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U.S. Analysts Questioned Iraq’s WMD Capability
U.S. intelligence analysts were questioning Iraq’s WMD capability in early 2003 even as Bush administration officials publicly made their case for war against Saddam Hussein, the Washington Post reported yesterday (see GSN, April 29). The National Security Council “believed the nuclear case was weak,” Robert Walpole, former national intelligence officer for strategic and nuclear programs, told investigators. President George W. Bush said in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address that British intelligence had found that Hussein was seeking “significant quantities” of uranium from Africa. However, CIA analysts that month were still working to determine whether the information was credible, according to a 2004 report from the Senate intelligence committee. The day before Bush’s speech, the CIA’s station chief in Berlin warned against trusting intelligence from the Iraqi defector known as “Curveball,” who had been the main source of information on Iraq’s reputed mobile biological weapons facilities, the Post reported (see GSN, April 8). Bush said in his speech that “three Iraqi defectors” had provided evidence that “Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile weapons labs … designed to produce germ warfare agents [that] can be moved from place to place to evade inspectors.” Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell also played up the mobile facilities in his February 2003 testimony on Iraq to the United Nations. In October 2002, Bush said that Iraq was looking into unmanned aerial vehicles “that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons” over the continental United States. That claim was based on a lone report that an Iraqi general had been looking to buy equipment in late 2000 or early 2001 for the vehicles, the Post reported. The manufacturer reportedly submitted mapping software of the United States as part of the order. The distributor did not include the software in its package, and the procurement agent later denied plans to purchase the software. The CIA by January 2003 “increasingly believed that the attempted purchase of the mapping software … may have been inadvertent,” according to the recent report by the presidential WMD commission. The U.S. Air Force intelligence chief at that time was also arguing that the unmanned vehicles were intended for reconnaissance, the Post reported. Military analysts believed the equipment purchase was “not necessarily indicative of an intent to target the U.S. homeland,” according to a January 2003 intelligence estimate (Walter Pincus, Washington Post, May 22). Meanwhile, Russia is trying to determine the fate of Iraqi missiles that were being destroyed before the March 2003 invasion, the Associated Press reported Saturday. “Not all the rockets were destroyed — the war got in the way, and even now nobody knows what happened to them. And this is a question,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov, according to Interfax. Fedotov was apparently speaking of Iraq’s Al Samoud 2 missiles, which had a range beyond that allowed under U.N. sanctions. The United States must determine what happened to the missiles, Fedotov said (Agence France-Presse, May 21).
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