Tenet supports CIA data, search for Iraqi weapons

CIA Director George J. Tenet yesterday acknowledged intelligence shortcomings in the run-up to the Iraq war but said teams searching for Saddam Hussein’s banned weapons of mass destruction need more time.

In a speech vigorously defending the CIA’s record, Mr. Tenet also said foreign intelligence from two human sources close to Saddam’s inner circle revealed that production of Iraqi chemical arms had resumed before the war.

Mr. Tenet said intelligence-gathering is difficult, and the full truth about Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs may never be known.

However, he said the CIA had a mixed record in trying to “penetrate Iraq” and spy on Saddam’s activities.

“We did not have enough of our own human intelligence,” Mr. Tenet said. “We did not ourselves penetrate the inner sanctum. Our agents were on the periphery of [weapons of mass destruction] activities, providing some useful information.”

Mr. Tenet disputed the recent testimony of former arms inspector David Kay, the top CIA representative on the Iraqi Survey Group, the 1,400-member team searching Iraq. Mr. Kay has said work to find Saddam Hussein’s arms is 85 percent complete and that no large stocks of weapons existed before the war.

He also said prewar intelligence on Iraq was “almost all wrong.”

But Mr. Tenet told a packed auditorium at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service that “we are nowhere near 85 percent finished.”

“Any call that I make today is necessarily provisional. Why? Because we need more time and we need more data,” he said.

President Bush is set to name a blue-ribbon commission to study U.S. intelligence failures amid calls from Democrats and others that the administration manipulated data to make the public case for war in Iraq.

On Capitol Hill yesterday, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence made available to senators a 300-page classified assessment of intelligence on Iraq. No details were made public, but one Senate aide said the report reflected some of Mr. Kay’s criticisms of prewar data.

Mr. Kay, speaking at a news conference yesterday, repeated his claim that work in searching for arms was about 85 percent finished.

“Look, if there were large stockpiles, they had to be produced by people, they had to be produced in facilities and they would have left some indelible signs,” Mr. Kay told the Carnegie Endowment.

“Where are those people? Where are those facilities? Where are the documents, the importation and the other records of such large production? Those have not been found. And I think those are pretty compelling proof at this point, maybe even the famous 85 percent level, for me, of proof that those don’t exist.”

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