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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.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39500-2003Aug9?language=printer
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