Iraq's WMD Programs: Culling Hard Facts from Soft Myths
A Message from Stuart A. Cohen Vice Chairman,
National Intelligence Council
United States Government
November 28, 2003
The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's
Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) has been dissected like no other
product in the history of the US Intelligence Community. We have
reexamined every phrase, line, sentence, judgment and alternative view
in this 90-page document and have traced their genesis completely. I
believed at the time the Estimate was approved for publication, and
still believe now, that we were on solid ground in how we reached the
judgments we made.
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. The four National Intelligence Officers who
oversaw the production of the NIE had over 100 years' collective work
experience on weapons of mass destruction issues, and the hundreds of
men and women from across the US Intelligence Community who supported
this effort had thousands of man-years invested in studying these
issues.
Let me be clear: The NIE judged with high confidence that Iraq had
chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in
excess of the 150 km limit imposed by the UN Security Council, and with
moderate confidence that Iraq did not have nuclear
weapons. These judgments were essentially the same conclusions reached
by the United Nations and by a wide array of intelligence
services—friendly and unfriendly alike. 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. Moreover, in those cases where US intelligence agencies
disagreed, particularly regarding whether Iraq was reconstituting a
uranium enrichment effort for its nuclear weapons program, the
alternative views were spelled out in detail. Despite all of this, ten
myths have been confused with facts in the current media frenzy. A hard
look at the facts of the NIE should dispel some popular myths making the
media circuit.
Myth #1: The Estimate favored going to war:
Intelligence judgments, including NIEs, are policy neutral. We do not
propose policies and the Estimate in no way sought to sway policymakers
toward a particular course of action. We described what we judged were
Saddam's WMD programs and capabilities and how and when he might use
them and left it to policymakers, as we always do, to determine the
appropriate course of action.
Myth #2: Analysts were pressured to change judgments to meet
the needs of the Bush Administration:
The judgments presented in the October 2002 NIE were based on data
acquired and analyzed over fifteen years. Any changes in judgments over
that period were based on new evidence, including clandestinely
collected information that led to new analysis. Our judgments were
presented to three different Administrations. And the principal
participants in the production of the NIE from across the entire US
Intelligence Community have sworn to Congress, under oath, that they
were NOT pressured to change their views on Iraq WMD or to conform to
Administration positions on this issue. In my particular case, I was
able to swear under oath that not only had no one pressured me to take a
particular view but that I had not pressured anyone else working on the
Estimate to change or alter their reading of the intelligence
information.
Myth #3: NIE judgments were news to Congress:
Over the past fifteen years our assessments on Iraq WMD issues have
been presented routinely to six different congressional committees
including the two oversight committees, the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
To the best of my knowledge, prior to this NIE, these committees never
came back to us with a concern of bias or an assertion that we had
gotten it wrong.
Myth #4: We buried divergent views and concealed
uncertainties:
Diverse agency views, particularly on whether Baghdad was
reconstituting its uranium enrichment effort and as a subset of that,
the purposes of attempted Iraqi aluminum tube purchases, were fully
vetted during the coordination process. Alternative views presented by
the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the Department of State, the
Office of Intelligence in the Department of Energy, and by the US Air
Force were showcased in the National Intelligence Estimate
and were acknowledged in unclassified papers on the subject. Moreover,
suggestions that their alternative views were buried as footnotes in the
text are wrong. All agencies were fully exposed to these alternative
views, and the heads of those organizations blessed the wording and
placement of their alternative views. Uncertainties were highlighted in
the Key Judgments and throughout the main text. Any reader would have
had to read only as far as the second paragraph of the Key Judgments to
know that as we said: "We lacked specific information on many key
aspects of Iraq's WMD program."
Myth #5: Major NIE judgments were based on single
sources:
Overwhelmingly, major judgments in the NIE on WMD were based on
multiple sources–often from human intelligence, satellite imagery,
and communications intercepts. Not only is the allegation wrong, but it
is also worth noting that it is not even a valid measure of the quality
of intelligence performance. A single human source with direct access to
a specific program and whose judgment and performance have proven
reliable can provide the "crown jewels"; in the early 1960s
Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy, who was then this country's only penetration of
the Soviet high command, was just such a source. His information enabled
President Kennedy to stare down a Soviet threat emanating from Cuba, and
his information informed US intelligence analysis for more than two
decades thereafter. In short, the charge is both wrong and meaningless.
Myth #6: We relied too much on United Nations reporting and
were complacent after UN inspectors left in 1998:
We never accepted UN reporting at face value. I know, because in the
mid 1990s I was the coordinator for US intelligence support to UNSCOM
and the IAEA. Their ability to see firsthand what was going on in Iraq,
including inside facilities that we could only peer at from above,
demanded that we pay attention to what they saw and that we support
their efforts fully. Did we ever have all the information that we wanted
or required? Of course not. Moreover, for virtually any critical
intelligence issue that faces us the answer always will be
"no." There is a reason that the October 2002 review of Iraq's
WMD programs is called a National Intelligence ESTIMATE and not a
National Intelligence FACTBOOK. On almost any issue of the day that we
face, hard evidence will only take intelligence professionals so far.
Our job is to fill in the gaps with informed analysis. And we sought to
do that consistently and with vigor. The departure of UNSCOM inspectors
in 1998 certainly did reduce our information about what was occurring in
Iraq's WMD programs. But to say that we were blind after 1998 is wrong.
Efforts to enhance collection were vigorous, creative, and productive.
Intelligence collection after 1998, including information collected by
friendly and allied intelligence services, painted a picture of Saddam's
continuing efforts to develop WMD programs and weapons that reasonable
people would have found compelling.
Myth # 7: We were fooled on the Niger "yellowcake"
story—a major issue in the NIE:
This was not one of the reasons underpinning our Key
Judgment about nuclear reconstitution. In the body of the Estimate,
after noting that Iraq had considerable low-enriched and other forms of
uranium already in country—enough to produce roughly
100 nuclear weapons—we included the Niger issue with appropriate
caveats, for the sake of completeness. Mentioning, with appropriate
caveats, even unconfirmed reporting is standard practice in NIEs and
other intelligence assessments; it helps consumers of the assessment
understand the full range of possibly relevant intelligence.
Myth #8: We overcompensated for having underestimated the WMD
threat in 1991:
Our judgments were based on the evidence we acquired and the analysis
we produced over a 15-year period. The NIE noted that we had
underestimated key aspects of Saddam's WMD efforts in the 1990s. We were
not alone in that regard: UNSCOM missed Iraq's BW program and the IAEA
underestimated Baghdad's progress on nuclear weapons development. But,
what we learned from the past was the difficulty we have had in
detecting key Iraqi WMD activities. Consequently, the Estimate specified
what we knew and what we believed but also warned policymakers that we
might have underestimated important aspects of Saddam's program. But in
no case were any of the judgments "hyped" to compensate for
earlier underestimates.
Myth #9: We mistook rapid mobilization programs for actual
weapons:
There is practically no difference in threat between a standing
chemical and biological weapons capability and one that could be
mobilized quickly with little chance of detection. The Estimate
acknowledged that Saddam was seeking rapid mobilization capabilities
that he could invigorate on short notice. Those who find such programs
to be less of a threat than actual weapons should understand that Iraqi
denial and deception activities virtually would have ensured our
inability to detect the activation of such efforts. Even with
"only" rapid mobilization capabilities, Saddam would have been
able to achieve production and stockpiling of chemical and biological
weapons in the midst of a crisis, and the Intelligence Community would
have had little, if any, chance of detecting this activity, particularly
in the case of BW. In the case of chemical weapons, although we might
have detected indicators of mobilization activity, we would have been
hard pressed to accurately interpret such evidence. Those who conclude
that no threat existed because actual weapons have not yet been found do
not understand the significance posed by biological and chemical warfare
programs in the hands of tyrants.
Myth #10: The NIE asserted that there were "large WMD
stockpiles" and because we haven't found them, Baghdad had no
WMD:
From experience gained at the end of Desert Storm more than ten years
ago, it was clear to us and should have been clear to our critics, that
finding WMD in the aftermath of a conflict wouldn't be easy. We judged
that Iraq probably possessed one hundred to five hundred metric tons of
CW munitions fill. One hundred metric tons would fit in a backyard
swimming pool; five hundred could be hidden in a small warehouse. We
made no assessment of the size of Iraq's biological weapons holdings but
a biological weapon can be carried in a small container. (And of course,
we judged that Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon.) When the Iraq
Survey Group (ISG), led by David Kay, issued its interim report in
October, acknowledging that it had not found chemical or biological
weapons, the inspectors had then visited only ten of the 130 major
ammunition depots in Iraq; these ammunition dumps are huge, sometimes
five miles by five miles on a side. Two depots alone are roughly the
size of Manhattan. It is worth recalling that after Desert Storm, US
forces unknowingly destroyed over 1,000 rounds of
chemical-filled munitions at a facility called Al Kamissiyah. Baghdad
sometimes had special markings for chemical and biological munitions and
sometimes did not. In short, much remains to be done in the hunt for
Iraq's WMD.
We do not know whether the ISG ultimately will be able to find
physical evidence of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons or confirm
the status of its WMD programs and its nuclear ambitions. The
purposeful, apparently regime-directed, destruction of evidence
pertaining to WMD from one end of Iraq to the other, which began even
before the Coalition occupied Baghdad, and has continued since then,
already has affected the ISG's work. Moreover, Iraqis who have been
willing to talk to US intelligence officers are in great danger. Many
have been threatened; some have been killed. The denial and deception
efforts directed by the extraordinarily brutal, but very competent Iraqi
Intelligence Services, which matured through ten years of inspections by
various UN agencies, remain a formidable challenge. And finally,
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. But now that
we have our own eyes on the ground, David Kay and the ISG must be
allowed to complete their work and other collection efforts we have
under way also must be allowed to run their course. And even then, it
will be necessary to integrate all the new information with intelligence
and analyses produced over the past fifteen years before we can
determine the status of Iraq's WMD efforts prior to the war.
Allegations about the quality of the US intelligence performance and
the need to confront these charges have forced senior intelligence
officials throughout US Intelligence to spend much of their time looking
backwards. I worry about the opportunity costs of this sort of
preoccupation, but 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. If this is allowed to happen, the Nation will be poorly served
by its Intelligence Community and ultimately much less secure.
Fundamentally, the Intelligence Community increasingly will be in
danger of not connecting the dots until the dots have become a straight
line.
We must keep in mind that the search for WMD cannot and should not be
about the reputation of US Intelligence or even just about finding
weapons. At its core, men and women from across the Intelligence
Community continue to focus on this issue because understanding the
extent of Iraq's WMD efforts and finding and securing weapons and all of
the key elements that make up Baghdad's WMD programs— before
they fall into the wrong hands—is vital to our national
security. If we eventually are proven wrong—that is, that there
were no weapons of mass destruction and the WMD programs were dormant or
abandoned—the American people will be told the truth; we would have
it no other way.
Stuart A. Cohen is an intelligence professional with 30
years of service in the CIA. He was acting Chairman of the National
Intelligence Council when the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on
Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction was published.
The Future of Iraq | The War and the Wider World | A Violent Month | Events of the Past Year | Government Documents | Maps
