Myth, Media, and WMDs

A bit late in the game, perhaps, and certainly with interesting timing, a senior intelligence official has countered media misconceptions, misperceptions, or misrepresentations of the intelligence community's pre-war assessment of the Iraqi WMD issue.

Stuart A. Cohen, Vice Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, has authored a document titled "Iraq's WMD Programs: Culling Hard Facts from Soft Myths" available as a press release on the CIA homepage. (An edited version was published in the November 28th Washington Post.)

Cohen was named Vice Chairman, National Intelligence Council in February 2003 after serving as Acting Chairman and Acting Vice Chairman since May 2002. He was appointed Director, Senior Review, Production and Analysis Staff and National Intelligence Officer At-Large in September 1998. In previous assignments, he served as Special Assistant to DCI William J. Casey; Deputy Executive Secretary, CIA; Director, DCI Nonproliferation Center; Chief, Inspections and Monitoring Support Staff; Chief, Counterintelligence Analysis Group; Chief of CIA's Directorate of Operations' Soviet and East European Intelligence Services Group; Deputy Chief, Arms Control Intelligence Staff; and Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Strategic Programs.

The National Intelligence Council (NIC) reports to the Director of Central Intelligence, providing coordinated analyses of foreign policy issues for the President and other senior policy makers.

The NIC includes a Chairman, Vice Chairman, and Officers drawn from government, academia, and the private sector. Their work ranges from brief analyses of current issues to “over the horizon” estimates of broader trends at work in the world.

In the document Cohen identifies and dispels 10 myths regarding the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Some highlights:

Myth #1: The Estimate favored going to war: Intelligence judgments, including NIEs, are policy neutral. We do not propose policies and the Estimate in no way sought to sway policymakers toward a particular course of action. We described what we judged were Saddam's WMD programs and capabilities and how and when he might use them and left it to policymakers, as we always do, to determine the appropriate course of action.

Myth #2: Analysts were pressured to change judgments to meet the needs of the Bush Administration: The judgments presented in the October 2002 NIE were based on data acquired and analyzed over fifteen years. Any changes in judgments over that period were based on new evidence, including clandestinely collected information that led to new analysis. Our judgments were presented to three different Administrations.

Myth #3: NIE judgments were news to Congress: Over the past fifteen years our assessments on Iraq WMD issues have been presented routinely to six different congressional committees including the two oversight committees, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. To the best of my knowledge, prior to this NIE, these committees never came back to us with a concern of bias or an assertion that we had gotten it wrong.

Myth #4: We buried divergent views and concealed uncertainties: Diverse agency views, particularly on whether Baghdad was reconstituting its uranium enrichment effort and as a subset of that, the purposes of attempted Iraqi aluminum tube purchases, were fully vetted during the coordination process. Alternative views presented by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the Department of State, the Office of Intelligence in the Department of Energy, and by the US Air Force were showcased in the National Intelligence Estimate and were acknowledged in unclassified papers on the subject.

Myth #5: Major NIE judgments were based on single sources: Overwhelmingly, major judgments in the NIE on WMD were based on multiple sources–often from human intelligence, satellite imagery, and communications intercepts. Not only is the allegation wrong, but it is also worth noting that it is not even a valid measure of the quality of intelligence performance. A single human source with direct access to a specific program and whose judgment and performance have proven reliable can provide the "crown jewels"; in the early 1960s Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy, who was then this country's only penetration of the Soviet high command, was just such a source. His information enabled President Kennedy to stare down a Soviet threat emanating from Cuba, and his information informed US intelligence analysis for more than two decades thereafter. In short, the charge is both wrong and meaningless.

Cohen's myth #9 is vital to the "imminent threat" vs. action to prevent imminent threat argument.

Myth #9: We mistook rapid mobilization programs for actual weapons: There is practically no difference in threat between a standing chemical and biological weapons capability and one that could be mobilized quickly with little chance of detection. The Estimate acknowledged that Saddam was seeking rapid mobilization capabilities that he could invigorate on short notice. Those who find such programs to be less of a threat than actual weapons should understand that Iraqi denial and deception activities virtually would have ensured our inability to detect the activation of such efforts. Even with "only" rapid mobilization capabilities, Saddam would have been able to achieve production and stockpiling of chemical and biological weapons in the midst of a crisis, and the Intelligence Community would have had little, if any, chance of detecting this activity, particularly in the case of BW. In the case of chemical weapons, although we might have detected indicators of mobilization activity, we would have been hard pressed to accurately interpret such evidence. Those who conclude that no threat existed because actual weapons have not yet been found do not understand the significance posed by biological and chemical warfare programs in the hands of tyrants.

And his final myth addresses the "where are the WMDs now?" question, with an implied answer that begs more questions.

Myth #10: The NIE asserted that there were "large WMD stockpiles" and because we haven't found them, Baghdad had no WMD: ...We judged that Iraq probably possessed one hundred to five hundred metric tons of CW munitions fill. One hundred metric tons would fit in a backyard swimming pool; five hundred could be hidden in a small warehouse. We made no assessment of the size of Iraq's biological weapons holdings but a biological weapon can be carried in a small container. (And of course, we judged that Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon.) When the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), led by David Kay, issued its interim report in October, acknowledging that it had not found chemical or biological weapons, the inspectors had then visited only ten of the 130 major ammunition depots in Iraq; these ammunition dumps are huge, sometimes five miles by five miles on a side. Two depots alone are roughly the size of Manhattan.

Sobering thoughts. In the interest of being able to sleep at night, I prefer the response to myth #9 as the answer to "where are they now?" However, earlier in the document Cohen states:

Let me be clear: The NIE judged with high confidence that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of the 150 km limit imposed by the UN Security Council, and with moderate confidence that Iraq did not have nuclear weapons. These judgments were essentially the same conclusions reached by the United Nations and by a wide array of intelligence services—friendly and unfriendly alike. The only government in the world that claimed that Iraq was not working on, and did not have, biological and chemical weapons or prohibited missile systems was in Baghdad.

Strange, perhaps, that if weapons aren't found I will hope they were telling the truth.