'Drawing their own picture'

WASHINGTON -- In the run-up to the war in Iraq, Washington and London worked in unison to present with terrifying specificity the intelligence underpinning their case for an invasion.

The Bush administration asserted that Iraq had unmanned drones capable of spreading biological weapons to US cities, and it displayed grainy black-and-white aerial photographs of new construction at the Al Qaim nuclear site as evidence that Iraq could produce a nuclear weapon within a few years, if not months. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell highlighted some of those alarms in his dramatic Feb. 5 presentation to the UN Security Council.

In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair trotted out an intelligence dossier on the threat -- including an assertion that Iraq could unleash a chemical or biological weapon within 45 minutes of an order from Saddam Hussein.

One year later, these claims have not just come under question, but in many cases now appear to have been false. On many of the most pivotal intelligence claims, David Kay, the CIA's former chief weapons inspector, said last week, "We were almost all wrong."

In London, a judicial inquiry cleared Blair of deliberately misleading his public about the 45-minute claim, but the testimony in the Hutton inquiry discredited the claim itself. It turned out to have come from a single Iraqi source and referred not to deploying weapons of mass destruction, but far less threatening field munitions.

In the ensuing debate over the quality and use of the Iraq intelligence, many analysts on both sides of the Atlantic are saying that Kay oversimplified the problem, and that the British inquiry missed the point. In this view, the Bush and Blair governments overlooked a substantial body of countervailing intelligence as they made their case for war.

"Kay says we all got it wrong. Well, that's not the case," said Greg Thielmann, who before the war was director of the Office of Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. "The White House was not interested in information other than that which substantiated its case."

After 25 years in government service, Thielmann, 53, said he chose early retirement last fall, in part because of his frustration with the Bush administration. "They took every piece of information, and all the way up the line, it was made less qualified and more alarming. That is why the American people were so misled about the nature of the Iraqi threat."

Frank Anderson, the former head of the CIA's Near East Division who is now the head of Foreign Reports, a private agency that analyzes the Middle East largely for the oil industry, said raw intelligence data were lacking.

"This wasn't a failure to connect the dots; there were no dots," Anderson said. And so the Bush and Blair governments took instead to "drawing their own picture."

The drones emerged as a key example. Kay told a Senate Armed Forces Committee last week that US weapons inspectors discovered that the drones were never capable of deployment for weapons of mass destruction.

That was disturbing news to Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, who told Kay at Wednesday's hearing that he voted for the Iraq war, largely because he had been presented with then-classified information that stated in no uncertain terms that Iraq possessed the unmanned drones capable of threatening American cities with biological weapons.

After the hearing, Nelson told the Globe that he was upset not only because the intelligence had proved wrong, but because he has since learned that others in the intelligence community had disputed the claims about the drones in the first place.

Officials in the Air Force believed the purpose of the drones was unarmed reconnaissance, not spreading biological weapons, according to now-declassified documents.

"I was told only the one thing, that he had the capability," Nelson said. "I was obviously misled, because I was given incorrect information and I was not told there was a dispute about the veracity of that information."

Another issue was the alleged stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. Kay told senators that the 3.9 tons of VX nerve gas that the administration warned was "unaccounted for" appears to have burned up in a traffic accident in 1991, as it was being transported back from the Kuwaiti border -- the explanation the Iraqis gave before the war.

The Carnegie Endowment's Joseph Cirincione said a great deal of intelligence had questioned the existence of stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, not least the persistent claims by UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, who said the inspections regime had effectively shut down Iraq's weapons program as best as they could confirm on the ground.

Cirincione said the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002 claimed that Iraq had between 100 tons and 500 tons of chemical and biological weapons. But according to documents that have recently been declassified and published in a Carnegie report, the Defense Intelligence Agency had stated in September 2002 that the information on weapons stockpiles was unreliable.

"Why did [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld choose to go with one estimate, and choose to ignore the analysis of his own agency?" he asked. "These are the questions that have not yet been asked. Wouldn't a responsible policy maker have had some pause before he rushed to tell America that Iraq had these with weapons with such a degree of certainty?"

Both the the Bush and Blair governments continue to defend the war as necessary. But as the debate intensifies about whether politicians manipulated intelligence to support their decision to go to war, Kay maintains that the intelligence itself is to blame.

"I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed," Kay told the committee, adding that none of the analysts he spoke to said they were pressured by politicians.

"You know, almost in a perverse way, I wish it had been undue influence, because we know how to correct that. . . . The fact that it wasn't tells me that we've got a much more fundamental problem of understanding what went wrong."

David Albright, a former weapons inspector who now heads the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said Kay's testimony ignored that "there was a lot of dissent" in the intelligence community on many key issues and that when "new information developed, they didn't even want to look at it."

One long-standing complaint within the US intelligence community is an over-reliance on technology, specifically satellite imagery, which has crept into intelligence gathering since the 1970s. That has coincided with a steady erosion of "human intelligence" from sources inside the countries.

Human intelligence, or "humint" in military parlance, in Iraq was providing information that was filtered through a shadowy -- and apparently unreliable -- network of Iraqi defectors who had a deeply vested interest in ridding Iraq of Hussein.

Explaining the inner workings of intelligence gathering, Anderson, a 25-year veteran of the CIA, added: "Everybody in the community was intensely aware that they didn't have the intelligence. They knew they didn't have it.

"The operational side was beating its head against the wall, saying, `We don't have it. We have to figure out a way to get it.' The analytical side was understandably frustrated, and doing its best to provide analysis when there is limited, and bad information," he said.

"Because of the lack of humint, we didn't have enough countervailing intelligence to dismiss what they were selling . . . So in the end of the day, there was a strong bias to buy the intelligence that fit what the policy makers wanted. And it looks like that's what happened."

That appears to have occurred with the British "45-minute" claim, which made its way into the infamous September 2002 intelligence document that became known as the "dodgy dossier."

The "45-minute" assertion came from a single source -- a senior Iraqi army officer who had obtained second-hand information about battlefield munitions and then passed it on to one of the Iraqi exile groups. In turn, that group passed it on to British intelligence, according to testimony by Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of the British intelligence service MI-6.

Brian Jones of the Defense Intelligence Staff testified at the inquiry headed by the British judge, Lord Hutton, "We felt we did in fact lack the collateral intelligence that allowed us to add confidence, if you like, to this single source."

One senior figure in the Iraqi opposition community in London who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that claim came through the London-based Iraqi National Accord.

"Everyone knew the 45-minute claim was questionable. . . . All of the information that was coming out of Iraq [before the invasion] was questionable, often exaggerated, and a lot of it was misleading. But we were just passing this information along. It was the intelligence community's job to verify it," the opposition member said.

Another factor was the strange behavior of Saddam Hussein. Kay said this week that Hussein apparently was willing to risk his regime to conceal phantom programs and that interviews showed that members of Hussein's own Republican Guard were convinced that it possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Jonathan Tucker, a former UN weapons inspector who traveled to Iraq in 1995, said, "The Iraqis had engaged in systematic deception and denial during the 1990s."

But he added that one of the more intriguing allegations still to be clarified is whether Hussein himself had constructed an elaborate bluff to hold on to power, or had perhaps been duped by his own scientists who were simply pocketing the money he provided for weapons programs.

"That really has to be clarified, the extent to which Saddam was deceived or was deceiving others," he said.

Sennott reported from London; Stockman from Washington, D.C.