Senators Question CIA Cooperation in Inquiry

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the CIA to account for significant gaps in information that the agency provided to the panel as part of its investigation last year into prewar intelligence failures on Iraq, congressional officials said Friday.

Committee officials said they had compiled a list of apparent discrepancies between material that was provided to Congress and disclosures contained in a report on U.S. intelligence gathering released last week by a presidential commission.

Lawmakers were said to be particularly concerned that the committee had not been told about warnings relayed to senior CIA officials before the war that an Iraqi defector code-named “Curveball” was unreliable. The defector, the principal source for prewar U.S. claims that Iraq had mobile biological weapons laboratories, has since been discredited.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) raised the issue with senior intelligence officials this week, a senior aide to the senator said. CIA Director Porter J. Goss appeared before the committee in closed session Thursday.

Other lawmakers have publicly expressed frustration that new details are surfacing nine months after the committee finished its own probe of intelligence on Iraq.

“That’s the type of information we would have expected to get in our inquiry,” said the aide to Roberts. “We’re interested to know: Did [CIA officials] ignore us, not understand us or deliberately keep things from us? We don’t want agencies to think they can play cute” with requests for information.

The aide said the CIA had been quick to acknowledge the problem and promise an explanation.

A senior aide to Sen. John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV (D-W. Va.), the vice chairman of the committee, said the senator was also concerned by the discrepancies.

The congressional scrutiny comes as the CIA has launched an internal examination of why disagreements over Curveball’s reliability were not reported to Congress and did not lead to a rejection of his claims.

Goss “has asked the agency to look into this issue to determine what happened so we’re able to take steps to ensure nothing like it happens again,” said CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise. Goss was sworn in as agency director in September, two months after the Senate committee issued its report.

Senate Intelligence Committee aides pointed to several key discrepancies. Among them was the disclosure in the report from the so-called weapons of mass destruction commission that a senior CIA official had met with a foreign intelligence official who said Curveball was crazy and possibly a fabricator.

That former CIA official -- Tyler Drumheller, then head of the agency’s European division -- told the commission he had passed that warning on to other high-ranking officials including then-CIA Director George J. Tenet.

Tenet said he did not recall receiving that warning.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times last week, Drumheller said that “everyone in the chain of command knew” and that there was “lots of documentation” to show suspicions about Curveball were widely disseminated.

The senior Republican aide to the intelligence committee said the panel would pursue any such documents. The committee also plans to examine statements that two CIA analysts made to the WMD commission indicating they had been punished and pushed out of their jobs after the Iraq war for urging the agency to admit that its intelligence was flawed.