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To understand a difficult topic like Iraq takes patience and care. Unfortunately, you rarely hear a patient, careful or thoughtful discussion of intelligence these days. But these times demand it because the alternative -- politicized, haphazard evaluation, without the benefit of time and facts -- may well result in an intelligence community that is damaged and a country that is more at risk.
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This estimate asked if Iraq had chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. We concluded that in some of these categories Iraq had weapons, and that in others where it did not have them, it was trying to develop them.
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They [CIA operatives] never said there was an imminent threat. Rather, they painted an objective assessment for our policy-makers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programs that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests. No one told us what to say or how to say it.
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First, Iraq's history. Everyone knew that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons in the 1980s and 1990s. Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iran and his own people on at least 10 different occasions. He launched missiles against Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel.
And we couldn't forget that in the early 1990s, we saw that Iraq was just a few years away from a nuclear weapon. This was not a theoretical program. It turned out that we and other intelligence services of the world had significantly underestimated his progress.
And finally, we could not forget that Iraq lied repeatedly about its unconventional weapons.
So to conclude before the war that Saddam had no interest in rebuilding his weapons of mass destruction programs, we would have had to ignore his long and brutal history of using them.
Our second stream of information was that the United Nations could not and Saddam would not account for all the weapons the Iraqis had: tons of chemical weapons precursors, hundreds of artillery shells and bombs filled with chemical or biological agents.
To conclude before the war that Saddam had destroyed his existing weapons, we would have had to ignore what the United Nations and allied intelligence said they could not verify.
The third stream of information came after the U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998. We gathered intelligence through human agents, satellite photos and communications intercepts. Other foreign intelligence services were clearly focused on Iraq and assisted in the effort.
In intercepts of conversations and other transactions, we heard Iraqis seeking to hide prohibited items, worrying about their cover stories and trying to procure items Iraq was not permitted to have.
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And to come to conclusions before the war other than those we reached, we would have had to ignore all the intelligence gathered from multiple sources after 1998.
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But before we start, let me be direct about an important fact. As we meet here today, the Iraq Survey Group is continuing its important search for people and data. And despite some public statements, we are nowhere near 85 percent finished. The men and women who work in that dangerous environment are adamant about that fact.
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Our community said with high confidence that Saddam was continuing and expanding his missile programs, contrary to U.N. resolutions. He had missiles and other systems with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions and he was seeking missiles with even longer ranges.
What do we know today? Since the war we have found an aggressive Iraqi missile program concealed from the international community.
In fact, David Kay just last fall said that the Iraq Survey Group, quote, "discovered sufficient evidence to date to conclude that the Iraqi regime was committed to delivery system improvements that would have, if Operation Iraqi Freedom had not occurred, dramatically breached U.N. restrictions placed on Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War."
We have also found that Iraq had plans and advanced design work for a liquid-propellant missile with ranges of up to 1,000 kilometers; activity that Iraq did not report to the U.N. and which could have placed large portions of the Middle East in jeopardy.
We have confirmed that Iraq had new work under way on prohibited solid-propellant missiles that were also concealed from the United Nations.
Significantly, the Iraq Survey Group has also confirmed prewar intelligence that Iraq was in secret negotiations with North Korea to obtain some of its most dangerous missile technology.
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Let me turn to unmanned aerial vehicles. The estimate said that Iraq had been developing an unmanned aerial vehicle probably intended to deliver biological warfare agents.
Baghdad's existing unmanned aerial vehicle could threaten its neighbors, U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf and, if a small unmanned aerial vehicle was brought close to our shores, the United States itself.
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The Iraq Survey Group found that two separate groups in Iraq were working on a number of unmanned aerial vehicles designed that were hidden from the U.N. until Iraq's declaration in December of 2002. Now we know that important design elements were never fully declared.
The question of intent, especially regarding the smaller unmanned aerial vehicle, is still out there. But we should remember that the Iraqis flight tested an aerial biological weapons spray system intended for a large unmanned aerial vehicle.
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My provisional bottom line today: Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon, he still wanted one, and Iraq intended to reconstitute a nuclear program at some point.
We have not yet found clear evidence that the dual-use items Iraq sought were for nuclear reconstitution. We do not yet know if any reconstitution efforts had begun. But we may have overestimated the progress Saddam was making.
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What do we know today? Last fall the Iraqi Survey Group uncovered, quote, "significant information, including research and development of biological weapons, applicable organisms, the involvement of the Iraqi intelligence service in possible biological weapons activities and deliberate concealment activities."
All of this suggests that Iraq, after 1996, further compartmentalized its program and focused on maintaining smaller covert capabilities that could be activated quickly to surge the production of biological weapons agents.
The Iraq Survey Group found a network of laboratories and safe houses controlled by Iraqi intelligence and security services that contained equipment for chemical and biological research and a prison laboratory complex possibly used in human testing for biological weapons agents that were not declared to the United Nations.
It also appears that Iraq had the infrastructure and the talent to resume production, but we have yet to find that it actually did so, nor have we found weapons.
Until we get to the bottom of the role played by the Iraqi security services, which were operating covert labs, we will not know the full extent of the program.
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My provisional bottom line today: Iraq intended to develop biological weapons. Clearly, research and development work was under way that would have permitted a rapid shift to agent production if seed stocks were available. But we do not yet know if production took place. And just as clearly, we have not yet found biological weapons.
Before I leave the biological weapons story, an important fact that you must consider: For years the U.N. searched unsuccessfully for Saddam's biological weapons program. His son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, who controlled the hidden program, defected and only then was the world able to confirm that Iraq indeed had an active and dangerous biological weapons program.
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We said in the estimate with high confidence that Iraq had them [chemical weapons]. We also believed, though with less certainty, that Saddam had stocked at least 100 metric tons of agent.
That may sound like a lot, but it would fit in a few dorm rooms on this campus. And the last time I remember, they're not very big rooms.
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My provisional bottom line today: Saddam had the intent and capability to quickly convert civilian industry to chemical weapons production. However, we have not yet found the weapons we expected.
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...Let me tell you some of what was going on in the fall of 2002.
Several sensitive reports crossed my desk from two sources characterized by our foreign partners as established and reliable. The first from a source who had direct access to Saddam and his inner circle said Iraq was not in the possession of a nuclear weapon. However, Iraq was aggressively and covertly developing such a (nuclear) weapon.
Saddam had recently called together his nuclear weapons committee, irate that Iraq did not yet have a weapon because money was no object and they possessed the scientific know-how. The committee members assured Saddam that once fissile material was in hand, a bomb could be ready in 18 to 24 months. The return of U.N. inspectors would cause minimal disruption because, according to the source, Iraq was expert at denial and deception.
The same source said that Iraq was stockpiling chemical weapons and that equipment to produce insecticides under the oil-for-food program had been diverted to covert chemical weapons production.
The source said that Iraq's weapons of last resort were mobile launchers armed with chemical weapons which would be fired at enemy forces in Israel; that Iraqi scientists were dabbling with biological weapons with limited success, but the quantities were not sufficient to constitute a real weapons program.
A stream of reporting from a different sensitive source with access to senior Iraqi officials said he believed production of chemical and biological weapons was taking place, that biological agents were easy to produce and hide, and that prohibited chemicals were also being produced at dual-use facilities.
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The source stated that a senior Iraqi official in Saddam's inner circle believed, as a result of the U.N. inspections, Iraq knew the inspectors' weak points and had to take advantage of them.
The source said that there was an elaborate plan to deceive inspectors and ensure prohibited items would never be found.
Now, did this information make any difference in my thinking? You bet it did.
The pattern of these efforts is one of deliberate, rather than random, acts. Iraqis who have volunteered information to us are still being intimidated and attacked.
Remember, finding things in Iraq is always very tough. After the first Gulf War, the U.S. Army blew up chemical weapons without knowing it. They were mixed in with conventional weapons in Iraqi ammo dumps.
My new special adviser, Charlie Duelfer, will soon be in Iraq to join Major Keith Dayton, commander of the Iraqi Survey Group, to continue our effort to learn the truth. And when the truth emerges, we will report it to the American people no matter what.
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So what do I think about all this today? Based on an assessment of the data we collected over the past 10 years, it would have been difficult for analysts to come to any different conclusions than the ones reached in October of 2002.
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I will say that our judgments were not single-threaded. U.N. inspection served as a base line and we had multiple strands of reporting from signals, imagery and human intelligence.
After the U.N. inspectors left in 1998, we made an aggressive effort to penetrate Iraq. Our record was mixed. While we had voluminous reporting, the major judgments reached were based on a narrower band of data. That's not unusual in our business.
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We did not have enough of our own human intelligence. We did not ourselves penetrate the inner sanctum.
Our agents were on the periphery of WMD activities, providing some useful information. We had access to emigres and defectors with more direct access to these programs. And we had a steady stream of reporting with access to the Iraqi leadership come to us from a trusted foreign partner.
Other partners provided important information. What we did not collect ourselves, we evaluated as carefully as we could.
Still, the lack of direct access to some of these sources created some risk. Such is the nature of our business.
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To be sure, we had difficulty penetrating the Iraqi regime with human sources. And I want to be very clear about something: A blanket indictment of our human intelligence around the world is dead wrong. We have spent the last seven years rebuilding our clandestine service. As director of central intelligence, this has been my highest priority.
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It will take an additional five years to finish the job of rebuilding our clandestine service, but the results so far have been obvious.
A CIA spy led us to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11th attacks.
Al Qaida's operational chief Nashiri, the man who planned and executed the bombing of the USS Cole, was located and arrested because of our human reporting.
Human sources were critical to the capture of Hambali, the chief terrorist in southeast Asia, who organized and killed hundreds of people when they bombed a nightclub in Bali.
So when you hear pundits say that we have no human intelligence capability, they don't know what they're talking about.
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Let's talk about Libya, where a sitting regime has volunteered to dismantle its WMD program. Somebody on television said we completely missed it. Well, he completely missed it. This was an intelligence success.
TENET: Why? Because American and British intelligence officers understood the Libyan programs.
Only through intelligence did we know each of the major programs Libya had going. Only through intelligence did we know when Libya started its first nuclear weapons program and then put it on the back burner for years. Only through intelligence did we know when the nuclear program took off again. We knew because we had penetrated Libya's foreign supplier network.
And through intelligence last fall, when Libya was to receive a supply of centrifuge parts, we worked with the foreign partners to locate and stop that shipment.
Intelligence also knew that Libya was working with North Korea to get longer-range ballistic missiles.
And we learned all of this through the powerful combination of technical intelligence, careful and painstaking analytic work, operational daring and, yes, the kind of human intelligence that people have led the American people to believe we no longer have.
This was critical when the Libyans approached British and U.S. intelligence about dismantling their chemical and biological and nuclear weapons programs. They came to the British and American intelligence because they knew we could keep the negotiations secret.
And in repeated talks, when CIA officers were the only official Americans in Libya, we and our British colleagues made clear just how much insight we had into their weapons of mass destruction and missile programs.
When the Libyans said they would show us their Scud-Bs, we said, "Fine. We want to examine your longer range Scud-Cs."
It was only when we convinced them that we knew Libya's nuclear program was a weapons program that they showed us their weapons design.
As should be clear to you, intelligence was the key that opened the door to Libya's clandestine programs.
Let me briefly mention Iran, and I will not go into detail. I want to assure you of one thing: that recent Iranian admissions about their nuclear programs validate our intelligence assessments. It is flat wrong to say that we were surprised by reports from the Iranian opposition last year.
And on North Korea, it was patient analysis of difficult-to- obtain information that allowed our diplomats to confront the North Korean regime about their pursuit of a different route to a nuclear weapon that violated international agreements.
One final spy story. Last year in my annual worldwide threat testimony before Congress in open session, I talked about the emerging threat from private proliferators, especially nuclear brokers. I was cryptic about this in public, but I can tell you now that I was talking about A.Q. Khan. His network was shaving years off the nuclear weapons development timelines of several states, including Libya.
Now, as you know from the news coming out of Pakistan, Khan and his network have been dealt a crushing blow and several of his senior officers are in custody. Malaysian authorities have shut down one of the network's largest plants. His network is now answering to the world for years of nuclear profiteering.
What did intelligence have to do with this? First, we discovered the extent of Khan's hidden network. We tagged the proliferators, we detected the networks stretching across four continents offering its wares to countries like North Korea and Iran.
Working with our British colleagues, we pieced together the picture of the network, revealing its subsidiaries, its scientists, its front companies, its agents, its finances and manufacturing plants on three continents. Our spies penetrated the network through a series of daring operations over several years.
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Our analysts, at the end of the day, have a duty to inform and warn. They did so honestly and with integrity when making judgments about the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.
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But as all these reviews are under way we must take some care. We cannot afford an environment to develop where analysts are afraid to make a call, where judgments are held back because analysts fear they will be wrong. Their work and these judgments make vital contributions to the country's security.
I came here today to also tell the American people that they must know that they are served by dedicated, courageous professionals. It is evident on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. It is evident by their work against proliferators. It is evident by the fact that well over two-thirds of Al Qaida's leaders can no longer hurt the American people.
I knew all of what Mr. Tenet said was true, but hearing him say it and make his case for a strong CIA was a very good thing and something that the American people (and especially the Left) need to hear. Again.
President Bush has virtually complete faith in Tenet and so do I--I take my cue from our President.
Tenet assures us that he and his agents are doing their job--which is all that we can demand or expect them to do--and doing it rather well, IMHO.
And one important thing Mr. Tenet forgot to mention was that the CIA is now actively working with the FBI in the GWOIT, something that just never happened before 9/11.
Put this in contrast to ex-President Clinton's relationship with his CIA director James Woolsey, who from his TV appearances and editorial columns is clearly as brilliant and capable as Tenet: when a bozo crashed a small plane on the
in 1994 (one year after the first WTC bombing), the joke was that it was Woolsey trying to get in to see Clinton because the President of the United States wouldn't see his own CIA director!
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