Global Security Newswire

A senior U.S. intelligence official Friday defended the October 2002 national intelligence estimate on alleged Iraqi WMD efforts, saying the report’s conclusions were “solid” even though U.S. forces in Iraq have found little evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (see GSN, Nov. 20).

The 2002 NIE said that Iraq possessed biological and chemical weapons and ballistic missiles and was also producing such weapons, according to the Associated Press. The report also said that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program, but had not developed an actual weapon (John Lumpkin, Associated Press/Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 29).

In a statement released on the CIA Web site Friday, Stu Cohen, vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, defended the assessments contained in the NIE.

“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,” wrote Cohen, who headed the council at the time when the report was prepared.

Cohen said in his statement that the United Nations, along with a number of international intelligence services, had made similar conclusions about Iraq’s WMD efforts.

“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,” he said.

Cohen suggested that the Iraq Survey Group, which is currently searching Iraq for evidence of prewar Iraqi WMD efforts, could still find quantities of usable weapons of mass destruction. He wrote in bolded text that “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.”

The current controversy over prewar Iraq intelligence could also have a damaging effect on future U.S. intelligence efforts, according to Cohen.

“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,” he wrote. “Fundamentally, the intelligence community increasingly will be in danger of not connecting the dots until the dots have become a straight line,” Cohen added (CIA release, Nov. 28).  

Meanwhile, a new study prepared by Center for Strategic and International Studies senior fellow Anthony Cordesman says that the U.S. and British intelligence failures regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction illustrate greater intelligence concerns, according to the Washington Post.

“Even a cursory review” of claims made in U.S. and British intelligence reports prior to the war “shows that point after point that was made was not confirmed during the war or after the first (six) months of effort following the conflict,” says the study, a draft of which was obtained by the Post.

The Iraqi experience demonstrates that U.S. intelligence is not “yet adequate to support grand strategy and tactical operations against proliferating powers or to make accurate assessments of the need to pre-empt,” the study says.

One concern in gathering intelligence on WMD programs is that countries can mix dual-use research in both open civilian programs and covert weapons efforts, according to the study. It also says that when WMD-related intelligence is reviewed, “far too little analysis is subjected to technical review by those who have actually worked on weapons development.”

Another flaw, according to the study, is that intelligence analysts do not focus enough on problems countries are having in systems integration, resulting in analysts “exaggerating the probable level of proliferation,” the study says (Walter Pincus, Washington Post, Nov. 29).

Iraq Survey Groups Shifts Personnel to Counterinsurgency MissionsA number of U.S. intelligence experts and linguists sent to aid the Iraq Survey Group are to be shifted to counterinsurgency missions, senior U.S. officials said last week.

While the group’s focus has been to search for evidence of alleged Iraqi WMD efforts, its members have been told over the last two weeks to “broaden their perspective and not to stay so focused on weapons that they miss the counterinsurgency stuff,” a U.S. Defense Department official said (Douglas Jehl, New York Times, Nov. 27).