Emperors, clothes, and David Kay on intelligence
I read and re-read James Risen's interview with David Kay in the NYT today. Kay comes across as a thoughtful person, no patsy by any means; someone who seems prepared to call it like he sees it, and who is still sincerely struggling to understand how the US intelligence "community" could have gotten it all so terribly wrong about Saddam's WMDs.
To me, the most interesting part of the interview was not Kay's assessment--based on debriefing of Tarek Aziz and other Saddam-regime detainees--that for the last few years of his time in power Saddam was effectively delusional, and indeed majorly deluded by people who came to him with cock-a-mamie schemes for weapons programs that could never work.
(Hey, the folks in Washington wouldn't know anything about any of those, I'm sure... )
No, the most interesting part is where Kay is reflecting on the effects of a kind of group-think inside the US intelligence agencies. It comes right at the end of Risen's interview:
- While [Kay] said the [CIA] analysts who were monitoring Iraq's weapons programs did the best they could with what they had, he argued that the agency failed to make it clear to American policy makers that their assessments were increasingly based on very limited information.
"I think that the system should have a way for an analyst to say, `I don't have enough information to make a judgment,' " Dr. Kay said. "There is really not a way to do that under the current system."
He added that while the analysts included caveats on their reports, those passages "tended to drop off as the reports would go up the food chain" inside the government.
As a result, virtually everyone in the United States intelligence community during both the Clinton and the current Bush administrations thought Iraq still had the illicit weapons, he said. And the government became a victim of its own certainty.
"Alarm bells should have gone off when everyone believes the same thing," Dr. Kay said. "No one stood up and said, `Let's examine the footings for these conclusions.' I think you ought to have a place for contrarian views in the system."
Kay told Risen that Iraq,
- attempted to revive its efforts to develop nuclear weapons in 2000 and 2001, but never got as far toward making a bomb as Iran and Libya did.
He said Baghdad was actively working to produce a biological weapon using the poison ricin until the American invasion last March. But in general, Dr. Kay said, the C.I.A. and other agencies failed to recognize that Iraq had all but abandoned its efforts to produce large quantities of chemical or biological weapons after the first Persian Gulf war, in 1991. [Emphasis by HC]
Kay said he and his team had learned that:
- sometime around 1997 and 1998, Iraq plunged into what he called a "vortex of corruption," when government activities began to spin out of control because an increasingly isolated and fantasy-riven Saddam Hussein had insisted on personally authorizing major projects without input from others.
After the onset of this "dark ages," Dr. Kay said, Iraqi scientists realized they could go directly to Mr. Hussein and present fanciful plans for weapons programs, and receive approval and large amounts of money. Whatever was left of an effective weapons capability, he said, was largely subsumed into corrupt money-raising schemes by scientists skilled in the arts of lying and surviving in a fevered police state.
Actually, it was even worse than that. One of the most hilarious tidbits Kay's people learned from former deputy Iraqi PM Tarek Aziz was that, "Mr. Hussein would send Mr. Aziz manuscripts of novels he was writing, even as the American-led coalition was gearing up for war."
Gosh, what is it with these crazy dictators? I remember once when someone asked me if I'd like to be the English-language literary agent for a work of fiction that a wellknown Middle Eastern ruler had written... My answer? No.
Anyway, I'm tired. I just want to end up here with David Kay's bottom line there, from the NYT story:
- "I'm personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction," Dr. Kay said. "We don't find the people, the documents or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on.
In both those posts, I was describing the Niger story--based on Mohamed el-Baradei's careful unraveling of it-- as clearly a fake one. Equally importantly, I was calling for a genuine, hard-hitting enquiry into who it was that had been responsible for planting such a potentially provocative story and thus leading the whole world astray...
We have yet to see such an enquiry materialize here in the US. Maybe the Valerie Plame enquiry could evolve into a bigger investigation of this sort here, in the same way the David Kelly enquiry led to much broader revelations about the general intel-skewing process in Britain. But it hasn't happened here yet.
In Britain, meanwhile, the count-down has now begun to the Hutton Inquiry's delivery of its final report, due Wednesday...
The Bushies are now saying that "all intelligence agencies" agreed on Iraqi wmd before the war. Well, I doubt that is the case. In October 2002, just as the inspectors were going back into Iraq, I asked an acquaintance in INR (State Dept intel) what he thought they would find. This was someone who had been working on Iraq for years. He said "nothing". Saddam, he said, had no nuclear program -- everyone agreed on that. As for chemicals and biologicals, those are hard to keep in stockpiles. They don't last long. The point, if you want them, is to have a production capability that can turn them out quickly. He thought Saddam had probably tried to keep that capability, but that the stockpiles were gone. I wonder what happened when views of this sort reached the top of the interagency process. That's where they probably got squashed. But there must have been plenty of people, looking at the same information as my informant, who reached the same conclusions that he did. But you can't easily mobilize the country for war because of a weapons program....