WASHINGTON — A top-secret U.S. intelligence report last fall is now at the center of an internal CIA review to determine whether U.S. intelligence miscalculated the extent of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. The report had concluded that Baghdad had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to reconstitute its nuclear program.
The document, which was described by intelligence officials familiar with the review, provided President Bush with his last major overview of the status of Iraq's program to develop weapons of mass destruction before the start of the war.
The document, called a national intelligence estimate, was issued last October. It is significant because it provided the White House with the last attempt by the entire intelligence community to reach a consensus concerning Iraq's weapons programs before the war started in March.
The national estimate has been an early focus of attention for a small team of retired CIA analysts who have been brought in by the agency's director, George Tenet, to assess the accuracy of the intelligence reports produced before the war, according to officials familiar with the review. Separately, the CIA is now in the process of turning over to Congress the documents that were used by analysts to prepare the national estimate, just as lawmakers in both the House of Representatives and Senate are preparing for their own reviews of the prewar intelligence.
Officials say that the CIA review team examining prewar intelligence plans to ask the Pentagon for documents from the special intelligence unit to try to determine what its role was in shaping the intelligence during the months leading up to the war.
One official familiar with the CIA review said that it appeared that the CIA and other intelligence agencies had developed fairly solid intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs after the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and through much of the 1990s.
During that time, the United States grew convinced that Iraq had chemical weapons, was trying to develop biological agents and was seeking to reconstitute a nuclear program that had been disrupted by the war. But the official said that it now appeared that the quality of the intelligence concerning Iraq's weapons programs subsequently declined.
Without conclusive new intelligence to the contrary, it appears that the intelligence community continued to make projections assuming a continued Iraqi weapons effort, in line with its earlier assessments, the official observed. Officials now acknowledge that at least some of the prewar analysis was inaccurate. The United States had, for example, received reports indicating that Iraqi military units had received the authority to deploy and use chemical weapons against advancing U.S. troops. But postwar searches of Iraqi military facilities and interrogations of Iraqi officers have failed to turn up any evidence that chemical weapons were deployed.
In London, meanwhile, Prime Minister Tony Blair, under fire from lawmakers over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, said Wednesday that he will cooperate with a parliamentary probe into his handling of intelligence reports.
Blair, who made Iraqi weapons of mass destruction the core of his case for war, hotly rejected claims that his government had exaggerated the threat or misused intelligence material. Opposition politicians called for an independent inquiry.
"The truth is, nobody believes a word now that the prime minister is saying," Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith shouted above the jeering of Blair's supporters.
Proof that he or his government lied to Parliament would be fatal to Blair's position, though for now he enjoys broad support from Labor Party lawmakers.
In hot-tempered exchanges in the House of Commons, Blair let his exasperation show.
Contributing: Associated Press