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CIA Resisted Doubts on Aluminum Tubes Thought to Be for Iraqi Nuke Program
The CIA resisted analyses by other government agencies that could have undermined its assertion that aluminum tubes sought by prewar Iraq were meant for a nuclear weapons program, the presidential commission on WMD intelligence said yesterday (see GSN, March 31). The agency intercepted tube samples in April 2001, and determined they were meant for use in uranium enrichment centrifuges. The CIA Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) stuck to that analysis even in the face of doubts from the Energy Department and other agencies, the Washington Post reported. The aluminum tubes were featured prominently in a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate claiming that Iraq had restarted its nuclear weapons program. CIA officials also repeatedly referred to the tubes as part of an enrichment program. The CIA’s position was based on claims that ranged from questionable to clearly untrue, the report found. Agency officials twice refused requests by the federal Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee to review the evidence, the commission report states. A WINPAC analyst used a contractor to perform tests, rather than sending the work to centrifuge technology experts at the DOE Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The analyst also rejected the contractor results, according to the Post. A panel of experts put together by the CIA determined the tubes were meant for a nuclear weapons program based on “a stack of documents provided by the CIA,” the report states. Energy Department experts informed the CIA shortly after the tubes were found that the tubes appeared for intended for manufacturing an Italian-designed rocket called Medusa. Iraq was known to be building copies of the Medusa, the Post reported. “The intercepted tubes were not only well-suited, but were in fact a precise fit, for Iraq’s conventional rockets,” the commission report states. However, “certain agencies were more wedded to the analytical position that the tubes were destined for a nuclear program.” The report notes that Energy Department officially supported the case by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency that Iraq was resuming nuclear weapons work, the Post reported. “DOE didn’t want to come out before the war and say (Iraq) wasn’t reconstituting,” one analyst told the commission (Linzer/Gellman, Washington Post, April 1).
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