Official Backs Prewar Claims

The CIA’s prewar assessments on Iraq were not exaggerated or tailored to support the Bush administration’s case for war, according to a retired agency official who is leading an internal review of the intelligence community’s performance.

Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy director of the CIA, said that there were significant gaps in the underlying intelligence on Iraq’s alleged banned weapons programs but that analysts were right to conclude that such programs still existed.

“I think it would have been hard for anybody to come to conclusions other than that there were weapons programs underway,” Kerr said Thursday in an interview with The Times.

Kerr also said he believes it was appropriate for the agency to go beyond asserting that Baghdad had programs in place and conclude that Saddam Hussein’s government had chemical and biological weapons.

“I think that was a judgment that was fairly based, a judgment that could have been made at that time on the evidence that was available,” Kerr said. “Whether it was right or wrong is another question.”

The United States has yet to find proof that Baghdad had chemical or biological weapons in the months leading up to the war, though the assertion that such weapons existed was the core of the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq.

Kerr heads a team of four retired intelligence officials reviewing the community’s prewar assessments on Iraq. An interim report has been delivered to CIA Director George J. Tenet.

Kerr noted that the review was only half-done and that the team would now turn toward comparing the intelligence community’s prewar claims with the evidence -- or lack thereof -- on the ground in Iraq.

He said that analysts at the CIA and other agencies probably came under pressure from the administration but that the integrity of the intelligence process did not appear to have been compromised.

“There probably was pressure. There always is pressure,” Kerr said. “But the primary conclusions didn’t change.”

He said his team based its conclusions in large part on the consistency of the reporting on Iraq’s alleged weapons programs between spring 2002 and the beginning of the war. Kerr said the review covered thousands of pages of documents.

The CIA was unequivocal in an unclassified report released in October. “Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions,” the report said in its second sentence. But much of the supporting material was nuanced.

It is unclear how much influence an internal CIA review will have in Washington, where Democrats on Capitol Hill are increasingly critical of prewar assertions about Iraq.

“There is troubling evidence of exaggeration and stretching on the part of the intelligence community,” Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Thursday. Levin was one of nine lawmakers who returned Thursday from a trip to Iraq, where they met with senior U.S. military and intelligence officials. The intelligence committees in the Senate and the House are conducting their own reviews of the prewar intelligence.

CIA officials declined to comment on Kerr’s report. Tenet has defended the agency’s work, dismissing complaints by some agency analysts that they felt pressured to shade their work to support White House objectives.

Kerr’s report supports Tenet’s position. Even so, Kerr said there were holes in the underlying information on which the agency based its Iraq claims.

Much of the agency’s analysis was “drawn out of conclusions out of earlier information,” Kerr said. In the late 1990s, “specific information [and] detailed, documented, hard sources were harder and harder to come by.”