Agency Alert About Iraqi Not Heeded, Officials Say
By DOUGLAS JEHL
February 7, 2004
An Iraqi military defector identified as unreliable by the Defense Intelligence Agency provided some of the information that went into United States intelligence estimates that Iraq had stockpiles of biological weapons at the time of the American invasion last March, senior government officials said Friday.
A classified ''fabrication notification'' about the defector, a former Iraqi major, was issued by the D.I.A. to other American intelligence agencies in May 2002, but it was then repeatedly overlooked, three senior intelligence officials said. Intelligence agencies use such notifications to alert other agencies to information they consider unreliable because its source is suspected of making up or embellishing information.
Because the warning went unheeded, the officials said, the defector's claims that Iraq had built mobile research laboratories to produce biological weapons were mistakenly included in, among other findings, the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which concluded that Iraq most likely had significant biological stockpiles.
Intelligence officers from the D.I.A. interviewed the defector twice in early 2002 and circulated reports based on those debriefings. They concluded he had no firsthand information and might have been coached by the Iraqi National Congress, the officials said. That group, headed by Ahmad Chalabi, who had close ties to the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney, had introduced the defector to American intelligence, the officials said.
Nevertheless, because of what the officials described as a mistake, the defector was among four sources cited by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in his presentation to the United Nations Security Council last February as having provided ''eyewitness accounts'' about mobile biological weapons facilities in Iraq, the officials said. The defector had described mobile biological research laboratories, as distinct from the mobile biological production factories mounted on trailers that were described by other sources.
The intelligence about the mobile facilities was central to the prewar conclusion that Iraq was producing biological arms, senior intelligence officials have said. No such arms or production facilities have been found in Iraq since the war, and David A. Kay, the former chief weapons inspector, has said he believes that Iraq never produced large stockpiles of the weapons during the 1990's.
Soon after the invasion, American troops in Iraq discovered suspicious trailers that were initially described by the Central Intelligence Agency as having been designed as factories for biological weapons. But most analysts have since concluded that they were used to make hydrogen for military weather balloons.
Dr. Kay reported in October that American inspectors had found ''a network of laboratories and safe houses controlled by Iraqi intelligence and security services'' that contained equipment for chemical and biological research. But American officials have not described any discovery of the mobile laboratories described by the Iraqi major.
In his speech at Georgetown University on Thursday, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, provided the first hint that the prewar intelligence on Iraq had been tainted by evidence previously identified as unreliable.
Apparently alluding to the Iraqi military defector, Mr. Tenet said intelligence agencies had ''recently discovered that relevant analysts in the community missed a notice that identified a source we had cited as providing information that, in some cases was unreliable, and in other cases was fabricated.'' Mr. Tenet went to say, ''We have acknowledged this mistake.''
In interviews on Friday, intelligence officials described the episode as a significant embarrassment. They said the information provided by the defector had contributed significantly not only to the National Intelligence Estimate but to Mr. Powell's presentation to the United Nations last Feb. 5.
''He was either making it up or he heard somebody else talking about it,'' one intelligence official said of the information the defector had provided, ''but he didn't know what he was talking about.'' The official said the notification circulated by the D.I.A. had advised other agencies ''that the information that this guy provided was unreliable.''
In a related matter, the intelligence officials acknowledged that the United States still had not been able to interview two other people with access to senior Iraqi officials, and whose claims that Iraq possessed chemical and biological stockpiles were relayed to American officials in September 2002 by two foreign intelligence services.