Powell Critical of Prewar Iraq Data

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Friday for first time directly criticized the intelligence community for giving him apparently flawed information he used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Powell said that the “most dramatic” of his allegations, that Saddam Hussein’s regime had mobile germ labs, was based on questionable U.S. intelligence. He urged the commission investigating prewar intelligence to examine how the data were gathered.

The comments were an abrupt reversal for Powell, who had acknowledged disagreements among analysts but had not criticized the intelligence community.

The Los Angeles Times on Sunday detailed flaws in the intelligence, including the use of discredited information from an Iraqi defector, code-named “Curveball.” Officials suspect that the defector was coached to supply false information.

Powell was questioned by reporters about the report during his flight home from Brussels, where he attended a meeting of foreign ministers at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters.

In his conversation with reporters, Powell acknowledged widespread doubts about Iraqi informants who told U.S. and German officials before the war that Hussein had built mobile germ weapons laboratories. The allegations were central to the evidence Powell dramatically presented to the Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, as he urged a skeptical United Nations to confront Hussein.

Powell said that as he prepared for his U.N. presentation, intelligence officials gave him data from four sources on mobile weapons labs. He insisted that he had pressed them to make sure their analysis was correct.

“It was presented to me in the preparation of that [portfolio of evidence] as the best information and intelligence that we had. They certainly indicated to me ... that it was solid,” he said.

He said the evidence about mobile labs was “the most dramatic” of the proof he offered the Security Council, and “I made sure it was multisourced.”

“I’m not the intelligence community, but I probed, and I made sure,” Powell told reporters.

“Now it appears not to be the case, that it was solid,” he said later. “If the sources fell apart, then we need to find out how we’ve gotten ourselves in that position.”

Powell said he hoped the commission appointed by the White House would “look into these matters to see whether or not the intelligence agency had a basis for the confidence that they placed in the intelligence at that time.”

And he noted pointedly, “I’ve had discussions with the CIA about it.”

His appearance before the Security Council was one of the most important moments of his term in office. As the Bush administration built its case against Hussein, it fell to Powell to use his high standing in the international community to sell the U.S. position.

None of the suspected weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, though the search is continuing.

Powell and other U.S. officials pointed to the evidence on mobile labs to show that Hussein was trying to develop an arsenal of germ weapons and to fit it into a fleet of trucks and railcars to elude weapons inspectors.

Current and former U.S. officials, including former chief weapons hunter David Kay, have said that most of the evidence came from Curveball. U.S. officials didn’t know the defector’s name until after the war. Later they learned that he was the brother of a top aide to Ahmad Chalabi.

Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, was an exile leader who pushed for the U.S.-led invasion. U.S. and British intelligence officials have acknowledged that lies and distortions by exile groups contributed to numerous misjudgments about Iraq’s suspected arms programs.

In a February speech, CIA Director George J. Tenet said that there were discrepancies in some claims made by human sources of intelligence.

Still, the Curveball case presents some especially difficult issues because of the informant’s reported direct ties to the Chalabi camp.

The story of Curveball is already under close review by an internal panel of the CIA as well as by congressional oversight committees seeking to explain why so much of the prewar intelligence was flawed.

Kay has said that the Curveball case was the most troubling of the intelligence lapses because it suggested “a lack of due diligence and care” by U.S. officials.

Last May, the CIA said it had found two suspect trucks in northern Iraq. The agency later backtracked and abandoned that claim. But some administration officials clung to the possibility that such mobile labs might exist.

As recently as January, Vice President Dick Cheney referred to the trucks as “conclusive” proof that Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction. Tenet later told Congress that he had called Cheney to warn him that the evidence was in doubt.

Though some analysts called the alleged labs “Winnebagos of Death” and “Hell on Wheels,” some U.N. weapons hunters doubted from the beginning that the trucks were equipped as mobile weapons labs. They believed the equipment was intended for more benign industrial uses, such as weather balloons.