USAF COUNTERPROLIFERATION CENTER

CPC OUTREACH JOURNAL

Maxwell AFB, Alabama

Issue No. 420, 1 April 2005

Articles & Other Documents:

U.S., Italy Give Missile-Deal Delay Intelligence Panel's Findings Criticized COMMISSION REPORT Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (Homepage) Study Faults Response To Outlawed Arms Iran President Leads Tour Of Atomic Plants Using Clues From Libya To Study A Nuclear Mystery Bush Panel Finds Big Flaws Remain In U.S. Spy Efforts Intelligence Analysts Whiffed On A 'Curveball' Data On Iraqi Arms Flawed, Panel Says Doubts On Weapons Were Dismissed Panel Warns That Defense Against Germ Attack Is Weak N. Korea Demands Disarmament Talks Tehran Rushes Weapons Program

Welcome to the CPC Outreach Journal. As part of USAF Counterproliferation Center’s mission to counter weapons of mass destruction through education and research, we’re providing our government and civilian community a source for timely counterproliferation information. This information includes articles, papers and other documents addressing issues pertinent to US military response options for dealing with nuclear, biological and chemical threats and attacks. It’s our hope this information resource will help enhance your counterproliferation issue awareness. Established in 1998, the USAF/CPC provides education and research to present and future leaders of the Air Force, as well as to members of other branches of the armed services and Department of Defense. Our purpose is to help those agencies better prepare to counter the threat from weapons of mass destruction. Please feel free to visit our web site at www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/awc-cps.htm for in-depth information and specific points of contact. Please direct any questions or comments on CPC Outreach Journal Jo Ann Eddy, CPC Outreach Editor, at (334) 953- 7538 or DSN 493-7538. To subscribe, change e-mail address, or unsubscribe to this journal or to request inclusion on the mailing list for CPC publications, please contact Mrs. Eddy. The following articles, papers or documents do not necessarily reflect official endorsement of the United States Air Force, Department of Defense, or other US government agencies. Reproduction for private use or commercial gain is subject to original copyright restrictions. All rights are reserved

Reuters.com March 30, 2005 U.S., Italy Give Germany Missile-Deal Delay By Jim Wolf, Reuters WASHINGTON, March 30 (Reuters) - The United States and Italy have given Germany an extra month to join them in developing a multibillion-dollar air and missile defense system, the Pentagon announced on Wednesday. A March 26 deadline to sign a memorandum of understanding passed without action by the coalition government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, which is divided over the project. At issue is the Medium Extended Defense System, or MEADS, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization-sponsored initiative to build a mobile surface-to-air system that would replace older troop-protecting interceptors like the Patriot missile. The United States, Italy and Germany have drawn up guidelines for a system to be operational by 2014, with the United States providing 55 percent of the financing, Germany 28 percent and Italy 17 percent. But Germany has yet to get parliamentary approval to spend the money. "In the unlikely event" that Germany is unable to commit by the new deadline, defense officials from the United States and Italy will consult on their options, said Pentagon spokesman Glenn Flood. Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , the Pentagon's biggest supplier, leads the effort to build the new missile system. Schroeder's Social Democratic-led government earlier this month put off seeking a parliamentary budget committee's nod to sign on after the Green party, a junior coalition member, balked. In mid-March, Germany's Federal Ministry of Defense told its U.S. and Italian counterparts it "needed more time to complete the German government approval process," said Flood. As a result, Italy and the United States, which signed the pact six months ago, agreed to extend the deadline for Germany to join them to April 25, he said. The German Federal Ministry of Defense has assured both of its would-be partners that it will use its "best efforts" to get government approval by then, Flood added. A Lockheed Martin spokeswoman, Jennifer Allen, said the program's design and development phase remained on schedule. Lockheed's partners in the project include Europe's biggest defense contractor, EADS, MBDA-Italia and Germany's LFK-Lenkflugkorpersysteme, a unit of EADS and MBDA. The consortium, headquartered in Orlando, Florida, won a $3 billion contract in September 2004 to design and develop MEADS to replace Patriot missiles in the United States and Germany, and Nike Hercules missiles in Italy. http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=8043003

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(Editor’s Note: Hyperlink for referenced report follows article.) Washington Post March 31, 2005 Pg. 17 Intelligence Panel's Findings Criticized Experts Call Suggestions Uninformed By Walter Pincus, Washington Post Staff Writer Some of the recommendations to be officially presented today by President Bush's commission on intelligence were already drawing criticism yesterday inside and outside the intelligence community. One proposal being questioned calls for restructuring the FBI's counterterrorism and counterintelligence operations and analysis under one director, and having that individual report both to the new director of national intelligence as well as to the FBI director. Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies, who had been briefed by FBI sources on the proposal, said that giving the DNI, whose prime concern is foreign intelligence, a role in domestic counterterrorism operations could create civil liberties issues. "The attorney general, unlike the intelligence director, has an institutional responsibility to protect constitutional rights and is subject to closer and more transparent congressional scrutiny than intelligence chiefs," Martin wrote in a paper sent yesterday to the commission. The FBI has over the past two years sharply increased its counterterrorism operations and created a directorate of intelligence that does analysis across the spectrum of bureau activities. One FBI official who reviewed the commission proposal said yesterday he was concerned that creating a new structure would be a problem. "Let the current process work itself out," he said. Several current and former intelligence officials, who had access to part or all of the report, praised many of its findings and recommendations but said the panel at times ignored changes instituted since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. They also criticized the commission for failing to take into consideration complexities of the intelligence business. For example, the panel criticizes the past performance of human intelligence activities and calls for appointing more CIA case officers to serve overseas outside embassies and without the cover of diplomatic immunity. Such officers take a long time to train and establish themselves abroad, several officials noted yesterday. "Of course we need more," a former senior officer said yesterday. "But they do not realize how hard that is to do." Another intelligence official said the panel focused on the problems created by different agencies not sharing intelligence information but ignored that "integration takes time, particularly when there is not one single government computer system. You can't build something like that overnight." The panel makes suggestions for better organization of the intelligence community. The report acknowledges a "problem" in the potential conflict between the new position of DNI and the director of the National Counterterrorism Center but, according to sources, does not make a recommendation for addressing it. The position of DNI, which will be filled by Ambassador John D. Negroponte, and the NCTC were part of the intelligence reorganization legislation adopted by Congress in December. The NCTC's mission is to fuse all foreign and domestic terrorism intelligence, and to conduct strategic planning for counterterrorism operations at home and abroad. Under the new intelligence reform statute, the NCTC director is tasked to brief the president on counterterrorism operations, a role that some officials say will undercut the authority of the DNI, who is supposed to be the president's chief adviser on all intelligence activities, including terrorism. The panel, officially the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, was named in February 2004 and led by senior U.S. Appeals Judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.). The nine-member panel will present its findings this morning to Bush. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14104-2005Mar30.html

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Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction COMMISSION REPORT Click on link below to access the files to read the Commission's report submitted to the President on March 31, 2005 http://www.wmd.gov/report/index.html

Link below is homepage for Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction http://www.wmd.gov/

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New York Times March 31, 2005 Study Faults Response To Outlawed Arms By David Johnston and Scott Shane WASHINGTON, March 30 - A report on United States intelligence to be made public on Thursday concludes that the government has failed to respond to the dire threat posed by unconventional weapons with the urgency and national purpose displayed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. "It's now been three and a half years since the Sept. 11 attacks," the report says in a section titled "Change and Resistance to Change." "A lot can be accomplished in that time." "Three and a half years after Dec. 7, 1941, the United States had built and equipped an army and navy that had crossed two oceans, the English Channel and the Rhine; it had already won Germany's surrender and was two months from vanquishing Japan," the report continues. The report of the presidential commission led by Laurence H. Silberman, a retired federal judge, and Charles S. Robb, a former Democratic governor and senator from Virginia, gives a grim account of the spy agencies' capabilities, despite a steady increase in the intelligence budget since 2001, to $40 billion a year from roughly $30 billion a year. The report, the latest of several scathing assessments of intelligence failures, recommends dozens of major changes at the 15 intelligence agencies. But even before its public release, officials at some intelligence agencies privately expressed fatigue and scant enthusiasm for further reshuffling, noting the agencies have been in a continuous state of flux since the September 2001 attacks. The succession of reports designed to fix blame for botched intelligence on the attacks and Iraqi weapons has generated some wariness and cynicism at the agencies. "We've been spending so much time reorganizing, we haven't had time to see if the changes we've already made have worked," said one intelligence official, who asked not to be identified because he is not authorized to speak to the news media. The nine-member Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction was appointed by President Bush a year ago. The members met Wednesday at commission offices in Arlington, Va., to review the report and plan its presentation to the president on Thursday. One official who has seen the entire report said the unclassified version totals about 600 pages, including appendixes. The classified version contains fewer than 100 additional pages, he said, but includes the only detailed discussion of current threats like nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea. The report includes a detailed analysis of the shortcomings of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that Iraq had biological and chemical weapons and an active nuclear program. It also contains before-and- after assessments of intelligence on Afghanistan and Libya, since American specialists now have access to those countries and can compare what weapons were expected and what were found. The report, which focuses its main criticism on the Central Intelligence Agency, proposes the creation of an antiproliferation center to gauge the threat posed by chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. It calls for specific changes at agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is urged to create a more independent intelligence unit inside its existing structure. Publicly, White House officials have said that the administration will embrace the report. But the officials who do the day-to-day work of intelligence said the report was being released at a chaotic time when they were still struggling to build the new organizations established by intelligence laws enacted late last year in response to earlier critiques. John D. Negroponte, who last was ambassador to Iraq, has been appointed by President Bush as the first director of national intelligence but is only scheduled for Senate confirmation in two weeks. The new law gives him sweeping authority over the intelligence agencies, but how much control he will have in practice over fiercely independent, often competing agencies is uncertain. Intelligence officials are still negotiating over which personnel from the C.I.A. might move to Mr. Negroponte's new operation, a delicate question that one former intelligence official says is comparable to "the partition of India, with the attendant communal violence." The intelligence reorganization adopted last year gives Mr. Negroponte a staff of 500, with an additional 150 people available to be temporarily assigned by all intelligence agencies. The C.I.A., which is expected to bear the brunt of the commission's criticism, has lost about 20 senior managers since Porter J. Goss replaced George J. Tenet as director last year, with some forced out and others taking advantage of the change in leadership to retire. Mr. Tenet's tenure was so long - more than seven years - that about 40 percent of C.I.A. employees had never worked under anyone else until Mr. Goss arrived. A similar transition is about to occur at the National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on foreign communications and is the country's biggest intelligence agency by work force and budget. The longest-serving director of N.S.A., Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force, is departing to become Mr. Negroponte's deputy after overseeing six years of rapid change at the agency. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/31/politics/31weapons.html?

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Los Angeles Times March 31, 2005 Iran President Leads Tour Of Atomic Plants Journalists are taken to see two nuclear facilities. The unprecedented visits aim to show that uranium enrichment has not resumed. By Times Wire Services NATANZ, Iran — Iranian President Mohammad Khatami took a group of journalists Wednesday on an unprecedented visit into a formerly secret underground nuclear plant that Washington wants dismantled. The tour of the Natanz facility and another nuclear plant in Isfahan was intended to show that Iran was not breaking its promise to suspend its uranium enrichment program, which Tehran says is aimed only at generating electricity. Western countries fear that Iran could produce nuclear bombs. The journalists were not shown any centrifuges used to enrich uranium or taken to a pilot enrichment facility at the Natanz plant that contains dozens of the machines. Iranian officials said the main enrichment facility at Natanz, 150 miles south of Tehran, was built more than 54 feet below ground because of "security problems." Defense experts said the placement so deep was a precaution against possible aerial attack by the United States or Israel, which have promised to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear arms. Approaching the complex, ringed by arid mountains, journalists counted at least 10 antiaircraft batteries. About 30 local and foreign journalists were shown a building two levels below ground where a vast empty hall was described as a room to house 50,000 centrifuges. The centrifuges have been idled pending Iran's discussions on the future of its nuclear program with the European Union. But Khatami made clear that Tehran intended to resume using them. Khatami said Iran would "definitely" proceed with enrichment but intended to reach a deal in negotiations with the EU and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the ' nuclear monitor. The EU wants Iran to permanently scrap nuclear fuel work at Natanz and elsewhere in return for assistance with developing nuclear energy and other economic and security cooperation. Reporters were allowed to photograph and film the complex and were later shown parts of the atomic facility in the central city of Isfahan, about 60 miles farther south. Sensitive fuel work has also been frozen at the Isfahan plant, which is designed to prepare uranium gas for Natanz. Centrifuges purify uranium hexafluoride gas into reactor or bomb fuel by spinning at high speeds. Low-grade enriched uranium is used in atomic power plants, but highly enriched uranium can be used in bombs. Although U.N. inspectors now regularly visit Iran's atomic facilities and have found no proof of nuclear weapons production, they have often rebuked Tehran for concealing key information and activities. U.S. State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said that if Iran wanted to allay international concerns, it would let U.N. inspectors enter what he called suspicious sites and interview key officials associated with the plants. "The point here is that if there is a commitment to transparency, there are real, effective, meaningful ways to demonstrate that commitment, beyond a staged media event," Ereli said. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran31mar31,1,7588689.story?coll=la-headlines-world

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New York Times March 31, 2005 Using Clues From Libya To Study A Nuclear Mystery By David E. Sanger and William J. Broad WASHINGTON, March 30 - In the 15 months since Libya turned over to the United States nearly two tons of illicit uranium it had planned to use in atomic weapons, the radioactive material has become a pivotal, if mysterious, piece of evidence for investigators unraveling the nuclear black market. The Bush administration, joined by United Nations inspectors, now say the uranium most likely came from North Korea and helps to build a case that the North has exported dangerous nuclear material to Libya, and perhaps beyond. The officials drew on scientific tests, secret documents and interviews with key players in the black market, which taken together are potentially highly incriminating. But the evidence is also circumstantial. In interviews this week, administration officials and foreign diplomats disclosed that Libyan officials had also surrendered financial ledgers to the United States that provide a guide to the front companies involved in the nuclear network set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist. One large payment, American officials contend, was directed to North Korea, presumably for the uranium hexafluoride that arrived in Tripoli in 2001. But American and foreign officials who have seen the financial documents or been briefed on them say they do not prove a direct payment from Libya to the North Korean government. In short, a year into the investigation of the case of the uranium cask, what is still missing, in the words of one senior American official, is "the knockout piece of evidence." And that, in the minds of some critics, has left the Bush administration's case open to continuing doubt, particularly given the intelligence failures before the . Those failures were addressed by a presidential commission that is due to report Thursday about the state of American intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. It is expected to be a searing indictment of assumptions made too quickly, of judgments never challenged. But its discussion of North Korea's and Iran's activities and the quality of intelligence in both countries was considered so delicate that the commission published the information only in a classified version of the report. Yet Iraq haunts the American effort to lay out its case on North Korea. In their often-contentious strategy sessions with China and South Korea, American officials have found themselves confronted by the question: why should Washington be trusted now? The tale of the uranium found in Libya is a case study of the trouble in filling in that map of the nuclear world. But it is also a very different story from what happened in Iraq, where there were bitter fights about whether was building dangerous stockpiles. Here, the questions are who made the uranium that was found in Libya, who sold it, and is there more? Evidence that North Korea, which has long sold conventional missiles, turned to trading in nuclear material initially sent a chill through Washington, Asia and the offices of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency. Instantly the case became a matter of intense focus for American intelligence officials and nuclear investigators. This account was pieced together from interviews with former and current American officials, allies whom they have briefed, and nuclear investigators from other nations. Last week, for the first time in public, the White House declared that the uranium came from North Korea. "The fact that nuclear material found its way out of North Korea to any destination is a source of serious concern for the United States," said Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, in a letter to . The letter denied that American officials visiting Asia had focused on the North Korean connection to draw attention from the fact that Mr. Khan's network in Pakistan - an American ally - had acted as a middleman. There are still many questions that allies and others have raised, and the administration has been unable or unwilling to fully answer. Jon B. Wolfsthal, a Korea expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said the administration's public case was too weak for outsiders to react to with anything but doubt, given the intelligence failures over Iraq. "This is clearly within the realm of possibility," he said of the uranium sale to Libya. "But there's a big difference between that and saying it happened." A European diplomat familiar with the I.A.E.A.'s investigation of the uranium shipment said a growing number of clues suggested that the source of the uranium was indeed North Korea. "There is a North Korean connection here," he said. "But what it is exactly is a mystery." The story began in late 2003, when Libya surrendered its nuclear program and led American, British and I.A.E.A. officials to the cask of uranium. It was flown to Washington in early 2004. In February 2004, Malaysia published a report - based on interviews with Buhari Sayed Abu Tahir , the chief operating officer of Mr. Khan's network - that the uranium hexafluoride had been flown to Libya aboard a Pakistani airplane in 2001. The findings of the Malaysian report, and the involvement of the Khan network in the uranium shipment, were widely reported. News of a possible North Korean link to the shipment emerged last spring when European investigators, quoted in The New York Times, said their interviews with members of the Khan network had pointed them in that direction. In late May, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Libya's receipt of 1.87 American tons of uranium hexafluoride was a down payment on an order for 20 metric tons, equivalent to 22 American tons. That amount was never delivered because Libya had abandoned its program, but experts said that was roughly enough to make 10 small nuclear warheads. Meanwhile, American officials also began to suspect North Korea was the source, partly because chemical traces on the outside of the cask indicated that it had been at the North's main nuclear site, Yongbyon. The United States had plutonium samples from that site. But as one American official said, "proving the container had been there is different from proving that the uranium inside it" also came from North Korea. Joseph Cirincione, director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment, said the traces of plutonium might simply indicate that North Korea shipped an empty canister to Pakistan, and that it was filled there, or someplace else. "If you look hard at these pillars, there are alternative explanations," he said. "They don't disprove the government claims but they raise doubts about their certainty." Similar questions in Washington touched off a months-long scientific study last year at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to determine whether the uranium hexafluoride was truly of North Korean origin. The results of that study are classified, officials say. They are also short of definitive. American officials apparently did not have a sample of North Korean uranium to compare with the uranium from Libya. Instead, through a process of elimination, they ruled out Pakistan as a source and eventually concluded that there was no other logical answer. Some experts have questioned that conclusion, saying it is unclear whether North Korea made the uranium hexafluoride itself, or merely supplied the raw uranium to Pakistan, which then made the highly toxic chemical. It is well known that the North routinely makes a precursor known as uranium tetraflouride at a plant near Yongbyon. Federal experts said converting that to the final product was relatively simple. "It's not a big step for North Korea to make uranium hexafluoride," said a nuclear scientist who regularly consults for intelligence agencies. The Bush administration has charged that North Korea is secretly pursuing a uranium enrichment program. The Chinese have expressed their doubts, perhaps because they really do not believe the evidence, or perhaps to keep the lines of communication with North Korea open. And so far, American officials have not identified for their allies any facility in North Korea that they believe makes uranium hexafluoride. "So if North Korea has a facility, does it really work?" Mr. Cirincione asked. More recently, United States officials have tried to follow the money trail. They argue that Libyan funds made it to companies or banks linked to North Korea. One foreign diplomat said I.A.E.A. investigators were digging through the same financial records that the United States had examined, and traced the money flow through money launderers to Khan front companies and "various bank accounts all over the world." But banking secrecy, he added, had impeded making firm links to North Korea despite "a couple places pointing to the D.P.R.K.," or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, but gave no further details. Asked if he thought the United States was exaggerating the financial tie between the shipment and North Korea, he said, "It's not hyping." But he insisted the case was still circumstantial. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/31/politics/31nuke.html

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New York Times April 1, 2005 Pg. 1 Bush Panel Finds Big Flaws Remain In U.S. Spy Efforts By Scott Shane and David E. Sanger WASHINGTON, March 31 - In a scorching assessment of chronic dysfunction inside American intelligence agencies, a presidential commission told President Bush on Thursday that the underlying causes of the failure to have understood Iraq's weapons programs "are still all too common." It also warned that the United States "knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors." In the bluntly worded, 601-page report, the nine-member commission flatly stated that harm done to American credibility because of the Iraq failure would take "years to undo." It also warned of specific new vulnerabilities, especially in understanding the spread of biological weapons programs. Even before John D. Negroponte begins his confirmation hearings as the first director of national intelligence, it urges him to undertake a radical reorganization of many of the nation's 15 intelligence agencies to end for good the long-running turf wars that have divided them. It also calls on him to encourage a culture that challenges assumptions before they turn into accepted wisdom, as they did about Iraq in the prelude to the American-led invasion. The commission, headed by Judge Laurence H. Silberman and former Senator Charles S. Robb of Virginia, noted acidly that despite several previous investigations lambasting deep flaws in the intelligence services, they have "an almost perfect record of resisting external recommendations." In its opening letter to Mr. Bush, it called the spy agencies "headstrong," and in a clear reference to Mr. Negroponte, it warned: "Sooner or later, they will try to run around - or over - the D.N.I. Then, only your determined backing will convince them that we cannot return to the old ways." The breadth and detail of the indictment, written in vivid, colloquial language rare in Washington, went beyond previous critiques. The report was particularly blistering about the low quality of the "President's Daily Brief," the morning intelligence review that once was deemed the gold standard of American intelligence. Mr. Bush had resisted turning over such briefing documents to the 9/11 commission that reported its findings last year. He did provide them to this panel, which operated under a far greater cloak of secrecy. Without revealing details of the briefs on Iraq, this commission concluded that the briefs were even "more alarmist and less nuanced" than the far more detailed 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons. The panel concluded that the intelligence estimate, intended to be the government's most authoritative analysis of the Iraqi threat, was "dead wrong." Mr. Bush met with the full commission for more than an hour Thursday morning, and emerged to declare that "we will correct what needs to be fixed, and build on what the commission calls solid intelligence successes." He was referring to a case study singled out by the commission that praised the intelligence agencies' discovery of Libya's nuclear program, in large part by piercing the nuclear black market network run by the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. Two months after a ship bearing nuclear centrifuge parts to Tripoli was intercepted on the high seas, Libya agreed to dismantle its nuclear program. But the commission, formally called the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, described that success as a rarity that intelligence agencies are "not well-postured to replicate." "They're still, in some respects, fighting the last war," Mr. Robb said, noting how many times outside studies have called for the intelligence agencies to adapt to a very different world of threats, and how steadfastly they have resisted change. Though much of the report concentrates on how the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other corners of the intelligence world exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq before the American-led invasion, Mr. Bush took a very different view of its main message. He put his emphasis on the opposite problem: the hazard of missing or underestimating threats "in a dangerous new century." "Our collection and analysis of intelligence will never be perfect, but in an age where our margin for error is getting smaller, in an age in which we are at war, the consequences of underestimating a threat could be tens of thousands of innocent lives," Mr. Bush said. "And my administration will continue to make intelligence reforms that will allow us to identify threats before they fully emerge so we can take effective action to protect the American people." The president, however, never discussed how the overestimation of Iraq's threat contributed to his decision to go to war, and the commission - citing the mandate he gave it more than a year ago, when the White House feared that the issue could affect the election - never delved into that issue. George J. Tenet, who was director of central intelligence from 1997 until last summer, released a statement on Thursday defending his record. "I wish the commission had spent more time reflecting on how far the intelligence community has come in rebuilding American intelligence," he wrote. Mr. Tenet said that by the late 1990's, budget cuts had left the agencies "nearly in Chapter 11." He added that "we put in place a deliberate program to rebuild capabilities and recruit a modern work force," changes that were still in progress when the Iraq assessment was undertaken. Deleted from the commission's public report were 91 additional pages that appear in a classified version, mostly a discussion of the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, and of covert operations. According to officials who have reviewed the commission's 11 specific findings about those two nations, which Judge Silberman and Mr. Robb declined to discuss even in general terms, the classified version includes a review of the parallel pitfalls that could affect judgments of how many nuclear weapons North Korea has built, or how long it will be until Iran can manufacture its own uranium weapons. The nature of intelligence about Iraq differed greatly from what is known about the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea. But when asked whether the current assessments of those two countries suffer from the same problem the commission said had plagued the Iraq analysis - an assumption that because a country is caught buying illicit goods, it knows how to assemble them - Mr. Robb would say only, "We found systemic problems throughout the community." But Judge Silberman interjected, saying those problems did not necessarily affect assessments of Iran and North Korea. Like the Senate Intelligence Committee report issued last year, this report documented sweeping failures of intelligence collection and analysis, debilitating turf battles, multiple agencies doing the same work, lagging technology and meager ranks of human spies. But it did so in much more vivid terms. The C.I. A. and the National Security Agency "may be sleek and omniscient in the movies, but in real life they and other intelligence agencies are vast government bureaucracies," it said, "prone to develop self-reinforcing, risk- averse cultures that take outside advice badly." As a central remedy, the commission prescribes the integration of the scattered agencies under the strong control of the new national intelligence director, Mr. Negroponte, a longtime diplomat who most recently served as ambassador to Iraq and to the United Nations. Under the director, "mission managers" would each be responsible for coordinating intelligence from all agencies on a certain target, which might be a country or a type of weapon. Mr. Bush assigned his homeland security adviser, Fran Townsend, to oversee the carrying out of the commission's recommendations. Ms. Townsend said she had already met with cabinet members and asked them to identify recommendations that could be adopted immediately, others that required review and "a small handful" that would require new legislation. Among the commission's 74 recommendations are the creation of a nongovernment research body to play permanent devil's advocate, challenging the agencies' assessments, and of a National Intelligence University to improve the training of analysts and spies. The commission proposes the creation of a National Counterproliferation Center of fewer than 100 people to manage and coordinate intelligence on the threat of weapons proliferation, especially from private networks like Dr. Khan's. It would join the National Counterterrorism Center as coordinating bodies under the director of national intelligence. Other ideas are likely to face stiff resistance from the agencies. Saying the Central Intelligence Agency's existing clandestine service is unlikely to overcome a history of poor performance, the report recommends creating a new Human Intelligence Directorate within C.I.A. to build a better spy service. It also urges major reshuffling of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. At the heart of the report is the dispiriting, though increasingly familiar, account of the failure on Iraqi weapons. The intelligence service was "crippled by its inability to collect meaningful intelligence on Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs," it said, and fell back on "old assumptions" based on Saddam Hussein's past behavior that he must be aggressively building an unconventional arsenal. The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi weapons produced in 2002 took the assumptions "and swathed them in the mystique of intelligence, providing secret information that seemed to support them but was in fact nearly worthless, if not misleading," the commission said. The commission provides a strange sort of exoneration for the and Ahmad Chalabi, the onetime Pentagon favorite who was accused of fueling the drive to war by providing false information about Mr. Hussein's arsenals to American officials and the news media. Quoting a C.I.A. investigation conducted after the war, it said "I.N.C.-related sources had a minimal impact" on the administration's assessments. But it also calls two sources in the I.N.C. "fabricators." On one of the most delicate questions raised by the Iraqi intelligence failure, the report said "the analysts who worked the Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments." But the commission added a caveat. Apparently referring to repeated statements from Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top policy makers suggesting that Mr. Hussein had illicit weapons stockpiles, the report said, "It is hard to deny that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom." The report said the intelligence agencies were behind the technological curve in crucial areas, notably biotechnology, and woefully ignorant of important cultural issues. During the , the agencies had impressive expertise on Soviet society and ideology, the report noted, but it said, "No equivalent talent pool exists today for the study of Islamic extremism." While C.I.A. gets the most attention, the eavesdroppers of National Security Agency also get a very critical look. While writing in vague terms to avoid compromising sources, the commission said Mr. Hussein's government was able to foil many of N.S.A.'s eavesdropping attempts. Technological changes in telecommunications have put major sources of intelligence out of reach of N.S.A.'s signals intelligence, the technical term for eavesdropping, it said, adding, "Regaining signals intelligence, access must be a top priority." The commission takes a strong stand against leaks to the news media of classified intelligence information, which it says have "cost the American people hundreds of millions of dollars, and done grave harm to national security." It proposed that an inspector general working for the director of national intelligence be assigned to investigate all leaks and deter them by firing or prosecuting identified leakers. In a brief note on interrogations, the commission said that captured detainees provided one source of critical intelligence and added that it had had been assured that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales personally approves interrogation techniques that go beyond methods that are openly published, apparently referring to publicly known military interrogation guidelines. The report adds, "Where special practices are allowed in extraordinary cases of dire emergency, those procedures should require permission from sufficiently high-level officials to ensure compliance with overall guidelines." Reaction to the report was generally positive. Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, praised the commission but said its recommendations could still languish without strong support from the president, Congress and Mr. Negroponte. "There's about a six-month window before turf battles and the inertia of Washington will sink this," she said. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/01/politics/01intel.html?

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Los Angeles Times April 1, 2005 Pg. 1 Intelligence Analysts Whiffed On A 'Curveball' Report says one Iraqi defector singlehandedly corrupted prewar weapons estimates. By Greg Miller and Bob Drogin, Times Staff Writers WASHINGTON — Prewar claims by the United States that Iraq was producing biological weapons were based almost entirely on accounts from a defector who was described as "crazy" by his intelligence handlers and a "congenital liar" by his friends. The defector, code-named "Curveball," spoke with alarming specificity about Iraq's alleged biological weapons programs and fleet of mobile labs. But postwar investigations showed that he wasn't even in the country at times when he claimed to have taken part in illicit weapons work. Despite persistent doubts about his credibility, Curveball's claims were included in the Bush administration's case for war without so much as a caveat. And when CIA analysts argued after the war that the agency needed to admit it had been duped, they were forced out of their jobs. The disclosures about Curveball and the extensive role he played in corrupting U.S. intelligence estimates on Iraq were included in a devastating report released Thursday by a commission established by President Bush to evaluate U.S. intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. The 601-page document is a sweeping assessment of U.S. intelligence failures that identifies breakdowns in dozens of cases involving multiple countries and terrorist organizations. But in many ways, Curveball's story is the centerpiece of the report, a cautionary tale told in excruciating detail to highlight failures that plagued U.S. spy agencies at almost every step in the intelligence process — from collection to analysis to presentation to policymakers. U.S. intelligence agencies' reliance on Curveball and their failure to scrutinize his claims are described in the report as the "primary reason" that the CIA and other spy agencies "fundamentally misjudged the status of Iraq's [biological weapons] programs." No other episode is explored in as much detail, or recounted with as much evident dismay. "Worse than having no human sources," the commission said, "is being seduced by a human source who is telling lies." Curveball even influenced assessments in areas where he claimed no inside knowledge, the commission said. One analyst told the panel that Curveball's descriptions of biological weapons activity in Iraq "pushed" chemical weapons experts to be more aggressive in their judgments. "Much of the CW confidence was built on the BW confidence," the analyst said. Curveball's identity has never been publicly revealed. His code name and the role he played in leading U.S. spy agencies to assess that Iraq possessed biological weapons was first described in an article in the Los Angeles Times in March 2004. The commission's report describes Curveball as an Iraqi chemical engineer who defected at a time when U.S. and other spy agencies were desperate for new sources on Iraq's weapons programs, after U.N. inspectors had left the country in 1998. The CIA never had access to Curveball. Instead, he was controlled by Germany's intelligence service, which passed along the information it collected to the United States through the Defense Intelligence Agency, a Pentagon spy agency that handled information from Iraqi defectors. Between January 2000 and September 2001, the report said, the DIA disseminated "almost 100 reports" from Curveball, who was seen as a valuable new source. Among his most alarming claims was that Iraq had assembled a fleet of mobile labs to manufacture biological weapons and evade detection. The reports triggered a flurry of escalating U.S. intelligence assessments on Iraq, even though the DIA "did not even attempt to determine Curveball's veracity," according to the report. Curveball's claims gained new currency after the Sept. 11 attacks, as the Bush administration adopted a policy of preempting international threats and turned its focus to Iraq. Curveball's claims were crucial to the case for war. An October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iraq "has" biological weapons was "based almost exclusively on information obtained" from Curveball, according to the report. Four months later, when then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made a presentation to the United Nations, he showed illustrations of Iraq's alleged bioweapons labs and described an accident in which 12 Iraqis had died operating one of the vehicles. Curveball was the main source for both assertions. Concerns about Curveball's credibility were never conveyed to Powell or other administration officials, the commission found. But there were problems with Curveball's claims at an early stage. Some CIA officials noted that Curveball's memory showed significant "improvement" as he pursued a European immigration deal and deteriorated when it was granted. In May 2000, a Defense Department official assigned to the CIA was allowed to meet with Curveball, apparently to examine the source physically to see whether he bore signs of having survived a biological weapons accident or had been vaccinated for exposure to such agents. The evaluation was "inconclusive," according to the commission. But the official expressed concern that Curveball had a "hangover" during their meeting and "might be an alcoholic." Further, the official was surprised that Curveball spoke excellent English because the Germans had said he didn't speak the language. By early 2001, the CIA was getting messages from German intelligence that Curveball was "out of control" and could not be located. Some of Curveball's information was contradicted by other intelligence. His description of a depot for the weapons labs didn't match surveillance images, which showed a wall where Curveball said vehicles were entering and exiting. As war approached, new problems surfaced. Before Powell's presentation, the CIA pressed for permission to speak directly with Curveball. The head of one of the agency's divisions arranged a lunch with a German intelligence official. The German official discouraged the idea, saying, "You don't want to see him because he's crazy," according to the commission report. The German went on to suggest that Curveball had suffered a nervous breakdown, that speaking with him would be "a waste of time," and that he might be a "fabricator." Agency officials dispute what happened next, in the commission's telling. Several officers in the CIA's clandestine service described meetings and conversations in which they warned senior agency officials of Curveball's credibility problems. One officer said she was told by then-Deputy Director of Operations James L. Pavitt that judgments about Curveball "should be made by analysts." Another recalled warning John McLaughlin, then deputy director of the CIA, that Curveball might be a fabricator, only to have McLaughlin say, "Oh, my! I hope that's not true." Finally, about midnight before the day of Powell's U.N. presentation, an agency officer described a telephone conversation with then-CIA Director George J. Tenet in which the officer warned against relying on Curveball. "Tenet replied with words to the effect of 'yeah, yeah,' and that he was 'exhausted,' " the commission's report said. Pavitt told the commission he was aware of "handling problems" with Curveball but did not know Curveball was the dominant source for biological weapons assessments. McLaughlin and Tenet told the panel that they did not recall receiving those warnings about Curveball. Tenet, McLaughlin and Pavitt all left the CIA last year. The commission report revealed details about problems with other prominent prewar claims. The CIA asserted that Iraq was importing aluminum tubes to be used as centrifuges in a nuclear weapons program, although authorities have since concluded they were for conventional rockets. An allegation that Iraq was seeking to acquire uranium from Niger was based on "transparently forged documents" purporting to show a contract between the countries, the commission concluded. There were "flaws in the letterhead, forged signatures, misspelled words, incorrect titles for individuals and government entities," the report said. The contract document also referred to an alleged meeting "that took place on 'Wednesday, July 7, 2000,' even though July 7, 2000, was a Friday," the report said. All of these assertions unraveled, but none in more embarrassing fashion than the case built on Curveball's accounts. After the invasion, intelligence officials tracked down Iraqis who Curveball had claimed were his co-workers in the biological weapons program. All denied there was a mobile biological weapons program, and none "even knew who Curveball was," the commission found. Curveball said the program began in 1995, but family members and associates said that he had been fired from his position that year, and that he was out of the country for much of the following four-year period. Although Curveball had said the deadly accident he witnessed had taken place in 1998, he "was not even in Iraq at that time, according to information supplied by family members and later confirmed by travel records," the commission found. When CIA officers finally got direct access to Curveball in May 2004, he was "unwilling or unable" to explain discrepancies in his account, and any remaining questions about his lack of reliability "were removed," the commission said. The panel challenged one persistent suspicion about Curveball: that his deception was the result of coaching by the Iraqi National Congress, an organization led by Ahmad Chalabi that had spent years urging the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime. The panel found that at least two national congress defectors were fabricators, but said it was "unable to uncover any evidence that the INC or any other organization was directing Curveball." Long after the invasion, the CIA resisted acknowledging that Curveball was a phony and that its prewar claims about Iraq's weapons programs were wrong, the commission said. One analyst who argued in late 2003 that Curveball had lied was "read the riot act" by his director, accused of "making waves" and ultimately forced to leave the office. Another analyst who urged the agency to issue a reassessment of Iraq's chemical weapons program was "told to leave." The agency rescinded all of its intelligence reports that were based on Curveball in May 2004. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-curveball1apr01,0,959265.story?coll=la-home-headlines

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Washington Post April 1, 2005 Pg. 1 Data On Iraqi Arms Flawed, Panel Says Intelligence Commission Outlines 74 Fixes for Bureaucracy By Walter Pincus and Peter Baker, Washington Post Staff Writers U.S. intelligence agencies were "dead wrong" in their prewar assessments of Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and today know "disturbingly little" about the capabilities and intentions of other potential adversaries such as Iran and North Korea, a presidential commission reported yesterday. While praising intelligence successes in Libya and Pakistan, the commission's report offered a withering critique of the government's collection of information leading to the , calling its data "either worthless or misleading" and its analysis "riddled with errors." That resulted in one of the "most damaging intelligence failures in recent American history." The 692-page report to President Bush determined that many of the problems that led to the Iraq breakdown have not been fixed, and warned that they may be undercutting the quality of current U.S. evaluations of Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons development. To avoid a repeat performance, the commission produced a set of 74 recommendations intended to "transform" a sprawling intelligence bureaucracy that it described as "fragmented, loosely managed and poorly coordinated." The report presents the most extensive examination to date of how the United States came to believe that Saddam Hussein was harboring secret weapons of mass destruction, leading to a war that toppled a dictator but turned up no such weapons. The report depicted an intelligence apparatus plagued by turf battles, wedded to old assumptions and mired in unimaginative thinking. Yet while unstinting in its appraisal of intelligence agencies, the panel that Bush appointed under pressure in February 2004 said it was "not authorized" to explore the question of how the commander in chief used the faulty information to make perhaps the most critical decision of his presidency. As he accepted the report yesterday, Bush offered no thoughts about relying on flawed intelligence to launch a war and took no questions from reporters. Instead, he focused on the proposals to revamp the intelligence agencies further after their post-Sept. 11 reorganization. "The central conclusion is one that I share," Bush said, flanked by the commission's co-chairmen, retired judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.). "America's intelligence community needs fundamental change to enable us to successfully confront the threats of the 21st century." Bush ordered White House homeland security adviser Frances Townsend to cull through the recommendations, most of which could be enacted by executive action, and she directed Cabinet secretaries to report back to her quickly. "You will begin to see action in a matter of weeks," Townsend said. Some Democrats complained that the commission effectively ducked the central issue of how Bush decided to go to war in Iraq to eliminate weapons that were not there. Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) said the report "fails to review an equally important aspect of our national security policymaking process -- how policymakers use the intelligence they are provided." House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) was even sharper. "The president's decision to go to war in Iraq was also dead wrong," she said, adding, "The investigation will not be complete unless we know how the Bush administration may have used or misused intelligence to pursue its own agenda." But former CIA director George J. Tenet, who reportedly once told Bush that the Iraq weapons intelligence was a "slam dunk," said the report is too harsh on the agency. "I wish the commission had spent more time reflecting on how far the intelligence community has come in rebuilding American intelligence," he said. The nine-member panel, officially called the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, blamed intelligence agencies for overselling their knowledge and not disclosing conflicting information to policymakers. At the same time, it exonerated Bush and Vice President Cheney from allegations of pressuring analysts to conclude that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. "The analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments," the commission said. "That said, it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom." In fact, the commission concluded that policymakers should in the future challenge analysts harder to justify their conclusions, even at the risk of being accused of politicizing intelligence. "It's very important for policymakers to question and push hard on the intelligence community to explore and to fill gaps," Silberman said. The panel's report became the latest to document the Iraq intelligence failures and offered details never disclosed in previous reports. It revealed, for example, that the National Security Agency, the organization that intercepts electronic signals, was effectively shut out of Iraq and lost access to "important aspects of Iraqi communications." And it described how the CIA failed to tell then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell before his showdown presentation to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 that a key allegation was provided by a single Iraqi source nicknamed "Curveball" whose credibility had been undercut. The analysts who helped prepare Powell's speech were unaware that, as the report puts it, Curveball was "lying." The report expressed particular concern that the nation's intelligence agencies are not adequately focusing on biological weapons. It said U.S. forces in Afghanistan discovered that al Qaeda's bioweapons research was "further along" than U.S. intelligence had known, particularly involving a pathogen the commission referred to only as "Agent X." "The program was extensive, well-organized, and operated for two years before September 11" at sites containing commercial equipment and run by "individuals with special training," the report noted. Based on what they found in Afghanistan, U.S. intelligence theorized that al Qaeda "had acquired several biological agents possibly as early as 1999, and had the necessary equipment to enable limited, basic production of Agent X." Bioweapons specialists said Agent X most likely referred to a strain of anthrax. U.S. officials have said that al Qaeda conducted research on anthrax at an Afghan facility called Tarnak Farm, some of it by Yazid Sufaat, a Malaysian bioscientist trained in California and now in detention in Malaysia. The commission expressed concern that intelligence agencies may still be misjudging situations in North Korea and Iran; however, the section of the report dealing with those countries remained classified. "The bad news is that we still know disturbingly little about the weapons programs and even less about the intentions of many of our most dangerous adversaries," the panel said in a cover letter to Bush. For all of the technical challenges facing the intelligence community, the commission linked its overall problem to management. "They're still in some respects fighting the last war," said Robb, referring to the Cold War. "The enemy has changed dramatically." The panel proposed empowering the new director of national intelligence, a position created by legislation last year, to better integrate the collection efforts of the government's 15 intelligence agencies at the CIA, Pentagon, State Department, Energy Department and FBI. But it also urged that analysts remain diversified at those agencies so they can carry on what the commission hopes will be a more lively debate about interpretations. The panel suggested a variety of reorganizations, including the creation of a Human Intelligence Directorate within the CIA to oversee increased overseas spying by the agency's Directorate of Operations as well as the Pentagon and FBI. It also proposed merging the FBI's counterintelligence and counterterrorism divisions with its new intelligence division into a new National Security Service within the bureau. The new service would report to both the FBI director and the national intelligence director. The report suggested several other new institutions as well, including a National Counter Proliferation Center to coordinate the fight against weapons of mass destruction; a National Intelligence University to enhance tradecraft training; a long-term analysis unit to escape the pressures of day-to-day intelligence collection; an Open Source Directorate to focus on finding publicly available information, particularly on the Internet; and a nonprofit research institute outside the intelligence community to encourage dissenting views. The panel also recommended changes to the intelligence reports Bush gets that are known as the presidential daily briefing. Leading up to the Iraq war, the panel found, the briefings were "disastrously one-sided" and "more alarmist and less nuanced" than longer studies, such as the National Intelligence Estimates. The daily briefings never cast doubt on prior information provided to Bush and thus "seemed to be 'selling' intelligence in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested." The panel called for toning down headlines in the briefings and limiting their content to intelligence that "requires high-level attention." It also recommended that the new intelligence director -- John D. Negroponte is awaiting Senate confirmation -- oversee the production of the briefings but not prepare them or even go the White House each morning to present them, because it would consume too much of his time. Staff writers Charles Babington and John Mintz contributed to this report. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15184-2005Mar31.html

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Washington Post April 1, 2005 Pg. 1 Doubts On Weapons Were Dismissed By Dafna Linzer and Barton Gellman, Washington Post Staff Writers As former secretary of state Colin L. Powell worked into the night in a New York hotel room, on the eve of his February 2003 presentation to the U.N. Security Council, CIA officers sent urgent e-mails and cables describing grave doubts about a key charge he was going to make. On the telephone that night, a senior intelligence officer warned then-CIA Director George J. Tenet that he lacked confidence in the principal source of the assertion that Saddam Hussein's scientists were developing deadly agents in mobile laboratories. "Mr. Tenet replied with words to the effect of 'yeah, yeah' and that he was 'exhausted,' " according to testimony quoted yesterday in the report of President Bush's commission on the intelligence failures leading up to his decision to invade Iraq in March 2003. Tenet told the commission he did not recall that part of the conversation. He relayed no such concerns to Powell, who made the germ- warfare charge a centerpiece of his presentation the next day. That was one among many examples -- cited over 692 pages in the report -- of fruitless dissent on the accuracy of claims against Iraq. Up until the days before U.S. troops entered Iraqi territory that March, the intelligence community was inundated with evidence that undermined virtually all charges it had made against Iraq, the report said. In scores of additional cases involving the country's alleged nuclear and chemical programs and its delivery systems, the commission described a kind of echo chamber in which plausible hypotheses hardened into firm assertions of fact, eventually becoming immune to evidence. Leading analysts accepted at face value data supporting the existence of illegal weapons, the commission said, and discounted counter-evidence as skillful Iraqi deception. The commission's anatomy of failure on Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program is a case in point. It begins in early 2001, as Bush took office, when the CIA got its first report that Iraq was trying to buy black-market aluminum tubes. The agency swiftly concluded, after intercepting a sample in April of that year, that Iraq intended the tubes to be used in centrifuges that would enrich uranium for the core of a nuclear weapon. The CIA's Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) never budged from that analysis, the report said. In the following 18 months, WINPAC analysts won a fierce bureaucratic battle against dissenters from other agencies who said the tubes -- roughly three feet long and three inches in diameter -- were the wrong size, shape and material for plausible use in centrifuges. The tubes became the principal evidence for a "key judgment" in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which said Iraq had "reconstituted" a nuclear weapons program and could build a bomb before the end of the decade. To support its assertions about the aluminum tubes, the CIA made a series of arguments that the nation's leading centrifuge physicists described repeatedly as technically garbled, improbable or unambiguously false, the report said. One WINPAC analyst -- identified previously in The Washington Post as "Joe," with his surname withheld at the CIA's request -- responded by bypassing the Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the nation's only major center of expertise on nuclear centrifuge technology. Joe commissioned a contractor to conduct tests of his own design, then rejected the contractor's results when they did not meet his expectations. Yesterday's report said the CIA also created a panel of experts to rival the Oak Ridge team. Those experts concluded, based on "a stack of documents provided by the CIA," that the tubes were meant for centrifuges. The CIA refused to convene the government's authoritative forum for resolving technical disputes about nuclear weapons. The Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee proposed twice, in the spring and summer of 2002, to assess all the evidence. The CIA's front office replied, according to yesterday's report, "that CIA was not ready to discuss its position." The same summer, then-deputy CIA director John E. McLaughlin brought talking points to a meeting of Bush's national security cabinet, asserting that the tubes were "destined for a gas centrifuge program" and that their procurement showed "clear intent to produce weapons-capable fissile material." The next month, the CIA sent policymakers a report calling the tubes "compelling evidence that Iraq has renewed its gas centrifuge uranium enrichment program." Within weeks of the tubes' interception, the report said, Energy Department experts told the CIA that they matched precisely the materials and dimensions of an Italian-made rocket called the Medusa, a standard NATO munition. They also pointed out that Iraq was building copies of the Medusa and declared a stockpile of identical tubes to U.N. inspectors in 1996. The CIA asked the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center for an analysis of the tubes but withheld the information about the Medusa and the 1996 discovery. The Army analysts said, among other things, that no known rocket used that particular aluminum alloy -- disregarding not only the Medusa but also the U.S.-built Hydra rocket. "The intercepted tubes were not only well-suited, but were in fact a precise fit, for Iraq's conventional rockets," the commission said yesterday, but "certain agencies were more wedded to the analytical position that the tubes were destined for a nuclear program." Even the Energy Department did not hold fast to its analysis. Although it dissented on the tubes, it went along with the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in concluding that Iraq had resumed a nuclear weapons program, based on arguments the commission called insubstantial and illogical. One analyst told the commission, "DOE didn't want to come out before the war and say [Iraq] wasn't reconstituting." Another key piece of evidence came from an Iraqi defector who told the DIA that Iraq had built a secret new nuclear facility. U.S. intelligence could not verify the report, or locate the alleged facility, which did not exist. After the war, the CIA concluded that the defector was "directed" in his claims by the Iraqi National Congress, led by then-exile . To this day, however, the DIA has not withdrawn the defector's reporting from national databases, the report showed. Nor has the DIA withdrawn assessments provided by defectors such as "Curveball," whose tales of mobile laboratories in which scientists cooked up biological weapons were pure fabrication, according to the commission. Concerns over Curveball had been floating around the CIA for more than three years by the time Powell shared his claims with the world. No CIA officer even met Curveball before the war, although on the night before Powell's presentation, a defense intelligence officer wrote an e-mail to colleagues noting that in his meeting with the defector, Curveball appeared "hung over" and unreliable. But the more Curveball's credibility came into question, the more his allegations were used to bolster the case for war, the report said. Even after Powell's now-famous presentation in the chamber of the U.N. Security Council, the CIA tried to find out more information about Curveball, whose stories had been relayed to the Pentagon through German intelligence. Five days after Powell's presentation, the CIA sent an e-mail to a senior defense intelligence official seeking more information about the defector. What followed, in the commission's account, highlights the terrible working relationships within the intelligence community, the lack of interest in getting the truth about Curveball and the ease with which the DIA discarded concerns about the case against Iraq. The defense intelligence division chief who received the CIA e-mail forwarded it to a subordinate in an e-mail that was inadvertently copied back to the sender. In it, the division chief expressed shock at the CIA's suggestion that Curveball might be unreliable. The "CIA is up to their old tricks" and did not "have a clue" about how the source had been handled, the division chief wrote in excerpts quoted in the commission's report. Only in March 2004, one year after the invasion of Iraq, did the CIA confront Curveball over his prewar claims. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17211-2005Mar31.html

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New York Times April 1, 2005 Panel Warns That Defense Against Germ Attack Is Weak By Eric Lipton WASHINGTON, March 31 - Warning that the United States has escaped catastrophic biological attack largely by luck, the presidential commission on intelligence urged the American government on Thursday to intensify its efforts to block any biological assaults by terrorist groups or other countries. The recommendation, which was made in some of the most strident language found in the 601-page report, came even though the commission, like others before it, confirmed that the United States was wrong in its assertion that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons before the start of the war with Iraq in 2003. In other places around the globe, including Afghanistan, United States intelligence officials have apparently underestimated progress by terrorists and others in developing biological weapons, which are much cheaper to use and easier to acquire than a nuclear bomb, the report said. "The threat is deeply troubling today; it will be more so tomorrow," it said. "The intelligence community, and the government as a whole, needs to approach the problem with a new urgency and new strategies." Global searches by the Central Intelligence Agency and other investigators for evidence of stockpiles of bacteria like anthrax, toxins like ricin, or viruses like smallpox or the plague have been inadequate, the report said. Even publicly available sources of information about biological weapons were not being monitored closely enough, the report said. The effort suffered, the report said, from "a poorly focused collection process that is ill equipped to gather and sort through the wealth of information that could help alert the community to crucial indicators of biological weapons activity." Evidence of the severity of the threat were widespread, it said. Anthrax-tainted letters killed five people in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and the Pentagon. The anthrax scare crippled mail delivery in several cities in the United States and required a cleanup costing more than $1 billion, the report said. In 1995, it further noted, the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin on subway trains in Tokyo, killing 12. Although the United States planned to spend $5.6 billion over the next decade to stockpile new vaccines and treatments for use if a biological or chemical attack occurs, the most important weakness, the report said, is in prevention. "We should consider ourselves lucky that we have not yet suffered a major biological attack," the report said. In Afghanistan, for example, investigators found evidence after the war there that Al Qaeda operatives had the equipment necessary for limited production of a particularly virulent biological weapon that the report identified only with a code name, Agent X, which unclassified documents suggested was anthrax. "The program was extensive, well organized and operated for two years before Sept. 11, but intelligence insights into the program were limited," the report said. The report recommended closer interaction between scientists and spies to improve the detection of biological weapons, which are hard to find because they can be manufactured anywhere from a brewery to a pharmaceutical plant. The report urged the passage of laws on an international scale to make the production of biological weapons a crime. Experts who have studied the threat posed by biological weapons said they welcomed the recommendations made by the commission because cold-war-era spy tools like spy satellites did not work against the biological threat. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/01/politics/01bioterror.html?pagewanted=all

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Los Angeles Times April 1, 2005 N. Korea Demands Disarmament Talks Pyongyang says the U.S. should treat it as an equal in negotiations and should remove its nuclear arsenal from the peninsula and region. By Associated Press SEOUL — North Korea said Thursday that the United States should dismantle all potential nuclear threats in the region before it would discuss giving up its own nuclear program, and it demanded to be treated equally in disarmament talks. "Now that we have become a nuclear power, the six-party talks should be disarmament talks where participants can solve the issue on an equal basis," a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a statement carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency. The unidentified spokesman said the nuclear crisis could no longer be resolved through discussions on a potential reward in return for freezing the nuclear program. "To realize a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula … U.S. nuclear threats on the Korean Peninsula and its neighboring region should be removed," the spokesman said. The United States has said it has removed its nuclear arsenal from the Korean Peninsula, and it was not clear what the spokesman meant. The international talks, also involving South Korea, China, Japan and Russia, have been stalled since June. Washington has said it will offer security guarantees and other economic and diplomatic benefits to the North, but only after it completely and verifiably dismantles its atomic weapons program. A North Korean official said in a report published today that the regime in Pyongyang, the capital, also wanted a U.S. apology for being labeled an "outpost of tyranny" before it returned to the talks. The "outpost of tyranny" comment was made by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her confirmation hearings. On a trip to the region last month, she pointedly called the North a "sovereign" country, which many saw as an attempt to soften her earlier remark. However, Han Song Ryol, deputy chief of the North's mission to the United Nations, told South Korea's Yonhap news agency that Rice's recent comment "cannot be taken as being equivalent to an apology." http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-nukes1apr01,1,3305917.story?coll=la-headlines-world

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Washington Times April 1, 2005 Pg. 13 Tehran Rushes Weapons Program Exiles say funds set aside for plan By Al Webb, The Washington Times LONDON -- The Iranian government is fast-tracking an atomic-weapons program and has allocated $2.5 billion to either buy three nuclear warheads or produce them at home, an organization of Iranian exiles claimed yesterday. The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an umbrella body of exiled opposition groups, said Tehran is speeding up efforts to build a plutonium bomb by 2007. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is determined that Iran will have a nuclear arsenal and that Tehran ?would acquire the warheads by their own means or buy them abroad,? NCRI official Mohammad Mohaddessin said. Mr. Mohaddessin, chairman of the exile group's foreign affairs committee, told reporters in Paris that he received news of the funds allocated for the warheads only yesterday morning. He declined to reveal his source, nor did he disclose which country could have provided the warheads. The main force behind the NCRI is the People's Mojahedin, also known as Mojahedin Khalq. Until recently it has waged war on fundamentalist Iran from bases in Iraq. The administration of Ronald Reagan branded it as a terrorist organization. ?Khamenei has told [Iranian Defense Minister Ali] Shamkhani ... that obtaining a nuclear bomb would guarantee the survival of the Iranian regime forever,? Mr. Mohaddessin said. The NCRI seeks the overthrow of Iran's clerical rulers and is listed as a terrorist organization by the European Union, as well as the United States. Mr. Mohaddessin said Ayatollah Khamenei ordered $2.5 billion in funding for the warheads in mid-2004. He also said the Iranian government is stepping up work on a heavy-water reactor in Arak, about 150 miles south of Tehran, that could come up with enough plutonium to manufacture one nuclear bomb a year. ?The regime told the International Atomic Energy Agency that the reactor would be operational in 2014; in reality, they want to start it in 2006 or 2007,? Mr. Mohaddessin said. Iran is prepared to produce 22 pounds of plutonium ?between now and 2006-07,? he added. Tehran has steadfastly maintained that its nuclear program is intended solely for peaceful purposes, including the generation of electricity. But both the United States and some European Union members are concerned that Iran could use that same program to produce atomic weapons. Britain, France and Germany are negotiating with Tehran to try to get Iran to provide ?objective guarantees? that its nuclear program will not be turned to weapons production. The NCRI exiles have stepped up the pressure on Western nations to take steps against Iran. The group said last year that a Pakistani scientist who is known to have sold nuclear secrets abroad has provided Tehran with the blueprints for a nuclear bomb. http://www.washtimes.com/world/20050401-012527-8225r.htm

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