, destruction of evidence
pertaining to WMD from one end of Iraq to the other,
which began even before the Coalition occupied Baghdad,
and has continued since then, already has affected the
ISG's work. Moreover, Iraqis who have been willing to
talk to US intelligence officers are in great danger.
Many have been threatened; some have been killed. The
denial and deception efforts directed by the
extraordinarily brutal, but very competent Iraqi
Intelligence Services, which matured through ten years
of inspections by various UN agencies, remain a
formidable challenge. And finally, finding
physically small but extraordinarily lethal weapons in a
country that is larger than the state of California
would be a daunting task even under far more hospitable
circumstances. But now that we have our own eyes
on the ground, David Kay and the ISG must be allowed to
complete their work and other collection efforts we have
under way also must be allowed to run their course. And
even then, it will be necessary to integrate all the new
information with intelligence and analyses produced over
the past fifteen years before we can determine the
status of Iraq's WMD efforts prior to the war.
Allegations about the quality of the US
intelligence performance and the need to confront these
charges have forced senior intelligence officials
throughout US Intelligence to spend much of their time
looking backwards. I worry about the opportunity costs
of this sort of preoccupation, but I also worry that
analysts laboring under a barrage of allegations will
become more and more disinclined to make judgments that
go beyond ironclad evidence—a scarce commodity in our
business. If this is allowed to happen, the Nation will
be poorly served by its Intelligence Community and
ultimately much less secure. Fundamentally, the
Intelligence Community increasingly will be in danger of
not connecting the dots until the dots have become a
straight line.
We must keep in mind that the search for WMD
cannot and should not be about the reputation of US
Intelligence or even just about finding weapons. At its
core, men and women from across the Intelligence
Community continue to focus on this issue because
understanding the extent of Iraq's WMD efforts and
finding and securing weapons and all of the key elements
that make up Baghdad's WMD programs— before they
fall into the wrong hands—is vital to our
national security. If we eventually are proven
wrong—that is, that there were no weapons of mass
destruction and the WMD programs were dormant or
abandoned—the American people will be told the truth; we
would have it no other way.
Stuart A. Cohen is an intelligence professional
with 30 years of service in the CIA. He was acting
Chairman of the National Intelligence Council when the
2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's Weapons of
Mass Destruction was published.
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