U.S. Team Leader in Iraq Arms Hunt May Quit

The American team searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq may soon lose its chief and has been reassigning some personnel from the hunt to fighting the insurgency, U.S. officials said Thursday.

Although officials insisted that they remained committed to seeking the weapons, the developments raise new questions about the future of a $900-million effort that the Bush administration has hoped would corroborate one of its main rationales for invading Iraq.

David Kay, who has led the 1,200-member Iraq Survey Group since June, has told superiors at the CIA that he is considering leaving the team, which has yet to find stockpiles of banned weapons, a U.S. official said. The official said Kay, a former United Nations weapons inspector, had not made a decision but would discuss the issue with his superiors next week.

Kay, who was said to be spending the holidays with his family in the Washington area, could not be reached for comment. Despite his declarations that the alleged weapons of mass destruction surely existed, Kay has acknowledged to colleagues his frustrations that the search has not turned up such arms.

After nearly seven months in the dangerous country, he is under pressure from his family to return, another U.S. official said.

Kay didn’t specify when hired how long he would stay, but the assignment has lasted longer than he expected, the first U.S. official said, noting: “His hope was that it wouldn’t be a lifetime gig.”

Officials willing to discuss Kay’s plans and the weapons search requested anonymity.

Though Kay has not publicized his political views, he strongly believed that Saddam Hussein had a large weapons arsenal that made him an imminent threat. As a paid NBC News consultant, for example, Kay declared on television during the spring that mobile trailers seized from the regime could have no other use but to serve as biological weapons laboratories. The assertion has been disputed by many experts, and even Kay’s group is in disagreement over the purpose of the trailers.

The first U.S. official insisted that the reassignment of personnel from the survey team was only temporary.

A defense official said recently that the Iraq Survey Group’s composition has been changing to include more counter-terrorism specialists and fewer weapons experts. Another defense official said the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which had sent a team to Iraq to secure and destroy any banned-weapon materials that might be found, has refocused that group’s work to aid counter-insurgency efforts.

Although U.S. officials did not discuss possible replacements, some experts said the search for weapons could be hurt if Kay’s job is downgraded and given to a new team leader without the same clout within the administration. Kay reports directly to CIA Director George J. Tenet and has had some direct access to President Bush.

Experts said the diversion of resources to counter-insurgency efforts also was a setback to the weapons hunt.

In a report overseen by Kay, the team said in October that it had found no weapon stockpiles. It said it had found evidence of a rudimentary nuclear program, and a missile program at various stages of development. The group said the evidence indicated that the regime was capable of building some chemical and biological weapons.

But senior Bush administration officials no longer argue publicly that Hussein needed to be overthrown because he had weapons of mass destruction and the risk was imminent that he would use them against his neighbors or U.S. interests. They now emphasize that it was necessary to overthrow a dangerous tyrant and to open the way for democracy in the Middle East.

Only this week, Bush suggested that it didn’t matter if Hussein didn’t possess weapons of mass destruction -- what mattered was that the deposed Iraqi leader wanted them and would be a menace if he acquired or developed them.

“So what’s the difference?” Bush asked in an interview with ABC-TV. “If he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger.”

In his initial interrogation Sunday, the captured Hussein reportedly denied that his regime possessed banned weapons.

David Albright, a United Nations weapons inspector in the 1990s, said the widespread perception had been that the goal of the hunt was to prove that the Bush administration’s war rationale was right.

Now, the government can focus the effort on the more important goal of “finding out what WMD assets Iraq had and making sure they’re brought under control,” said Albright, who is with the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based think tank.

Meanwhile, the State Department on Thursday announced a program to find peaceful civilian employment for Iraqi scientists and technicians who formerly worked on weapons programs.