| 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 United States now had "irrefutable evidence"
- thousands of tubes made of high-strength aluminum, tubes that
the Bush administration said were destined for clandestine Iraqi
uranium centrifuges, before some were seized at the behest of the
United States.
Those tubes became a critical exhibit in the administration's brief
against Iraq. As the only physical evidence the United States could
brandish of Mr. Hussein's revived nuclear ambitions, they gave credibility
to the apocalyptic imagery invoked by President Bush and his advisers.
The tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs,"
Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, explained
on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002. "We don't want the smoking gun to
be a mushroom cloud."
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 America's leading nuclear scientists, an examination
by The New York Times has found. They sometimes overstated even
the most dire intelligence assessments of the tubes, yet minimized
or rejected the strong doubts of nuclear experts. They worried privately
that the nuclear case was weak, but expressed sober certitude in
public.
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 Iraq.
Today, 18 months after the invasion of Iraq, investigators there
have found no evidence of hidden centrifuges or a revived nuclear
weapons program. The absence of unconventional weapons in Iraq is
now widely seen as evidence of a profound intelligence failure,
of an intelligence community blinded by "group think,"
false assumptions and unreliable human sources.
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 Iraq was weaker than that for
chemical and biological weapons." Regarding the tubes, Mr.
Tenet said "alternative views were shared" with the administration
after the intelligence community drafted a new National Intelligence
Estimate in late September 2002.
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 Washington,
London and Vienna. The stakes were high, and they knew it. [...]
Throughout the 1990's, United States intelligence agencies were
deeply preoccupied with the status of Iraq's nuclear weapons program,
and with good reason.
After the Persian Gulf war in 1991, arms inspectors discovered
that Iraq had been far closer to building an atomic bomb than even
the worst-case estimates had envisioned. And no one believed that
Saddam Hussein had abandoned his nuclear ambitions. To the contrary,
in one secret assessment after another, the agencies concluded that
Iraq was conducting low-level theoretical research and quietly plotting
to resume work on nuclear weapons.
But at the start of the Bush administration, the intelligence agencies
also agreed that Iraq had not in fact resumed its nuclear weapons
program. Iraq's nuclear infrastructure, they concluded, had been
dismantled by sanctions and inspections. In short, Mr. Hussein's
nuclear ambitions appeared to have been contained.
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 Iraq to buy 60,000 high-strength aluminum tubes
from Hong Kong.
[This was] why a new C.I.A. analyst named Joe quickly sounded the
alarm.
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 University of Kentucky in the late 1970's
with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, then joined
the Goodyear Atomic Corporation, which dispatched him to Oak Ridge,
Tenn., a federal complex that specializes in uranium and national
security research. [...]
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 Oak
Ridge known as Y- 12, his entry into intelligence work. His assignment
was to track global sales of material used in nuclear arms. He retired
after two years, taking a buyout with hundreds of others at Oak
Ridge, and moved to the C.I.A. [...]
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 April 10, 2001.
The tubes, the report asserted, "have little use other than
for a uranium enrichment program."
This alarming assessment was immediately challenged by the Energy
Department, which builds centrifuges and runs the government's nuclear
weapons complex.
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 Iraq had for years used high-strength
aluminum tubes to make combustion chambers for slim rockets fired
from launcher pods. Back in 1996, inspectors from the International
Atomic Energy Agency had even examined some of those tubes, also
made of 7075-T6 aluminum, at a military complex, the Nasser metal
fabrication plant in Baghdad, where the Iraqis acknowledged making
rockets. According to the international agency, the rocket tubes,
some 66,000 of them, were 900 millimeters in length, with a diameter
of 81 millimeters and walls 3.3 millimeters thick.
The tubes now sought by Iraq had precisely the same dimensions
- a perfect match.
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.
[...]
Thus, well before Sept. 11, 2001, the debate within the intelligence
community was already neatly framed: Were the tubes for rockets
or centrifuges? [...]
The intelligence community embarked on an ambitious international
operation to intercept the tubes before they could get to Iraq.
The big break came in June 2001: a shipment was seized in Jordan.
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 America's enemies. They included Dr. Jon
A. Kreykes, head of Oak Ridge's national security advanced technology
group; Dr. Duane F. Starr, an expert on nuclear proliferation threats;
and Dr. Edward Von Halle, a retired Oak Ridge nuclear expert. Dr.
Houston G. Wood III, a professor of engineering at the University
of Virginia who had helped design the 40-foot American centrifuge,
advised the team and consulted with Dr. Zippe.
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. [...]
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. [...]
Similar conclusions were being reached by Britain's intelligence
service and experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency, a
United Nations body.
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 Vienna, a senior official said.
Likewise, Britain's experts believed the tubes would need "substantial
re- engineering" to work in centrifuges, according to Britain's
review of its prewar intelligence. Their experts found it "paradoxical"
that Iraq would order such finely crafted tubes only to radically
rebuild each one for a centrifuge. Yes, it was theoretically possible,
but as an Energy Department analyst later told Senate investigators,
it was also theoretically possible to "turn your new Yugo into
a Cadillac."
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. [...]
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 Iraq truly
wanted to use them this way, "we should just give them the
tubes."
Enter Cheney
In the months after Sept. 11, 2001, as the Bush administration
devised a strategy to fight Al Qaeda, Vice President Cheney immersed
himself in the world of top-secret threat assessments. Bob Woodward,
in his book "Plan of Attack," described Mr. Cheney as
the administration's new "self-appointed special examiner of
worst-case scenarios," and it was a role that fit. [...]
With the Taliban routed in Afghanistan after Sept. 11, Mr. Cheney
and his aides began to focus on intelligence assessments of Saddam
Hussein. Mr. Cheney had long argued for more forceful action to
topple Mr. Hussein. But in January 2002, according to Mr. Woodward's
book, the C.I.A. told Mr. Cheney that Mr. Hussein could not be removed
with covert action alone. His ouster, the agency said, would take
an invasion, which would require persuading the public that Iraq
posed a threat to the United States.
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 Iraq and unconventional weapons. They wanted
to know about any Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda and Baghdad's ability to
make unconventional weapons. [...]
Mr. Cheney, for example, read a Feb. 12, 2002, report from the
Defense Intelligence Agency about Iraq's reported attempts to buy
500 tons of yellowcake, a uranium concentrate, from Niger, according
to the Senate Intelligence Committee report. Many American intelligence
analysts did not put much stock in the Niger report. Mr. Cheney
pressed for more information.
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 Europe and the Middle East
to build support for a confrontation with Iraq. It is not known
whether he mentioned Niger or the tubes in his meetings. But on
his return, he made it clear that he had repeatedly discussed Mr.
Hussein and the nuclear threat.
"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 Middle East, he and
other senior administration officials had been sent two C.I.A. reports
about the tubes. Each cited the tubes as evidence that "Iraq
currently may be trying to reconstitute its gas centrifuge program."
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 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 Iraq's military capabilities
were "substantiated by intelligence information." As a
result, Senate investigators were not permitted to interview White
House officials about what they knew of the tubes debate and when
they knew it.
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." [...]
Over the summer of 2002, the White House secretly refined plans
to invade Iraq and debated whether to seek more United Nations inspections.
At the same time, in response to a White House request in May, C.I.A.
officials were quietly working on a report that would lay out for
the public declassified evidence of Iraq's reported unconventional
weapons and ties to terror groups.
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.
[...]
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. [...]
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.
[...]
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 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. [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]
Beyond tubes, the estimate cited several other "key judgments"
that supported its assessment. The committee found that intelligence
just as flawed. [...]
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. [...]
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 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.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times |
