How the White
House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence
By DAVID
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.
Speaking to a group of Wyoming Republicans in September, Vice President Dick Cheney said the
Those tubes became a critical exhibit in the
administration's brief against
But almost a year before, Ms. Rice's staff
had been told that the government's foremost nuclear experts seriously
doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons, according to four
officials at the Central Intelligence Agency and two senior administration
officials, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity. The experts, at the
Energy Department, believed the tubes were likely intended for small artillery
rockets.
The White House, though, embraced the disputed theory that
the tubes were for nuclear centrifuges, an idea first championed in April
2001 by a junior analyst at the C.I.A. Senior nuclear scientists considered
that notion implausible, yet in the months after 9/11, as the administration built a case for confronting Iraq, the
centrifuge theory gained currency as it rose to the top of the government.
Senior
administration officials repeatedly
failed to fully disclose the contrary views of
One 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
Today, 18 months after the invasion of
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 among both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to ask hard questions.
Precisely how
knowledge of the intelligence dispute traveled through the upper reaches of the
administration is unclear. Ms. Rice knew
about the debate before her Sept. 2002 CNN appearance, but only learned of
the alternative rocket theory of the tubes soon afterward, according to two
senior administration officials. President
Bush learned of the debate at roughly the same time, a senior
administration official said.
Last week,
when asked about the tubes, administration officials said they relied on repeated assurances by George J.
Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, that the tubes were in
fact for centrifuges. They also noted that the intelligence community,
including the Energy Department, largely agreed that Mr. Hussein had revived
his nuclear program.
"These
judgments sometimes require members of the intelligence community to make tough
assessments about competing interpretations of facts," said Sean
McCormack, a spokesman for the president.
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
The tubes
episode is a case study of the intersection
between the politics of pre-emption and the inherent ambiguity of intelligence.
The tubes represented a scientific puzzle and rival camps of experts clashed
over the tiniest technical details in secure rooms in
So did a
powerful vice president who saw in 9/11 horrifying confirmation of his
long-held belief that the United States too often naïvely underestimates the
cunning and ruthlessness of its foes.
"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,'' he said. "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,
After the Persian Gulf war in 1991, arms inspectors
discovered that
But at the
start of the Bush administration, the
intelligence agencies also agreed that
Then
According to a
511-page report on flawed prewar intelligence by the Senate Intelligence
Committee, the agencies learned in early 2001 of a plan by
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
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
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
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
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
The tubes now
sought by
That 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 that made no sense, they argued in a
new report, because
More to the
point, those 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
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
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
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
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
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
The Energy
Department experts did not think that 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
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
Likewise,
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. The machines were a prototype designed for laboratory experiments and
meant to be operated 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.
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
Enter Cheney
In the months
after
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
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. "
With the
Taliban routed in
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
"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
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
"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
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 policy makers 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
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
The tubes sought by
"They never lay out the other case," one
Congressional official said of those C.I.A. 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
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 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
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
identifying 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 that 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 by then so
widely known that even the Australian government was aware of it. "
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 Mr. Tenet, the director of
central intelligence, 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 unidentified 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 it 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 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 sensitive 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 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.
"The vice president's public statements have reflected
the evolving judgment of the
intelligence community," Kevin Kellems, Mr. Cheney's spokesman, said
in a written statement.
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 unidentified senior administration official dismissed the debate as a
"footnote, not a split." Citing another unidentified
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, the Oak Ridge adviser, 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,
said one team member and the group's president, David Albright.
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 had been done in
2000.
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 that 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, with written dissents 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.
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."
Today, the Intelligence Committee's report makes clear, that
93-page estimate stands as one of the most flawed documents in the history of
American intelligence. The committee concluded unanimously that most of the
major findings in the estimate were 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 in the body of the report.
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 that 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
that 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 that 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 principal 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, on Page A10, 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 helping to draft 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."
Six weeks later, the war began.
This article was reported by David Barstow, William J. Broad and Jeff Gerth, and was written by Mr. Barstow.