Key Senator Criticizes Prewar Data

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Sunday for the first time that Saddam Hussein’s alleged mobile germ factories and labs probably “did not exist,” and he sharply criticized prewar U.S. intelligence about Iraq’s suspected weapons.

Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who typically is a strong supporter of the CIA and the Bush White House, said the administration’s use of flawed intelligence regarding the purported mobile bioweapons facilities is “embarrassing for everybody.”

Roberts’ barbed comments on CNN stoked a growing controversy at senior levels of the Bush administration and in the intelligence community over whether the CIA was fooled by duplicitous Iraqi defectors into conjuring up a phantom biological weapons system that became a key piece of evidence in the White House case for war.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told reporters last week that the CIA’s intelligence sources were not “solid.” He said agency officials had assured him early last year that multiple sources had confirmed that Iraq had concealed germ factories in trucks and railroad cars. He said their account had formed the “most dramatic” part of his address to the U.N. Security Council six weeks before the invasion.

The Los Angeles Times reported on March 28 that the CIA’s primary source for information on the alleged mobile weapons labs was an Iraqi defector code-named “Curveball.” The CIA never interviewed the defector, a Baghdad engineer who had sought refuge in Germany, and did not learn his identity until after the war, The Times reported.

U.S. intelligence officials and congressional investigators said they had determined after the war that most of Curveball’s claims were false. They said the defector, the brother of a senior aide to Ahmad Chalabi -- a former Iraqi exile leader with close ties to the Pentagon, now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council -- apparently had been coached to provide detailed information to German authorities that then was funneled to Washington.

Former chief U.S. weapons hunter David Kay told The Times that his investigation in Iraq last summer and fall showed that two other Iraqi defectors cited by Powell as providing corroboration for Curveball’s account had heard of the vehicles but had not seen or worked on them. He called the case “damning.”

The CIA acknowledged in February that Powell had cited information from another Iraqi defector who was known to be unreliable. Officials said the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency had posted a “fabrication notice” about the defector in mid-2002 on a classified computer network, but that the CIA officials who briefed Powell before his speech were unaware of the warning.

A CIA spokesman said Sunday that he could not comment on either Roberts’ or Powell’s remarks, or whether the CIA had abandoned its claims about Iraq’s mobile facilities.

U.S., British and Australian weapons-hunting teams have found no evidence over the last year to support the CIA’s assessments that Hussein’s regime had been producing and stockpiling chemical and biological weapons, and was reconstituting a nuclear weapons program, before the war.

Kay told a Senate committee in January that it appeared all such clandestine weapons work had been destroyed or abandoned in the early 1990s, and that the CIA and other Western spy services had misinterpreted intelligence about Iraq’s weapons programs over the last decade. Recent reports by both the British and Israeli governments have reached similar conclusions.

Unlike other illicit weapons that once were part of Iraq’s arsenal, however, no evidence has emerged to show that Iraq ever had a covert program to develop or build a fleet of vehicles to brew and spew out anthrax, botulinum toxin and other deadly germs that could kill thousands of people, as the CIA had claimed.

Appearing Sunday on CNN’s “Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer,” Roberts said the CIA’s claims on the vehicles were “embarrassing to everybody who used the intelligence,” including members of Congress, officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations and “especially Secretary Powell.”

Roberts added that an investigation by his committee into the prewar intelligence had focused in part on the alleged mobile germ factories. Committee members are now reviewing the draft report and conclusions, and Roberts said he aimed to release an unclassified version in late May.

Although the report is not yet complete, “I think there is a preponderance of evidence that those mobile labs did not exist, in regards to any kind of biological weaponry,” he said.

Roberts blamed, in part, what he called “an assumption train” by U.S. and other intelligence agencies that all signs were interpreted to mean that Iraq was hiding banned weapons. “We have a real systemic problem on our hands,” he said.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who sits on the Intelligence Committee, noted that Vice President Dick Cheney argued in a radio interview in January that two large trucks found in April 2003 in northern Iraq were “conclusive” proof that Hussein had an illegal biological weapons program. CIA Director George Tenet later told a Senate committee that he had called Cheney after the interview to advise him that the CIA no longer stood behind that claim.

“Apparently, the CIA did not even notify the vice president as of a month and a half ago that we don’t believe those [trucks] had anything to do anymore with biological weapons,” Levin said. “So there have been some really significant failures on the part of the intelligence community and exaggerations on the part of the users of that intelligence.”