[Senate Hearing 108-678]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 108-678
EFFORTS TO DETERMINE THE STATUS OF IRAQI WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
AND RELATED PROGRAMS
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
JANUARY 28, 2004
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Armed Services
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
96-675 PDF WASHINGTON DC: 2004
---------------------------------------------------------------------
For Sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office
Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; (202) 512�091800
Fax: (202) 512�092104 Mail: Stop IDCC, Washington, DC 20402�090001
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
JOHN WARNER, Virginia, Chairman
JOHN McCAIN, Arizona CARL LEVIN, Michigan
JAMES M. INHOFE, Oklahoma EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts
PAT ROBERTS, Kansas ROBERT C. BYRD, West Virginia
WAYNE ALLARD, Colorado JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut
JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama JACK REED, Rhode Island
SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii
JOHN ENSIGN, Nevada BILL NELSON, Florida
JAMES M. TALENT, Missouri E. BENJAMIN NELSON, Nebraska
SAXBY CHAMBLISS, Georgia MARK DAYTON, Minnesota
LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina EVAN BAYH, Indiana
ELIZABETH DOLE, North Carolina HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, New York
JOHN CORNYN, Texas MARK PRYOR, Arkansas
Judith A. Ansley, Staff Director
Richard D. DeBobes, Democratic Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
__________
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WITNESSES
Efforts to Determine the Status of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction
and Related Programs
january 28, 2004
Page
Kay, Dr. David, Former Special Advisor to the Director of Central
Intelligence on Strategy Regarding Iraqi Weapons of Mass
Destruction Programs........................................... 7
(iii)
EFFORTS TO DETERMINE THE STATUS OF IRAQI WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
AND RELATED PROGRAMS
----------
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28, 2004
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 11:05 a.m., in
room SD-106, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Senator John
Warner (chairman) presiding.
Committee members present: Senators Warner, McCain, Inhofe,
Roberts, Allard, Sessions, Collins, Ensign, Dole, Cornyn,
Levin, Kennedy, Byrd, Reed, Akaka, Bill Nelson, E. Benjamin
Nelson, Dayton, Bayh, Clinton, and Pryor.
Committee staff members present: Judith A. Ansley, staff
director; and Gabriella Eisen, nominations clerk.
Majority staff members present: Charles W. Alsup,
professional staff member; L. David Cherington, counsel; Regina
A. Dubey, research assistant; Gregory T. Kiley, professional
staff member; Thomas L. MacKenzie, professional staff member;
Lucian L. Niemeyer, professional staff member; Lynn F. Rusten,
professional staff member; Scott W. Stucky, general counsel;
and Richard F. Walsh, counsel.
Minority staff members present: Richard D. DeBobes,
Democratic staff director; Evelyn N. Farkas, professional staff
member; Richard W. Fieldhouse, professional staff member; Maren
R. Leed, professional staff member; Gerald J. Leeling, minority
counsel; Peter K. Levine, minority counsel; and William G.P.
Monahan, minority counsel.
Staff assistants present: Michael N. Berger, Leah C.
Brewer, Andrew W. Florell, and Nicholas W. West.
Committee members' assistants present: John A. Bonsell,
assistant to Senator Inhofe; James Beauchamp, assistant to
Senator Roberts; Jayson Roehl, assistant to Senator Allard;
Arch Galloway II, assistant to Senator Sessions; Derek J.
Maurer, assistant to Senator Collins; D'Arcy Grisier, assistant
to Senator Ensign; Lindsey R. Neas, assistant to Senator
Talent; Clyde A. Taylor IV, assistant to Senator Chambliss;
Christine O. Hill, assistant to Senator Dole; Russell J.
Thomasson, assistant to Senator Cornyn; Mieke Y. Eoyang,
assistant to Senator Kennedy; Christina Evans and Terrence E.
Sauvain, assistants to Senator Byrd; Elizabeth King, assistant
to Senator Reed; Caroline Tess, assistant to Senator Bill
Nelson; Eric Pierce, assistant to Senator E. Benjamin Nelson;
Todd Rosenblum, assistant to Senator Bayh; Andrew Shapiro,
assistant to Senator Clinton; and Terri Glaze, assistant to
Senator Pryor.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR JOHN WARNER, CHAIRMAN
Chairman Warner. The committee meets today to review a
further report, and I stress a further report, from Dr. David
Kay on his efforts and the efforts of the team which he was
privileged to work with, known as the Iraq Survey Group (ISG).
He served as the special advisor to the Director of Central
Intelligence (DCI) in determining the status of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) and related programs in Iraq.
After assuming this position last July, Dr. Kay made his
initial interim official report to this committee on October 3.
As members of the committee are aware, Dr. Kay has stepped down
from this position and has been succeeded by Charles A.
Duelfer, a former colleague and member of the U.N. Special
Commission with Dr. Kay, who has been appointed by Director
Tenet to continue this important mission. I met with Mr.
Duelfer the day before yesterday and we just momentarily met
with him in the Intelligence Committee room.
Dr. Kay volunteered, and I emphasize that, volunteered to
resume his public service, worked diligently for 6 months in
Iraq under difficult and often dangerous conditions, and just
concluded his work last week and reported to the DCI. I thank
you and I thank your wife for your public service.
Working with General Dayton and the ISG, your mission was
to search for all facts, I repeat all facts, relevant to the
many issues about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and related
programs. You initiated what was and continues, I emphasize
continues, to be a very difficult, complex mission, that in
your own words is yet to be completed.
As you cautioned us when you took up this post in July,
patience is required to ensure we complete a thorough
assessment of this important issue. In this hearing today, we
hope to receive your assessment of what has been accomplished
to date, I repeat to date, and what, in your professional
judgment remains to be done by the ISG. It is far too early to
reach any final judgments or conclusions.
In recent days, I mentioned I met with General Dayton, I
met extensively with Dr. Kay over the recess period, and Mr.
Duelfer, and have received the assurances of General Dayton and
Mr. Duelfer that they will be prepared to present to Congress a
second official interim report of the ISG in the timeframe of
late March.
It is crucial that the important work of the ISG go on.
Thus far, the findings have been significant. Dr. Kay has
stated that although we've not found evidence of large
stockpiles of WMD or forward-deployed weapons, the ISG has made
the following evidence as a part of their record that will be
forthcoming: first, evidence of Saddam Hussein's intent to
pursue WMD programs on a large scale; actual, ongoing chemical
and biological research programs; an active program to use the
deadly chemical ricin as a weapon, a program that was
interrupted only by the start of the war in March; evidence of
long-range missile programs that, in all probability, were
ultimately going to be used to deliver WMD; evidence that
Saddam Hussein was attempting to reconstitute his fledgling
nuclear program as late as 2001; and most important, evidence
that clearly indicates Saddam Hussein was conducting a wide
range of activities in clear contravention of the United
Nations' resolutions.
As you recently stated, Dr. Kay, and I quote you, ``It was
reasonable to conclude that Iraq posed an imminent threat. What
we learned during the inspection made Iraq a more dangerous
place potentially than in fact we thought it was even before
the war.'' Further, you said on NBC's Today show on Tuesday
that it was ``absolutely prudent for the U.S. to go to war.''
Dr. Kay, I concur in those conclusions. I believe a real
and growing threat has been eliminated and a coalition of
nations acted prudently in the cause of freedom. I'd be
interested if you concur in my conclusions.
While some have asserted that the President and his senior
advisors may have exaggerated or manipulated pre-war
intelligence on Iraq's WMD programs, Dr. Kay reached the
following conclusion, which I think is different. As you stated
recently, ``We have to remember that this view of Iraq (pre-war
assessment of WMD capabilities) was held during the Clinton
administration and did not change in the Bush administration.
It is not a political got-you issue. Often, estimates are
different than reality. The important thing is, when they
differ, to understand why.''
That's precisely why I called this meeting, Dr. Kay, to
continue the work of this committee in developing a body of
fact from which reasonable people at the conclusion of that
collection of facts can reach their own objective thoughts and
conclusions. It's been a difficult process, but the ISG work is
not completed.
Now, you have stated that you believe there did not exist
large stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, but I hope
that you will, in your testimony, indicate that since the work
is not completed, since Iraq is as big as California and
Baghdad approximates the sprawling territory of Los Angeles,
that we could find caches and reserves of weapons of mass
destruction, chemical or biological, or even further evidence
about the nuclear program.
We also would hope that you'd address the question of
whether or not Saddam Hussein had some kind of ``breakout''
capability for quickly producing chemical or biological
weapons, and was this not a basis for constituting a conclusion
that there was an imminent threat from Saddam Hussein and his
military.
Why were the Iraqi WMD records systematically looted or
destroyed, and why do scientists in custody today continue not
to be forthcoming, if there was nothing to hide or nothing
substantial existed?
The work of the ISG has shown that Saddam Hussein had WMD
intentions, had WMD programs that did survive, and did outwit
for 12 years the United Nations Security Council and the
resolutions, indeed, the inspections in large measure. If
ultimately the findings of the ISG do differ from the pre-war
assessments of our Intelligence Community, differ from
assessments of the United Nations, differ from assessments of
intelligence services of many other nations, indeed, that is
cause for concern. But we are not there yet in terms of the
totality of fact on which to draw such serious conclusions.
Today and tomorrow our policymakers must be able to rely on
the intelligence they are provided. The safety and security of
the men and women of the Armed Forces are dependent on
intelligence, and indeed, the security of our Nation. So
collectively all of us, Congress, the executive branch, and
other nations, we must vigorously continue to pursue the
collection of the facts as the ISG is doing, and upon that
completion, then draw our conclusions and take such corrective
measures as may be necessary.
As we speak, over 1,400 individuals, military and civilian,
are on the ground in Iraq seeking the facts about Iraq's WMD
programs. I have confidence in the commitment and the ability
of General Dayton, Mr. Duelfer, your successor, and
representatives from our coalition partners to complete this
mission. They have some of the best and brightest of our
military and our Intelligence Community to complete this task,
and Congress has provided the necessary means, a very
substantial appropriation of recent. We remain committed to
providing the resources that are necessary for the completion
of the ISG work.
Dr. Kay, I thank you for your public service once again.
Senator Levin.
STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARL LEVIN
Senator Levin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and let me join you
in welcoming Dr. Kay to the hearing and stating our thanks for
his work on the Iraq Survey Group.
Dr. Kay's recent reported statements--for example, that the
Intelligence Community was wrong about there being stockpiles
of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the war; that it
is the Intelligence Community's consensus that the two alleged
``biological'' trailers were for hydrogen production, not for
producing biological warfare agents; and that Iraq had not
reconstituted its nuclear weapons program--stand in sharp
contrast to the statements made by the administration before
going to war in Iraq. Dr. Kay's recent statements raise serious
questions about the accuracy and objectivity of our
intelligence and about the administration's public statements
before the war that were supposedly based on that intelligence.
Before the war, the administration, in order to support its
decision to go to war, made numerous vivid, unqualified
statements about Iraq having in its possession weapons of mass
destruction--not ``programs,'' not ``program-related
activities,'' and not ``intentions.'' Actual weapons is what
the administration's statements focused on.
For example, on August 26, 2002, Vice President Cheney gave
a major speech about a threat from Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction.
He asserted the following: ``Simply stated, there is no
doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our
friends, against our allies, and against us.''
Vice President Cheney was not talking about programs or
intentions; he was specifically referring to existing weapons
that were being amassed for use against us.
Here is what Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said in his
testimony to this committee on September 19, 2002: ``Saddam
Hussein's amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of biological
weapons, including anthrax, botulism toxin, possibly smallpox.
He's amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons,
including VX, sarin, and mustard gas.
Notice again, not programs or intentions, it's stockpiles
that Saddam Hussein was said to have amassed.
On September 27, President Bush said that we must make sure
that Saddam Hussein, ``never has the capacity to use the
stockpiles of anthrax that we know he has, or VX, the
biological weapons which he possesses.'' Notice again, not
reference to programs or intentions. The representation is
stockpiles and weapons in the possession of Saddam Hussein.
On October 7, 2002, President Bush said that, ``It [Iraq]
possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons.''
Possesses and produces, not programs or intentions.
On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke
at the U.N. He said, ``We know from sources that a missile
brigade outside Baghdad was dispersing rocket launchers and
warheads containing biological warfare agent to various
locations. Most of the launchers and warheads had been hidden
in large groves of palm trees--and were to be moved every 1 to
4 weeks to escape detection. There can be no doubt,'' Secretary
Powell said, ``no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological
weapons . . . and he has the ability to dispense these lethal
poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and
destruction.''
Secretary Powell talked about ``the existence of mobile
production facilities used to make biological agents.'' He said
that, ``We know what the tanks, pumps, compressors, and other
parts look like. We know how they fit together. We know how
they work. We know a great deal about the platforms on which
they are mounted. We know that Iraq has at least seven of these
mobile biological agent production factories.''
Then he said, ``Our conservative estimate is that Iraq
today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical
weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield
rockets.'' He followed on by saying, ``Saddam Hussein has
chemical weapons. . . We have sources who tell us that he
recently has authorized his field commanders to use them.''
Secretary Powell, in other words, spoke of actual weapons, not
about ``program-related activities'' or ``intentions.''
On March 11, 2003, just before the start of the war,
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said the following: ``We know he
continues to hide biological and chemical weapons, moving them
to different locations as often as every 12 to 24 hours and
placing them in residential neighborhoods.''
About 2 weeks later, Secretary Rumsfeld said, ``We know
where they [weapons of mass destruction] are.''
Just in case there was ever any doubt about the reason
given for why we went to war, the President's Press Secretary
restated the point this way on April 10, 2003: ``Make no
mistake . . . we have high confidence that they have weapons of
mass destruction. That is what this war was about and it is
about. We have high confidence it will be found.''
Incredibly enough, administration leaders are still saying
that we found weapons of mass destruction production
facilities. Just last week, Vice President Cheney said that the
two trailers found in Iraq were part of a mobile biological
weapons lab program and were, in his words, ``conclusive
evidence that he did in fact have programs for weapons of mass
destruction.''
But today's witness, Dr. David Kay, is reported in the New
York Times as saying that the consensus in the Intelligence
Community is that those two trailers were for producing
hydrogen for weather balloons or possibly rocket fuel--but not
for biological weapons.
Surely we should find out what is the basis for Vice
President Cheney's recent statement, as well as the basis for
the unqualified administration statements made before the war
which I have just quoted.
Unfortunately, as of now, the leadership of the Senate will
not allow an inquiry into how the administration characterized
the intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The
Intelligence Committee's inquiry is limited to the question of
the production of intelligence. That committee is not looking
into how that intelligence was used and characterized by
policymakers.
We will continue to press for an inquiry looking to get the
whole story, the full picture. If the only way to obtain that
is to have an outside, independent, nonpartisan commission to
conduct a comprehensive and objective review of the entire
matter, so be it.
Whether one agreed or disagreed with the decision to
proceed to war, and whether one agreed or disagreed with the
decision to proceed without the support of the international
community acting through the U.N., the case made by the
administration for initiating the war against Iraq was not
because Iraq had intentions to someday resume production of
weapons of mass destruction. It was because they had in their
possession weapons of mass destruction.
Although the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
intentions or ambitions and program-related activities is a
serious issue, it is not why we went to war. The case for war
was Iraq's possession, production, deployment, and stockpiling
of weapons of mass destruction. A different case for war
against Iraq can be made, but the case which the administration
made to the American people was the presence of actual weapons
of mass destruction.
When lives are at stake and our military is going to be
placed in harm's way, in other words, when we decide to go to
war, it is totally unacceptable to have intelligence that is
this far off or to exaggerate or shape the intelligence for any
purpose by anybody. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Warner. Dr. Kay, we'll now receive from you any
preliminary comments you wish to make.
STATEMENT OF DR. DAVID KAY, FORMER SPECIAL ADVISOR TO THE
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE ON STRATEGY REGARDING IRAQI
WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION PROGRAMS
Dr. Kay. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. As we
discussed, I do not have a written statement. This hearing came
about very quickly. I do have a few preliminary comments, but I
suspect you're more interested in asking questions. I'll be
happy to respond to those questions to the best of my ability.
I would like to open by saying that the talent, dedication,
and bravery of the staff of the ISG that was my privilege to
direct is unparalleled and the country owes a great debt of
gratitude to the men and women who have served over there and
continue to serve doing that.
A great deal has been accomplished by the team and I do
think, I echo what you said, Senator, I think it important that
it goes on and that it is allowed to reach its full conclusion.
In fact, I really believe it ought to be better resourced and
totally focused on WMD, that that is important to do it.
But I also believe that it is time to begin the fundamental
analysis of how we got here, what led us here, and what we need
to do in order to ensure that we are equipped with the best
possible intelligence as we face these issues in the future.
Let me begin by saying we were almost all wrong, and I
certainly include myself here. Senator Kennedy knows very
directly. Senator Kennedy and I talked on several occasions
prior to the war that my view was that the best evidence that I
had seen was that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction.
I would also point out that many governments that chose not to
support this war, certainly the French, President Chirac, as I
recall, in April of last year referred to Iraq's possession of
WMD. The Germans, certainly the intelligence service, believed
that there were WMD.
It turns out we were all wrong probably in my judgment and
that is most disturbing. We're also in a period in which we've
had intelligence surprises in the proliferation area that go
the other way. The case of Iran, a nuclear program that the
Iranians had was 18 years old, that we underestimated, and that
in fact we didn't discover. It was discovered by a group of
Iranian dissidents outside the country who pointed their
national community to the location. The Libyan program recently
discovered was far more extensive than was assessed prior to
that.
There's a long record here of being wrong. There's a good
reason for it, there are probably multiple reasons. Certainly
proliferation is a hard thing to track, particularly in
countries that deny easy and free access and don't have free
and open societies.
In my judgment, based on the work that has been done to
this point by the ISG, in fact that I reported to you in
October, Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of Resolution
1441. Resolution 1441 required that Iraq report all of its
activities, one last chance to come clean about what it had. We
have discovered hundreds of cases based on both documents,
physical evidence, and the testimony of Iraqis of activities
that were prohibited under the initial U.N. Resolution 687 and
that should have been reported under Resolution 1441 with Iraqi
testimony that not only did they not tell the U.N. about this,
they were instructed not to do it and they hid material.
I think the aim, and certainly the aim of what I've tried
to do since leaving, is not political and certainly not a witch
hunt at individuals. It's to try to direct our attention at
what I believe is a fundamental fault analysis that we must now
examine.
Let me take one of the explanations most commonly given:
Analysts were pressured to reach conclusions that would fit the
political agenda of one or another administration. I deeply
think that is a wrong explanation. As a leader of the effort of
the ISG, I spent most of my days not out in the field leading
inspections, it's typically what you do at that level. I was
trying to motivate, direct, find strategies.
In the course of doing that, I had innumerable analysts who
came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was
not the world that they had thought existed and that they had
estimated. Reality on the ground differed in advance and never,
not in a single case, was the explanation, I was pressured to
do this. The explanation was very often, the limited data we
had led one to reasonably conclude this, I now see that there's
another explanation for it.
Each case was different but the conversations were
sufficiently in depth and our relationship was sufficiently
frank that I am convinced that at least of the analysts I dealt
with, I did not come across a single one that felt it had been,
in the military term, inappropriate command influence that led
them to take that position. It was not that. It was the honest
difficulty based on the information that had been collected and
led the analyst to that conclusion.
Almost in a perverse way, I wish it had been undue
influence, because we know how to correct that. We get rid of
the people who in fact were exercising that. The fact that it
wasn't tells me that we have a much more fundamental problem of
understanding what went wrong and we have to figure out what
was there. That's what I call fundamental fault analysis.
Like I say, I think we have other cases other than Iraq. I
do not think the problem of global proliferation of weapons
technology of mass destruction is going to go away and that's
why I think it is an urgent issue.
Let me wrap up here with just a brief summary of what I
think we are now facing in Iraq. I regret to say that I think
at the end of the work of the ISG there is still going to be an
unresolvable ambiguity about what happened. A lot of that
traces to the failure on April 9 to establish immediately
physical security in Iraq, the unparalleled looting and
destruction, a lot of which was directly intentional, designed
by the security services to cover the tracks of the Iraq WMD
program and their other programs as well, a lot of which was
what we simply called ``Ali Baba'' looting. ``It had been the
regime, the regime is gone, I'm going to go take the gold
toilet fixtures and everything else imaginable.'' I've seen
looting around the world and thought I knew the best looters in
the world. The Iraqis excel at that.
The result is--and document destruction--we're really not
going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some
of the positive conclusions that we're going to come to. There
will be always unresolved ambiguity here. But I do think the
ISG, I think Charlie Duelfer is a great leader, I have utmost
confidence in Charles, I think you will get as full an answer
as you can possibly get.
Let me just conclude by my own personal tribute, both to
the President and to George Tenet for having the courage to
select me to do this and my successor, Charlie Duelfer, as
well. Both of us are known for what is, at times, a regrettable
strength--a streak of independence. I came not from within the
administration and it was clear and clear in our discussions
and no one asked otherwise, that I would lead this the way I
thought best and I would speak the truth as we found it. I had
absolutely no pressure prior, during the course of the work at
the ISG, or after I left to do anything otherwise. I think that
shows a level of maturity and understanding that I think bodes
well for getting to the bottom of this.
But it is really up to you and your staff on behalf of the
American people to take on that challenge. It's not something
that anyone from the outside can do, so I look forward to these
hearings and other hearings and how you will get to the
conclusions.
I do believe we have to understand why reality turned out
to be different than expectations and estimate. But you have
more public service, certainly many of you than I have ever had
and you recognize that this is not unusual. I told Senator
Warner earlier that I've been drawn back as a result of a
recent film of reminding me of something. At the time of the
Cuban missile crisis, the combined estimate--there was
unanimity in the intelligence service--was that there were no
Soviet warheads in Cuba at the time of the missile crisis.
Fortunately, President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy disagreed
with the estimate and chose a course of action less ambitious
and aggressive than recommended by their advisors.
But the most important thing about that story, which is not
often told, is that as a result after the Cuban missile crisis,
immediate steps were taken to correct our inability to collect
intelligence on the movement of nuclear material out of the
Soviet Union to other places, so that by the end of the Johnson
administration, the Intelligence Community had a capability to
do what it had not been able to do at the time of the Cuban
missile crisis.
I think you face a similar responsibility in ensuring that
the community is able to do a better job in the future than it
has done in the past.
Senator, I'm happy to answer your questions.
Chairman Warner. Thank you very much. Colleagues, we'll go
to a round of 6 minutes. In the event there's a vote, it's my
intention to continue the hearing on a rotation basis as
members come and go so we have continuity.
Doctor, I assure you that Congress, this committee, the
Intelligence Committee under Senator Roberts, Senator
Rockefeller, that Senator Levin and I will pursue this, but
we'll wait until such time as the work of the Intelligence
Committee--we both serve on that committee--is completed, we've
had a chance to analyze it, and then we'll sit down to
determine what the next step may be.
But bottom line, and you have emphasized it, and that is
that we have to make such corrections as we deem necessary to
the intelligence system, for the security of this country, for
the safety of the men and women in uniform who today and
tonight and tomorrow and for the definite future will be out
there taking risks in the cause of freedom. So I assure you it
will be done.
Now, I want to pick up on your comment that we were all
wrong. Let's stop to think about that. We agreed, you and I,
we've had extensive discussions, that the work of the ISG has
to continue, correct?
Dr. Kay. Absolutely.
Chairman Warner. That given the size of Iraq, California,
the size of Baghdad, Los Angeles, we could discover some facts
that would confirm the conclusions that were reached by the
Intelligence Community, not only in this country but other
nations in the future. Am I not correct in that assumption?
Dr. Kay. I certainly think that's a theoretical
possibility, yes, Senator Warner.
Chairman Warner. So maybe we better not pronounce we're all
wrong yet, because I think until we have finished the work, the
ISG and the other nations that are working for the ISG, I think
we better hold such conclusion in abeyance. That would be my
thought.
Dr. Kay. Senator Warner, may I only add, it would be
totally out of character for me to be against continued
investigation in almost any area, that's my life. I believe
that the effort that has been directed to this point has been
sufficiently intense that it is highly unlikely that there were
large stockpiles of deployed, militarized chemical and
biological weapons there. Is it theoretically possible in a
country as vast as that that they've hidden? It's theoretically
possible, but we went after this not in the way of trying to
find where the weapons are hidden. When you don't find them in
the obvious places, you look to see were they produced, were
there people that produced them, were there the inputs to the
production process?
You do that and you eliminate, and that's what I mean by
unresolved ambiguity. When the ISG wraps up its work, whether
it be 6 months or 6 years from now, there are still going to be
people who say, you didn't look everywhere, isn't it possible
it was hidden someplace? The answer has to be honestly, yes,
it's possible, but you try to eliminate that by this other
process, and when I reached the conclusion, which I admit is
partial and is purely mine that I think there were no large
stockpiles of WMD, it's based on that process. But I agree,
we're not in disagreement at all. The search must continue.
Chairman Warner. Right. But the operative word in your
assumption is large. Several small caches could constitute an
imminent threat. Am I not correct in that?
Dr. Kay. That's always possible and I doubt that we will
ever--I mean, it's possible--they could be there and we could
never find them.
Chairman Warner. All right. But let's give this process a
chance to continue.
Dr. Kay. Absolutely.
Chairman Warner. We agree that there could be the discovery
in some future date of the evidence which confirms, perhaps not
in totality, but in part, the conclusions of the international
intelligence community, so we leave open that option.
But let's go back to your other statement that you feel
that perhaps as much as 85 percent of the work of the ISG has
been completed. Am I correct in that?
Dr. Kay. I've said I think 85 percent of the major elements
of the Iraqi program are probably known. That's not 85 percent
of the total volume.
Chairman Warner. But in our discussions you've emphasized
that 15 percent yet to be done could yield productive evidence
that's just as important to what you've accumulated or not
accumulated to date.
Dr. Kay. Senator Warner, that's certainly true,
particularly with regard to the foreign countries and
individuals that assisted that program, which remain a
continuing threat in other countries unless we know fully who
they were and what they contributed.
Chairman Warner. Clearly that at the outbreak of the war or
prior thereto and during the war, an awful lot of destruction
of documents took place and perhaps other tangible evidence.
Today the persons who were most likely involved in weapons
programs, most likely to have the knowledge, are refusing to
talk. Does that not lend itself to an assumption that there had
to be something there, otherwise they wouldn't have gone about,
so methodically destroying all the records and refusing to
talk?
Dr. Kay. You're absolutely--I think, and I think I've said,
but let me be absolutely clear about it, Iraq was in clear and
material violation of Resolution 1441. They maintained programs
and activities and certainly they had the intentions at a point
to resume their programs, so there was a lot they wanted to
hide because it showed what they were doing that was illegal. I
hope we find even more evidence of that.
Chairman Warner. Part of that program was missiles clearly,
clearly in defiance of the U.N. resolution in terms of range.
They had the potential to incorporate in those warheads,
although small quantities, nevertheless very lethal types of
WMD. Am I not correct in that?
Dr. Kay. You're absolutely correct.
Chairman Warner. Could you say that the work thus far of
the ISG, and I recounted a number of things including the ricin
and so forth in my opening statement, does not that lend itself
to the understanding, the conclusion that Saddam Hussein and
this military machine under his control posed an imminent
threat, perhaps to the neighbors, perhaps to those beyond the
perimeter of the neighbors?
Dr. Kay. Senator Warner, I think the world is far safer
with the disappearance and the removal of Saddam Hussein. I
have said I actually think this may be one of those cases where
it was even more dangerous than we thought. I think when we
have the complete record, you're going to discover that after
1998 it became a regime that was totally corrupt, individuals
were out for their own protection, and in a world where we know
others are seeking WMD, the likelihood at some point in the
future of a seller and a buyer meeting up would have made that
a far more dangerous country than even we anticipated with what
may turn out not to be a fully accurate estimate.
Chairman Warner. Thank you, Dr. Kay.
Senator Levin.
Senator Levin. Dr. Kay, on the question of stockpiles, you
have stated, I believe, that in your opinion, Iraq did not have
large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in 2002. Is
that correct?
Dr. Kay. That's correct, Senator.
Senator Levin. Do you have any evidence that they had any
stockpiles, large or small, in 2002?
Dr. Kay. I simply have no evidence, Senator.
Senator Levin. You've not uncovered any evidence of small
stockpiles?
Dr. Kay. We have not uncovered any small stockpiles, that's
correct.
Senator Levin. Have you uncovered any evidence that they
had small stockpiles in 2002?
Dr. Kay. We have evidence that they certainly could have
produced small amounts, but we've not discovered evidence of
the stockpiles.
Senator Levin. On the question of the vans, according to
the New York Times on January 26, you indicated that there's a
consensus in the Intelligence Community that the trailers that
we found were intended to produce hydrogen for weather balloons
or possibly rocket fuel, but not for producing biological
warfare agents. Was that an accurate report of your position?
Dr. Kay. That's probably not my exact words, but roughly
accurate. I think the consensus opinion is that when you look
at those two trailers, while they had capabilities in many
areas, their actual intended use was not for the production of
biological weapons.
Senator Levin. Now, on January 22, just a week ago, Vice
President Cheney said that we know, for example, that prior to
our going in, he had spent time and effort acquiring mobile
biological weapons labs and were quite confident he did, in
fact, have such a program. We found a couple of semi-trailers
at this point which we believe were in fact part of that
program and I would deem that ``conclusive evidence, if you
will, that he did, in fact, have programs for weapons of mass
destruction.''
Now, those vans, according to the Vice President, 1 week
ago are conclusive evidence that he had weapons, and yet you're
saying that the consensus in the Intelligence Community is that
those vans were for some non-weapons-related purpose, they were
either for weather balloons, hydrogen, or rocket fuel, but not
for weapons of mass destruction.
Do you know what intelligence Vice President Cheney is
relying on when he tells the public a week ago, not before the
war, everyone would--they were all wrong before the war--but
now, a week ago still staying that those vans are conclusive
evidence that there was a biological weapons program. My
question: Do you know what intelligence Vice President Cheney
was relying on 1 week ago when he made that statement to the
American public?
Dr. Kay. Senator Levin, if you want the short answer, and
the obvious answer, as you probably know, is, am I aware of
what the Vice President was reading a week ago, I'm not.
Senator Levin. Have you seen intelligence which would
support that conclusion?
Dr. Kay. Yes, I have. In fact, if you had asked me, as I
think in fact you did, or members of Senator Roberts' Select
Intelligence Committee certainly did in July and August, this
has been a source of real struggle with regard to those vans.
There was a point during the process when I would have said the
consensus opinion is that they were for biological weapons.
It's been an ongoing struggle to understand those two vans and
it's been a shifting target in that regard.
Senator Levin. Now I understand that shifting target thing.
I'm talking about right now. You've said that the consensus in
the Intelligence Community is that those vans are not related.
Is that a correct statement which you just gave here this
morning? Is that the consensus opinion in the Intelligence
Community now?
Dr. Kay. It is my view of the consensus opinion, but there
are, no doubt given the nature of opinions, people out there
who hold a different opinion.
Senator Levin. All right. But in your judgment, the
consensus in the Intelligence Community now is that those are
not biological weapons vans?
Dr. Kay. That is my personal judgment. Others may well hold
a different one.
Senator Levin. All right. I think it's critically important
that we find out the basis of the Vice President's statement.
I'm saying this to our chairman, not to you, that we find out
the basis of the Vice President's statement, because this is
where intelligence becomes so important. If there's
intelligence out there that still supports the conclusion with
certainty, he deems this conclusive evidence that he had
programs for weapons of mass destruction. This is a week ago.
Now, we have to find out what the basis, it seems to me, of
that statement is. This is the Vice President's statement. I
would ask the chairman that we ask the Vice President for the
basis of that statement which he made publicly just about a
week ago.
Senator Roberts. Would the Senator yield on that point?
Senator Levin. I'd like to first, if I could, just ask our
chairman whether or not we could ask the Vice President for the
basis of that statement that was made a week ago?
Senator Roberts. I think I have an answer for you if you'd
yield.
Senator Levin. I'd like to hear it frankly from the Vice
President in writing.
Chairman Warner. We have to continue here, colleagues. I'm
going to ask the indulgence of the committee while the chair
requests that the committee act on the following list of
military nominations. A quorum now being present, I ask the
committee consider a list of 4,763 pending military
nominations. The nominations have been before the committee the
required length of time and no objection has been raised
regarding them.
Is there a motion to favorably report the 4,763 nominations
to the Senate?
Senator Levin. Support.
Chairman Warner. Second? All in favor, say aye.
(A chorus of ayes.)
Opposed?
(No response.)
Motion carried.
Senator Levin. My final question, Dr. Kay, subject to the
chair perhaps commenting on my request is this: Is it your
judgment that the aluminum tubes that Iraq was trying to
acquire were intended or used for a centrifuge program to
enrich uranium for nuclear weapons? Is that your view?
Dr. Kay. Senator Levin, this is an area which falls into
what Senator Warner referred to, where I think it's important
that the investigation continue. It is my judgment based on the
evidence that was collected, but there clearly can be more,
that it's more than probable that those tubes were intended for
us in a conventional missile program rather than in a
centrifuge program, but it's an open question that's still
being investigated.
Senator Levin. All right. But that is your judgment that
they were not related to uranium enrichment?
Dr. Kay. That is my personal judgment that they probably
were not, based on evidence, but there's still more evidence
possible to gain.
Senator Levin. One short final question, my second final
question: In your judgment, had Iraq reconstituted its nuclear
weapon program in the way you understand the word reconstitute?
Dr. Kay. It was in the early stages of renovating the
program, building new buildings. It was not a reconstituted,
full-blown nuclear program.
Senator Levin. Thank you.
Chairman Warner. Senator, I will take under consideration
your request. I think Senator Roberts, when it becomes his
turn, may have a statement that's relevant to it.
Senator McCain.
Senator McCain. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Dr.
Kay, for your service to our country for many years. We're very
proud to have people like you who are willing to serve the
country.
Dr. Kay, you find yourself today in a very highly charged
political environment, and you are by nature a scientist and
not one who's familiar with these kinds of passions around an
election year. I think it's important to establish your belief
and that of the overwhelming body of the intelligence and the
Intelligence Community, both here, overseas, and in the Clinton
administration, the following facts. Saddam Hussein developed
and used weapons of mass destruction. True?
Dr. Kay. Absolutely.
Senator McCain. He used them against the Iranians and the
Kurds? Just yes or no?
Dr. Kay. Oh, yes.
Senator McCain. Okay. You and inspectors found enormous
quantities of banned chemical and biological weapons in Iraq in
the 1990s?
Dr. Kay. Yes, sir.
Senator McCain. We know that Saddam Hussein had once a very
active nuclear program?
Dr. Kay. Yes.
Senator McCain. He realized and had ambitions to develop
and use weapons of mass destruction?
Dr. Kay. Clearly.
Senator McCain. So the point is, if he were in power today,
there is no doubt that he would harbor ambitions for the
development and use of weapons of mass destruction. Is there
any doubt in your mind?
Dr. Kay. There's absolutely no doubt, and I think I've said
that, Senator.
Senator McCain. Good. But it's important to emphasize this
point when we look at what has obviously been an intelligence
failure.
Dr. Kay. I agree.
Senator McCain. When you answered a question from Reuters,
what happened to the stockpiles of biological and chemical
weapons that everyone expected to be there, your answer was
simple: ``I don't think they existed.''
So what needs to be established here is that when we--at
least I hope is your--I believe is your view and certainly
mine, that, as you just stated, America, the world, and Iraq is
a far better and safer place with Saddam Hussein gone from
power, and the sacrifice made by American citizens and that are
serving and sacrificing today was not only worth it, but very
important to the future of the Middle East and the world. Do
you share that?
Dr. Kay. That's certainly true, Senator. I've probably
learned not to speak to wire reporters and even to watch out
for Senators who want one-word answers. It tends to compress
complex issues.
Senator McCain. But you agree with the fundamental
principle here that what we did was justified and enhanced the
security of the United States and the world by removing Saddam
Hussein from power?
Dr. Kay. Absolutely.
Senator McCain. Okay. That's important to establish because
now in this political season, those are attempted to be mixed,
that because we didn't find the weapons of mass destruction,
therefore, the conflict was not justified. That's why I think
it's important to establish those salient facts.
But obviously we were wrong, as you said. Now why were we
wrong?
Dr. Kay. Senator, I wouldn't pretend that I know all the
answers or even know all the questions to get at that. I am
convinced that that is the important forefront of the inquiry
that quite frankly you must undertake. I have hypotheses of
where I think things generically have occurred. I think we
became almost addicted to the incredible amount of effort that
United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) and U.N. inspectors
could produce on the scene and that flow of information----
Senator McCain. Including intelligence gained by the
previous administration?
Dr. Kay. That's correct. Did not develop our own human
intelligence (HUMINT) sources there. Now, this really goes
back, quite frankly, the change took place if you look at it,
it goes back to the Carter administration when, as a result of
things that had occurred in the Vietnam area, essentially our
HUMINT capability was spun down and we got in the habit of
relying on intelligence collected by liaison services. If a
liaison, an individual from another country, gets caught as a
spy, it doesn't make the front page of The Washington Post or
The New York Times, it's not politically embarrassing, and
quite frankly, you don't have a dead American, so there are
good reasons to do it.
More importantly, and things that I think you have to worry
about, we have all stressed, why didn't the Intelligence
Community collect the dots prior to September 11? It all looks
clear in retrospect. Quite frankly, the most common problem you
have with analysts is you do not want them to overanalyze the
data. If there are only a few dots connected, maybe they don't
belong connected.
I'm convinced in this area, partly because of Iraqi
behavior, to a large extent because of Iraqi behavior, they
cheated, they lied, we knew it, UNSCOM, the U.N. had caught
them, we got in the habit of new pieces of information accreted
to this overall consensus view without challenging that
consensus.
Senator McCain. Do you believe that those that provided
false intelligence estimates ought to be held accountable?
Dr. Kay. Absolutely.
Senator McCain. Do you believe that we need an independent,
outside investigation?
Dr. Kay. Senator----
Senator McCain. You don't have to answer that if you don't
choose to, Dr. Kay. That's not a fair question.
Dr. Kay. No, it is really what goes to the heart of the
integrity of our own process. I generally believe that it's
important to acknowledge failure. I also think we have enough
history to understand that closed orders and secret societies,
whether they be religious or governmental, are the groups that
have the hardest time reforming themselves in the face of
failure without outside input.
I must say, my personal view, and it's purely personal, is
that in this case, you will finally determine that it is going
to take an outside inquiry both to do it and to give yourself
and the American people the confidence that you have done it.
Senator McCain. Not only for what happened in the past, but
so that we can rely on intelligence in the future.
Dr. Kay. I would say entirely with regard to the future.
Witch hunting is not a profitable inquiry. It is for the future
that you need this.
Senator McCain. Well, again, every once in a while we get a
chance to see again someone who has served his country with a
distinction and honor and courage, and we thank you, Dr. Kay.
Dr. Kay. Thank you, Senator.
Chairman Warner. Thank you, Senator McCain.
Senator Kennedy.
Senator Kennedy. Thank you, Dr. Kay, and I join in all of
those that thank you for your service to the country. It is
impressive indeed and we thank you for your appearance here
before the committee.
Now, the real question, Dr. Kay, is whether there was a
greater failure than a failure of intelligence. Yesterday you
said if anyone was abused by the intelligence, it was the
President of the United States rather than the other way
around. But Greg Thielmann, the former Director of the Office
of Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs in the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, stated last
July, some of the fault lies with the performance of the
Intelligence Community, but most of it lies with the way senior
officials misused the information they were provided.
He said they surveyed the data, picked out what they liked,
the whole thing was bizarre. The Secretary of Defense had this
huge Defense Intelligence Agency and he went around it. In
fact, with regard to the question of Iraq's chemical weapons
program, the Defense Intelligence Agency got it exactly right
in September 2002. According to the February 2, 2004, edition
of the New Republic, an agent's report stated there is no
reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and
stockpiling chemical weapons or where Iraq has or will
establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities. Yet
the President told the United Nations in September 2002 that
Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard, and other
chemical agents.
The next month, the State Department said that the evidence
was inadequate to support a judgment that a nuclear program had
been restarted. It said it was impossible to project a timeline
for the completion of activities it does not know are
happening. Yet in an October 7, 2002, speech in Ohio, President
Bush said if the Iraqi regime is able to produce or steal an
amount of highly-enriched uranium larger than a single
softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.
Then in September, the Department of Energy had serious
concerns about whether the famous aluminum tubes had anything
to do with the Iraqis' nuclear programs, yet Secretary Powell
used the information in his speech before the United Nations.
In October of last year, the CIA sent two memos to the
White House voicing strong doubts about the reliability of
claims that Iraq was trying to obtain nuclear materials from
Africa, but the President still used the statement in his State
of the Union address attributed to British intelligence.
Many of us feel that the evidence so far leads only to one
conclusion, that what has happened was more than a failure of
intelligence, it was the result of manipulation of the
intelligence to justify a decision to go to war. Now, did you
have the access to those different intelligence reports as a
civilian?
Dr. Kay. Yes, Senator. I had full access to everything in
the Intelligence Community with regard to Iraq.
Senator Kennedy. You had it with regard to the State
Department's intelligence and the Department of Energy?
Dr. Kay. Yes.
Senator Kennedy. All of those with their conclusions that
I've read, just summaries of their conclusions?
Dr. Kay. I had that as well as the individuals. I had on my
team members of the Department of Energy who had, in fact,
participated in writing that view.
Senator Kennedy. Can you give us any explanation of why
these agencies in retrospect appear to have had it right, and
the information that the administration used appeared to have
it wrong? What weight was given to these reports when you look
at them in retrospect, and when you have a number of those that
were involved in the reports believing that the information
reports were used selectively to justify a policy decision to
take the country to war?
Dr. Kay. Senator Kennedy, it's impossible in the short time
I have to reply to take you fully through that, and in fact,
that's my hope that Senator Roberts and his committee will have
done that, but let me just say that there's a selective process
that goes on both ways. There were people in the DOE who
believe that those aluminum tubes were indeed for a centrifuge
program.
It's a lot easier after the fact and after you know the
truth to be selective that you were right. I've gone through
this a lot in my career. All I can say is if you read the total
body of intelligence in the last 12 to 15 years that flowed on
Iraq, I quite frankly think it would be hard to come to a
conclusion other than Iraq was a gathering serious threat to
the world with regard to WMD.
I remind you, it was Secretary Cohen who stood, I think in
this very committee room, with 5 pounds of flour and talked
about anthrax.
Senator Kennedy. Just to come back because we have limited
time--gathering serious threat, you really think that that is--
those are the words that brought us to war, those were the
words that justified us going into war, a gathering serious
threat?
Dr. Kay. Senator, that's probably far more in your realm
than in my realm. I'll take Senator McCain's defense of I being
a knave in the world of politics.
Senator Kennedy. Well, no, I appreciate your response and I
appreciate your appearance here and I think that when we look
at who has the responsibility, I think it's fair enough to look
not only what the intelligence, but all the intelligence
agencies, and as Senator Levin said how that intelligence was
used. I think that is going to be the key to find out just what
representations were made and the reasons why they were made,
because I think on the basis of the information we have now, I
think it's difficult to draw a conclusion that it was used
selectively and in many instances manipulated to carry on a
policy decision. Thank you.
Chairman Warner. Thank you, Senator Kennedy. Colleagues,
just an administrative announcement. We had scheduled this
morning a 9:30 hearing on three nominations for the Department
of Defense. It was my judgment, given the uncertainty of the
weather, that we could not hold it at 9:30. This committee will
meet at 4:00 for the purpose of considering the following
nominees: Mr. Di Rita, Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Public Affairs; Mr. Harvey, Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Networks and Information Integration; and Mr. Chatfield,
Director of Selective Service. I do hope as many as possible
can attend. Thank you very much.
Senator Inhofe.
Senator Inhofe. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Dr. Kay,
I would repeat everything that has been said about you and your
service, and I appreciate it. I appreciate also the private
conversations we've had and your being very straightforward.
Just out of curiosity, and this is something you may have a
difficult time answering because you're trying to get into
somebody else's mind, but in our conversations when we talked a
year ago now, a year ago this month, I believe, about the fact
that there were weapons of mass destruction, we knew he had
used weapons of mass destruction. Then last week there was an
article where you were quoted to say that contemporary
documents that proved Iraq destroyed the weapons of mass
destruction in the 1990s. Just out of curiosity, do you have
any idea why Saddam Hussein did not come forth with that
evidence when it would have been to his benefit to do so?
Dr. Kay. Senator, we've wrestled hours with trying to get
an explanation for Iraqi, and particularly Saddam's, behavior,
when in fact his rule was at stake, and why he didn't do
something else. I think most of us come down on two essential
issues. He did not want to appear to the rest of the Arab world
as having caved into the U.S. and the U.N., so the creative
ambiguity of maintaining weapons was important to him and his
view of Iraq and particularly himself and the rest of the
world.
The second is domestic politics. We often forget that he
used chemical weapons against the Kurds and the Shia and that
was a continuing threat to him, and he thought that that in
fact gave him leverage against it. That's our best explanation.
Senator Inhofe. That's a very good answer. I appreciate
that. Senator Levin talked about large caches of weapons of
mass destruction, and Senator Warner talked about some small
ones. I think back and I can recall when--and this is about a
year ago now, it was in January, I believe--that they found 11
chemical rockets that had the capabilities of holding 140
liters of something like VX gas, which he had used in the past.
Now, if we found those rockets and they could carry 140
liters of VX, which all the professional people in discussing
this said could kill a million people, why is that not
considered a weapon of mass destruction?
Dr. Kay. Well, I think, Senator, the reason--and we
actually found additional warheads during--the same warheads--
--
Senator Inhofe. Some 36 after that, I believe.
Dr. Kay. Yes, afterwards, is that there was no evidence--
look, clearly they were in violation not having declared those
and turned them over, but there was no evidence that the
warheads themselves had ever been filled. But they were in
violation of Resolution 1441. They possessed those and they
should have declared them and allowed the U.N. to destroy them.
Senator Inhofe. Okay, because I consider that to be a
weapon of mass destruction--anything that can potentially kill
a million people is a weapon of mass destruction.
Now, the third question that I have is you were quoted as
saying that you believed Hussein had been pursuing a course of
constructive ambiguity before the war, bluffing about having
weapons to give the illusion of power and to put up a
deterrent, and your quote was, ``Saddam wanted to enjoy the
benefit of having chemical or biological weapons without having
to pay the cost.''
Now, in other articles, you had suggested that Saddam was
being deceived by a scientist who duped him into funding
nonexistent programs. You're quoted as saying, ``whatever was
left in an effective weapons capability was largely subsumed
into corrupt money-raising schemes by scientists skilled in the
art of lying in a police state.''
Well, some have said there is some inconsistency there.
Which of those do you think is the case, that he thought he had
them or that he knew he didn't have them and was bluffing?
Dr. Kay. Saddam being deceived was a common phenomenon
after 1998 and crossed all areas, not just WMD, as it became a
more corrupt society. I remember the New York Times editorial
which sees an inconsistency being doing that. I actually don't
see it. He knew he had the capability, he wanted to enjoy the
benefits of others thinking he had it. The deception related to
more advanced programs and that's where it continued up until
the time of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Senator Inhofe. I appreciate that very much and thank you
for your responses.
Chairman Warner. Thank you very much, Senator. Senator
Robert Byrd just informed me that he is required to be on the
floor for the vote and other reasons. I will put into the
record his questions and I thank you very much.
Senator Clinton.
Senator Clinton. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and Dr.
Kay, I join with my colleagues in thanking you for your public
service, and it's with great admiration that I have followed
your service over a number of years and I thank you greatly.
I just wanted to clarify a few other comments that had been
reported in the press just to get the record clear in my own
mind. There were some references to your decision to leave the
effort due to the failure to have the full complement of
analysts, translators, interrogators, and others to work with
you. I know that that was a concern that had been expressed to
this committee and others because of the movement of people out
of the group into counterinsurgency efforts. Was that a factor
in either impacting the quality and substance of the search or
your decision to step down?
Dr. Kay. Senator Clinton, there were two factors that led
me to decide it was the appropriate time to return to private
life. When I agreed to take on this job, I had only two
conditions. When you negotiate with the Federal Government,
salary is not one of the things you can negotiate. I said there
were two things that were important to me. One is that the
instrument we were going to use, the Iraqi Survey Group, be
totally focused on elimination of WMD as long as we carried out
that mission.
That was based on two facts. One, my experience with the
Federal Government is that when you have multiple masters and
multiple tasks, you get the typical interagency mush and you
don't get directive action and I didn't think we had the time
to do that.
The second was, and I told George Tenet directly this, my
undertaking this task from the President of investigating and
trying to determine reality compared to your estimates, you are
going to run a moral hazard, the moral hazard of self-
investigation, and that the only way I was willing to be a
party to that is that I had the independence to choose the
instrument that was going to be doing it and I had the
resources that were necessary to do it, and that was agreed.
By September, I was in the process of running battles, both
with the DOD and with the Intelligence Community that wanted to
redirect resources and the activities of the ISG to the looming
political insecurity crisis that was Baghdad. I perfectly
understood the difficultly we were having. I lived there, I
knew how hazardous it was. I just thought the ISG and those
resources were inappropriate for it.
By November, I had lost that battle, the decision had been
made to give ISG parallel priorities in addition to WMD and
resources were being halved off, and at that point, I did what
I had said in June when I took the job, I'm simply not prepared
to run that moral hazard for myself or for someone else under
those conditions.
No big surprise and no anger on my part. I was clear going
in, it's actually in writing on those two points. When the
administration felt that it couldn't live up to that any longer
because of the security situation, which I fully understood, I
thought it best to let someone else who has--who I have great
respect for and has capabilities and I think he can do it--take
on the job.
Senator Clinton. Dr. Kay, I appreciate your explanation,
but it raises two additional questions, at least in my mind,
that we have addressed one before, and that is whether we had
enough resources on the ground to begin with, making this
Hobbesian choice as to whether to continue with the full
complement of resources and personnel you required and were
agreed to be given to you to pursue this important task, or
having to divert because we didn't have enough resources on the
ground to do the other job illustrates clearly the confusion at
the very center of this whole enterprise, post-military action.
But it raises an additional concern to me, which is that
this wasn't a priority. If you have a real priority, you figure
out how to meet that priority. I think that the
administration's decision to divert resources and personnel
speaks volumes about what they really thought was at stake. I
think by certainly November, if not by September, the fact that
so much of the documentary evidence had been destroyed in the
looting, the preliminary reports that you provided to Congress
and the administration, presaged what has become the final
conclusion you've reached, that we were not going to find such
evidence of weapons of mass destruction, certainly raises for
me serious questions about the real intention of the
administration to begin with.
Second, I'm very interested in what you have concluded
about the Iraqi decisions to abandon WMD because of the U.N.
inspection process, that during the 1990s in fact, the
international community's efforts to discover and destroy
Saddam's weapons was working. Is that a fair statement of your
findings?
Dr. Kay. It's a compressed but fair, and I must say I had a
number of former U.N. inspectors working for me. We often sat
around and said that it turned out we were better than we
thought we were in terms of the Iraqis feared that we had
capabilities. Although they took tremendous steps to try to
compromise us and to lie, in fact the U.N. inspection process
achieved quite a bit.
Senator Clinton. Of course my time has expired, but I think
that rightly does raise questions that we should be examining
about whether or not the U.N. inspection process pursuant to
Resolution 1441 might not also have worked without the loss of
life that we have confronted both among our own young men and
women as well as Iraqis.
Dr. Kay. Senator Clinton, let me just add to that. We have
had a number of Iraqis who have come forward and said, we did
not tell the U.N. about what we were hiding nor would we have
told the U.N. because we would run the risk of our own. I think
we have learned things that no U.N. inspector would have ever
learned given the terror regime of Saddam and the tremendous
personal consequences that scientists had to run by speaking
the truth.
That's not to say, and it's not incompatible with the fact
that inspections accomplished a great deal in holding a program
down, and that's where the surprise is. In holding the program
down and keeping it from breakout, I think the record is better
than we would have anticipated. I don't think the record is
necessarily better than we thought with regard to getting the
final truth because of the power of the terrorist state that
Saddam Hussein had.
Senator Clinton. Thank you.
Chairman Warner. Thank you, Senator. That question you
raise is an important one, and our witness addressed it and
gave his views about the resources, but I would withhold any
final judgment on that issue until we have before this
committee General Dayton and General Abizaid.
I talked with General Dayton 2 weeks ago extensively about
this issue. He has a somewhat different perspective than our
distinguished witness, and as recently as last night I talked
to General Abizaid, and he likewise has respectfully a
different view.
But there is one point that you all concur on, and that is
there came a time in that fall period when we were losing brave
soldiers, death, wounded, and otherwise, and General Abizaid
felt that he had to call upon some of your people who had
capabilities and who indeed were on an ongoing basis
contributing intelligence from your work to the war of trying
to stop the insurrection in Iraq.
Dr. Kay. Senator Warner, as you understand, competing
priorities are the hardest choice that a military commander and
others have to make. What most people don't understand, but I
know you do, is how genuinely short we are as a nation of
people with certain limited capabilities, for example,
intelligence officers who speak Arabic. There are more people
in this room, or there were at the beginning, than we have in
the Intelligence Community who are actually case officers who
speak Arabic.
That's not a surprise. The committees, Senator, the
Intelligence Committee has addressed it before. The fact is
we've done a very poor job of addressing it. Like I say, I have
no anger or bitterness about it. It was simply a fact of life.
Chairman Warner. But I think you also concurred that----
Dr. Kay. We peeled resources away.
Chairman Warner.--the urgency of the loss of life and limb
among the coalition forces dictated bringing together quickly
such resources as we could to try and stem the tide of that
loss.
Dr. Kay. Absolutely. That was certainly General Abizaid's
judgment.
Chairman Warner. I thank you. I'll go vote, and colleagues,
I will----
Senator Sessions. Mr. Chairman, if you're going to go vote,
I'm not safe staying. As long as you're here, I know they won't
call that vote.
Chairman Warner. I realize that, but I'll guarantee you
you're going to be protected.
Senator Sessions. I will just be brief. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman. I think everybody on this committee believed that
there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, very few
doubted it. I remember very distinctly the most questions on
that was Chairman Warner, and he would ask every major witness,
when this war is over, are you going to find weapons of mass
destruction there? I believe he did it a half a dozen times.
General Abizaid recently testified that after he was asked
that question, he went back to CENTCOM, called all his staff
officers in and said, Senator Warner asked me this and are we
going to find it, and everyone told him that they would. So I
don't feel like there's any deliberate activities here that
would indicate that the President or somebody is trying to
manipulate intelligence.
In fact, I felt always that the strongest argument for
taking military action was the fact that the war of 1991 never
really ended. We were shooting at the Iraqis, we were dropping
bombs on them, they were shooting at our planes, they were in
violation of U.N. resolutions, they had promised to eliminate
weapons of mass destruction as part of that 1991 agreement to
stop the American attack on Baghdad, and they didn't comply
with that.
There was pressure in the world to quit embargoing the
people of Iraq, they were suffering, and we had to make a
decision. Were we going to allow them to not comply with the
agreement they made to end that war, allow them to be free to
build weapons of mass destruction and threaten the
neighborhood, or were we going to act under U.N. resolutions?
Did those resolutions have any value at all?
So the President, I think, could have justified action on
that basis had he chosen to. I think that indicates to me he
clearly believed there were weapons of mass destruction there
or he could have used other arguments. I guess, Dr. Kay, your
view is that Saddam Hussein in his own mind had expansionistic
intentions with regard to the world and that he felt that the
possession or threat of weapons of mass destruction enhanced
that ability to be a powerful force in the region. Is that
correct?
Dr. Kay. Absolutely right, Senator, I think he--both in the
region and he thought of them as a potential weapon to use
against his own citizens to enforce compulsion and agreement. I
mean, the Kurds and the Shia were threats to Saddam and he
recognized them and he had used chemical weapons.
Senator Sessions. Now I noticed that, I believe at one
point you noted that even his own military officers believed
they had them.
Dr. Kay. Yes.
Senator Sessions. In other words, they would think--would
you explain that?
Dr. Kay. In interviewing the Republican Guard generals and
the Special Republican Guard generals and asking about their
capabilities and having them, the assurance was they didn't
personally have them and hadn't seen them, but the units on
their right or left had them, and as you worked the way around
the circle, those defending Baghdad, which is the immediate
area of concern, you got this very strange phenomenon of, no, I
don't have them, I haven't seen them, but look to my right and
left.
This was an intentional ambiguity, and realize freedom of
discussion and movement was not something encouraged in Iraq.
For example, Republican Guard divisions never entered into the
city limits of Baghdad. Only the Special Republican Guard (SRG)
was allowed to. You didn't even train in multi-divisional units
because of that issue of his concern about them. It was a
powerful deception technology. We have it, but we haven't seen
it, but we know that someone else has it.
Senator Sessions. It is true, I think, no one can dispute,
that had he not had these weapons of mass destruction, and had
opened his country and plainly demonstrated it, this war would
have been avoided?
Dr. Kay. Yes, I think that's true, and that's always been
one of the mysteries for all of us to determine how--why would
he have run this risk that cost him his regime and the death of
members of his family if he didn't have those weapons.
Senator Sessions. That was certainly, I think, on the heart
and mind of the Members of Congress. We just felt it was so
impossible they didn't exist. Now, as your investigation went
about, it strikes me that in the time building up to this final
initiation of military action that the Iraqi individuals who
may have been involved in weapons of mass destruction knew that
their programs were the target of this action and that they
were in violation of U.N. resolutions, and isn't it true they
could have seen themselves as being subject to prosecution for
war crimes?
Dr. Kay. Absolutely, and a number of those in custody are
worried about that greatly. It is one reason they're not
talking.
Senator Sessions. So not being unclever, they would know
and would have a real incentive to destroy any evidence that
they had anything to do with weapons of mass destruction, so we
could realistically expect many of the documents that would
have shown all these actions are no longer in existence.
Dr. Kay. That's right, Senator, and that's why I referred
to the--there's probably a level of unresolvable ambiguity
we're going to have to learn to live with about this program.
Senator Sessions. I would just add, if you would like to
comment, I think that you indicated the Intelligence Community
has made mistakes in your opinion and missed much with regard
to the ideas about Iraq. I think it's wise that a wise leader
in this country, he has different groups of intelligence
agencies really try to find out what each is saying, to
personally interview as close as he can to the people it
involved, and to make sure that he's getting the nuances from
different groups.
Do you think the Vice President or other administration
leaders should be criticized for talking with individual
intelligence agencies as they try to make a decision about
whether or not to go to war?
Dr. Kay. Absolutely not. In fact, Senator Sessions, it's, I
won't say funny, it's one of these strange things for those of
us inside, I've had analysts complain that no one talked to
them and then analysts who are talked to complain. Look,
analysts are not generally shrinking--good ones--shrinking
violets. They know the difference between people, they're used
to being questioned closely, they should be questioned closely,
and they are.
That's why I think--I've never met an analyst who felt in
this case with regard to these sets of issues that there was
any inappropriate pressure, and in most cases, they would love
to have been questioned more, certainly by the Vice President
or the President or anyone else. That's their profession.
Senator Sessions. They long for their opportunity to talk
to someone in authority.
Dr. Kay. That's what they do.
Senator Sessions. I thought it was odd that the Vice
President was criticized for going over on a Saturday morning
and sitting down with really true people involved in this and
asking their opinions. I just don't think that was a legitimate
criticism. Thank you.
Senator Roberts [presiding]. It is my distinct pleasure
serving as the acting presiding chairman to recognize Senator
Reed for any comments he might wish to make.
Senator Reed. Dr. Kay, let me also commend you, not only
for your service but for your integrity. We appreciate your
being here today.
In your discussion with Tom Brokaw, you were asked about
the nature of the threat posed by Iraq and Mr. Brokaw said,
``but an imminent threat to the United States,'' and your
response was, ``Tom, an imminent threat is a political
judgment.'' Now, what does that mean? Does that mean that when
you're presented with analysis from--in fact, conflicting
analysis--that the President can impose a political
calculation? Particularly a president that seems to have a very
preconceived notion of the threat from Iraq?
Dr. Kay. Senator Reed, it means that any president, when
he's presented with intelligence, has to make a choice about
how much risk he's prepared to run for the nation that he
leads. It is my belief that regardless of political party,
after September 11, the shadowing effects of that horrible
tragedy changed, as a nation, the level of risk that all of us
are prepared to run, that we would like to avoid, but where you
place yourself on the spectrum of how much risk you're going to
run is a political responsibility which elected officials have
and I certainly don't have.
I think fundamentally that's why in a democracy we elect
people like you and we elect a president to make those
determinations. It's not a fixed point that is ever going to be
carved as pi's constant. It is, what's the world look like and
how much risk will I run.
Senator Reed. But also, Doctor, that judgment has to be
logically related to the evidence you have before you, and like
so many, and I think you too, there was a supposition that
perhaps had Saddam had chemical or biological weapons, less
credibility and claims about having nuclear weapons or a
nuclear program, and in fact, not just my conclusion but many
people concluded similarly that despite that assumption that
there was not an imminent threat to the United States. That
wasn't just a political judgment, that was looking at the facts
that were presented by the Intelligence Community, even if they
were flawed, and making a judgment based on those facts.
Dr. Kay. Senator Reed, I think it's often easy to forget
that in the case of Saddam, here's an individual who had
invaded two neighboring countries, used chemical weapons
against one of those, used them against his own neighbors, and
who, by U.N. testimony, had cheated and lied for a decade. So,
as I look back on the evidence, I understand the decision while
honoring the right of any elected leader to choose how much
risk he's prepared to run, and that's what I mean by that. I
don't think it's something that is a physics constant that you
can just pull out of a table.
Senator Reed. Dr. Kay, you also were quoted and Senator
Kennedy referred to it, ``I think if anyone was abused by the
intelligence, it was the President of the United States rather
than the other way around.'' Are you suggesting that the
President was misled by the American Intelligence Community?
Dr. Kay. No, sir. What I'm suggesting is that the actual
facts on the ground will turn out to be substantially
different, at least with regard to large stockpiles, than the
estimate before, and we better understand why that's true.
There are other reasons and other things about Iraq to be
concerned with, and certainly I think Iraq, if you look back at
its history of using these weapons, the fact that they remained
in violation of Resolution 1441, and all of those facts are
provable, but with regard to the actual existing weapons, which
people keep coming back to because they are the most
demonstrable symbol of the threat, reality is very likely going
to turn out to be different than the estimates.
Senator Reed. Dr. Kay, you used the term, abused by the
intelligence.
Dr. Kay. That's right.
Senator Reed. He was misled?
Dr. Kay. If I were your broker and you were investing on my
advice, something of course I would not advise you to do, and
at the end of the day, I had said Enron was the greatest
company in the world and you had lost a substantial amount of
money because it turned out differently, you would think I had
abused you. I think the estimate is going to turn out to be
different than reality. That's abuse as far as I'm concerned.
Senator Reed. Part of the intelligence process, as I
understand it, is not only the presentation of evidence and
analysis by the agencies, but the probing questioning of
leaders, decision makers, particularly when the evidence is not
totally reconciled. Do you think that those probing questions
were made, particularly since so many people in the
administration had preconceived notions about the nature of the
threat?
Dr. Kay. Senator Reed, I was not party to that. I hope in
whatever process of review that's going on that the full record
is out there. I will just say I'm convinced myself if I had
been there, presented with what I have seen as the record of
the intelligence estimates, I would have come to the same
conclusion that the political leaders did.
Senator Reed. Dr. Kay, is North Korea today a gathering
serious threat?
Dr. Kay. North Korea is an enigma probably with nuclear
weapons and long-range missiles. I would probably put it higher
up on my scale of gathering threat. I think it's an existing
threat.
Senator Reed. We are approaching North Korea with the same
deeply flawed Intelligence Community that abused the President
of the United States?
Dr. Kay. I have no knowledge of whether we're approaching
it with the same--in a case where the reality will turn out to
be different from the estimate. I just don't know. I think
that's an appropriate question for you and others to ask.
Senator Reed. Dr. Kay, the U.N. inspectors were readmitted
into Iraq for a brief period of time. Had they been allowed to
continue their mission with adequate support, would they have
likely reached the same conclusion you have?
Dr. Kay. All I can say is that among an extensive body of
Iraqi scientists who are talking to us, they have said we had--
the U.N. interviewed us, we did not tell them the truth, we did
not show them this equipment, we did not talk about these
programs, we couldn't do it as long as Saddam was in power. I
suspect regardless of how long they had stayed, that attitude
would have been the same.
Senator Reed. Just one final point because my time has
expired. I do recollect that there were some missiles destroyed
because of either their disclosure or discovery by these
inspectors, which suggested another data point, we seldom
remember that too, remember that despite----
Dr. Kay. Absolutely, that's true.
Senator Reed. So that there was a degree of cooperation and
a degree of success, perhaps not as conclusive as yours, but
that was happening, is that correct?
Dr. Kay. It wasn't cooperation. This was the case of the Al
Samoud 2 missile, which had been, even under UNSCOM days, a
source of dispute with regard to its range. They continued to
develop it after the inspectors left in 1998. By the time the
U.N. was readmitted and there actually existed Al Samoud 2s,
there was no way you could contend that that was shorter than
150 kilometers, and in fact destruction had begun of those
missiles, that's correct.
Senator Reed. My time has expired. Thank you, Dr. Kay.
Chairman Warner [presiding]. Thank you, Senator.
Senator Roberts.
Senator Roberts. Yes, thank you very much.
Chairman Warner. I, by way of introduction, Senator
Roberts, say that I feel that you and the committee that you
lead are making a lot of progress towards coming to a body of
fact and putting it together that will help not only Members of
Congress, but others trying to have a better understanding of
this situation.
Senator Roberts. I thank the chairman and I would hope he
would write a personal note to Senator Kennedy and Senator
Levin, maybe indicate that as well.
Dr. Kay, thank you for your service and thanks to the
membership of the ISG team that you led. You have earned our
respect. We have repeated that in the Intelligence Committee
where you appeared as of this morning for 2 hours. That was
classified and closed, we won't get into that, but I want to
assure you of one thing. There is an outside investigation
taking place under the jurisdiction of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, which is our jurisdiction and our obligation. This
involves 10 staffers working 24/7 on floor-to-ceiling
documents, having interviewed over 175 people, analysts,
critics, and everybody else that wants to come in. We take that
job very seriously and we are progressing. I think that when
Members finally get the draft, the first draft of the working
paper, many of these questions will be answered. I personally
take some umbrage at people, who for one reason or another,
think we need to have an outside investigation before our
inquiry is even complete.
As a matter of fact, we had a memo that came out several
months ago indicating conclusions before we even finished the
inquiry, so I have some strong feelings about that. In response
to Senator Levin and in reference to the Intelligence Committee
inquiry, the draft inquiry report is complete. It will be
available to Members next Thursday and for their study and
their perusal, and it's going to take some time because you
have to wade through this and it's very voluminous. Hopefully
during that week they will become educated and many of these
questions will be answered.
As I said, we interviewed 175 analysts and critics and some
policymakers and others, and like your analysts at the ISG, not
one said that they were intimidated or coerced or that their
product was somehow manipulated. Every statement referred to by
Senator Levin with regard to the administration officials was a
reflection of what was provided by the Intelligence Community.
I mean, why would you do otherwise?
The reason that the Vice President apparently keeps
referring to the trailers as mobile labs is that that is the
view of the CIA as I speak, it's on the CIA web page. It is a
part of the National Intelligence Estimate, which is provided
to the Vice President and the National Security Council and the
President. That's what the CIA believes right now, a very clear
paragraph that goes into very specific reasons as to why they
think that this is a mobile lab.
Now, as you pointed out, there are other points of view.
That's always the case in regards to, I guess, intelligence. By
the way, this National Intelligence Estimate was mandated by
Senator Graham and Senator Durbin in 60--or in 30 days, and so
to some extent, I believe part of the problem is it became a
dump, if you will, and I don't mean to use that as a
pejorative, of all past intelligence, which you have indicated
most of us think was on a train that was moving and that train
just kept moving and it was very difficult to change the
direction of the opinion of virtually every Intelligence
Community all throughout the world. I think the draft report
again will answer all of the Senators' questions.
You recently have been quoted in the press, as has been
said, as saying that the Intelligence Community owes the
President an explanation about what went wrong with their
analysis. You also said it's not a political issue--well, it
is, but it shouldn't be--it's an issue of the capabilities of
one's intelligence service to collect valid and truthful
information.
What do you think went wrong, both in the analysis and
collection of intelligence? You've already touched on this.
Have you seen any evidence through your discussions with the
Intelligence Community analysts or officials over at the DCI
that the Intelligence Community recognizes that all of the
intelligence and their analysis was so wrong? Any admission on
that part, and do you have any thoughts on what should be done
to fix these problems?
I am really interested in your commentary on the dots.
Prior to September 11, if you had 10 dots to connect, you had
to connect eight or nine of them to at least have a report and
a threat warning out there. After September 11, so that we
wouldn't be risk-averse, if you connected two or three dots and
you didn't report, you were really in trouble. So the
Intelligence Community can't have it both ways. First, we
really criticized them for saying wait, wait, wait, wait until
you have the appropriate jigsaw puzzle in place that you can
really read the intelligence. After September 11, why, we have
a situation, say, if you have two or three of the dots
connected, why, then you're criticized as well.
Now, that's a speech, not a question, but if you have any
thoughts on this, I'd appreciate hearing from you.
Dr. Kay. No, I think the very appropriate thing, Senator
Roberts, would be to concur.
Senator Roberts. I appreciate that. What went wrong, both
in the collection and the analysis of intelligence? You've
touched on that.
Dr. Kay. Senator Roberts, you're far more likely having
done, as you quite rightly point out, a far more exhaustive
study than I've had the opportunity. I've been on the sharp end
of the stick out there. I think it will turn out that we will
find that there were major shortfalls in collection. As a
Nation, and this really goes back over 20 years, we decided to
concentrate most of our intelligence resources on technical
collection. We got better definition from space. There's only
so much you can see when you're looking at judgments of this
sort, and we're particularly bad about understanding societal
trends.
I think we will, in the end, when the appropriate historian
comes around, be able to say that somewhere after 1998 the
social glue that held Iraq together had been corrosively
destroyed by Saddam Hussein, that it had become the ultimate
criminal terrorist conspiracy internally. That's one reason
we're having such great difficulty and our troops are having
such great difficulty putting it back together again. It's not
just the number of troops there, it's that the glue that holds
people together in a relationship that allows cooperation was
destroyed by Saddam Hussein, just as the infrastructure was
destroyed.
But that turns out to be one of the hardest things for
intelligence services to read. As you recall, we got it wrong
in World War II, and it was the very famous strategic bombing
survey. All the intelligence leading up through the end of
World War II said the bombing campaign was destroying the
German will to fight, the civilians were less willing, and the
German war production was falling. As it turned out afterwards,
the German will to fight increased under the bombing and the
war production went up to the last 2 months of the war, it was
still increasing.
In the case of the Soviet Union--well, skip Vietnam, but
very similar estimates about societal determination and economy
turned out to be wrong. After the fall of the Soviet Union,
what had looked like a 10-foot power turned out to be an
economy that barely existed and a society that had horrible
levels of human health problems, of lack of education and all,
leading to the current situation. It is a fundamental issue
that we have--all intelligence services have had understanding
that, and yet in many ways, it turns out to probably be far
more important than counting trailers, and yet we've invested
in counting trailers as opposed to understanding the other.
I am convinced that we have sadly underfunded and developed
our human intelligence capability, we have genuinely become
risk-adverse, and looked at ways that will not put Americans
either at political or human risk as being spies, and tried to
do it on the cheap using others. I think there will turn out to
be trade-craft problems that you probably have already
identified, and I haven't had the advantage of reading your
report, that are out there that need to be looked at.
The last one, which you referred to, we've put the analysts
under tremendous pressure, and the tendency is to overanalyze
limited data. There is a point where an analysts simply needs
to tell people, I can't draw a conclusion, I don't have enough
data, go get me more data. But in the wake of September 11,
believe me, that is difficult to do. It's always been
difficult, but it is much more difficult now.
Senator Roberts. I thank you for your candor and service.
My time has expired, but I would say we are constantly having
these ``Oh my God'' hearings in the Intelligence Committee,
``Oh my God,'' how did this happen? You go back to the U.S.S.
Cole and you go back to the Khartoum chemical plant, you go
back to the nuclear test in India, you go back to Khobar
Towers, you go back to the Belgrade bombing, and it goes on and
on and on, same kind of thing. I hope that we have to come up
with better solutions on how to fix these problems that we have
been referring to. I know that Senator Collins is waiting
patiently so I yield back my time.
Chairman Warner. We're going to recognize Senator Dayton in
between.
Senator Roberts. Oh, I'm sorry.
Chairman Warner. Thank you.
Senator Dayton. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Dr. Kay, I met you
in July in Baghdad, it was 115 degrees there and we left after
3 days and you stayed on and under those conditions to
persevere as you have and with the veracity you've shown in
your report and your candor here today, I would echo the
others. Your service to our country has been not only patriotic
but heroic, and I thank you for that.
It seems to be one of the traps that we may be falling into
here, and I'm not an expert, so I ask you the question, are all
weapons of mass destruction alike? It would strike me
intuitively they are not, and if we're talking about biological
capabilities, chemical capabilities, I would draw a line, say
nuclear strikes me as something of a different order,
conventional weapons, just about everything we put into the air
or on land or in the water these days I would think constitutes
a weapon of mass destruction.
Are we putting ourselves in a trap here where anything of
any viability at all starts to fall into that category?
Dr. Kay. It's an important question, particularly as
technology drives capabilities of even what formerly would have
been said conventional weapons of capability to do mass
disruption at least, if not mass destruction. Same thing is
true in the cyber era. We have today an e-mail worm spreading
throughout the world that is doing vast mass disruption, if not
mass destruction, and may be doing that in some areas.
So these old terms don't serve us particularly well. It's
one thing I hope to write about as I finish this.
Senator Dayton. Which weapons of mass destruction qualify
in that upper echelon of truly mass destruction?
Dr. Kay. I think all of us have and would continue to put
the nuclear weapons in a different category. It's a single
weapon that can do tremendous damage as opposed to multiple
weapons that can do the same order of damage. The fire bombing
of Tokyo in terms of number of people killed was roughly
equivalent to a single bomb in Nagasaki, but it took a lot more
aircraft to do it.
So I still treat, and I think we should politically treat
nuclear as a difference. But I must say, the revolution in
biology, some developments in cyber, I think we're going to
have a blurring out there of capabilities, and that makes the
control, it makes the intelligence problem far more difficult
to estimate.
Senator Dayton. Based on your general knowledge, how many
countries would you say in the world today would qualify under
the category of developing weapons of mass destruction and
related program activities, or having such activities?
Dr. Kay. Senator Dayton, I hesitate to give you an off-the-
cuff number because I know I'll probably--it's going to be like
the 85 percent, I'm going to have to live with it for longer
than I want to. I would say that in the nuclear area, in
addition to those that we know have--possess nuclear weapons,
that includes India----
Senator Dayton. I want to go to the vernacular that we're
using, this broader category.
Dr. Kay. The broader category? Oh, I suspect you're talking
about probably 50 countries that have programs that would fall
somewhere in that broader vernacular.
Senator Dayton. So if we're going to take out those
countries or their governments which are engaged in what we
would call weapons of mass destruction-related program
activities, we're going to be cutting quite a wide swath.
Dr. Kay. Senator Dayton, I think you're on to the issue. We
no longer are going to be living in a world in which we can
control capabilities. Intentions are what are going to be
important. Quite frankly, that's what made Saddam so dangerous
in my view. Here was an individual who had invaded his
neighbors, used chemical weapons against one of them and used
them against the others, so it was hard to have a benign
interpretation of that individual's intentions, and the real
challenge for intelligence is going to be giving to our
political leaderships not just judgment about capabilities, but
judgments against real intentions, and that is tough.
Senator Dayton. Mr. Chairman--well, I guess he left--I will
commend the chairman even in his absence for holding this
hearing and letting these answers, the chips fall where they
may, because I think what we're at issue here goes way beyond
politics or partisan advantage one way or the other. This is
about the survival of our country and the world as we know it.
I guess I would ask you in the context of I'm assuming that
our--and I'm not on the Intelligence Committee--but I'm
impressed that there are very dedicated men and women who are
spending all of their lives trying their very best to come up
with the answers to these very difficult questions and
assessments. Given the limits that you say which go both ways,
and Iraq may be less developed and countries like Iran and
Libya farther developed, what does that argue about the wisdom
of a policy of pre-emptive strikes?
Dr. Kay. I don't know about the wisdom, but it certainly
argues about the difficulty of doing it wisely.
Senator Dayton. I guess it would strike me, and I hope--
again, the chairman's not here--but I would hope we would hold
a hearing or two about the success, it appears, with regard to
Libya and the administration's role, and I gather the preceding
administration's role, so in secret negotiations which have
brought about a de-nuclearizing of that country and that
threat, which certainly sounds like it would qualify in the
upper echelon as you describe it, and contrast that approach
and its success without a loss of American life in that country
to what has occurred in Iraq.
So I hope we can look at both sides of this question and I
will give the administration credit, whatever the case may be,
for its successes, but I also want to recognize, I think, the
grave risks that this limitation of intelligence information
and its veracity imposes on a doctrine that says we're going to
preemptively strike a country that we believe has things that
we've now discovered in this case, with the best of intentions
I'll concede that, they did not have.
My time is up, but again, I thank you for your public
service, sir.
Senator Allard [presiding]. Since the chairman of the Armed
Services Committee has had to go vote, I'll go ahead and be
chairman temporarily until he gets back. In the meantime, it's
my turn to go ahead and talk to Dr. Kay and visit with him
about some of the issues related to his duties.
First of all, I'm trying to think back at the time our men
and women were going into Iraq, there was a lot of concern at
that particular point in time about Iraqis having weapons of
mass destruction, particularly chemical weapons, and did you
find evidence that there was chemical weapons there at the
battlefield that perhaps maybe was not in large quantities, but
small quantities, that would have been a decided threat to our
men and women on the field?
Dr. Kay. Senator Allard, that's really one of our immediate
focuses, because both of the concern, and consequently the
threat it posed to Americans, but also because of the evidence
we kept, as you will recall, discovering Iraqi defense chemical
gear, protective suits and all, as we moved across. We have not
found any chemical weapons that were present on the battlefield
even in small number.
Senator Allard. So all we had is a history of him having
used weapons of mass destruction using chemicals because we
knew about the Kurds and where he had used chemicals in that
particular instance, is that right?
Dr. Kay. No, I would not say it was just the history. There
was real reporting that he had it, Iraqi defectors and others,
that he had it, and ambiguous conversations overheard. So it
was more than a history, it was a reality, and if you've ever
had the opportunity to put one of the U.S. protective suits on,
you realize the men and women you saw dressed up in those
chemical suits as they marched towards Baghdad did that out of
real fear that he had chemical weapons. That was not because of
political pressure. You don't put those suits on for political
pressure. They're too uncomfortable. It was a genuine fear
based on the best available information that was present at
that time.
Senator Allard. Yes. I recall about the time that our men
and women were going into the field in Iraq that also they
discovered a nuclear disposal site, if you recall that. They
had that on TV and they actually showed the barrels of nuclear
waste.
Dr. Kay. Oh, yes, okay.
Senator Allard. Do you recall that?
Dr. Kay. Yes, I do.
Senator Allard. What was the source of that nuclear
material? Why was that there and what was the source of that
nuclear material?
Dr. Kay. There was a large amount of nuclear waste and
material that the U.N. had purposely left there as the Iraqi
program was taken down.
Senator Allard. That was after the Persian Gulf conflict?
Dr. Kay. That was after the Persian Gulf conflict. What was
removed was the direct use material that could have been used
in a normal fission weapon. On the other hand, there was a
large amount of yellow cake, there was nuclear residue, highly
radioactive, various sources, there was a large cesium source,
a cobalt source, and others that in fact had been stored away,
and I think the waste you're referring to is that.
Senator Allard. Do we have any idea of the origin of that
material?
Dr. Kay. The origin of most of that material is pretty well
understood. The Iraqis both mined uranium of their own as well
as imported uranium in the 1980s from Africa.
Senator Allard. What country in Africa would that come
from?
Dr. Kay. Niger.
Senator Allard. Niger?
Dr. Kay. The French had provided reactor fuel, as had the
Russians provided reactor fuel, and some of the waste probably
had origins in that.
Senator Allard. Do we know when that nuclear program was
brought down and when that material was stored in that waste
site?
Dr. Kay. We know very precisely, Senator. We started doing
it in late 1991, and it continued--it was almost complete by
1995 as material was moved out of Iraq and was sealed and was
stored. It's very well-documented. The International Atomic
Energy Agency did a good job.
Senator Allard. Okay. The National Intelligence Estimate
concluded that Iraq could build its first nuclear weapon when
it acquired sufficient weapons-grade material. Did you think
that conclusion was accurate?
Dr. Kay. Yes. You have to realize this was a country that
had designed and had gone through a decade-long nuclear
program, they knew the secrets. But we took away the critical
element in making a nuclear weapon once you know the secrets,
which they had and they'd run the physical tests, is the actual
fissile material. It's difficult, expensive, takes a fairly
substantial footprint to develop. The estimate, as I read that
estimate, and I think all of us did who were concerned with it,
is, if they managed to acquire a sufficient amount of plutonium
or high-enriched uranium from a place like the former Soviet
Union stockpile, how long would it take to fashion that into a
nuclear explosive device, and I think that estimate was
actually fairly conservative.
Senator Allard. You ran over one part of your statement
that I want to go back. You said they actually ran a test on
the material that they had there?
Dr. Kay. With regard to nuclear material?
Senator Allard. Yes.
Dr. Kay. During the 1980s they ran a number of tests using
both what are normal simulants that you use in a physics
experiments, as well as they had separated out a small quantity
of plutonium and they had some high-enriched uranium that had
been supplied in French fuel.
At the time of the first Gulf War, we subsequently learned,
they were taking the French fuel and trying to produce, fashion
together, a crude nuclear explosive device, for which they had
run experiments understanding how much conventional explosions
it would take to move the mass together. They were good
physicists.
Senator Allard. Did they use the aluminum tubes at that
point in time to enrich their uranium, do you we know?
Dr. Kay. No, they did not. They relied on different
processes.
Senator Allard. Okay. I have one other question. What can
you tell us about Iraq's efforts to restarts its nuclear
program in 2000 and 2001?
Dr. Kay. As best as has been determined, and this is
obviously something the investigation is continuing, in 2000
they had decided that their nuclear establishment had
deteriorated to such a point that it was totally useless. They
started--the main center is a center called al-Tuatha, which
is--in fact, I think you probably flew over it--you generally
do when you go around Baghdad. It's a large site but the
physical facility had seriously deteriorated and they started
building new buildings, renovating it, hiring some new staff,
and bringing them together.
They ran a few physics experiments, re-ran experiments they
had actually run in the 1980s. Fortunately, from my point of
view, Operation Iraqi Freedom intervened and we don't know how
or how fast that would have gone ahead.
Senator Allard. So it was definitely a threat as far as
you're concerned, in 2001, 2000?
Dr. Kay. Given their history, it was certainly an emerging
program that I would not have looked forward to their
continuing to pursue. It was not yet up as a full nuclear
production site again.
Senator Allard. Thank you, Dr. Kay. I now call on Senator
Pryor.
Senator Pryor. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Dr. Kay, thank you
again for being here. I know that a number of people have
expressed their gratitude and I want to join in that chorus.
Let me just ask a few questions here. How long were you
searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
Dr. Kay. I arrived in June and I left in late December.
Senator Pryor. Were you on the ground most of that time?
Dr. Kay. Yes, only except the time I was required to be
back here before you.
Senator Pryor. Right. How many sites did you or your team
visit in Iraq?
Dr. Kay. Senator Pryor, I'm sure we can give you the exact
number, but it was in the hundreds.
Senator Pryor. Also I'm sure you looked at, what, thousands
of pages of documents, is that fair?
Dr. Kay. Closer to hundreds of thousands of pages of
documents.
Senator Pryor. How many inspectors and, I guess you might
want to call them analysts, did you have on your team there to
assist in this effort?
Dr. Kay. Roughly in terms of--they fall into three areas,
to give you the count that is--you can deal with and make some
meaning. In terms of subject matter experts, that is, analysts,
we had at the max count somewhere around 110, maybe as high as
130 at the very max, it can go lower than that at other times.
In terms of case officers, these are clandestine officers who
are used to working in the field and equipped by trade craft
and training to do that, the figure comes out to be somewhere
around 30 to occasionally 40. Translators and interpreters was
roughly somewhere between 300 and 400 at various times.
Senator Pryor. Okay. Did you have full access to our
intelligence, our pertinent intelligence on WMD?
Dr. Kay. Absolutely.
Senator Pryor. Nothing was screened from you as far as you
know?
Dr. Kay. As far as I know, nothing was screened, nor do I
believe anything was screened.
Senator Pryor. Right. At what point during this process did
you start to get that uneasy feeling about WMD in Iraq where
you thought you might not find anything or your search might be
unfruitful?
Dr. Kay. Senator Pryor, it was not a 3 a.m. wake-up call in
the middle of the night, it was the emerging picture that we
had gathered, and by late September, early October, we were all
starting to look at the data and look at the conclusion and
come to it, and certainly by November, I think if asked, and I
have been asked internally, I kept saying, I think we have a
program here that looks different from the estimate with regard
to assembled weapons.
Senator Pryor. All right. At what point did you begin
communicating that with the Pentagon or the administration or
the CIA? I don't know exactly who you're reporting to.
Dr. Kay. It was with the intelligence agencies. Oh, I think
my first communication about this program may look like one
that doesn't have assembled weapons but has capability to
rapidly restart his program actually came in July based on,
here again I'm, as all analysts, this may have been a case of
connecting dots when there were few dots, and certainly by the
fall, there was a fairly regular dialogue with regard to these.
Senator Pryor. Okay. I know that when you're talking to the
intelligence agencies, to some extent you're talking to the
White House, but did you ever report this directly to the White
House?
Dr. Kay. No. In fact, I've spoken to the President,
directly to the White House only once. It was in July when I
was back. The channels went, as they appropriately should,
through the DCI.
Senator Pryor. In this summer and fall period where you
started expressing concerns and started to tell them about your
findings and some of your conclusions perhaps, what was their
response to that? What was their reaction to that?
Dr. Kay. It was the absolutely appropriate one: where's the
data? What's the data? Have you considered this? Will you look
here? Have you done that? It was the healthy skepticism and
dialogue that I too exercise with regard to my own staff and I
expect to be held to. There was absolutely no inappropriate
response, no refusal to consider it. It was the healthy
skepticism and demand for data, which is appropriate.
Senator Pryor. You've testified today that we know Iraq had
some WMD and used some in the 1980s and on into the very early
1990s. What is your thinking on how they got from that point,
where they clearly had some, to today, where I guess your
conclusion, it's fair to say, is they don't have a weapons
program, and if they have any WMD at all, it's very small.
Dr. Kay. It's not that they don't have a weapons program--
didn't have a weapons program. I hope they don't now. It is
that they had a weapons program, but it was a program activity
designed to allow future production at some time, and that the
missile program was actually moving ahead. I continue to
emphasize I think is one that we've paid inadequate attention
to.
I think how they got there is they got there because the
U.N. inspectors did a better job. I had them tell me in 1991,
they told me personally, directly, ``you're not behaving like
we thought a U.N. inspector would behave.'' I took that as a
compliment. We were intrusive, we were aggressive in the best
sense of that word. As we kept finding things and then the key
defection, we come back to Hussein Kamal in 1995, which they
feared would lay open their whole past 5 years of deceit and
lying to the U.N., they decided to reduce the thing that they
were most vulnerable to, and that's large retained stocks,
knowing that they could--at some point they'd get rid of us,
they thought, and they could restart production, so they kept
the technology but they didn't--they came to what I think is a
fair conclusion, why keep stockpiles of weapons that are
vulnerable to inspectors when you've lost your delivery
capability? Wait until you have your delivery capability and
then it's a relatively short order.
We have documentary evidence and testimony that Saddam and
Uday and Qusay asked in both 2000 and 2001 how long it would
take to restart production of mustard and VX nerve gas. This
was a key point in part of this reckoning of when did you think
they might be following a different strategy than the estimate.
When you get senior officials asking, how long will it take you
to produce these agents, that tells you at least to be awake to
the possibility that that means they didn't have those agents.
Senator Pryor. So, and this is my last question because I'm
out of time, is it your opinion then that the regime that was
set up after the Gulf War in 1991 was at least to some degree
effective in ending their WMD capabilities?
Dr. Kay. I think UNSCOM deserves a considerable amount of
credit for disarming and destroying, the typical thing which
all of us who served on UNSCOM are proud of. In terms of
destruction, we destroyed more of the WMD program than bombing
did during the Gulf War.
I think where we always worried, and appropriately so, we
know now, is getting at what they retained and what they hid,
because you were up against things that were smaller, easier to
hide in a terrorist regime. We took the easy stuff out, nuclear
reactors, big plants, large amounts of material, and that gets
to your earlier very good question, why did they change the
strategy? They changed to the things that we were not
particularly good at unmasking, that would allow them to
restart the program as soon as they got rid of us.
Senator Pryor. That's all I have, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.
Chairman Warner [presiding]. Thank you very much, Senator.
Senator Collins.
Senator Collins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Dr. Kay, let me
start by joining my colleagues in thanking you for your most
impressive extraordinary public service and we very much
appreciate your being here today to share your experiences and
your conclusions with us.
I am deeply troubled by what appears to be a colossal
failure by our intelligence agencies, and I would note that
this failure spans agencies, it spans years, but it also spans
countries. It really is a global intelligence failure, it
wasn't just our intelligence agencies alone that so misread
this vital situation.
I personally believe that the war was justified for the
reasons that Senator McCain listed as well as others. We know
that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons at one point,
we know that he invaded his neighbors, that he used chemical
weapons to kill some 5,000 Kurdish citizens, we know that he
planned to assassinate a former President of the United States,
he shot at our planes, he violated the cease fire agreement for
the first Gulf War, he ignored numerous United Nations
resolutions. So there was lots of justification to hold Saddam
accountable.
But what if we're faced with making a decision where there
isn't this additional justification? That is what is so
frightening to me, because we make such serious life and death
decisions relying on this intelligence information. I, for one,
don't know whether or not to trust the intelligence estimates
on North Korea now. We've turned out to be wrong in the other
direction on Libya and Iran. So that's why this is so troubling
to me.
It's particularly troubling because the briefings that we
had were so detailed and so specific, and I want to cite an
example. We had known based on the Iraqi declarations to the
U.N. inspectors that Iraq had produced thousands of tons of
deadly chemical weapons such as mustard gas, sarin, and VX, as
well as very large quantities of biological agents such as
anthrax. I recall being told, and I used it in my statement,
that when the inspectors left in 1998, there were very large
discrepancies between the weapons that were declared and the
amounts that were destroyed.
For example, I was told that at least 1.5 tons--tons--of
deadly nerve agent, the VX, were unaccounted for. What, in your
opinion, happened to all of those chemical agents and
biological agents? Where did the VX and anthrax go?
Dr. Kay. It is still a subject of investigation. Let me
deal with the VX. Interesting enough, the Iraqis, we now have
the records of the Iraqis as they tried to investigate that in
order to get the evidence to answer UNSCOM and later UNMOVIC on
that.
This is what happens. Remember, they had the ends of two
chaotic wars. They had the end of the Iran/Iraq war and they
had the end of Gulf War II. One large amount of VX--it had been
forward deployed in Iraq towards the Kuwaiti border--as they
were moving it back in 1991, there was a traffic accident. The
truck carrying it was totally consumed in a fire. They
documented it in part, but there was the usual embarrassment of
do we tell Saddam we've just burned up a large amount of
chemical warfare agent, so it wasn't fully reported and fully
documented. They didn't do analytical sampling so they had
nothing--and only partial records.
That now looks like an explanation that increasingly looks
like it was true. Some of it was simply accounting errors that
were wrong in material balance. Others are going to be in what
I call this unresolved ambiguity, that we may simply never
know.
Senator Collins. I'm intrigued by the interviews that you
conducted with some of the Iraqi scientists, who outlined a
plan of deception of their own where they may have told Saddam
what he wanted to hear for fear of the consequences to them if
they said they couldn't deliver on certain weapons. That leads
me to ask you, do you believe that Saddam himself believed that
he had these stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons? I
realize that's in some ways an unanswerable question, but what
is your feeling on that, what's your judgment?
Dr. Kay. It's one of the toughest questions around and we
have just little pieces of evidence, so let me tell you now
what I believe, because I don't know, or what I think is true,
but what the evidence shows. We have these questions about how
long will it take you to produce? It sounds like he knows he
doesn't have anything and so he's asking for restarts of
production, and these included Saddam, Uday, and Qusay.
There are other reports from the interrogations that at
times Saddam referred to secret stockpiles, small amounts that
were existing, no confirmation of that. My suspicion is that he
probably thought he was closer to getting it, could restart
faster than the scientists and engineers knew it would take. So
when it really came down, these requests, one in--I think it's
two in 2001, in which they gave him estimates that were longer
than he obviously had expected them to be, was when they were
confronting the truth. I think he had been told they had got
rid of it all but that we could really turn the tap on very
quickly, and it turned out they lied about how quickly. It was
quick but it wasn't as quick as he anticipated.
But this is one of those areas, as Senator Warner correctly
keeps referring to, as where the investigation really does need
to continue.
Senator Collins. Thank you.
Chairman Warner. Thank you very much, Senator.
Senator Ben Nelson.
Senator Ben Nelson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Dr. Kay, I
want to add my appreciation for your candor. It's very
refreshing to see such public candor in a time when too often
the trend is progressive candor, but I want to thank you for
many of your points that you've made because I think it helps
us understand the importance of intelligence and the importance
of accurate intelligence, and yet the difficulty there is in
first of all achieving the role that you need to gather
intelligence, let alone establishing its accuracy.
It's based on that that I have concerns about the use of
preemptive force being predicated on intelligence. I think many
supported the President's decision to use force to liberate
Iraq and believe that the world's a safer place because of
Saddam being in a prison cell. But many of us supported
Saddam's removal because we believed in the credibility of the
intelligence that was provided, and we believe also, and I
believe personally, that the President did not intentionally
mislead the American people, nor do I believe Prime Minister
Blair would mislead his public.
But there is unquestionably a credibility issue here that
must be addressed. That credibility problem involves the
accuracy of the intelligence information, or lack of accuracy,
its uses, and most likely, its embellishment. Your findings
indicate that Iraq had only a rudimentary chemical, biological,
and nuclear program, and you've identified and you've said that
weapons of mass destruction-related program activities, and I
have to ask you, what does that mean? What are weapons of mass
destruction-related program activities?
Dr. Kay. That includes, for example, and take the specific
examples of the Iraqis, a program to develop a substitute for a
major precursor for VX using indigenous production capability
and indigenous chemicals so they would not have to import it.
It includes a study, for example, on a simulant for
anthrax. Pre-1991, their anthrax was liquid. They had tried to
freeze-dry it and get it down to the dry anthrax, which is
stable and much more deadly, lethal, as we found out here. By
using this simulant, they actually pushed about two generations
the production capability. Now, for this simulant, the same
production capability that produces it, is exactly the same
that produces anthrax, so they in fact had moved ahead their
anthrax capability by working on a simulant.
So it's in those areas that you get program--they had
looked at the lethality of various agents and classified them.
That's WMD-related work.
Senator Ben Nelson. All right. You've indicated that you've
found no evidence of existing stockpiles of WMDs. Is it
possible that they found their way to Syria? Is there any way
of knowing whether they found their way to Syria or to another
location?
Dr. Kay. In terms of possibility, you can't rule out
anything. The way I tried to direct our activities, I knew we
were not going to get permission to conduct inspections in
Syria as much as I would professionally and personally have
enjoyed it. I also knew that the intelligence we collected that
showed movement of material across the Iraq/Syrian border
didn't show what was in the containers.
So you try to answer that question by saying, was there
something to be moved back across the border? Look at
production capability. It is totally inadequate for saying, did
they move small amounts, did they move technology, did they
move documentation? Absolutely possible, I would say probable.
But my personal belief is that they did not move large
stockpiles because I do not believe they had reconstituted the
capability that had produced large stockpiles.
So that's how you get at it. Is it inadequate? Yes. Will it
probably always remain as an--unless the Syrian regime really
changes course, will it always remain uncertain? Yes.
Senator Ben Nelson. Is it a basic assumption on your part
or a suspicion that's based on the evidence that you've said,
movement of certain undefined, non-inspected containers or
other activity that took it across--took things across the
border?
Dr. Kay. My belief that they did not move large stockpiles
of WMD to Syria is based on my conclusion that there were not
large stockpiles to move. My assumption that it might have been
something else is there was so much movement that you just
can't rule out what was there. I don't know.
Senator Ben Nelson. Well, is it fair to say that the people
who are in charge of the weapons of mass destruction activity
probably were better informed about how to secrete it than
those who decided to bury airplanes?
Dr. Kay. One makes that assumption.
Senator Ben Nelson. I would think so.
Dr. Kay. I also have to say that the people most likely to
have been involved in this movement were the people in the
intelligence services and around Uday and Qusay, and
fortunately for the world, Uday and Qusay are no longer around
to give evidence. A lot of those intelligence agents are either
now dead or they're in opposition to the U.S. and not available
for ISG. So there is a limited circle of people who probably
had first-hand knowledge about moving it, and here's how we get
to irreducible uncertainty. They're dying, not soon enough in
my view, but they are dying.
Senator Ben Nelson. Dr. Kay, I appreciate very much, as I
say, your candor, and I totally agree with you that an outside
body investigating and looking into this intelligence
credibility issue is important. Certainly it's absolutely
critical to the first track doctrine, which has to be on the
basis of what you know, not what you think you know, and I
appreciate your candor with respect to that as well. I'm
certain that that's not always an easy thing to be able to take
a position that strong, but I do appreciate that you've done
that.
Dr. Kay. Thank you.
Senator Ben Nelson. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Warner. Thank you, Senator, for your
participation.
Senator Cornyn.
Senator Cornyn. Thank you. Dr. Kay, I too want to thank you
for your service. I'm deeply concerned lest the politics of the
moment overshadow some important facts. First, would you agree
that not only are intelligence agencies, but Democrats,
Republicans, President Clinton, President Bush, France,
Germany, Britain, all agreed that Saddam had stockpiles of WMD?
Dr. Kay. I think that's true.
Senator Cornyn. Until your report, after your long work
with the ISG, have you found that anyone, any one of those
people or groups that I've identified have in fact learned that
it was not true, but nevertheless tried to manipulate it and
present it as fact for some improper purpose?
Dr. Kay. No, I know of no manipulation. I know of a lot of
skepticism because it was such a widely-held view and wanting
to know the facts, and I view that as absolutely appropriate.
Senator Cornyn. So you know of no evidence, no indication
that anyone tried to intentionally manipulate the intelligence
that we got in order to justify going to war in Iraq?
Dr. Kay. I've seen no evidence of that, nor have I seen any
evidence after the fact of anyone trying to influence the
conclusions that I or others are reaching as part of the ISG.
Senator Cornyn. Let me just try to nail down a couple other
facts. Although it now appears that Saddam, or at least so far
appears that Saddam did not have large stockpiles of WMD, he
did continue research on chemical and biological and even
nuclear weapons, correct?
Dr. Kay. Absolutely.
Senator Cornyn. Would you say then, Dr. Kay, that it was
just a matter of time before Saddam would build such stockpiles
or have that capability in a way that would threaten not only
people in Iraq but people in that neighborhood and perhaps
others?
Dr. Kay. I think you will have, when you get the final ISG
report, pretty compelling evidence that Saddam had the
intention of continuing the pursuit of WMD when the opportunity
arose, and that the first start on that, the long pole in the
tent, was this restart of the long-range missile program.
Senator Cornyn. So that given time, these programs would
have matured and Saddam would have been able to reconstitute
his WMD arsenal?
Dr. Kay. I hesitate, Senator, I think that's the safe
assumption. What I don't know over time, and I'm more and more
struck with, is how corrupt and destructive that society had
become, but you can't count on when it would fall apart, and it
might fall apart in ways that are far more dangerous, so I
think that is the safe assumption.
Senator Cornyn. You said something during your opening
statement that intrigues me and something that I'm afraid may
be overlooked in all of this back and forth, and that has to do
with proliferation. You said that there was a risk of a willing
seller meeting a willing buyer of such weapons or weapons
stockpiles, whether they be large, small, or programs, whether
it's information that Iraqi scientists might be willing to sell
or work in cooperation with rogue organizations or even
nations, but do you consider that to have been a real risk in
terms of Saddam's activities and these programs, the risk of
proliferation?
Dr. Kay. Actually, I consider it a bigger risk than the--
and that's why I paused on the preceding question--I consider
that a bigger risk than the restart of his programs being
successful. I think the way the society was going and the
number of willing buyers in the market, that probably was a
risk that if we did avoid, we barely avoided.
Senator Cornyn. Indeed that continues to be a concern we
have today in the old Soviet Union and other places where----
Dr. Kay. Pakistan.
Senator Cornyn. Pakistan, other nations where they've had
official weapons programs, biological, chemical, and nuclear,
the risk of proliferation into the hands of terrorists like al
Qaeda and others. Is that correct, sir?
Dr. Kay. That's correct.
Senator Cornyn. Indeed, the deception that you've talked
about of Saddam's own military and scientists and others who
perhaps led him to believe that they were following through on
his orders to develop these weapons of mass destruction, would
you say that that deception not only convinced perhaps Saddam
to some extent, but indeed that contributed to his
intransigence before the world community and defiance of the
United Nations and particularly finally of U.N. Resolution
1441?
Dr. Kay. I think that probably did. I'm just hesitant
because analyzing the mind of someone who would end up in a
spider hole like Saddam requires a skill that I suspect I was
not equipped for, but yes, I think that's a reasonable
interpretation.
Senator Cornyn. Thank you very much, Dr. Kay, I appreciate
it.
Chairman Warner. Thank you, Senator, very much.
Senator Bill Nelson.
Senator Bill Nelson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Dr. Kay, in
the interview with the New York Times a few days ago, you had
said, ``I think that the system should have a way for an
analyst to say, `I don't have enough information to make a
judgment.' There is really not a way to do that under the
current system.''
The New York Times article goes on and this is what I want
to ask you about. ``He added,'' meaning you, ``that while the
analysts included caveats on their reports, those passages
tended to drop off as the reports would go up the food chain
inside the government.'' Tell me about that. How is that
possible that in the Intelligence Community specifically when
caveats are there about intelligence, that they get dropped off
as it goes up the pecking order?
Dr. Kay. Senator, when Jim Risen asked me about that, I
gave him an example which he did not include in the article. I
said writing caveats has about the same intellectual enjoyment
as being a writer for the National Geographic. I look at the
pictures, I look at the captions. I confess, although I think
we have in the basement probably a 20-year collection of
National Geographics, I would be hard-pressed on a polygraph to
say that I've ever read more than five of them.
What happens is, it's not that they are physically removed.
It's the higher up you go--just in your office, I suspect there
are things that your staff passes up that you read the
headlines of, you read the summary, you're busy, you have other
things to do. Caveats tend to fall into footnotes, they tend to
fall into smaller-point type. After all, they're not what most
people think, and you have just limited time and attention and
it's a natural filtering phenomenon as opposed to a physical
cutting. It's just one of those things, and look, I can point
to myself as having been a consumer at points of intelligence,
you like to believe that you fully read it and you search the
caveats and you gave them the same attention that you give the
dominant opinion. Very often you don't. There are just not that
many hours in the day.
Senator Bill Nelson. Dr. Kay, I, along with 76 other
Senators, voted for the resolution authorizing the President,
the expenditure of funds for starting the war. I want to tell
you some specific information that I was told by the
Intelligence Community that has subsequently been made public
by Secretary Powell in his speech to the United Nations. At the
time it was highly classified and subsequently the
administration declassified it and made it public.
I haven't heard these comments from anybody else, but I was
told not only did he have the weapons of mass destruction, and
that he had the means to deliver them through unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAVs), but that he had the capability of transporting
those UAVs outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland here in
America, specifically by putting them on ships off the eastern
seaboard, of which they would then drop their WMD on eastern
seaboard cities. You can see all the more why I thought there
was an imminent threat. Can you bring any light on this?
Dr. Kay. Senator, what we have spent a great deal of time
exploring and it's still being explored is the UAV program. It
was a very large UAV program and discoveries were being made
really in the last 2 months with regard to that program. The
Iraqis acknowledged that at least one of those families of UAVs
was a direct descendant from an earlier one that had a spray
tank on it.
I think the judgment you will find, certainly it's--let me
not judge what others will say--my judgment, having looked at
that evidence of the UAV program, is that it was an active
program, it's one of these program elements, WMD program
elements that continued. It was not at fruition. While it may
have been theoretically possible that you could have snuck one
of those on a ship off the East Coast off the United States
that might have gotten, been able to deliver a small amount
someplace, and that's certainly always possible, a good
hobbyist could probably do it right now with off-the-shelf
material here. I don't think there was the deployment
capability, the existing deployment capability at that point
for any sort of systematic military attack.
But certainly as a terrorist action, who knows what he
would have done. But we just did not discover--I mean, we
discovered the UAVs and we discovered their development, and
one of them is tied to a sprayer application, but it was not a
strong point.
Senator Bill Nelson. Dr. Kay, needless to say, I was
absolutely told that that was a fact and I have subsequently
found out, now after the fact, that there was a vigorous
dispute in the Intelligence Community, and one part of the
community said that was absolutely not true, and therefore you
can see the chagrin with which I approach this discussion.
Dr. Kay. I understand, Senator.
Chairman Warner. Thank you very much, Senator. Colleagues,
I take note that our distinguished witness has been under the
scrutiny of Congress since approximately 9:00 this morning when
I first met with you in another setting and Senator Levin
joined us at that setting. So I would suggest maybe just a few
minutes and then we'll conclude what I believe has been a very
thorough and broad-ranging series of questions and responses.
Your responses are very forthright in my personal judgment.
So, Senator Levin, if you'd like to start off, I'll wrap
up.
Senator Levin. Okay, thank you. Thank you again, Dr. Kay.
Are you familiar with the Carnegie Endowment report?
Dr. Kay. I'm familiar with it, Senator. I've not read it
cover to cover.
Senator Levin. Let me read you just a portion of it then on
page 34. It has to do with the assessments before December 2001
and after December 2001. ``Assessments prior to December 2001
had voiced concerns and warned of intentions to restart weapons
programs, but did not assert that any programs or weapons
existed. Most were consistent with the 1998 intelligence report
to Congress while UNSCOM inspectors were still in Iraq,'' and
now I'm quoting that report, that 1998 report from this
Carnegie report: ``After 4 years of denials, Iraq admitted to a
defensive program resulting in the destruction of Al Hakam, a
large biological warfare (BW) production facility Iraq was
trying to hide as a legitimate biological plant. Iraq still has
not accounted for over 100 BW bombs and over 80 percent of
imported growth media directly related to future Iraqi
production of thousands of gallons of biological agent. This
lack of cooperation is an indication that Iraq intends to
reconstitute its BW capability when possible.''
That's the assessment prior to 2001. After 2001, the
assessment was they have biological weapons in their
possession, not that they intend to reconstitute its BW
capability when possible, which is the prior assessment, but
that after 2001, after November 11, in effect, they have
possession, inventories, stockpiles of weapons of mass
destruction. Do you see a difference between the before and
after?
Dr. Kay. Senator Levin, I don't think that is a fair--as my
memory, and I don't have the documents in front of me, I do not
think that is a fair characterization of the intelligence
reports and judgments prior to 2001. I refer you again, if you
go back to Secretary Cohen's testimony before this committee,
Secretary Cohen in the Clinton administration was not referring
to anthrax that might be reconstituted, produced in some
reconstituted program, he was referring to actual weapons.
Senator Levin. Which Iraq had at what point? We've gone
back to at least look at his--the part that we're able to get
on Secretary Cohen, which was an interview on a TV station.
Dr. Kay. But there was also testimony.
Senator Levin. It seems from this he's talking about what
they had in the early 1990s and what we caught him with and
what that can do, what that anthrax can do and what they
destroyed, that's what he was talking about in that interview.
Are you saying he came before this committee?
Dr. Kay. My memory is it was this committee. It may not
have been this committee.
Senator Levin. But you're saying that Secretary Cohen said,
in our judgment, they have anthrax, they are producing anthrax,
and here, this bag of 5 pounds is what they can do? That's what
you're saying today?
Dr. Kay. My memory is that in holding that 5-pound bag and
talking about how much destruction that could do, he made
reference to Iraq having those capabilities.
Senator Levin. Currently?
Dr. Kay. That's my memory, sir, but you have the record,
you have a staff behind you, I don't.
Senator Levin. We'll check it, because it's pretty
important because you're saying that Secretary Cohen said that
they--the same thing basically as we were told immediately
prior to the attack on Iraq, which is that they had possession
of BW weapons and here's what 5 pounds can do. I'm not saying
he didn't say that, by the way. I'm going to go back and check
too. But you're now saying that we better check the record
before----
Dr. Kay. I'm saying that my memory is that that's what he
said, but I always believe in checking the record.
Senator Levin. Okay. We will surely do that to see if your
memory's correct. But let me then also read to you something
from the assessments on the BW. This is the report, this is the
last Clinton administration report for the period January to
June 2000 on BW, and I'm going to read you this paragraph and
then I'm going to read you the report for the period of January
to June by the Bush administration and I want to see if you
think they're the same.
Here's what the last Clinton administration report said:
``In 1995, Iraq admitted to having an offensive BW program and
submitted the first in a series of full, final, and complete
disclosures that were supposed to reveal the full scope of its
BW program. According to UNSCOM, these disclosures are
incomplete and filled with inaccuracies. Since the full scope
and nature of Iraq's BW program was not verified, UNSCOM
assessed that Iraq continues to maintain a knowledge base and
industrial infrastructure that could be used to produce quickly
a large amount of BW agents at any time if needed.''
Knowledge base and infrastructure that could be used to
produce--now this is the report for the period January to June
2002 of the Bush administration. During this reporting period,
Baghdad continued to pursue a BW program. Continued to pursue a
program. Do you consider those words to be the same as
continuing to maintain a knowledge base and an industrial
infrastructure that could be used to produce? You consider
those to be the same assessments?
Dr. Kay. I'm not sure they're terribly different.
Senator Levin. Are they somewhat different?
Dr. Kay. They're somewhat different. Quite frankly, your
memory is better than mine. I'm not sure that is the total
scope of what the Clinton administration had on the biological
program at that point. I remember a more voluminous statement
about it.
Senator Levin. It is, it's far more. I'm trying to
obviously--because you can't quote the entire--to pick out
representative parts.
Dr. Kay. I understand that, but in judging similarities and
accuracies, selection is always a danger in any field.
Senator Levin. It is, I agree, by anybody that attempts to
communicate that's always a problem.
Dr. Kay. Absolutely.
Senator Levin. But what I would like you to do then,
because you've made a representation here that these were the
same assessments that were made by both the Clinton
intelligence folks, and the Bush intelligence folks, that you
go back and see whether or not in fact that is accurate.
I've given you quotes and I can continue to show
differences. The Carnegie report shows significant differences
between intelligence. It's not so much Clinton/Bush, it's prior
to September 11, after September 11. That's the key thing when
intelligence at that point changed significantly in the
analysis of the Carnegie folks. I would think that, since
you're making a statement that it didn't, that you take a look
at at least their assessment and the documentation that they
provide that shows the significant shift in intelligence before
and after September 11. Are you willing to do that?
Dr. Kay. Senator Levin, I'm always happy to take homework
assignments from you. I hope it comes with an address for one
of those undisclosed locations. Quite frankly, after I get out
of here, I'm going to tell Senator Warner I'm disappearing to
an undisclosed location for a couple of weeks.
Senator Levin. You're entitled to it.
Dr. Kay. But I certainly will do that. It's a point well
taken.
Senator Levin. You're very much entitled to it. One other
comment here. People have talked about France, Russia, and
everybody else. This is a quote from Chirac, I don't know
whether this is representative or not: ``I have no evidence
that these weapons exist in Iraq,'' Chirac said. ``U.S.
officials, however, say they are certain that Iraq has the
weapons and insists that it must turn them over for destruction
or face war.'' That's what his quote is in The Washington Post
in February 2003. Now, maybe you have other information.
Dr. Kay. There are other quotes from the French and from
Chirac.
Senator Levin. Where Chirac says they do have weapons?
Dr. Kay. Yes.
Senator Levin. Okay. That's just one quote. Russia,
however, said that they did not have, or that they had not seen
undeniable proof of Iraqi arms programs or terrorist ties.
That's a quote we have in the Associated Press, maybe that's
not accurate or representative. Do you know whether Russia----
Dr. Kay. I don't--the Russian intelligence I don't have on
the tip of my tongue unless----
Senator Levin. All right. Have you been asked by the
intelligence, by the CIA, for whom you were working until a
week ago, I believe, whenever.
Dr. Kay. That's correct.
Senator Levin. Have you been asked to give a final report
of your views?
Dr. Kay. I did a final briefing out for the DDCI and the
DCI of what I found. It was an oral briefing. It lasted a
substantial portion of a day. I think they fully understand
what I concluded in my report at that point, yes.
Senator Levin. Do you know whether or not they made notes
of your briefing?
Dr. Kay. There were note-takers in the room but I don't
know what----
Senator Levin. I think we either, and it's not up to me,
I'm not the chairman, but it seems to me it's important for the
history and for the future that we have your views in a formal
report. You didn't give us written testimony today, it was just
a couple days that you had the invitation of the chairman to
come here, so I'm not at all critical, by the way, of that,
believe me. I'm not critical of the chairman, I'm not critical
of you, either one. I'm glad you're here.
But I do think it's important that we get your views, in
some kind of a formal, cohesive way because they're valuable to
us, we've obviously followed your views very carefully, the
country has. It seems to me in these circumstances that you
should put, the way you want to say it, your views, for the
record, for the Nation, for us, even though we're not in the
middle of an inquiry in this committee, I wish we were frankly
but we're not, I'm trying to do the best I can as ranking
member, but the Intelligence Committee is, so perhaps they
would ask you. I can't ask on behalf of Senator Roberts either.
But in any event, if asked, by either our chairman or by
Senator Roberts, would you be willing to provide your final
report, on the way out?
Dr. Kay. If asked by those two Senators, and certainly the
senior Senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia where I live,
my general policy, as I told Senator Warner when he asked me to
appear here, is never to say no to Senator Warner. There may a
point in my life when I decide that's unwise, but I have not
reached that point yet.
Senator Levin. Most of us are in the same position. We
don't say no to Senator Warner as a matter of fact. Okay,
that's then up to those two Senators----
Chairman Warner. I think that you raise an interesting
point and I've given it some consideration and I will discuss
it with our distinguished witness, but it seems to me it could
well be done in the context of your commenting on the next
interim report that would be forthcoming.
Dr. Kay. I leave it to you.
Senator Levin. One other question that I would hope the
chairman would take under advisement. That is that we ask the
CIA if they have taken notes of a day-long debrief that they
share those notes with us. Your comments here obviously are
significant, your comments here period. Your statement in the
New York Times has been read by, I'm sure, not just millions of
New York Times readers but by every member of this committee
and their staff, probably more than once. That's how
significant those views are, so I would think that we ought to
take full advantage at least of the notes of the CIA at a
minimum that they took of a day-long debrief.
Again, I close with my statement of thanks for your
willingness to come as a private citizen and to share your
opinions with the committee and with the Nation.
Chairman Warner. Thank you, Senator Levin. Do you have any
final comment? I would simply ask one last question. I think
there may be an omission in the record that should be plugged.
Any evidence with regard to participation by either Saddam
Hussein or his principal henchmen in the WMD sharing with al
Qaeda or any other terrorist organizations?
Dr. Kay. There's no evidence that I can think of that I
know of. This was obviously an investigative target. There may
well have been evidence produced since I left or will be by the
time of the March--it's certainly something that has a great
deal of attention.
Chairman Warner. Thank you. The hearing will now be
concluded with my, again, expression of appreciation to you and
your very lovely wife, who made it possible for you to be here
today.
Dr. Kay. Thank you very much. I'll convey that.
Chairman Warner. We are adjourned.
[Questions for the record with answers supplied follow:]
Questions Submitted by Senator Robert C. Byrd
iraq survey group funds
1. Senator Byrd. Dr. Kay, Congress has appropriated very large sums
of money to the search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. In April
2003, Congress appropriated $300 million for the search, and in
November 2003, Congress approved another substantial amount of funds,
the exact amount of which is classified. How much of these funds have
been spent to date?
Dr. Kay. As I have now left U.S. Government service, I no longer
have access to financial data for the ISG and this question should be
directed to the Department of Defense as the agency that controlled ISG
finances.
2. Senator Byrd. Dr. Kay, do you have any estimate of how much it
will take to complete the ISG's mission later this year?
Dr. Kay. The question of how much time will be required to complete
ISG's mission depends upon what that mission is, the resources that
will be made available for that mission/missions, and the security
environment within Iraq which greatly impacts the pace of ISG's work.
3. Senator Byrd. Dr. Kay, you have said that the work of the ISG is
about 85 percent complete. Does the ISG still require that huge amount
of funds if its work is so close to completion?
Dr. Kay. I believe that about 85 percent of the work necessary to
understand the status of Iraq's WMD programs at the time of the war,
and particularly to answer the question as to whether they had large
stockpiles of WMD, has been carried out. I do not believe that
completing that work will require ``huge'' amounts of funds, but a
deterioration of the security environment in Iraq and any greater use
of contractor personnel to replace the Government employees used during
my period in Iraq could substantially increase the cost.
4. Senator Byrd. Dr. Kay, you spoke at today's hearing about the
diversion of personnel away from the ISG to purposes not closely
related to the search for weapons of mass destruction. Do you believe
that funds have been, or will be, diverted from the ISG to carry out
activities unrelated to its charter?
Dr. Kay. As the charter of the ISG has been changed from when I
took over in June, I believe that any diversion of funds will be
related to the new charter of ISG as promulgated by the Department of
Defense.
[Whereupon, at 1:49 p.m., the committee adjourned.]