News Release

Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: What's There, What's Not, and What Does it All Mean?

February 12, 2004

WASHINGTON—Former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay said on Tuesday that even though no large stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons are likely to be found, the United States has much to learn from a continued hunt for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). "We should press ahead with the work of the Iraq Survey Group, not in a hope that we may find something, but because there is a lot we can learn in Iraq," Kay told an audience at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C.

The former weapons inspector said three important tasks remain for the survey group: learning about the foreign assistance provided to the Iraqi weapons program; determining why the U.S. intelligence agencies missed signs of the disintegration of Iraqi arms programs and society; and establishing where the rest of the documents and individuals involved in Iraqi WMD programs are.

According to Kay, assistance from foreign sources—in the form of intellectual capital—enabled Iraq to advance its missile program more rapidly and more successfully than estimated. He suggested that examining this could provide useful lessons for future anti-proliferation efforts. "[Tracking] foreign assistance is something the U.S. has done poorly in the past. We have generally looked at large imports of equipment, precursors, and supplies. But the real heart of the weapons program is the intellectual capital—the ability of people who know how to do things and who have done it themselves to transfer that knowledge," said Kay. Such procurement of expertise from foreign sources, he pointed out, could be transferred via physical collaboration or through a variety of other means that are difficult to track—including the Internet.

Another issue worth examination that has implications beyond Iraq, noted Kay, is how the inspection procedures could have prevented intelligence analysts from understanding when a country had made a fundamental change in behavior. "We got so used to being deceived by Iraq that it became the only reality we could imagine," said Kay. Each new piece of evidence was fit into a pattern of a country that cheated, lied, and deceived. Any new evidence that might not have fit that pattern was hard to assess in other terms, he said.

This dominant model of thinking—of an Iraq that had built and used weapons of mass destruction and that was caught lying and cheating about their existence—also persisted among intelligence analysts, according to Kay. "There was no contrarian analysis and every piece of new information that was obtained was added to the old analysis, and the foundations were ignored," said the former weapons inspector. And those foundations, were of a society that, in Kay's view, was profoundly corrupt and in the process of disintegration. "Saddam [Hussein] ran a state of absolute terror in which the moral fabric of the society was destroyed," he said.

The work of analysts was also hampered by a lack of information collected inside Iraq by U.S. intelligence agencies. According to Kay, the intelligence community relied mainly on technical collection capabilities and UN weapons inspectors on the ground, which created a habit of dependence that became apparent when the inspectors where forced out of Iraq in 1998. The enormous information gap on Iraqi WMD that followed forced the U.S. intelligence community to rely instead on data supplied by exiled Iraqis or liaison services from U.S. allies and other countries. "The Middle East is not a new region to us, hence the lack of human intelligence and expertise on the culture and language came as a big surprise to me," said Kay.

Kay recommended that the new national commission on intelligence examine how policy makers used the information they were given on Iraq. Citing his own experience, he said he was instructed to find the truth and saw no evidence of abuse or manipulation of intelligence by senior policymakers. He also noted that as an analyst, he had always welcomed the interest of senior officials in his assessments.

Looking ahead, Kay said much work remains to be done in Iraq even after the hunt for WMD is completed. The existence of a weapons program in the past necessitates putting in place a monitoring mechanism that would keep track of Iraqi scientists and documents. As the United States transfers sovereignty to Iraqis, he suggested that local and international monitoring systems could help in keeping track of the weapons program.

Related Resources

• David Kay's address at USIP on February 10
  Archived video, audio and transcript are available from the event.

This Newsbyte was written by Daniel Serwer and Ylber Bajraktari of USIP's Office of Peace and Stability Operations. The views expressed here are not necessarily those of the Institute, which does not advocate specific policies.

The United States Institute of Peace is an independent, nonpartisan institution established and funded by Congress. Its goals are to help prevent and resolve violent international conflicts, promote post-conflict stability and development, and increase conflict management capacity, tools, and intellectual capital worldwide. The Institute does this by empowering others with knowledge, skills, and resources, as well as by directly engaging in peacebuilding efforts around the globe.