Amid questions, analyst procedures revamped

WASHINGTON -- The CIA is making changes in how it handles intelligence after identifying specific problems in its disputed prewar assessment that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction, officials said yesterday.

Director George Tenet, whose agency's performance is under intense scrutiny, has ordered an end to the longstanding practice of withholding from analysts details about the clandestine agents who provide information, officials said.

The changes were ordered after an internal review revealed several occasions when CIA analysts mistakenly believed that Iraq weapons data had been confirmed by multiple sources, when in fact it had come from a single source, said Jami Miscik, deputy director for intelligence, in a speech yesterday to the agency's analysts. The misunderstanding arose because CIA operatives had given analysts ambiguous information.

In other cases, Miscik said, analysts believed they were looking at information that came from a reliable source who had direct knowledge, but subsequent review showed the agent with the good reputation was actually supplying information from other parties "about whom we know little."

Tenet is "adamant this must change," Miscik told the analysts. "We are not brushing aside the agency's duty to protect sources and methods, but barriers to sharing information must be removed.

"Analysts can no longer be put in a position of making a judgment on a critical issue without a full and comprehensive understanding of the source's access to the information on which they are reporting," Miscik said, according to a text of her speech.

Under the CIA's current system, analysts are told only about the reliability of the source, but get no other details such as an explanation of the person's access to the information he or she is providing. That is designed to protect agents' identities, but also has roots in a bureaucratic divide between the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence, the agency's analytical side.

The moves are the first publicly known changes made to CIA operations in response to a cascade of criticism over the agency's prewar conclusions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. President Bush has created a commission to probe the CIA record, and the intelligence committees in the Senate and House are also conducting reviews. Democrats, meanwhile, are demanding the investigations extend to whether top Bush administration officials exaggerated the findings to build a case for war.

Yesterday's moves show Tenet "is trying to get ahead of the criticism" of his agency, said one senior congressional aide with intelligence experience. Tenet will face public questioning on Capitol Hill in the first week of March, when he is scheduled to give his annual report on worldwide threats.

"Criticisms will be pointed and harsh," Miscik told the analysts, and "while some of the criticisms will be unmerited, we have to recognize that many will be justified."

Miscik didn't specify what prewar information was now considered questionable, or what CIA weapons judgments might have been influenced by the data.

Analysts have long felt they needed to know more about sources of information -- not their names but rather whether they have first-hand, or less direct, access to the information they are presenting, officials said.

"This is something the analysts have sought for years and have never been able to get," said one former senior agency analyst.

Miscik said analysts working on Iraq were sometimes misled into thinking more than one agent was involved because reports would describe a single source more than once and would use different descriptions each time.

In cases where analysts didn't realize they were looking at information from unproven sources, Miscik said, the scanty information in the reports gave them no way of knowing.

Miscik also described another problem: the reliance on "inherited assumptions," or failing to retest past intelligence conclusions as time goes on.

She called that issue "the single most important aspect of our tradecraft that needs to be examined."