Edition: U.S. / Global

THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ: INTELLIGENCE; Powell's Case, a Year Later: Gaps in Picture of Iraq Arms

Published: February 1, 2004
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Mr. Powell declined to comment on the latest information assembled by The Times. A State Department official said the secretary preferred to wait ''until all the facts are in,'' and that the secretary saw ''no evidence of any political pressure'' in any of the analysis of the intelligence.

Last week, Mr. Powell, on his way to the former Soviet republic of Georgia, told reporters, ''Last year when I made my presentation, it was based on the best intelligence that we had at the time.'' He added, ''Now, I think their best judgment was correct with respect to intention, with respect to capability to develop such weapons, with respect to programs.''

Still, he said, ''what the open question is: how many stocks they had, if any? And if they had any, where did they go? And if they didn't have any, then why wasn't that known beforehand?''

In hindsight, both Dr. Kay and close allies of the White House say, too much weight was given to untested sources of human intelligence, and too little credence given to the possibility that satellite photographs and intercepted communications might have benign interpretations.

The C.I.A. declined to comment for the record for this article, but a senior intelligence official said Saturday that American intelligence agencies ''continue to a believe that given the information available to us at the time, it is hard to see how analysts could reasonably have come to any other overall judgments than the ones they reached.'' The official described as ''premature'' any conclusion that the intelligence agencies' prewar judgments were ''all wrong.''

''There are still millions of documents that have yet to be examined, thousands of scientists and former government officials yet to be thoroughly debriefed, and countless possible hiding sites which have yet to be searched,'' the senior intelligence official said. ''We find it puzzling that those who say the intelligence community reached its conclusions on limited evidence are reaching opposite conclusions on even less.''

Dr. Kay rejected charges that policy makers pressured analysts to bend their assessments to fit the administration's need to justify the coming war. He said he had talked to a number of C.I.A. analysts involved in the prewar intelligence reports, and none ever told of pressure by the administration to shape reports.

Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence who has been leading an internal review of the prewar intelligence, said in an interview on Friday that he believed that the C.I.A. reporting on Iraq was consistent from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration, and that there was no evidence in the finished reports of changes that were the result of White House pressure. Mr. Kerr added that C.I.A. analysts working on high-profile subjects were used to scrutiny and skepticism from policy makers.

Mr. Kerr said the second phase of his review of prewar intelligence, submitted recently to Mr. Tenet, concluded that the quality of the underlying evidence used in prewar reports was ''a mixed bag,'' with some evidence good and some not.

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Goss, the House intelligence committee chairman, said: ''We simply didn't have enough dots. Our collectors had not given us that kind of close-in plans and intentions information that you've got to have.''

Other officials, including some still serving in the administration, argue that Mr. Powell presented a case that paid too little attention to information that might have undermined the worst-case conclusions the administration was highlighting.

''They took every piece of information that proved their point and listed it,'' a former senior intelligence official who took part in the prewar debates said, referring to the senior C.I.A. officials whose analytical conclusions formed the basis of Mr. Powell's presentation. ''They would disregard or make fun of any contrary evidence. They forgot they were making mere guesses, and even guesses have to be taken with caution. They didn't hedge or caveat. Instead they would say we're right and you're wrong and it's a matter of national security.''

Mr. Powell's case at the United Nations was supposed to be bulletproof: he had thrown out President Bush's own assertions, since discredited, that Iraq sought uranium in Africa, and he tossed away pictures of Iraqi ''nuclear mujahedeen'' when he concluded that the C.I.A. could not identify them.

''There were a lot of cigars lit,'' Mr. Powell said last summer. ''I didn't want any going off in my face or the president's face.''

Chemical Arms: A Basic Flaw

''Our conservative estimate,'' Mr. Powell declared in his United Nations presentation, is that ''Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent'' or enough, as he put it, ''to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.''

To make that case, Mr. Powell unveiled before the Security Council an array of previously classified evidence on a scale not seen in that room since Adlai Stevenson appeared during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, armed with photographs of Soviet missiles. (''This was my Adlai moment,'' Mr. Powell joked later.) But in retrospect, the satellite photographs and tape-recordings of intercepted communications that Mr. Powell played that day now seem to describe actions that are less fearsome than they first appeared.