[Mb-civic] Skewed Intelligence Data in 2002 to War in Iraq

[Michael Butler]

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CIA and White House Go To War    €

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    Skewed Intelligence Data in March to War in Iraq
    By David Barstow, William J. Broad, and Jeff Gerth
    The New York Times

     Sunday 03 October 2004

     In 2002, at a crucial juncture on the path to war, senior members of
the Bush administration gave a series of speeches and interviews in which
they asserted that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons
program.

     In a speech to veterans that August, Vice President Dick Cheney said
Mr. Hussein could have an atomic bomb "fairly soon." The next month, Mr.
Cheney told a group of Wyoming Republicans the United States had
"irrefutable evidence" - thousands of tubes made of high-strength aluminum,
tubes that the Bush administration said were destined for clandestine Iraqi
uranium centrifuges, before some were seized at the behest of the United
States.

     The tubes quickly became a critical exhibit in the administration's
brief against Iraq. As the only physical evidence the United States could
brandish of Mr. Hussein's revived nuclear ambitions, they gave credibility
to the apocalyptic imagery invoked by President Bush and his advisers. The
tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," Condoleezza
Rice, the president's national security adviser, asserted on CNN on Sept. 8,
2002. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

     Before Ms. Rice made those remarks, though, she was aware that the
government's foremost nuclear experts had concluded that the tubes were most
likely not for nuclear weapons at all, an examination by The New York Times
has found. Months before, her staff had been told that these experts, at the
Energy Department, believed the tubes were probably intended for small
artillery rockets.

     But Ms. Rice, and other senior administration officials, embraced a
disputed theory about the tubes first championed in April 2001 by a new
analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. Senior scientists considered the
theory implausible, yet in the months after 9/11, as an administration built
a case for confronting Iraq, the theory gained currency as it rose to the
top of the government.

     "She was aware of the differences of opinion" the senior administration
official said of Ms. Rice in an interview authorized by the White House.
"She was also aware that at the highest level of the intelligence community,
there was great confidence that these tubes were for centrifuges."

     Ms. Rice's alarming description on CNN was in keeping with the
administration's overall treatment of the tubes. Senior administration
officials repeatedly failed to fully disclose the contrary views of
America's leading nuclear scientists, The Times found. They sometimes
overstated even the most dire intelligence assessments of the tubes, yet
minimized or rejected the strong doubts of their own experts. They worried
privately that the nuclear case was weak, but expressed sober certitude in
public.

     The result was a largely one-sided presentation to the public that did
not convey the depth of evidence and argument against the administration's
most tangible proof of a revived nuclear weapons program in Iraq.

     In response to questions last week about the tubes, administration
officials emphasized two points: First, they said they had relied on the
repeated assurances of George J. Tenet, then the director of central
intelligence, that the tubes were in fact for centrifuges. Second, they
noted that the intelligence community, including the Energy Department,
largely agreed that Mr. Hussein had revived his nuclear program.

     "We understood from intelligence briefings that the aluminum tubes were
a part of the case" for nuclear reconstitution, Kevin Kellems, director of
communications for Mr. Cheney, said in a statement. But "there were a number
of other important pieces of evidence." Furthermore, he said, the concerns
about Mr. Hussein's nuclear capabilities "followed the tenor of the
intelligence we had been hearing for some time."

     It is not known when the president learned of the doubts that had been
raised about the tubes. Sean McCormack, a spokesman for Mr. Bush, said
yesterday that the president relied on the intelligence community to assess
the tubes' significance. "These judgments sometimes require members of the
intelligence community to make tough assessments about competing
interpretations of facts," he said.

     Mr. Tenet declined to be interviewed. But in a statement, he said he
"made it clear" to the White House "that the case for a possible nuclear
program in Iraq was weaker than that for chemical and biological weapons."
Regarding the tubes, Mr. Tenet said "alternative views were shared" with the
administration after the intelligence community drafted a new National
Intelligence Estimate in late September 2002.

     Today, 18 months after the invasion of Iraq, investigators there have
found no evidence of hidden centrifuges or a revived nuclear weapons
program. The absence of unconventional weapons in Iraq is now widely seen as
evidence of a profound intelligence failure, of an intelligence community
blinded by "group think," false assumptions and unreliable human sources.

     Yet the tale of the tubes, pieced together through records and
interviews with senior intelligence officers, nuclear experts,
administration officials and Congressional investigators, reveals a
different failure.

     Far from "group think," American nuclear and intelligence experts
argued bitterly over the tubes. A "holy war" is how one Congressional
investigator described it. But if the opinions of the nuclear experts were
seemingly disregarded at every turn, an overwhelming momentum gathered
behind the C.I.A. assessment. It was a momentum built on a pattern of haste,
secrecy, ambiguity, bureaucratic maneuver and a persistent failure in the
Bush administration and even among Democrats in Congress to ask hard
questions. That momentum gave urgency to the call for action against Iraq.

     "We have a tendency - I don't know if it's part of the American
character - to say, 'Well, we'll sit down and we'll evaluate the evidence,
we'll draw a conclusion,' " Mr. Cheney said as he discussed the tubes in
September 2002 on the NBC News program "Meet the Press."

     "But we always think in terms that we've got all the evidence. Here, we
don't have all the evidence. We have 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent. We
don't know how much. We know we have a part of the picture. And that part of
the picture tells us that he is, in fact, actively and aggressively seeking
to acquire nuclear weapons."

     Joe Raises the Tube Issue

    Throughout the 1990's, United States intelligence agencies were deeply
preoccupied with the status of Iraq's nuclear weapons program, and with good
reason.

     After the Persian Gulf war in 1991, arms inspectors discovered that
Iraq had been far closer to building an atomic bomb than even the worst-case
estimates had envisioned. And no one believed that Saddam Hussein had
abandoned his nuclear ambitions. To the contrary, in one secret assessment
after another, the agencies concluded that Iraq was conducting low-level
theoretical research and quietly plotting to resume work on nuclear weapons.

     But at the start of the Bush administration, the intelligence agencies
also agreed that Iraq had not in fact resumed its nuclear weapons program.
Iraq's nuclear infrastructure, they concluded, had been dismantled by
sanctions and inspections. In short, Mr. Hussein's nuclear ambitions appear
to have been contained.

     Then Iraq started shopping for tubes.

     According to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, the agencies
learned in early 2001 of a plan by Iraq to buy 60,000 high-strength aluminum
tubes from Hong Kong.

     The tubes were made from 7075-T6 aluminum, an extremely hard alloy that
made them potentially suitable as rotors in a uranium centrifuge. Properly
designed, such tubes are strong enough to spin at the terrific speeds needed
to convert uranium gas into enriched uranium, an essential ingredient of an
atomic bomb. For this reason, international rules prohibited Iraq from
importing certain sizes of 7075-T6 aluminum tubes; it was also why a new
C.I.A. analyst named Joe quickly sounded the alarm.

     At the C.I.A.'s request, The Times agreed to use only Joe's first name;
the agency said publishing his full name could hinder his ability to operate
overseas.

     Joe graduated from the University of Kentucky in the late 1970's with a
bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, then joined the Goodyear Atomic
Corporation, which dispatched him to Oak Ridge, Tenn., a federal complex
that specializes in uranium and national security research.

     Joe went to work on a new generation of centrifuges. Many European
models stood no more than 10 feet tall. The American centrifuges loomed 40
feet high, and Joe's job was to learn how to test and operate them. But when
the project was canceled in 1985, Joe spent the next decade performing
hazard analyses for nuclear reactors, gaseous diffusion plants and oil
refineries.

     In 1997, Joe transferred to a national security complex at Oak Ridge
known as Y-12, his entry into intelligence work. His assignment was to track
global sales of material used in nuclear arms. He retired after two years,
taking a buyout with hundreds of others at Oak Ridge, and moved to the
C.I.A.

     The agency's ability to assess nuclear intelligence had markedly
declined after the cold war, and Joe's appointment was part of an effort to
regain lost expertise. He was assigned to a division eventually known as
Winpac, for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control. Winpac
had hundreds of employees, but only a dozen or so with a technical
background in nuclear arms and fuel production. None had Joe's hands-on
experience operating centrifuges.

     Suddenly, Joe's work was ending up in classified intelligence reports
being read in the White House. Indeed, his analysis was the primary basis
for one of the agency's first reports on the tubes, which went to senior
members of the Bush administration on April 10, 2001. The tubes, the report
asserted, "have little use other than for a uranium enrichment program."

     This alarming assessment was immediately challenged by the Energy
Department, which builds centrifuges and runs the government's nuclear
weapons complex.

     The next day, Energy Department officials ticked off a long list of
reasons why the tubes did not appear well suited for centrifuges. Simply
put, the analysis concluded that the tubes were the wrong size - too narrow,
too heavy, too long - to be of much practical use in a centrifuge.

     What was more, the analysis reasoned, if the tubes were part of a
secret, high-risk venture to build a nuclear bomb, why were the Iraqis
haggling over prices with suppliers all around the world? And why weren't
they shopping for all the other sensitive equipment needed for centrifuges?

     All fine questions. But if the tubes were not for a centrifuge, what
were they for?

     Within weeks, the Energy Department experts had an answer.

     It turned out, they reported, that Iraq had for years used
high-strength aluminum tubes to make combustion chambers for slim rockets
fired from launcher pods. Back in 1996, inspectors from the International
Atomic Energy Agency had even examined some of these tubes, also made of
7075-T6 aluminum, at a military complex, the Nasser metal fabrication plant
in Baghdad, where the Iraqis acknowledged making rockets. According to the
international agency, the rocket tubes, some 66,000 of them, were 900
millimeters in length, with a diameter of 81 millimeters and walls 3.3
millimeters thick.

     The tubes now sought by Iraq had precisely the same dimensions - a
perfect match.

     This finding was published May 9, 2001, in the Daily Intelligence
Highlight, a secret Energy Department newsletter published on Intelink, a
Web site for the intelligence community and the White House.

     Joe and his Winpac colleagues at the C.I.A. were not persuaded. Yes,
they conceded, the tubes could be used as rocket casings. But this made no
sense, they argued in a new report, because Iraq wanted tubes made at
tolerances that "far exceed any known conventional weapons." In other words,
Iraq was demanding a level of precision craftsmanship unnecessary for
ordinary mass-produced rockets.

     More to the point, these analysts had hit on a competing theory: that
the tubes' dimensions matched those used in an early uranium centrifuge
developed in the 1950's by a German scientist, Gernot Zippe. Most centrifuge
designs are highly classified; this one, though, was readily available in
science reports.

     Thus, well before Sept. 11, 2001, the debate within the intelligence
community was already neatly framed: Were the tubes for rockets or
centrifuges?

     Experts Attack Joe's Case

    It was a simple question with enormous implications. If Mr. Hussein
acquired nuclear weapons, American officials feared, he would wield them to
menace the Middle East. So the tube question was critical, yet none too easy
to answer. The United States had few spies in Iraq, and certainly none who
knew Mr. Hussein's plans for the tubes.

     But the tubes themselves could yield many secrets. A centrifuge is an
intricate device. Not any old tube would do. Careful inquiry might answer
the question.

     The intelligence community embarked on an ambitious international
operation to intercept the tubes before they could get to Iraq. The big
break came in June 2001: a shipment was seized in Jordan.

     At the Energy Department, those examining the tubes included scientists
who had spent decades designing and working on centrifuges, and intelligence
officers steeped in the tricky business of tracking the nuclear ambitions of
America's enemies. They included Dr. Jon A. Kreykes, head of Oak Ridge's
national security advanced technology group; Dr. Duane F. Starr, an expert
on nuclear proliferation threats; and Dr. Edward Von Halle, a retired Oak
Ridge nuclear expert. Dr. Houston G. Wood III, a professor of engineering at
the University of Virginia who had helped design the 40-foot American
centrifuge, advised the team and consulted with Dr. Zippe.

     On questions about nuclear centrifuges, this was unambiguously the
A-Team of the intelligence community, many experts say.

     On Aug. 17, 2001, weeks before the twin towers fell, the team published
a secret Technical Intelligence Note, a detailed analysis that laid out its
doubts about the tubes' suitability for centrifuges.

     First, in size and material, the tubes were very different from those
Iraq had used in its centrifuge prototypes before the first gulf war. Those
models used tubes that were nearly twice as wide and made of exotic
materials that performed far better than aluminum. "Aluminum was a huge step
backwards," Dr. Wood recalled.

     In fact, the team could find no centrifuge machines "deployed in a
production environment" that used such narrow tubes. Their walls were three
times too thick for "favorable use" in a centrifuge, the team wrote. They
were also anodized, meaning they had a special coating to protect them from
weather. Anodized tubes, the team pointed out, are "not consistent" with a
uranium centrifuge because the coating can produce bad reactions with
uranium gas.

     In other words, if Joe and his Winpac colleagues were right, it meant
that Iraq had chosen to forsake years of promising centrifuge work and
instead start from scratch, with inferior material built to
less-than-optimal dimensions.

     The Energy Department experts did not think this made much sense. They
concluded that using the tubes in centrifuges "is credible but unlikely, and
a rocket production is the much more likely end use for these tubes."
Similar conclusions were being reached by Britain's intelligence service and
experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations body.

     Unlike Joe, experts at the international agency had worked with Zippe
centrifuges, and they spent hours with him explaining why they believed his
analysis was flawed. They pointed out errors in his calculations. They noted
design discrepancies. They also sent reports challenging the centrifuge
claim to American government experts through the embassy in Vienna, a senior
official said.

     Likewise, Britain's experts believed the tubes would need "substantial
re-engineering" to work in centrifuges, according to Britain's review of its
prewar intelligence. Their experts found it "paradoxical" that Iraq would
order such finely crafted tubes only to radically rebuild each one for a
centrifuge. Yes, it was theoretically possible, but as an Energy Department
analyst later told Senate investigators, it was also theoretically possible
to "turn your new Yugo into a Cadillac."

     In late 2001, intelligence analysts at the State Department also took
issue with Joe's work in reports prepared for Secretary of State Colin L.
Powell. Joe was "very convinced, but not very convincing," recalled Greg
Thielmann, then director of strategic, proliferation and military affairs in
the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

     By year's end, Energy Department analysts published a classified report
that even more firmly rejected the theory that the tubes could work as
rotors in a 1950's Zippe centrifuge. These particular Zippe centrifuges,
they noted, were especially ill suited for bomb making. They were a
prototype designed for laboratory experiments, operating as single units. To
produce enough enriched uranium to make just one bomb a year, Iraq would
need up to 16,000 of them working in concert, a challenge for even the most
sophisticated centrifuge plants.

     Iraq had never made more than a dozen centrifuge prototypes. Half
failed when rotors broke. Of the rest, one actually worked to enrich
uranium, said Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, who once ran Iraq's centrifuge program.

     The Energy Department team concluded it was "unlikely that anyone"
could build a centrifuge site capable of producing significant amounts of
enriched uranium "based on these tubes." One analyst summed it up this way:
the tubes were so poorly suited for centrifuges, he told Senate
investigators, that if Iraq truly wanted to use them this way, "we should
just give them the tubes."

     Enter Cheney 

    In the months after Sept. 11, 2001, as the Bush administration devised a
strategy to fight Al Qaeda, Vice President Dick Cheney immersed himself in
the world of top-secret threat assessments. Bob Woodward, in his book "Plan
of Attack," described Mr. Cheney as the administration's new "self-appointed
special examiner of worst-case scenarios," and it was a role that fit.

     Mr. Cheney had grappled with national security threats for three
decades, first as President Gerald R. Ford's chief of staff, later as
secretary of defense for the first President Bush. He was on intimate terms
with the intelligence community, 15 spy agencies that frequently feuded over
the significance of raw intelligence. He knew well their record of getting
it wrong (the Bay of Pigs) and underestimating threats (Mr. Hussein's
pre-1991 nuclear program) and failing to connect the dots (Sept. 11).

     As a result, the vice president was not simply a passive recipient of
intelligence analysis. He was known as a man who asked hard, skeptical
questions, a man who paid attention to detail. "In my office I have a
picture of John Adams, the first vice president," Mr. Cheney said in one of
his first speeches as vice president. "Adams liked to say, 'The facts are
stubborn things.' Whatever the issue, we are going to deal with facts and
show a decent regard for other points of view."

     With the Taliban routed in Afghanistan after Sept. 11, Mr. Cheney and
his aides began to focus on intelligence assessments of Saddam Hussein. Mr.
Cheney had long argued for more forceful action to topple Mr. Hussein. But
in January 2002, according to Mr. Woodward's book, the C.I.A. told Mr.
Cheney that Mr. Hussein could not be removed with covert action alone. His
ouster, the agency said, would take an invasion, which would require
building a convincing public case that Iraq posed a threat to the United
States.

     The evidence for that case was buried in classified intelligence files.
Mr. Cheney and his aides began to meet repeatedly with analysts who
specialized in Iraq and unconventional weapons. They wanted to know about
any Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda and Baghdad's ability to make unconventional
weapons.

     "There's no question they had a point of view, but there was no attempt
to get us to hew to a particular point of view ourselves, or to come to a
certain conclusion," the deputy director of analysis at Winpac told the
Senate Intelligence Committee. "It was trying to figure out, why do we come
to this conclusion, what was the evidence. A lot of questions were asked,
probing questions."

     Of all the worst-case possibilities, the most terrifying was the idea
that Mr. Hussein might slip a nuclear weapon to terrorists, and Mr. Cheney
and his staff zeroed in on Mr. Hussein's nuclear ambitions.

     Mr. Cheney, for example, read a Feb. 12, 2002, report from the Defense
Intelligence Agency about Iraq's reported attempts to buy 500 tons of
yellowcake, a uranium concentrate, from Niger, according to the Senate
Intelligence Committee report. Many American intelligence analysts did not
put much stock in the Niger report. Mr. Cheney promptly pressed for more
information.

     At the same time, a senior intelligence official said, the agency was
fielding repeated requests from Mr. Cheney's office for intelligence about
the tubes, including updates on Iraq's continuing efforts to procure
thousands more after the seizure in Jordan.

     "Remember," Dr. David A. Kay, the chief American arms inspector after
the war, said in an interview, "the tubes were the only piece of physical
evidence about the Iraqi weapons programs that they had."

     In March 2002, Mr. Cheney traveled to Europe and the Middle East to
build support for a confrontation with Iraq. It is not known whether he
mentioned Niger or the tubes in his meetings. But on his return, he made it
clear that he had repeatedly discussed Mr. Hussein and the nuclear threat.

     "He is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time," Mr. Cheney
asserted on CNN.

     At the time, the C.I.A. had not reached so firm a conclusion. But on
March 12, the day Mr. Cheney landed in the Middle East, he and other senior
administration officials had been sent two C.I.A. reports about the tubes.
Each cited the tubes as evidence that "Iraq currently may be trying to
reconstitute its gas centrifuge program."

     Neither report, however, mentioned that leading centrifuge experts at
the Energy Department strongly disagreed, according to Congressional
officials who have read the reports.

     What White House is Told

    As the Senate Intelligence Committee report made clear, the American
intelligence community "is not a level playing field when it comes to the
competition of ideas in intelligence analysis."

     The C.I.A. has a distinct edge: "unique access to policymakers and
unique control of intelligence reporting," the report found. The
Presidential Daily Briefs, for example, are prepared and presented by agency
analysts; the agency's director is the president's principal intelligence
adviser. This allows agency analysts to control the presentation of
information to policy makers "without having to explain dissenting views or
defend their analysis from potential challenges," the committee's report
said.

     This problem, the report said, was "particularly evident" with the
C.I.A.'s analysis of the tubes, when agency analysts "lost objectivity and
in several cases took action that improperly excluded useful expertise from
the intelligence debate." In interviews, Senate investigators said the
agency's written assessments did a poor job of describing the debate over
the intelligence.

     From April 2001 to September 2002, the agency wrote at least 15 reports
on the tubes. Many were sent only to high-level policy makers, including
President Bush, and did not circulate to other intelligence agencies. None
have been released, though some were described in the Senate's 511-page
report.

     Several senior C.I.A. officials insisted that those reports did
describe at least in general terms the intelligence debate. "You don't go
into all that detail but you do try to evince it when you write your current
product," one agency official said.

     But several Congressional and intelligence officials with access to the
15 assessments said not one of them informed senior policy makers of the
Energy Department's dissent. They described a series of reports, some with
ominous titles, that failed to convey either the existence or the substance
of the intensifying debate.

     Over and over, the reports restated Joe's main conclusions for the
C.I.A. - that the tubes matched the 1950's Zippe centrifuge design and were
built to specifications that "exceeded any known conventional weapons
application."

     They did not state what Energy Department experts had noted - that many
common industrial items, even aluminum cans, were made to specifications as
good or better than the tubes sought by Iraq. Nor did the reports
acknowledge a significant error in Joe's claim - that the tubes "matched"
those used in a Zippe centrifuge.

     The tubes sought by Iraq had a wall thickness of 3.3 millimeters. When
Energy Department experts checked with Dr. Zippe, a step Joe did not take,
they learned that the walls of Zippe tubes did not exceed 1.1 millimeters, a
substantial difference.

     "They never lay out the other case," one Congressional official said of
these C.I.A.'s assessments.

     The Senate report provides only a partial picture of the agency's
communications with the White House. In an arrangement endorsed by both
parties, the Intelligence Committee agreed to delay an examination of
whether White House descriptions of Iraq's military capabilities were
"substantiated by intelligence information." As a result, Senate
investigators were not permitted to interview White House officials about
what they knew of the tubes debate and when they knew it.

     But in interviews, C.I.A. and administration officials disclosed that
the dissenting views were repeatedly discussed in meetings and telephone
calls.

     One senior official at the agency said its "fundamental approach" was
to tell policy makers about dissenting views. Another senior official
acknowledged that some of their agency's reports "weren't as well caveated
as, in retrospect, they should have been." But he added, "There was
certainly nothing that was hidden."

     Four agency officials insisted that Winpac analysts repeatedly
explained the contrasting assessments during briefings with senior National
Security Council officials who dealt with nuclear proliferation issues. "We
think we were reasonably clear about this," a senior C.I.A. official said.

     A senior administration official confirmed that Winpac was indeed
candid about the differing views. The official, who recalled at least a half
dozen C.I.A. briefings on tubes, said he knew by late 2001 that there were
differing views on the tubes. "To the best of my knowledge, he never hid
anything from me," the official said of his counterpart at Winpac.

     This official said he also spoke at least once to senior officials at
the Department of Energy about the tubes, and a spokeswoman for the
department said in a written statement that the agency "strongly conveyed
its viewpoint to senior policy makers."

     But if senior White House officials understood the department's main
arguments against the tubes, they also took into account its caveats. "As
far as I know," the senior administration official said, "D.O.E. never
concluded that these tubes could not be used for centrifuges."

     A Referee is Ignored

    Over the summer of 2002, the White House secretly refined plans to
invade Iraq and debated whether to seek more United Nations inspections. At
the same time, in response to a White House request in May, C.I.A. officials
were quietly working on a report that would lay out for the public
declassified evidence of Iraq's reported unconventional weapons and ties to
terror groups.

     That same summer the tubes debate continued to rage. The primary
antagonists were the C.I.A. and the Energy Department, with other
intelligence agencies drawn in on either side.

     Much of the strife centered on Joe. At first glance, he seemed an
unlikely target. He held a relatively junior position, and according to the
C.I.A. he did not write the vast majority of the agency's reports on the
tubes. He has never met Mr. Cheney. His one trip to the White House was to
take his family on the public tour.

     But he was, as one staff member on the Senate Intelligence Committee
put it, "the ringleader" of a small group of Winpac analysts who were
convinced that the tubes were destined for centrifuges. His views carried
special force within the agency because he was the only Winpac analyst with
experience operating uranium centrifuges. In meetings with other
intelligence agencies, he often took the lead in arguing the technical basis
for the agency's conclusions.

     "Very few people have the technical knowledge to independently arrive
at the conclusion he did," said Dr. Kay, the weapons inspector, when asked
to explain Joe's influence.

     Without naming him, the Senate Intelligence Committee's report
repeatedly questioned Joe's competence and integrity. It portrayed him as so
determined to prove his theory that he twisted test results, ignored factual
discrepancies and excluded dissenting views.

     The Senate report, for example, challenged his decision not to consult
the Energy Department on tests designed to see if the tubes were strong
enough for centrifuges. Asked why he did not seek their help, Joe told the
committee: "Because we funded it. It was our testing. We were trying to
prove some things that we wanted to prove with the testing." The Senate
report singled out this comment for special criticism, saying, "The
committee believes that such an effort should never have been intended to
prove what the C.I.A. wanted to prove."

     Joe's superiors strongly defend his work and say his words were taken
out of context. They describe him as diligent and professional, an
open-minded analyst willing to go the extra mile to test his theories. "Part
of the job of being an analyst is to evaluate alternative hypotheses and
possibilities, to build a case, think of alternatives," a senior agency
official said. "That's what Joe did in this case. If he turned out to be
wrong, that's not an offense. He was expected to be wrong occasionally."

     Still, the bureaucratic infighting was now so widely known that even
the Australian government was aware of it. "U.S. agencies differ on whether
aluminum tubes, a dual-use item sought by Iraq, were meant for gas
centrifuges," Australia's intelligence services wrote in a July 2002
assessment. The same report said that the tubes evidence was "patchy and
inconclusive."

     There was a mechanism, however, to resolve the dispute. It was called
the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, a secret body of experts
drawn from across the federal government. For a half century, Jaeic
(pronounced jake) has been called on to resolve disputes and give
authoritative assessments about nuclear intelligence. The committee had
specifically assessed the Iraqi nuclear threat in 1989, 1997 and 1999. An
Energy Department expert was the committee's chairman in 2002, and some
department officials say the C.I.A. opposed calling in Jaeic to mediate the
tubes fight.

     Not so, agency officials said. In July 2002, they insist, they were the
first intelligence agency to seek Jaeic's intervention. "I personally was
concerned about the extent of the community's disagreement on this and the
fact that we weren't getting very far," a senior agency official recalled.

     The committee held a formal session in early August to discuss the
debate, with more than a dozen experts on both sides in attendance. A second
meeting was scheduled for later in August but was postponed. A third meeting
was set for early September; it never happened either.

     "We were O.B.E. - overcome by events," an official involved in the
proceedings recalled.

     White House Makes a Move

    "The case of Saddam Hussein, a sworn enemy of our country, requires a
candid appraisal of the facts," Mr. Cheney said on Aug. 26, 2002, at the
outset of an address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in
Nashville.

     Warning against "wishful thinking or willful blindness," Mr. Cheney
used the speech to lay out a rationale for pre-emptive action against Iraq.
Simply resuming United Nations inspections, he argued, could give "false
comfort" that Mr. Hussein was contained.

     "We now know Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear
weapons," he declared, words that quickly made headlines worldwide. "Many of
us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon. Just
how soon, we cannot really gauge. Intelligence is an uncertain business,
even in the best of circumstances."

     But the world, Mr. Cheney warned, could ill afford to once again
underestimate Iraq's progress.

     "Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop 10
percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected
to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great
portion of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten America's friends
throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to
nuclear blackmail."

     A week later President Bush announced that he would ask Congress for
authorization to oust Mr. Hussein. He also met that day with senior members
of the House and Senate, some of whom expressed concern that the
administration had yet to show the American people tangible evidence of an
imminent threat. The fact that Mr. Hussein gassed his own people in the
1980's, they argued, was not sufficient evidence of a threat to the United
States in 2002.

     President Bush got the message. He directed Mr. Cheney to give the
public and Congress a more complete picture of the latest intelligence on
Iraq.

     In his Nashville speech, Mr. Cheney had not mentioned the aluminum
tubes or any other fresh intelligence when he said, "We now know that Saddam
has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." The one specific source
he did cite was Hussein Kamel al-Majid, a son-in-law of Mr. Hussein's who
defected in 1994 after running Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear
weapons programs. But Mr. Majid told American intelligence officials in 1995
that Iraq's nuclear program had been dismantled. What's more, Mr. Majid
could not have had any insight into Mr. Hussein's current nuclear
activities: he was assassinated in 1996 on his return to Iraq.

     The day after President Bush announced he was seeking Congressional
authorization, Mr. Cheney and George J. Tenet, director of the C.I.A.,
traveled to Capitol Hill to brief the four top Congressional leaders. After
the 90-minute session, J. Dennis Hastert, the House speaker, told Fox News
that Mr. Cheney had provided new information about unconventional weapons,
and Fox went on to report that one source said the new intelligence
described "just how dangerously close Saddam Hussein has come to developing
a nuclear bomb."

     Tom Daschle, the South Dakota Democrat and Senate majority leader, was
more cautious. "What has changed over the course of the last 10 years, that
brings this country to the belief that it has to act in a pre-emptive
fashion in invading Iraq?" he asked.

     A few days later, on Sept. 8., the lead article on Page 1 of The New
York Times gave the first detailed account of the aluminum tubes. The
article cited unnamed senior administration officials who insisted that the
dimensions, specifications and numbers of tubes sought showed that they were
intended for a nuclear weapons program.

     "The closer he gets to a nuclear capability, the more credible is his
threat to use chemical and biological weapons, " a senior administration
official was quoted as saying. "Nuclear weapons are his hole card."

     The article gave no hint of a debate over the tubes.

     The White House did much to increase the impact of The Times' article.
The morning the article was published, Mr. Cheney went on the NBC News
program "Meet the Press" and confirmed when asked that the tubes were the
most alarming evidence behind the administration's view that Iraq had
resumed its nuclear weapons program. The tubes, he said, had "raised our
level of concern." Ms. Rice, the national security adviser, went on CNN the
same day and said the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons
programs."

     Neither official mentioned that the nation's top nuclear design experts
believed overwhelmingly that the tubes were poorly suited for centrifuges.

     Mr. Cheney, who has a history of criticizing officials who disclose
classified information, typically refuses to comment when asked about secret
intelligence. Yet on this day, with a Gallup poll showing that 58 percent of
Americans did not believe President Bush had done enough to explain why the
United States should act against Iraq, Mr. Cheney spoke openly about one of
the closest held secrets regarding Iraq. Not only did Mr. Cheney draw
attention to the tubes; he did so with a certitude that could not be found
in even the C.I.A.'s assessments. On "Meet the Press," Mr. Cheney said he
knew "for sure" and "in fact" and "with absolute certainty" that Mr. Hussein
was buying equipment to build a nuclear weapon.

     "He has reconstituted his nuclear program," Mr. Cheney said flatly.

     But in the C.I.A. reports, evidence "suggested" or "could mean" or
"indicates" - a word used widely in a report issued just weeks earlier.
Little if anything was asserted with absolute certainty. The intelligence
community had not yet concluded that Iraq had indeed reconstituted its
nuclear program.

     Mr. Kellems, Mr. Cheney's spokesman, said, "The vice president's public
statements have reflected the evolving judgment of the intelligence
community."

     The C.I.A. routinely checks presidential speeches that draw on
intelligence reports. This is how intelligence professionals pull
politicians back from factual errors. One such opportunity came soon after
Mr. Cheney's appearance on "Meet the Press." On Sept. 11, 2002, the White
House asked the agency to clear for possible presidential use a passage on
Iraq's nuclear program. The passage included this sentence: "Iraq has made
several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used in centrifuges to
enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."

     The agency did not ask speechwriters to make clear that centrifuges
were but one possible use, that intelligence experts were divided and that
the tubes also matched those used in Iraqi rockets. In fact, according to
the Senate's investigation, the agency suggested no changes at all.

     The next day President Bush used virtually identical language when he
cited the aluminum tubes in an address to the United Nations General
Assembly.

     Dissent, but to Little Effect

    The administration's talk of clandestine centrifuges, nuclear blackmail
and mushroom clouds had a powerful political effect, particularly on
senators who were facing fall election campaigns. "When you hear about
nuclear weapons, this is the national security knock-out punch," said
Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon who sits on the Intelligence
Committee and ultimately voted against authorizing war.

     Even so, it did not take long for questions to surface over the
administration's claims about Mr. Hussein's nuclear capabilities. As it
happened, Senator Dianne Feinstein, another Democratic member of the
Intelligence Committee, had visited the International Atomic Energy Agency
in Vienna in August 2002. Officials there, she later recalled, told her they
saw no signs of a revived nuclear weapons program in Iraq.

     At that point, the tubes debate was in its 16th month. Yet Mr. Tenet,
of the C.I.A., the man most responsible for briefing President Bush on
intelligence, told the committee that he was unaware until that September of
the profound disagreement over critical evidence that Mr. Bush was citing to
world leaders as justification for war.

     Even now, committee members from both parties express baffled anger at
this possibility. How could he not know? "I don't even understand it,"
Olympia Snowe, a Republican senator from Maine, said in an interview. "I
cannot comprehend the failures in judgment or breakdowns in communication."

     Mr. Tenet told Senate investigators that he did not expect to learn of
dissenting opinions "until the issue gets joined" at the highest levels of
the intelligence community. But if Mr. Tenet's lack of knowledge meant the
president was given incomplete information about the tubes, there was still
plenty of time for the White House to become fully informed.

     Yet so far, Senate investigators say, they have found little evidence
the White House tried to find out why so many experts disputed the C.I.A.
tubes theory. If anything, administration officials minimized the divide.

     On Sept. 13, The Times made the first public mention of the tubes
debate in the sixth paragraph of an article on Page A13. In it an unnamed
senior administration official dismissed the debate as a "footnote, not a
split." Citing another unnamed administration official, the story reported
that the "best technical experts and nuclear scientists at laboratories like
Oak Ridge supported the C.I.A. assessments."

     As a senior Oak Ridge official pointed out to the Intelligence
Committee, "the vast majority of scientists and nuclear experts" in the
Energy Department's laboratories in fact disagreed with the agency. But on
Sept. 13, the day the article appeared, the Energy Department sent a
directive forbidding employees from discussing the subject with reporters.

     The Energy Department, in a written statement, said that it was
"completely appropriate" to remind employees of the need to protect nuclear
secrets and that it had made no effort "to quash dissent."

     In closed hearings that month, though, Congress began to hear testimony
about the debate. Several Democrats said in interviews that secrecy rules
had prevented them from speaking out about the gap between the
administration's view of the tubes and the more benign explanations
described in classified testimony.

     One senior C.I.A. official recalled cautioning members of Congress in a
closed session not to speak publicly about the possibility that the tubes
were for rockets. "If people start talking about that and the Iraqis see
that people are saying rocket bodies, that will automatically become their
explanation whenever anyone goes to Iraq," the official said in an
interview.

     So while administration officials spoke freely about the agency's
theory, the evidence that best challenged this view remained almost entirely
off limits for public debate.

     In late September, the C.I.A. sent policymakers its most detailed
classified report on the tubes. For the first time, an agency report
acknowledged that "some in the intelligence community" believed rockets were
"more likely end uses" for the tubes, according to officials who have seen
the report.

     Meanwhile, at the Energy Department, scientists were startled to find
senior White House officials embracing a view of the tubes they considered
thoroughly discredited. "I was really shocked in 2002 when I saw it was
still there," Dr. Wood said of the centrifuge claim. "I thought it had been
put to bed."

     Members of the Energy Department team took a highly unusual step: They
began working quietly with a Washington arms-control group, the Institute
for Science and International Security, to help the group inform the public
about the debate, one team member and the group's president, David Albright,
said.

     On Sept. 23, the institute issued the first in series of lengthy
reports that repeated some of the Energy Department's arguments against the
C.I.A. analysis, though no classified ones. Still, after more than 16 months
of secret debate, it was the first public airing of facts that undermined
the most alarming suggestions about Iraq's nuclear threat.

     The reports got little attention, partly because reporters did not
realize they had been done with the cooperation of top Energy Department
experts. The Washington Post ran a brief article about the findings on Page
A18. Many major newspapers, including The Times, ran nothing at all.

     Scrambling for an 'Estimate'

    Soon after Mr. Cheney's appearance on "Meet the Press," Democratic
senators began pressing for a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq,
terrorism and unconventional weapons. A National Intelligence Estimate is a
classified document that is supposed to reflect the combined judgment of the
entire intelligence community. The last such estimate on Iraq had been done
in 2000.

     Asked when Mr. Cheney became aware of the disagreements over the tubes,
Mr. Kellems, his spokesman, said, "The vice president knew about the debate
at about the time of the National Intelligence Estimate."

     Most estimates take months to complete. But this one had to be done in
days, in time for an October vote on a war resolution. There was little time
for review or reflection, and no time for Jaeic, the joint committee, to
reconcile deep analytical differences.

     This was a potentially thorny obstacle for those writing the nuclear
section: What do you do when the nation's nuclear experts strongly doubt the
linchpin evidence behind the C.I.A.'s claims that Iraq was rebuilding its
nuclear weapons program?

     The Energy Department helped solve the problem. In meetings on the
estimate, senior department intelligence officials said that while they
still did not believe the tubes were for centrifuges, they nonetheless could
agree that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons capability.

     Several senior scientists inside the department said they were stunned
by this stance; they saw no compelling evidence of a revived nuclear
program. Some laboratory officials blamed time pressure and inexperience.
Thomas S. Ryder, the department's representative at the meetings, had been
acting director of the department's intelligence unit for only five months.
"A heck of a nice guy but not savvy on technical issues," is the way one
senior nuclear official described Mr. Ryder, who declined comment. Mr.
Ryder's position was more alarming than prior assessments from the Energy
Department. In an August 2001 intelligence paper, department analysts warned
of suspicious activities in Iraq that "could be preliminary steps" toward
reviving a centrifuge program. In July 2002 an Energy Department report,
"Nuclear Reconstitution Efforts Underway?", noted that several developments,
including Iraq's suspected bid to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger,
suggested Baghdad was "seeking to reconstitute" a nuclear weapons program.

     According to intelligence officials who took part in the meetings, Mr.
Ryder justified his department's now firm position on nuclear reconstitution
in large part by citing the Niger reports. Many C.I.A. analysts considered
that intelligence suspect, as did analysts at the State Department.

     Nevertheless, the estimate's authors seized on the Energy Department's
position to avoid the entire tubes debate, which was now relegated to a
10-page annex. The estimate would instead emphasize that the C.I.A. and the
Energy Department both agreed that Mr. Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear
weapons program. Only the closest reader would see that each agency was
basing its assessment in large measure on evidence the other considered
suspect.

     On Oct. 2, nine days before the Senate vote on the war resolution, the
new National Intelligence Estimate was delivered to the Intelligence
Committee. The most significant change from past estimates dealt with
nuclear weapons; the new one agreed with Mr. Cheney that Iraq was in
aggressive pursuit of the atomic bomb.

     Today, the Intelligence Committee's report makes clear, that estimate
stands as one of the most flawed documents in the history of American
intelligence. The committee concluded unanimously that almost every major
finding in the estimate was wrong, unfounded or overblown.

     This was especially true of the nuclear section.

     Estimates express their most important findings with high, moderate or
low confidence levels. This one claimed "moderate confidence" on how fast
Iraq could have a bomb, but "high confidence" that Baghdad was rebuilding
its nuclear program. And the tubes were the leading and most detailed
evidence cited.

     According to the committee, the passages on the tubes, which adopted
much of the C.I.A. analysis, were misleading and riddled with factual
errors. The estimate, for example, included a chart intended to show that
the dimensions of the tubes closely matched a Zippe centrifuge. Yet the
chart omitted the dimensions of Iraq's 81-millimeter rocket, which precisely
matched the tubes.

     The estimate cited Iraq's alleged willingness to pay top dollar for the
tubes, up to $17.50 each, as evidence they were for secret centrifuges. But
Defense Department rocket engineers told Senate investigators that 7075-T6
aluminum is "the material of choice for low-cost rocket systems."

     The estimate also asserted that 7075-T6 tubes were "poor choices" for
rockets. In fact, similar tubes were used in rockets from several countries,
including the United States, and in an Italian rocket, the Medusa, which
Iraq had copied.

     Beyond tubes, the estimate cited several other "key judgments" that
supported its assessment. The committee found this intelligence just as
flawed.

     The estimate, for example, pointed to Iraq's purchases of magnets,
balancing machines and machine tools, all of which could be used in a
nuclear program. But each item also had legitimate non-nuclear uses, and
there was no credible intelligence whatsoever showing they were for a
nuclear program.

     The estimate said Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission was building new
production facilities for nuclear weapons. The Senate found this claim was
based on a single operative's report, which described how the commission had
constructed one headquarters building and planned "a new high-level
polytechnic school."

     Finally, the estimate stated that many nuclear scientists had been
reassigned to the A.E.C. The Senate found nothing to back this conclusion.
It did, though, discover a 2001 report in which a commission employee
complained that Iraq's nuclear program "had been stalled since the gulf
war."

     Such "key judgments" are supposed to reflect the very best American
intelligence. (The Niger intelligence, for example, was considered too shaky
to be included as a key judgment.) Yet as they studied raw intelligence
reports, those involved in the Senate investigation came to a sickening
realization. "We kept looking at the intelligence and saying, 'My God,
there's nothing here,' " one official recalled.

     The Vote for War

    Soon after the National Intelligence Estimate was completed, Mr. Bush
delivered a speech in Cincinnati in which he described the "grave threat"
that Iraq and its "arsenal of terror" posed to the United States. He dwelled
longest on nuclear weapons, reviewing much of the evidence outlined in the
estimate. The C.I.A. had warned him away from mentioning Niger.

     "Facing clear evidence of peril," the president concluded, "we cannot
wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of
a mushroom cloud."

     Four days later, on Oct. 11, the Senate voted 77-23 to give Mr. Bush
broad authority to invade Iraq. The resolution stated that Iraq posed "a
continuing threat" to the United States by, among other things, "actively
seeking a nuclear weapons capability."

     Many senators who voted for the resolution emphasized the nuclear
threat.

     "The great danger is a nuclear one," Senator Feinstein, the California
Democrat, said on the Senate floor.

     But Senator Bob Graham, then chairman of the Intelligence Committee,
said he voted against the resolution in part because of doubts about the
tubes. "It reinforced in my mind pre-existing questions I had about the
unreliability of the intelligence community, especially the C.I.A.," Mr.
Graham, a Florida Democrat, said in an interview.

     At the Democratic convention in Boston this summer, Senator John Kerry
pledged that should he be elected president, "I will ask hard questions and
demand hard evidence." But in October 2002, when the Senate voted on Iraq,
Mr. Kerry had not read the National Intelligence Estimate, but instead had
relied on a briefing from Mr. Tenet, a spokeswoman said. "According to the
C.I.A.'s report, all U.S. intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking
nuclear weapons," Mr. Kerry said then, explaining his vote. "There is little
question that Saddam Hussein wants to develop nuclear weapons."

     The report cited by Mr. Kerry, an unclassified white paper, said
nothing about the tubes debate except that "some" analysts believed the
tubes were "probably intended" for conventional arms.

     "It is common knowledge that Congress does not have the same access as
the executive branch," Brooke Anderson, a Kerry spokeswoman, said yesterday.

     Mr. Kerry's running mate, Senator John Edwards, served on the
Intelligence Committee, which gave him ample opportunity to ask hard
questions. But in voting to authorize war, Mr. Edwards expressed no
uncertainty about the principle evidence of Mr. Hussein's alleged nuclear
program.

     "We know that he is doing everything he can to build nuclear weapons,"
Mr. Edwards said then.

     On Dec. 7, 2002, Iraq submitted a 12,200-page declaration about
unconventional arms to the United Nations that made no mention of the tubes.
Soon after, Winpac analysts at the C.I.A. assessed the declaration for
President Bush. The analysts criticized Iraq for failing to acknowledge or
explain why it sought tubes "we believe suitable for use in a gas centrifuge
uranium effort." Nor, they said, did it "acknowledge efforts to procure
uranium from Niger."

     Neither Energy Department nor State Department intelligence experts
were given a chance to review the Winpac assessment, prompting complaints
that dissenting views were being withheld from policy makers.

     "It is most disturbing that Winpac is essentially directing foreign
policy in this matter," one Energy Department official wrote in an e-mail
message. "There are some very strong points to be made in respect to Iraq's
arrogant noncompliance with U.N. sanctions. However, when individuals
attempt to convert those 'strong statements' into the 'knock out' punch, the
Administration will ultimately look foolish - i.e., the tubes and Niger!"

     The U.N. Inspectors Return

    For nearly two years Western intelligence analysts had been trying to
divine from afar Iraq's plans for the tubes. At the end of 2002, with the
resumption of United Nations arms inspections, it became possible to seek
answers inside Iraq. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency
immediately zeroed in on the tubes.

     The team quickly arranged a field trip to the Nasser metal fabrication
factory, where they found 13,000 completed rockets, all produced from
7075-T6 aluminum tubes. The Iraqi rocket engineers explained that they had
been shopping for more tubes because their supply was running low.

     Why order tubes with such tight tolerances? An Iraqi engineer said they
wanted to improve the rocket's accuracy without making major design changes.
Design documents and procurement records confirmed his account.

     The inspectors solved another mystery. The tubes intercepted in Jordan
had been anodized, given a protective coating. The Iraqis had a simple
explanation: they wanted the new tubes protected from the elements. Sure
enough, the inspectors found that many thousands of the older tubes, which
had no special coating, were corroded because they had been stored outside.

     The inspectors found no trace of a clandestine centrifuge program. On
Jan. 10, 2003, The Times reported that the international agency was
challenging "the key piece of evidence" behind "the primary rationale for
going to war." The article also reported that officials at the Energy
Department and State Department had suggested the tubes might be for
rockets.

     The C.I.A. theory was in trouble, and senior members of the Bush
administration seemed to know it.

     Also that January, White House officials who were drafting what would
become Secretary Powell's speech to the Security Council sent word to the
intelligence community that they believed "the nuclear case was weak," the
Senate report said. In an interview, a senior administration official said
it was widely understood all along at the White House that the evidence of a
nuclear threat was piecemeal and weaker than that for other unconventional
arms.

     But rather than withdraw the nuclear card - a step that could have
undermined United States credibility just as tens of thousands of troops
were being airlifted to the region - the White House cast about for new
arguments and evidence to support it.

     Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked the
intelligence agencies for more evidence beyond the tubes to bolster the
nuclear case. Winpac analysts redoubled efforts to prove that Iraq was
trying to acquire uranium from Africa. When rocket engineers at the Defense
Department were approached by the C.I.A. and asked to compare the Iraqi
tubes with American ones, the engineers said the tubes "were perfectly
usable for rockets." The agency analysts did not appear pleased. One rocket
engineer complained to Senate investigators that the analysts had "an
agenda" and were trying "to bias us" into agreeing that the Iraqi tubes were
not fit for rockets. In interviews, agency officials denied any such effort.

     According to the Intelligence Committee report, the agency also sought
to undermine the I.A.E.A.'s work with secret intelligence assessments
distributed only to senior policy makers. Nonetheless, on Jan. 22, in a
meeting first reported by The Washington Post, the ubiquitous Joe flew to
Vienna in a last-ditch attempt to bring the international experts around to
his point of view.

     The session was a disaster.

     "Everybody was embarrassed when he came and made this presentation,
embarrassed and disgusted," one participant said. "We were going insane,
thinking, 'Where is he coming from?' "

     On Jan. 27, the international agency rendered its judgment: it told the
Security Council that it had found no evidence of a revived nuclear weapons
program in Iraq. "From our analysis to date," the agency reported, "it
appears that the aluminum tubes would be consistent with the purpose stated
by Iraq and, unless modified, would not be suitable for manufacturing
centrifuges."

     The Powell Presentation

    The next night, during his State of the Union address, President Bush
cited I.A.E.A. findings from years past that confirmed that Mr. Hussein had
had an "advanced" nuclear weapons program in the 1990's. He did not mention
the agency's finding from the day before.

     He did, though, repeat the claim that Mr. Hussein was trying to buy
tubes "suitable for nuclear weapons production." Mr. Bush also cited British
intelligence that Mr. Hussein had recently sought "significant quantities"
of uranium from Africa - a reference in 16 words that the White House later
said should have been stricken, though the British government now insists
the information was credible.

     "Saddam Hussein," Mr. Bush said that night, "has not credibly explained
these activities. He clearly has much to hide. The dictator of Iraq is not
disarming."

     A senior administration official involved in vetting the address said
Mr. Bush did not cite the I.A.E.A. conclusion of Jan. 27 because the White
House believed the agency was analyzing old Iraqi tubes, not the newer ones
seized in Jordan. But senior officials in Vienna and Washington said the
international group's analysis covered both types of tubes.

     The senior administration official also said the president's words were
carefully chosen to reflect the doubts at the Energy Department. The crucial
phrase was "suitable for nuclear weapons production." The phrase stopped
short of asserting that the tubes were actually being used in centrifuges.
And it was accurate in the sense that Energy Department officials always
left open the possibility that the tubes could be modified for use in a
centrifuge.

     "There were differences," the official said, "and we had to address
those differences."

     In his address, the president announced that Mr. Powell would go before
the Security Council on Feb. 5 and lay out the intelligence on Iraq's
weapons programs. The purpose was to win international backing for an
invasion, and so the administration spent weeks drafting and redrafting the
presentation, with heavy input from the C.I.A., the National Security
Council and I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney's chief of staff.

     The Intelligence Committee said some drafts prepared for Mr. Powell
contained language on the tubes that was patently incorrect. The C.I.A.
wanted Mr. Powell to say, for example, that Iraq's specifications for
roundness were so exacting "that the tubes would be rejected as defective if
I rolled one under my hand on this table, because the mere pressure of my
hand would deform it."

     Intelligence analysts at the State Department waged a quiet battle
against much of the proposed language on tubes. A year before, they had sent
Mr. Powell a report explaining why they believed the tubes were more likely
for rockets. The National Intelligence Estimate included their dissent -
that they saw no compelling evidence of a comprehensive effort to revive a
nuclear weapons program. Now, in the days before the Security Council
speech, they sent the secretary detailed memos warning him away from a long
list of assertions in the drafts, the Intelligence Committee found. The
language on the tubes, they said, contained "egregious errors" and "highly
misleading" claims. Changes were made, language softened. The line about
"the mere pressure of my hand" was removed.

     "My colleagues," Mr. Powell assured the Security Council, "every
statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not
assertions."

     He made his way to the subject of Mr. Hussein's current nuclear
capabilities.

     "By now," he said, "just about everyone has heard of these tubes, and
we all know there are differences of opinion. There is controversy about
what these tubes are for. Most U.S. experts think they are intended to serve
as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Other experts and the
Iraqis themselves argue that they are really to produce the rocket bodies
for a conventional weapon, a multiple rocket launcher."

     But Mr. Powell did not acknowledge that those "other experts" included
many of the nation's most authoritative nuclear experts, some of whom said
in interviews that they were offended to find themselves now lumped in with
a reviled government.

     In making the case that the tubes were for centrifuges, Mr. Powell made
claims that his own intelligence experts had told him were not accurate. Mr.
Powell, for example, asserted to the Security Council that the tubes were
manufactured to a tolerance "that far exceeds U.S. requirements for
comparable rockets."

     Yet in a memo written two days earlier, Mr. Powell's intelligence
experts had specifically cautioned him about those very same words. "In
fact," they explained, "the most comparable U.S. system is a tactical rocket
- the U.S. Mark 66 air-launched 70-millimeter rocket - that uses the same,
high-grade (7075-T6) aluminum, and that has specifications with similar
tolerances."

     In the end, Mr. Powell put his personal prestige and reputation behind
the C.I.A.'s tube theory.

     "When we came to the aluminum tubes," Richard A. Boucher, the State
Department spokesman, said in an interview, "the secretary listened to the
discussion of the various views among intelligence agencies, and reflected
those issues in his presentation. Since his task at the U.N. was to present
the views of the United States, he went with the overall judgment of the
intelligence community as reflected by the director of central
intelligence."

     As Mr. Powell summed it up for the United Nations, "People will
continue to debate this issue, but there is no doubt in my mind these
illicit procurement efforts show that Saddam Hussein is very much focused on
putting in place the key missing piece from his nuclear weapons program: the
ability to produce fissile material."

   

    Go to Original 

    C.I.A.-White House Tensions Are Being Made Public to Rare Degree
    By Douglas Jehl
    The New York Times

     Saturday 02 October 2004

     Washington - James L. Pavitt spent 31 years at the Central Intelligence
Agency, the last five as head of the clandestine service, before retiring in
August. But never, Mr. Pavitt said Friday, does he recall anything like "the
viciousness and vindictiveness" now playing out in a battle between the
White House and the C.I.A.

     The tensions have simmered for years, mostly over intelligence about
Iraq, including whether Iraq posed a threat. But in the last few weeks, they
have surged into the open in a remarkable way, in a struggle in which both
sides believe they have much at stake.

     Already, the contents of classified intelligence estimates about Iraq
have been leaked by people sympathetic to the C.I.A., to the considerable
embarrassment of the White House. In response, the White House associated
the documents' authors with "pessimists and naysayers," and President Bush
initially dismissed one particularly damaging forecast as nothing more than
a guess. And in newspaper columns in recent days, Republican partisans have
variously described what is now afoot as part of an insurgency or vendetta
being waged by the C.I.A. against the White House.

     "Wars bring things out in people that sometimes other disputes don't,"
said R. James Woolsey, a former director of central intelligence. "But even
with the passions of war, I think you ought to keep it within channels." A
third former intelligence official was more critical of the C.I.A. "The
agency's role is to tell the administration what it thinks, not to criticize
its policies," the official said.

     Of course, the most urgent threat to the agency lies in the effort now
under way in Congress to restructure American intelligence agencies under
the command of a new national intelligence director. Those efforts were
recommended by the Sept. 11 commission, but the agency's now infamous prewar
misjudgments on Iraq and its illicit weapons were an important factor in
prompting the calls for change.

     In defense, the agency's allies have clearly been trying, as they see
it, to set the record straight, by calling attention to what they regard as
the more prescient judgments by the C.I.A. that the Bush administration
dismissed. In an election year that is very much about the war in Iraq, the
overlapping streams of self-preservation and politics have elevated the
intelligence agencies to unusual prominence.

     "My opponent looked at the same intelligence I looked at," President
Bush said several times in his debate with Senator John Kerry on Thursday
night, alluding to the C.I.A.'s prewar blunder in asserting that Iraq
possessed illicit weapons. But Mr. Kerry replied that it was the White
House, not the C.I.A., that sent the country to war in Iraq.

     In a telephone conversation on Friday, Mr. Pavitt made an argument that
echoed that others have sounded in recent weeks. "There was nothing in the
intelligence that was a casus belli," Mr. Pavitt said. The C.I.A. may have
been wrong about Iraq and its weapons, he acknowledged, but it was on the
mark in issuing prewar warnings about the obstacles that an American
occupying force would face in postwar Iraq.

     Mr. Pavitt's career whose spanned the Church Committee revelations, in
the mid-1970s, of C.I.A. improprieties, the sharp downsizing of the C.I.A.
under President Jimmy Carter, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the repeated
intelligence failures of recent years, including those related to the Sept.
11 attacks.

     As deputy director of operations, Mr. Pavitt headed human spying
operations, and was the day-to-day tactical commander of the clandestine war
on terrorism. He worked closely with the White House, and said he has no
sympathy with those in the government who may have leaked the contents of
classified documents to make a political point. "The agency is not out to
undermine this president," Mr. Pavitt said.

     At the C.I.A. and the White House, officials dismissed the idea that
the institutions were at odds. An intelligence official said the notion of
an institutional battle between the White House and the C.I.A. was "simply
not the case."

     Sean McCormack, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said
that the White House believed "that the men and women of our intelligence
community and the C.I.A. are doing a terrific job in helping to defend the
country, and are working tirelessly day and night."

     But Mr. Pavitt was not alone among former intelligence officials in
describing what is now unfolding as extraordinary. In interviews, several
other former high-ranking officials, including those from the C.I.A. and
other intelligence agencies, said that while C.I.A. and White House were
continuing to work closely and professionally together, they had rarely seen
tensions so high among their allies and other partisans on both sides.

     As for what may lie ahead, the shape and fate of any intelligence
overhaul still remains far from certain. The terms of possible legislation
are still being debated by the House and Senate, and it is unclear whether
new legislation will be passed before Election Day. But all of the changes
under consideration threaten to strip the C.I.A. from the position of
preeminence among American intelligence agencies that it has enjoyed for
more than 50 years.

     "I think this has much more to do with intelligence reform than with
Iraq," said the former senior C.I.A. official. "People are just very angry
and worried and on the defensive about what they think might happen to the
agency." (Like most others interviewed for this story, the former official
would not allow his name to be used, saying that to do so would jeopardize
his professional and business relationships.)

     Whatever the motivation, the steps taken by people sympathetic to the
C.I.A. allies to call attention to intelligence successes on Iraq have been
notable. They included the disclosure in mid-September by government
officials to The New York Times of details of a classified National
Intelligence Estimate prepared for President Bush in July 2004 and
distributed in late August. Its gloomy assessment of the challenges facing
Iraq said that an environment of tenuous stability was the best-case outcome
the country could expect through the end of 2005.

     Other disclosures by government officials early this week have included
specific new details contained in two other classified documents, prewar
assessments on Iraq that were issued by the National Intelligence Council in
January 2003. As described by the government officials, the postwar
challenges identified in the documents included a surge in anti-Americanism
in the Muslim world and the possibility of an anti-American insurgency in
Iraq. The intelligence warnings appeared to have been much sharper than was
acknowledged in the more upbeat forecasts provided before the war by Mr.
Bush and top deputies including Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense
secretary.

     From some conservative voices, including the editorial page of The Wall
Street Journal, the response has been furious. An editorial published by the
Journal on Wednesday under the heading of "The C.I.A.'s Insurgency" said
that Mr. Bush "now has two insurgencies to defeat: the one that the C.I.A.
is struggling to help put down in Iraq, and the other inside Langley against
the Bush administration."

     "Rather than keep this dispute in-house," it said, "the dissenters have
taken their objections to the public, albeit usually through calculated and
anonymous leaks that are always spun to make the agency look good and the
Bush administration look bad."

     An op-ed article published on Friday in the Washington Times by John B.
Roberts II, a conservative commentator on national security affairs,
reiterated that message. "When the president cannot trust his own C.IA.," it
warned, "the nation faces dire consequences."

     Mr. Pavitt, the recently retired C.I.A. official, said such a
suggestion was offensive. "This President has been served extremely well by
intelligence," he said.

  

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