Tenet defends Iraq intelligence; threat wasn’t “imminent”

Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet on Thursday defended the quality of intelligence analysis of Iraq's suspected weapons programs, which administration officials used to justify last year's invasion of that country.

But Tenet drew a sharp line between those assessments-which he said consisted largely of "estimates"-and the pronouncements by some Bush administration officials that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and was preparing to use them on U.S. interests.

Intelligence analysts never called Iraq an "imminent" threat to the United States, Tenet told a crowd of foreign policy students at Georgetown University in Washington. But he insisted that CIA-led analysis of Iraqi chemical, biological or nuclear programs represented analysts' best efforts to ascertain any threat they posed, and that some of it was inconclusive.

"We concluded that in some of these areas, Iraq had weapons," Tenet said, referring to an October 2002 national intelligence estimate that gathered all 14 intelligence agencies' thinking on the subject. "But we said we had no specific information on the types or quantities of weapons, agent or stockpiles at Baghdad's disposal," he added later.

Tenet's speech followed President Bush's announcement that he would appoint a commission to examine the quality of prewar intelligence gathering and analysis. The move was prompted by statements from the former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay, who said intelligence agencies' conclusion that Iraq possessed the weapons was wrong.

Tenet acknowledged that controversy has enveloped his agency. But he warned against a politically motivated review of the analysis and the agencies' performance, saying it "may well result in an intelligence community that is damaged, and a country that is more at risk."

He described a decade's worth of U.S. intelligence efforts to determine the scale and scope of Iraqi weapons programs, which used numerous "strands" of reporting, including satellite images, intercepted communications and information from sources close to Saddam Hussein's government. Tenet praised the work, calling it at times "brilliant," but emphasized that intelligence analysis, by design, is rarely absolute.

"In the intelligence business, you are almost never completely wrong or completely right," he said. "This applies in full to the question of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction."

Tenet also left little doubt that he thinks the Iraq controversy has overshadowed a rational discussion of how the intelligence process works and could be improved. "To understand a difficult topic like Iraq takes patience and care," Tenet said. "Unfortunately, you rarely hear a patient, careful-or thoughtful-discussion of intelligence these days."

He stressed that the work of the Iraq Survey Group, the unit Kay headed and that still is looking for weapons and related evidence, is far from over. Several times he called for "patience," and held out the possibility that weapons or evidence of weapons programs could still be found.

But the intelligence chief also revealed that there was little consensus among analysts about what the data culled from Iraq really meant. "Analysts differed on several important aspects of these programs, and those debates were spelled out in the estimate," he said, referring to the October 2002 report. Officials used the estimate in public when justifying the case for preemptive military action against Iraq.

But while Tenet said intelligence agencies never used the word "imminent," he also said no one had put any pressure on the agencies to shade their analysis or come up with conclusions they couldn't support. "No one told us what to say or how to say it," Tenet said. Instead, he added, the agencies "painted an objective assessment for our policymakers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programs that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests."

"It is important to underline the word estimate," Tenet later said of the analysis. "Because not everything we analyze can be known to a standard of absolute proof." Senior administration officials publicly characterized the analysis in much stronger terms. Vice President Dick Cheney, for instance, said the intelligence left "no doubt" that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Tenet towed a careful line between loyalty to his agency and loyalty to the president. He did not point to administration officials who had made statements that would be considered more forceful than the analysis itself. But he also staunchly defended the employees under his watch, praising them for their work and their integrity, and taking pains to emphasize cases in which their calls have been right.

"At no time will we allow our integrity or our willingness to make the tough calls be compromised," Tenet said in closing remarks.