Insider Faults CIA on Iraq Analysis

The beleaguered CIA faces new criticism in an internal report submitted this week by a veteran officer, who found serious fault with the agency’s analysis on Iraq and said he believed intelligence officials had not come to grips with the causes or scope of the failure.

After spending three months reviewing virtually every piece of raw intelligence that went into the CIA’s assessments on Iraq since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Richard J. Kerr, the former deputy director of the agency, said he found failings in the way the data were analyzed and presented, and gaps in the underlying intelligence.

“It is very hard to see [the pre-war analysis on Iraq] as anything but a failure in terms of the specifics that we provided” to policymakers, Kerr said in a telephone interview with The Times. He said he submitted a report of his findings to CIA Director George J. Tenet this week that in many respects echoes the criticism raised by David Kay, who resigned last week as head of the U.S. weapons search team in Iraq.

Kerr emphasized that Iraq was an extremely difficult target, and that many of the intelligence community’s judgments were understandable, even if they were wrong. Kerr, like Kay, said he found no evidence that analysts shaded their estimates to support the Bush administration’s case for war.

But Kerr challenged some of Kay’s broader criticisms, saying he did not believe the former weapons inspector was qualified to pass judgment on whether the intelligence system needs wholesale restructuring or reform.

Even as he came to the CIA’s defense on certain points, Kerr said that, overall, the agency has not owned up to fundamental problems exposed by the failure to find banned weapons stocks in Iraq.

“They’re going to have to face up to it and deal with it in a direct way, and I don’t think they have,” Kerr said. “I don’t think they have systematically looked at how they did this, at this whole problem, looking at the lessons and trying to understand the strengths and shortcomings” of their assessments on Iraq.

Kerr’s comments were echoed by members of Congress, who said they were becoming increasingly impatient with the agency’s refusal to acknowledge that its assessments on Iraq were fundamentally flawed.

“They’re in denial,” said Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “It’s critically important for the national security challenges of the future that these problems get fixed. And I have seen no evidence that they are owning up to it.”

Since it first became clear that weapons stocks might not be found, CIA leaders have issued a series of statements staunchly defending their work, including an August statement by Tenet and a November newspaper opinion piece by Stuart A. Cohen, who was responsible for producing an exhaustive prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons programs.

A CIA spokesman declined to comment on Kerr’s report Friday, saying it had not been reviewed by Tenet, who had commissioned it. But he said the agency continues to stand by its work and that it is too early to conclude that the Iraq analysis was wrong, because the search for banned weapons is not over.

“We just think it’s premature to leap to the conclusion that there are no weapons,” said the spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

In testimony on Capitol Hill this week, Kay called for the creation of an independent commission to investigate the intelligence failure, an idea long backed by Democrats and gaining new momentum among Republicans. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Friday that he supported the creation of a commission.

The House and Senate Intelligence committees are preparing reports that are said to be sharply critical of the CIA and other agencies for their conclusions on Iraq.

President Bush on Friday said, “I want to know the facts” about any intelligence failures in Iraq, but did not endorse the calls for an independent commission. Bush continues to defend the decision to go to war, but has abandoned his previous assurances that weapons would be found.

“One thing is for certain, one thing we do know,” Bush said Friday, is “that Saddam Hussein was a danger. He was a growing danger.”

Kerr submitted his report during a week in which the agency was tossed by a storm of criticism. In his appearance on Capitol Hill and a series of interviews with the media, Kay said there had been “major shortfalls” in the intelligence on Iraq, and that he did not believe there were any stocks of banned weapons in the country when the United States invaded last year.

Kerr’s comments are likely to carry particular weight within the intelligence community because he is a respected 32-year veteran of the agency. A Soviet analyst during the Cuban missile crisis, he went on to hold a number of prominent positions, including interim director of the agency during the administration of President George H.W. Bush. He retired in 1992.

Kerr said his inquiry was focused on the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate -- a document that represented the intelligence community’s most thorough assessment of Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons capabilities. It concluded that “Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.”

When the suspected stocks of weapons failed to turn up after the war, Tenet tapped Kerr to lead a team of agency retirees to review the document and determine whether its assertions were supported by the raw intelligence collected over the last decade by spies, inspectors, satellites, signal-intercept equipment and other sources.

Kerr said the outcome of his review “is a fair report, and I think it understands the problem, but it’s critical in some areas of how the analysis was done and the presentation of the estimate.”

“We criticize a lot about how it was put together.... There are judgments we found somewhat more difficult than [CIA analysts] did to support,” he said.

Kerr declined to provide a detailed breakdown of his findings, but he pointed to areas of concern, including the extent to which the agency’s mid-1990s judgments on Iraq continued to shape its later reporting. Other areas of concern included the absence of mechanisms to challenge faulty assumptions and inadequate efforts to highlight uncertainties in analyses presented to policymakers.

He said an examination of the raw reports shows a significant drop-off in the quality of the intelligence after United Nations weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998.

“Before, we had admissions by the Iraqis, we had people on the ground and inspectors following up on evidence,” Kerr said. “Then [after inspectors left] it becomes traditional intelligence, where you’re doing it from afar, with less certainty.”

Kerr said it was evident that the quality began to degrade after 1995 as Hussein’s government became increasingly hostile to inspectors, ultimately leading to their withdrawal and to President Clinton’s decision to order air strikes on suspected weapons facilities in 1998.

Despite his criticisms, Kerr said that given their limitations, it would have been extremely difficult for analysts to reach any conclusion other than that Hussein was still amassing banned weapons.

“It may be wrong, but there still was merit in how we approached the problem,” Kerr said.

“Analysts had strong reasons -- based on Iraq’s practices, admissions, deception tactics and a continuing flow of information -- to believe that programs continued.”