Depiction
of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence
By Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 10, 2003; Page A01 >
His name was Joe, from the U.S. government. He carried 40
classified slides and a message from the Bush administration.
An engineer-turned-CIA analyst, Joe had helped build the U.S.
government case that Iraq posed a nuclear threat. He landed in
Vienna on Jan. 22 and drove to the U.S. diplomatic mission
downtown. In a conference room 32 floors above the Danube River,
he told United Nations nuclear inspectors they were making a
serious mistake.
At issue was Iraq's efforts to buy high-strength aluminum
tubes. The U.S. government said those tubes were for centrifuges
to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb. But the IAEA, the world's
nuclear watchdog, had uncovered strong evidence that Iraq was
using them for conventional rockets.
Joe described the rocket story as a transparent Iraqi lie.
According to people familiar with his presentation, which
circulated before and afterward among government and outside
specialists, Joe said the specialized aluminum in the tubes was
"overspecified," "inappropriate" and "excessively strong." No
one, he told the inspectors, would waste the costly alloy on a
rocket.
In fact, there was just such a rocket. According to
knowledgeable U.S. and overseas sources, experts from U.S.
national laboratories reported in December to the Energy
Department and U.S. intelligence analysts that Iraq was
manufacturing copies of the Italian-made Medusa 81. Not only the
Medusa's alloy, but also its dimensions, to the fraction of a
millimeter, matched the disputed aluminum tubes.
A CIA spokesman asked that Joe's last name be withheld for his
safety, and said he would not be made available for an interview.
The spokesman said the tubes in question "are not the same as the
Medusa 81" but would not identify what distinguishes them. In an
interview, CIA Director George J. Tenet said several different
U.S. intelligence agencies believed the tubes could be used to
build gas centrifuges for a uranium enrichment program.
The Vienna briefing was one among many private and public
forums in which the Bush administration portrayed a menacing
Iraqi nuclear threat, even as important features of its evidence
were being undermined. There were other White House assertions
about forbidden weapons programs, including biological and
chemical arms, for which there was consensus among analysts. But
the danger of a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein, more potent as an
argument for war, began with weaker evidence and grew weaker
still in the three months before war.
This article is based on interviews with analysts and
policymakers inside and outside the U.S. government, and access
to internal documents and technical evidence not previously made
public.
The new information indicates a pattern in which President
Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates -- in public
and behind the scenes -- made allegations depicting Iraq's
nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more
imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On
occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not
conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected
misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information
upon which it had previously relied:
Bush and others often alleged that President Hussein
held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, but did not
disclose that the known work of the scientists was largely
benign. Iraq's three top gas centrifuge experts, for example, ran
a copper factory, an operation to extract graphite from oil and a
mechanical engineering design center at Rashidiya.
The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October
2002 cited new construction at facilities once associated with
Iraq's nuclear program, but analysts had no reliable information
at the time about what was happening under the roofs. By
February, a month before the war, U.S. government specialists on
the ground in Iraq had seen for themselves that there were no
forbidden activities at the sites.
Gas centrifuge experts consulted by the U.S. government
said repeatedly for more than a year that the aluminum tubes were
not suitable or intended for uranium enrichment. By December
2002, the experts said new evidence had further undermined the
government's assertion. The Bush administration portrayed the
scientists as a minority and emphasized that the experts did not
describe the centrifuge theory as impossible.
In the weeks and months following Joe's Vienna
briefing, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others continued
to describe the use of such tubes for rockets as an implausible
hypothesis, even after U.S. analysts collected and photographed
in Iraq a virtually identical tube marked with the logo of the
Medusa's Italian manufacturer and the words, in English, "81mm
rocket."
The escalation of nuclear rhetoric a year ago,
including the introduction of the term "mushroom cloud" into the
debate, coincided with the formation of a White House Iraq Group,
or WHIG, a task force assigned to "educate the public" about the
threat from Hussein, as a participant put it.
Two senior policymakers, who supported the war, said in
unauthorized interviews that the administration greatly
overstated Iraq's near-term nuclear potential.
"I never cared about the 'imminent threat,' " said one of the
policymakers, with directly relevant responsibilities. "The
threat was there in [Hussein's] presence in office. To me, just
knowing what it takes to have a nuclear weapons program, he
needed a lot of equipment. You can stare at the yellowcake
[uranium ore] all you want. You need to convert it to gas and
enrich it. That does not constitute an imminent threat, and the
people who were saying that, I think, did not fully appreciate
the difficulties and effort involved in producing the nuclear
material and the physics package."
No White House, Pentagon or State Department policymaker
agreed to speak on the record for this report about the
administration's nuclear case. Answering questions Thursday
before the National Association of Black Journalists, national
security adviser Condoleezza Rice said she is "certain to this
day that this regime was a threat, that it was pursuing a nuclear
weapon, that it had biological and chemical weapons, that it had
used them." White House officials referred all questions of
detail to Tenet.
In an interview and a four-page written statement, Tenet
defended the NIE prepared under his supervision in October. In
that estimate, U.S. intelligence analysts judged that Hussein was
intent on acquiring a nuclear weapon and was trying to rebuild
the capability to make one.
"We stand behind the judgments of the NIE" based on the
evidence available at the time, Tenet said, and "the soundness
and integrity of our process." The estimate was "the product of
years of reporting and intelligence collection, analyzed by
numerous experts in several different agencies."
Tenet said the time to "decide who was right and who was
wrong" about prewar intelligence will not come until the Iraqi
Survey Group, the CIA-directed, U.S. military postwar study in
Iraq of Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs is
completed. The Bush administration has said this will require
months or years.
Facts and Doubts
The possibility of a nuclear-armed Iraq loomed large in the
Bush administration's efforts to convince the American public of
the need for a preemptive strike. Beginning last August, Cheney
portrayed Hussein's nuclear ambitions as a "mortal threat" to the
United States. In the fall and winter, Rice, then Bush, marshaled
the dreaded image of a "mushroom cloud."
By many accounts, including those of career officials who did
not support the war, there were good reasons for concern that the
Iraqi president might revive a program to enrich uranium to
weapons grade and fabricate a working bomb. He had a
well-demonstrated aspiration for nuclear weapons, a proficient
scientific and engineering cadre, a history of covert development
and a domestic supply of unrefined uranium ore. Iraq was
generally believed to have kept the technical documentation for
two advanced German centrifuge designs and the assembly diagrams
for at least one type of "implosion device," which detonates a
nuclear core.
What Hussein did not have was the principal requirement for a
nuclear weapon, a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium
or plutonium. And the U.S. government, authoritative intelligence
officials said, had only circumstantial evidence that Iraq was
trying to obtain those materials.
But the Bush administration had reasons to imagine the worst.
The CIA had faced searing criticism for its failures to foresee
India's resumption of nuclear testing in 1998 and to "connect the
dots" pointing to al Qaeda's attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Cheney,
the administration's most influential advocate of a worst-case
analysis, had been powerfully influenced by his experience as
defense secretary just after the Persian Gulf War of 1991.
Former National Security Council official Richard A. Clarke
recalled how information from freshly seized Iraqi documents
disclosed the existence of a "crash program" to build a bomb in
1991. The CIA had known nothing of it.
"I can understand why that was a seminal experience for
Cheney," Clarke said. "And when the CIA says [in 2002], 'We don't
have any evidence,' his reaction is . . . 'We didn't have any
evidence in 1991, either. Why should I believe you now?' "
Some strategists, in and out of government, argued that the
uncertainty itself -- in the face of circumstantial evidence --
was sufficient to justify "regime change." But that was not what
the Bush administration usually said to the American people.
To gird a nation for the extraordinary step of preemptive war
-- and to obtain the minimum necessary support from allies,
Congress and the U.N. Security Council -- the administration
described a growing, even imminent, nuclear threat from Iraq.
'Nuclear Blackmail'
The unveiling of that message began a year ago this week.
Cheney raised the alarm about Iraq's nuclear menace three
times in August. He was far ahead of the president's public line.
Only Bush and Cheney know, one senior policy official said,
"whether Cheney was trying to push the president or they had
decided to play good cop, bad cop."
On Aug. 7, Cheney volunteered in a question-and-answer session
at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, speaking of Hussein,
that "left to his own devices, it's the judgment of many of us
that in the not-too-distant future, he will acquire nuclear
weapons." On Aug. 26, he described Hussein as a "sworn enemy of
our country" who constituted a "mortal threat" to the United
States. He foresaw a time in which Hussein could "subject the
United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail."
"We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire
nuclear weapons," he said. "Among other sources, we've gotten
this from firsthand testimony from defectors, including Saddam's
own son-in-law."
That was a reference to Hussein Kamel, who had managed Iraq's
special weapons programs before defecting in 1995 to Jordan. But
Saddam Hussein lured Kamel back to Iraq, and he was killed in
February 1996, so Kamel could not have sourced what U.S.
officials "now know."
And Kamel's testimony, after defecting, was the reverse of
Cheney's description. In one of many debriefings by U.S.,
Jordanian and U.N. officials, Kamel said on Aug. 22, 1995, that
Iraq's uranium enrichment programs had not resumed after halting
at the start of the Gulf War in 1991. According to notes typed
for the record by U.N. arms inspector Nikita Smidovich, Kamel
acknowledged efforts to design three different warheads, "but not
now, before the Gulf War."
'Educating the Public'
Systematic coordination began in August, when Chief of Staff
Andrew H. Card Jr. formed the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, to
set strategy for each stage of the confrontation with Baghdad. A
senior official who participated in its work called it "an
internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to
make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its
responsibilities."
In an interview with the New York Times published Sept. 6,
Card did not mention the WHIG but hinted at its mission. "From a
marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in
August," he said.
The group met weekly in the Situation Room. Among the regular
participants were Karl Rove, the president's senior political
adviser; communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin
and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio;
and policy advisers led by Rice and her deputy, Stephen J.
Hadley, along with I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.
The first days of September would bring some of the most
important decisions of the prewar period: what to demand of the
United Nations in the president's Sept. 12 address to the General
Assembly, when to take the issue to Congress, and how to frame
the conflict with Iraq in the midterm election campaign that
began in earnest after Labor Day.
A "strategic communications" task force under the WHIG began
to plan speeches and white papers. There were many themes in the
coming weeks, but Iraq's nuclear menace was among the most
prominent.
'A Mushroom Cloud'
The day after publication of Card's marketing remark, Bush and
nearly all his top advisers began to talk about the dangers of an
Iraqi nuclear bomb.
Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair conferred at Camp David
that Saturday, Sept. 7, and they each described alarming new
evidence. Blair said proof that the threat is real came in "the
report from the International Atomic Energy Agency this morning,
showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapon
sites." Bush said "a report came out of the . . . IAEA, that they
[Iraqis] were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't
know what more evidence we need."
There was no new IAEA report. Blair appeared to be referring
to news reports describing curiosity at the nuclear agency about
repairs at sites of Iraq's former nuclear program. Bush cast as
present evidence the contents of a report from 1996, updated in
1998 and 1999. In those accounts, the IAEA described the history
of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program that arms inspectors had
systematically destroyed.
A White House spokesman later acknowledged that Bush "was
imprecise" on his source but stood by the crux of his charge. The
spokesman said U.S. intelligence, not the IAEA, had given Bush
his information.
That, too, was garbled at best. U.S. intelligence reports had
only one scenario for an Iraqi bomb in six months to a year,
premised on Iraq's immediate acquisition of enough plutonium or
enriched uranium from a foreign source.
"That is just about the same thing as saying that if Iraq gets
a bomb, it will have a bomb," said a U.S. intelligence analyst
who covers the subject. "We had no evidence for it."
Two debuts took place on Sept. 8: the aluminum tubes and the
image of "a mushroom cloud." A Sunday New York Times story quoted
anonymous officials as saying the "diameter, thickness and other
technical specifications" of the tubes -- precisely the grounds
for skepticism among nuclear enrichment experts -- showed that
they were "intended as components of centrifuges."
No one knows when Iraq will have its weapon, the story said,
but "the first sign of a 'smoking gun,' they argue, may be a
mushroom cloud."
Top officials made the rounds of Sunday talk shows that
morning. Rice's remarks echoed the newspaper story. She said on
CNN's "Late Edition" that Hussein was "actively pursuing a
nuclear weapon" and that the tubes -- described repeatedly in
U.S. intelligence reports as "dual-use" items -- were "only
really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge
programs."
"There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he
can acquire nuclear weapons," Rice added, "but we don't want the
smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Anna Perez, a communications adviser to Rice, said Rice did
not come looking for an opportunity to say that. "There was
nothing in her mind that said, 'I have to push the nuclear
issue,' " Perez said, "but Wolf [Blitzer] asked the
question."
Powell, a confidant said, found it "disquieting when people
say things like mushroom clouds." But he contributed in other
ways to the message. When asked about biological and chemical
arms on Fox News, he brought up nuclear weapons and cited the
"specialized aluminum tubing" that "we saw in reporting just this
morning."
Cheney, on NBC's "Meet the Press," also mentioned the tubes
and said "increasingly, we believe the United States will become
the target" of an Iraqi nuclear weapon. Defense Secretary Donald
H. Rumsfeld, on CBS's "Face the Nation," asked listeners to
"imagine a September 11th with weapons of mass destruction,"
which would kill "tens of thousands of innocent men, women and
children."
Bush evoked the mushroom cloud on Oct. 7, and on Nov. 12 Gen.
Tommy R. Franks, chief of U.S. Central Command, said inaction
might bring "the sight of the first mushroom cloud on one of the
major population centers on this planet."
'Literary License'
In its initial meetings, Card's Iraq task force ordered a
series of white papers. After a general survey of Iraqi arms
violations, the first of the single-subject papers -- never
published -- was "A Grave and Gathering Danger: Saddam Hussein's
Quest for Nuclear Weapons."
Wilkinson, at the time White House deputy director of
communications for planning, gathered a yard-high stack of
intelligence reports and press clippings.
Wilkinson said he conferred with experts from the National
Security Council and Cheney's office. Other officials said Will
Tobey and Susan Cook, working under senior director for
counterproliferation Robert Joseph, made revisions and circulated
some of the drafts. Under the standard NSC review process, they
checked the facts.
In its later stages, the draft white paper coincided with
production of a National Intelligence Estimate and its
unclassified summary. But the WHIG, according to three officials
who followed the white paper's progress, wanted gripping images
and stories not available in the hedged and austere language of
intelligence.
The fifth draft of the paper was obtained by The Washington
Post. White House spokesmen dismissed the draft as irrelevant
because Rice decided not to publish it. Wilkinson said Rice and
Joseph felt the paper "was not strong enough."
The document offers insight into the Bush administration's
priorities and methods in shaping a nuclear message. The white
paper was assembled by some of the same team, and at the same
time, as the speeches and talking points prepared for the
president and top officials. A senior intelligence official said
last October that the president's speechwriters took "literary
license" with intelligence, a phrase applicable to language used
by administration officials in some of the white paper's most
emotive and misleading assertions elsewhere.
The draft white paper precedes other known instances in which
the Bush administration considered the now-discredited claim that
Iraq "sought uranium oxide, an essential ingredient in the
enrichment process, from Africa." For a speechwriter, uranium was
valuable as an image because anyone could see its connection to
an atomic bomb. Despite warnings from intelligence analysts, the
uranium would return again and again, including the Jan. 28 State
of the Union address and three other Bush administration
statements that month.
Other errors and exaggerations in public White House claims
were repeated, or had their first mention, in the white
paper.
Much as Blair did at Camp David, the paper attributed to U.N.
arms inspectors a statement that satellite photographs show "many
signs of the reconstruction and acceleration of the Iraqi nuclear
program." Inspectors did not say that. The paper also quoted the
first half of a sentence from a Time magazine interview with U.N.
chief weapons inspector Hans Blix: "You can see hundreds of new
roofs in these photos." The second half of the sentence, not
quoted, was: "but you don't know what's under them."
As Bush did, the white paper cited the IAEA's description of
Iraq's defunct nuclear program in language that appeared to be
current. The draft said, for example, that "since the beginning
of the nineties, Saddam has launched a crash program to divert
nuclear reactor fuel for . . . nuclear weapons." The crash
program began in late 1990 and ended with the war in January
1991. The reactor fuel, save for waste products, is gone.
'Footnotes and Disclaimers'
A senior intelligence official said the White House preferred
to avoid a National Intelligence Estimate, a formal review of
competing evidence and judgments, because it knew "there were
disagreements over details in almost every aspect of the
administration's case against Iraq." The president's advisers,
the official said, did not want "a lot of footnotes and
disclaimers."
But Bush needed bipartisan support for war-making authority in
Congress. In early September, members of the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence began asking why there had been no
authoritative estimate of the danger posed by Iraq. Sen. Richard
J. Durbin (D-Ill.) wrote Sept. 9 of his "concern that the views
of the U.S. intelligence community are not receiving adequate
attention by policymakers in both Congress and the executive
branch." When Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), then committee chairman,
insisted on an NIE in a classified letter two days later, Tenet
agreed.
Explicitly intended to assist Congress in deciding whether to
authorize war, the estimate was produced in two weeks, an
extraordinary deadline for a document that usually takes months.
Tenet said in an interview that "we had covered parts of all
those programs over 10 years through NIEs and other reports, and
we had a ton of community product on all these issues."
Even so, the intelligence community was now in a position of
giving its first coordinated answer to a question that every top
national security official had already answered. "No one outside
the intelligence community told us what to say or not to say,"
Tenet wrote in reply to questions for this article.
The U.S. government possessed no specific information on Iraqi
efforts to acquire enriched uranium, according to six people who
participated in preparing for the estimate. It knew only that
Iraq sought to buy equipment of the sort that years of
intelligence reports had said "may be" intended for or "could be"
used in uranium enrichment.
Richard J. Kerr, a former CIA deputy director now leading a
review of the agency's intelligence analysis about Iraq, said in
an interview that the CIA collected almost no hard information
about Iraq's weapons programs after the departure of IAEA and
U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, arms inspectors during the
Clinton administration. He said that was because of a lack of
spies inside Iraq.
Tenet took issue with that view, saying in an interview, "When
inspectors were pushed out in 1998, we did not sit back. . . .
The fact is we made significant professional progress." In his
written statement, he cited new evidence on biological and
missile programs, but did not mention Hussein's nuclear
pursuits.
The estimate's "Key Judgment" said: "Although we assess that
Saddam does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient material
to make any, he remains intent on acquiring them. Most agencies
assess that Baghdad started reconstituting its nuclear program
about the time that UNSCOM inspectors departed -- December
1998."
According to Kerr, the analysts had good reasons to say that,
but the reasons were largely "inferential."
Hussein was known to have met with some weapons physicists,
and praised them as "nuclear mujaheddin." But the CIA had
"reasonably good intelligence in terms of the general activities
and whereabouts" of those scientists, said another analyst with
the relevant clearances, and knew they had generally not
reassembled into working groups. In a report to Congress in 2001,
the agency could conclude only that some of the scientists
"probably" had "continued at least low-level theoretical R&D
[research and development] associated with its nuclear
program."
Analysts knew Iraq had tried recently to buy magnets,
high-speed balancing machines, machine tools and other equipment
that had some potential for use in uranium enrichment, though no
less for conventional industry. Even assuming the intention, the
parts could not all be made to fit a coherent centrifuge model.
The estimate acknowledged that "we lack specific information on
many key aspects" of the program, and analysts presumed they were
seeing only the tip of the iceberg.
'He Made a Name'
According to outside scientists and intelligence officials,
the most important factor in the CIA's nuclear judgment was
Iraq's attempt to buy high-strength aluminum tubes. The tubes
were the core evidence for a centrifuge program tied to building
a nuclear bomb. Even circumstantially, the CIA reported no
indication of uranium enrichment using anything but
centrifuges.
That interpretation of the tubes was a victory for the man
named Joe, who made the issue his personal crusade. He worked in
the gas centrifuge program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in
the early 1980s. He is not, associates said, a nuclear physicist,
but an engineer whose work involved the platform upon which
centrifuges were mounted.
At some point he joined the CIA. By the end of the 1990s,
according to people who know him casually, he worked in export
controls.
Joe played an important role in discovering Iraq's plans to
buy aluminum tubes from China in 2000, with an Australian
intermediary. U.N. sanctions forbade Iraq to buy anything with
potential military applications, and members of the Nuclear
Suppliers Group, a voluntary alliance, include some forms of
aluminum tubing on their list of equipment that could be used for
uranium enrichment.
Joe saw the tubes as centrifuge rotors that could be used to
process uranium into weapons-grade material. In a gas centrifuge,
the rotor is a thin-walled cylinder, open at both ends, that
spins at high speed under a magnet. The device extracts the
material used in a weapon from a gaseous form of uranium.
In July 2001, about 3,000 tubes were intercepted in Jordan on
their way to Iraq, a big step forward in the agency's efforts to
understand what Iraq was trying to do. The CIA gave Joe an award
for exceptional performance, throwing its early support to an
analysis that helped change the agency's mind about Iraq's
pursuit of nuclear ambitions.
"He grabbed that information early on, and he made a name for
himself," a career U.S. government nuclear expert said.
'Stretches the Imagination'
Doubts about Joe's theory emerged quickly among the
government's centrifuge physicists. The intercepted tubes were
too narrow, long and thick-walled to fit a known centrifuge
design. Aluminum had not been used for rotors since the 1950s.
Iraq had two centrifuge blueprints, stolen in Europe, that were
far more efficient and already known to work. One used maraging
steel, a hard steel alloy, for the rotors, the other carbon
fiber.
Joe and his supporters said the apparent drawbacks were part
of Iraq's concealment plan. Hussein's history of covert weapons
development, Tenet said in his written statement, included
"built-in cover stories."
"This is a case where different people had honorable and
different interpretations of intentions," said an Energy
Department analyst who has reviewed the raw data. "If you go to a
nuclear [counterproliferation official] and say I've got these
aluminum tubes, and it's about Iraq, his first inclination is to
say it's for nuclear use."
But the government's centrifuge scientists -- at the Energy
Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and its sister
institutions -- unanimously regarded this possibility as
implausible.
In late 2001, experts at Oak Ridge asked an alumnus, Houston
G. Wood III, to review the controversy. Wood, founder of the Oak
Ridge centrifuge physics department, is widely acknowledged to be
among the most eminent living experts.
Speaking publicly for the first time, Wood said in an
interview that "it would have been extremely difficult to make
these tubes into centrifuges. It stretches the imagination to
come up with a way. I do not know any real centrifuge experts
that feel differently."
As an academic, Wood said, he would not describe "anything
that you absolutely could not do." But he said he would "like to
see, if they're going to make that claim, that they have some
explanation of how you do that. Because I don't see how you do
it."
A CIA spokesman said the agency does have support for its view
from centrifuge experts. He declined to elaborate.
In the last week of September, the development of the NIE
required a resolution of the running disagreement over the
significance of the tubes. The Energy Department had one vote.
Four agencies -- with specialties including eavesdropping, maps
and foreign military forces -- judged that the tubes were part of
a centrifuge program that could be used for nuclear weapons. Only
the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research joined
the judgment of the Energy Department. The estimate, as
published, said that "most analysts" believed the tubes were
suitable and intended for a centrifuge cascade.
Majority votes make poor science, said Peter D. Zimmerman, a
former chief scientist at the Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency.
"In this case, the experts were at Z Division at Livermore
[Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] and in DOE intelligence
here in town, and they were convinced that no way in hell were
these likely to be centrifuge tubes," he said.
Tenet said the Department of Energy was not the only agency
with experts on the issue; the CIA consulted military battlefield
rocket experts, as well as its own centrifuge experts.
Unravelings
On Feb. 5, two weeks after Joe's Vienna briefing, Powell gave
what remains the government's most extensive account of the
aluminum tubes, in an address to the U.N. Security Council. He
did not mention the existence of the Medusa rocket or its Iraqi
equivalent, though he acknowledged disagreement among U.S.
intelligence analysts about the use of the tubes.
Powell's CIA briefers, using data originating with Joe, told
him that Iraq had "overspecified" requirements for the tubes,
increasing expense without making them more useful to rockets.
That helped persuade Powell, a confidant said, that Iraq had some
other purpose for the tubes.
"Maybe Iraqis just manufacture their conventional weapons to a
higher standard than we do, but I don't think so," Powell said in
his speech. He said different batches "seized clandestinely
before they reached Iraq" showed a "progression to higher and
higher levels of specification, including in the latest batch an
anodized coating on extremely smooth inner and outer surfaces. .
. . Why would they continue refining the specification, go to all
that trouble for something that, if it was a rocket, would soon
be blown into shrapnel when it went off?"
An anodized coating is actually a strong argument for use in
rockets, according to several scientists in and out of
government. It resists corrosion of the sort that ruined Iraq's
previous rocket supply. To use the tubes in a centrifuge, experts
told the government, Iraq would have to remove the anodized
coating.
Iraq did change some specifications from order to order, the
procurement records show, but there is not a clear progression to
higher precision. One tube sample was rejected because its
interior was unfinished, too uneven to be used in a rocket body.
After one of Iraq's old tubes got stuck in a launcher and
exploded, Baghdad's subsequent orders asked for more precision in
roundness.
U.S. and European analysts said they had obtained records
showing that Italy's Medusa rocket has had its specifications
improved 10 times since 1978. Centrifuge experts said in
interviews that the variations had little or no significance for
uranium enrichment, especially because the CIA's theory supposes
Iraq would do extensive machining to adapt the tubes as
rotors.
For rockets, however, the tubes fit perfectly. Experts from
U.S. national labs, working temporarily with U.N. inspectors in
Iraq, observed production lines for the rockets at the Nasser
factory north of Baghdad. Iraq had run out of body casings at
about the time it ordered the aluminum tubes, according to
officials familiar with the experts' reports. Thousands of
warheads, motors and fins were crated at the assembly lines,
awaiting the arrival of tubes.
"Most U.S. experts," Powell asserted, "think they are intended
to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium." He
said "other experts, and the Iraqis themselves," said the tubes
were really for rockets.
Wood, the centrifuge physicist, said "that was a personal slam
at everybody in DOE," the Energy Department. "I've been grouped
with the Iraqis, is what it amounts to. I just felt that the
wording of that was probably intentional, but it was also not
very kind. It did not recognize that dissent can exist."
Staff writers Glenn Kessler, Dana Priest and Richard Morin and
staff researchers Lucy Shackelford, Madonna Lebling and Robert
Thomason contributed to this report.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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