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Intelligence: C.I.A. Admits It Didn�t Give Weapon Data to the U.N.
February 21, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 - The Central Intelligence Agency has
acknowledged that it did not provide the United Nations
with information about 21 of the 105 sites in Iraq singled
out by American intelligence before the war as the most
highly suspected of housing illicit weapons.
The acknowledgment, in a Jan. 20 letter to Senator Carl
Levin, Democrat of Michigan, contradicts public statements
before the war by top Bush administration officials.
Both George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence,
and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said
the United States had briefed United Nations inspectors on
all of the sites identified as "high value and moderate
value" in the weapons hunt.
The contradiction is significant because Congressional
opponents of the war were arguing a year ago that the
United Nations inspectors should be given more time to
complete their search before the United States and its
allies began the invasion. The White House, bolstered by
Mr. Tenet, insisted that it was fully cooperating with the
inspectors, and at daily briefings the White House issued
assurances that the administration was providing the
inspectors with the best information possible.
In a telephone interview on Friday, Senator Levin said he
now believed that Mr. Tenet had misled Congress, which he
described as "totally unacceptable."
Senior administration officials said Friday night that Ms.
Rice had relied on information provided by intelligence
agencies when she assured Senator Levin, in a letter on
March 6, 2003, that "United Nations inspectors have been
briefed on every high or medium priority weapons of mass
destruction, missile and U.A.V.-related site the U.S.
intelligence community has identified." Mr. Tenet said much
the same thing in testimony on Feb. 12, 2003.
U.A.V.'s are unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly called
drones.
Asked about the contradiction between the C.I.A.'s current
account and Ms. Rice's letter, the spokesman for the
national security council, Sean McCormack, said, "Dr. Rice
provided a good-faith answer to Senator Levin based on the
best information that was made available to her."
This is not the first time the White House and the C.I.A.
have engaged in finger-pointing about the quality of the
intelligence that formed the basis of administration
statements.
Last summer, Dr. Rice noted that Mr. Tenet had not read
over the State of the Union address in which Mr. Bush said
Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy uranium from Africa, a
statement the White House later acknowledged was based on
faulty intelligence. That began a prolonged period of
tension between the agency and the White House that has
never fully abated, and may be inflamed by the C.I.A.'s
acknowledgment to Senator Levin.
The letter to Senator Levin, from Stanley M. Moskowitz, the
agency's director of Congressional affairs, disclosed that
the agency had shared information on only 84 of the 105
suspected priority weapons sites.
Mr. Moskowitz did not directly account for the sites
omitted. But he cited an earlier letter from the agency to
the senator that said the agency had sought to help the
United Nations by providing "the intelligence that we
judged would be fruitful in their search for prohibited
material and activities in Iraq."
In a letter to Senator Levin on May 23, 2003, Mr. Tenet had
also said that "in hindsight, we could have been more
precise in the words we chose to describe which of the high
and medium sites that we gave" to United Nations
inspectors.
Mr. Tenet added in that letter, "We were focusing on the
intelligence we had that we believed would lead to fruitful
efforts by the inspectors, rather than trying to
specifically decipher our `list of lists' and the process
by which we shared information."
An intelligence official who spoke on condition of
anonymity described Senator Levin as "obsessed with this
particular issue" and said the C.I.A. had done nothing
inappropriate. "We provided the best information that we
had, and the notion that we held back information that
would have been useful is just absurd," the official said.
Mr. Moskowitz suggested that the sites about which the
C.I.A. had not provided information were already known to
United Nations inspectors.
The acknowledgment by the agency came after more than a
year of questions from Senator Levin. He said he believed
that the Bush administration had withheld the information
because it wanted to persuade the American people that the
United Nations-led hunt for weapons in Iraq had run its
full course before the war.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/21/politics/21WEAP.html?ex=1078582774&ei=1&en=d0c312615e084b57
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