Inspectors Find Aims, Not Arms

The top U.S. weapons hunter in Iraq told Congress on Thursday that he had found no weapons of mass destruction but that Saddam Hussein “had not given up his aspirations and intentions” while he ruled the country to acquire chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

The long-awaited report by David Kay, the CIA special advisor, appeared to undermine prewar claims by the White House and the intelligence community that Hussein had recently produced large stockpiles of poison gas and germ weapons and was working to produce nuclear bombs.

Kay acknowledged that it is still unclear whether Hussein’s regime possessed unconventional weapons before the war.

“We have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist, or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone,” Kay said, according to a 13-page unclassified statement released by the CIA.

Kay, who heads the 1,200-member Iraq Survey Group, testified behind closed doors for most of the day to the House and Senate intelligence committees. His interim report, which ran several hundred pages, was kept secret. Kay said he would issue another interim report in three months but that he might need six to nine months to reach definitive conclusions.

Few seemed satisfied with the report. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was disappointed with the uncertain findings six months after the United States went to war.

“I’m not pleased by what I heard today,” said Roberts, usually a stalwart supporter of the White House and the CIA. “I am concerned, like my colleagues, in regard to the lack of results.... There has not been a breakthrough.”

The committee’s ranking Democrat, Sen. John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, sharply questioned the intelligence that suggested Iraq had posed an imminent danger.

“Did we misread it or did they mislead us, or did [we] simply get it wrong?” he asked. “Whatever the answer is, it’s not a good answer.”

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld indicated he was still waiting to see whether the prewar intelligence was accurate.

“It’s not clear that it was off by a little bit or a mile at this stage,” he said. “If it is off by a lot, that will be unfortunate and we’ll know that.”

Kay’s report suggests that at least some of the prewar intelligence was deeply flawed. A National Intelligence Estimate prepared last October, for example, warned that Hussein had renewed production of mustard, sarin and VX agents, and “probably has stocked” 100 to 500 tons of chemical weaponry, “much of it added in the past year.”

But Kay said “multiple sources” indicated that Iraq did not have an ongoing chemical weapons program after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

“Information found to date suggests that Iraq’s large-scale capability to develop, produce and fill new [chemical] munitions was reduced -- if not entirely destroyed -- during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of U.N. sanctions and U.N. inspections,” Kay said.

Interrogation of Iraqi scientists and officials, Kay said, showed that Hussein “remained firmly committed to acquiring nuclear weapons” and that the dictator “would have resumed nuclear weapons development at some future point.”

Kay said such testimony “should clear up any doubts about whether Saddam still wanted to obtain nuclear weapons.”

But Kay revealed little evidence to substantiate the Bush administration’s prewar claims that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear arms programs.

Speaking to reporters after briefing senators, Kay indicated that he had found little more than vestiges of Iraq’s nuclear ambitions.

“The evidence we’ve found on the nuclear program at most right now would suggest a very tentative restart on the program at the very most rudimentary level,” Kay said. “It clearly does not look like a massive resurgent program.”

Kay noted, however, that the nuclear program was the one inspectors knew the least about after months of searching. Iraq’s alleged nuclear threat was a linchpin of the administration’s case for war.

In a speech in Cincinnati last October, Bush warned that Hussein “could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year” and said that unless the United States acted, the final proof of Iraq’s nuclear ambitions “could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

The report is also at odds with White House, State Department and CIA claims that Hussein had a fleet of modified trailer trucks that Iraq used to produce biological agents.

“We have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile [biological weapons] production effort,” Kay said, adding that two large trucks found in April could have been used to produce either hydrogen for military weather balloons, missile propellant or biological agents. But the trucks were not “ideally suited” for any of those activities, he said.

Bush had touted the two trucks as proof of the administration’s prewar claims. “We found the weapons of mass destruction,” he said in May. “We found biological laboratories.”

Kay’s report also calls into question intelligence that convinced the Pentagon that U.S. forces were likely to face chemical attack around Baghdad.

“We have not yet found evidence to confirm prewar reporting that Iraqi military units were prepared to use [chemical weapons] against coalition forces,” Kay said.

The White House sought Thursday to play down the significance of the report, stressing its interim nature. “This is a progress report. Keep it in perspective,” said White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. He said Kay’s group was going through “massive” amounts of documents and interviewing many Iraqis who might have knowledge of Hussein’s weapons programs.

“The president believes [Hussein] had weapons of mass destruction and weapons of mass destruction programs, and that the truth will come out,” McClellan said.

Rolfe Ekeus, the Swedish diplomat who headed the United Nations’ weapons inspections in Iraq from 1991 to 1997, said the Kay report contained “no surprises.” U.N. experts long ago had concluded that “Iraq was just working on preserving their capability to eventually reestablish their weapons,” Ekeus said in a telephone interview.

“I think the Americans were misled” about allegations of recent arms production, he said.

Kay said his investigators had discovered “dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment” Iraq had concealed from U.N. inspectors earlier this year. But Kay said that most of the finds were still under investigation and that none clearly pointed to production of illegal arms.

He said the search was severely hampered by the deliberate destruction of potentially crucial documents, computer hard drives and other valuable materials.

“It is important to keep in mind that even the bulkiest materials we are searching for, in the quantities we would expect to find, can be concealed in spaces not much larger than a two-car garage,” he said.

Kay said the evidence so far suggests that after 1996, Iraq focused “on maintaining smaller, covert capabilities that could be activated quickly to surge the production” of biowarfare agents.

He said Iraqi scientists had conducted new research on deadly microbes, including ricin and aflatoxin, and that a vial of one organism -- live C. botulinum Okra B -- had been found in a scientist’s home and could be used to create a biological weapon.

He also said Iraq had built, but not disclosed, unmanned aerial vehicles that could fly farther than permitted by U.N. resolutions and had “continuing covert capability” to manufacture fuel propellant for proscribed long-range missiles. But he said it was an “open question” whether the drones were meant to spray poison gas or be used for surveillance or as decoys.

Kay’s report came as the CIA was struggling to defend its prewar assessments of Iraq. The leading members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence recently sent a letter to CIA Director George J. Tenet faulting the agency for relying on “outdated” information with “too many uncertainties” to justify its judgments on Iraq’s activities.

Tenet sent a sharply worded rebuttal Thursday to Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), the committee chairman, and vice chairman Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice).

“The suggestion by the committee that we did not challenge long-standing judgments and assessments is simply wrong,” Tenet said.

The judgments and tradecraft of the agency’s Iraq analysis “were honest and professional, based on many years of effort and experience,” he said.

Harman issued a statement saying the committee’s views were only reinforced by Kay’s report.

Times staff writers Esther Schrader and Shweta Govindarajan contributed to this report.