posted March 31, 2005 09:30 AM              

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WASHINGTON (March 31) - In a scathing report, a presidential commission said Thursday that America's spy agencies were ''dead wrong'' in most of their judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the war and that the United States knows ''disturbingly little'' about the weapons programs and threats posed by many of the nation's most dangerous adversaries.

The commission called for dramatic change to prevent future failures. It outlined more than 70 recommendations, saying that President Bush must give John Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, broaders powers for overseeing the nation's 15 spy agencies.

It also called for sweeping changes at the FBI to combine the bureau's counterterrorism and counterintelligence resources into a new office.

The unclassified version of the report does not go into significant detail on the intelligence community's abilities in Iran and North Korea because commissioners did not want to tip the U.S. hand to its leading adversaries. Those details are included in the classified version.

The commission was formed by Bush a year ago to look at why U.S. spy agencies mistakenly concluded that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, one of the administration's main justifications for invading in March 2003.

''We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction,'' the commission said in a report to the president. ''This was a major intelligence failure.''

The main cause, the commission said, was the intelligence community's ''inabililty to collect good information about Iraq's WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions rather than good evidence.

''On a matter of this importance, we simply cannot afford failures of this magnitude,'' the report said.

But the commission also said that it found no indication that spy agencies distorted the evidence they had concerning Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, a charge raised against the administration during last year's presidential campaign.

Looking beyond Iraq, the panel examined the abillity of the intelligence community to accurately assess the risk posed by America's foes.

''The bad news is that we still know disturbingly little about the weapons programs and even less about the intentions of many of our most dangerous adversaries,'' its report said. The commission did not name any country, but appeared to be talking about nations such as North Korea and Iran.

03-31-05 0815EST

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posted April 01, 2005 01:08 PM            

Julian Borger in Washington
Friday April 1, 2005
The Guardian

A presidential commission investigating the intelligence debacle that preceded the Iraq invasion reported yesterday that the damage done to US credibility would "take years to undo".

American intelligence was described by the report as being in chaos, often paralysed by the rivalry of 15 different spy agencies and affected by unchallenged assumptions about Baghdad's supposed weapons of mass destruction.

The incompetence described in the report occasionally descends into farce, particularly over an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball, whose fabricated tales about mobile biological laboratories and their influence on US decision-makers were reminiscent of Graham Greene's accidental spy in Our Man in Havana. Despite warnings that he was "crazy", "a waste of time", and that he had not even been in Iraq at the time of an event he supposedly saw, his claims became the subject of almost 100 Defence Intelligence Agency reports and a focus of the National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002.

Most critically, Curveball's description of mobile laboratories provided one of the highlights of Colin Powell's address to the UN security council on February 5 2003, in which the then US secretary of state laid out the justification for the invasion.
Curveball's story has already been told in part, but yesterday's account is the most comprehensive. He was an Iraqi chemical engineer who was first debriefed in 2000,(when Clinton was Pres) by a foreign liaison service - not named in yesterday's report but elsewhere reported as being German intelligence.

Before the war, the Germans refused to let US interrogators question Curveball directly, saying that he "would refuse to speak to Americans"; they just passed on his claims, according to the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Warning signs emerged in May 2000 (when Clinton was Pres)when a military intelligence officer was allowed to visit Curveball. He reported: "I do have a concern with the validity of the information, based on Curveball having a terrible hangover the morning of [the meeting]."

The warning fell on deaf ears, but by autumn 2002 the CIA was growing increasingly nervous, knowing it had not met an important source. So a meeting was arranged between the local CIA division chief and German intelligence officers. When the division chief asked whether US agents could question the defector, "the foreign intelligence service responded with words to the effect of 'You don't want to see him because he's crazy' - furthermore, the [German] representative said that he worried that Curveball was 'a fabricator'."

The division chief passed on this alarming news to his superiors, but George Tenet (Clinton's appointee), then CIA chief, and his deputy, John McLaughlin, both denied having been told of it.

On the eve of Mr Powell's UN speech, Mr Tenet and senior intelligence officers were cloistered with the secretary of state in New York, going over the administration's claims. At midnight Mr Tenet called the division chief at home, but the two men have different recollections of the conversation.

"Although he did not remember his exact words, the division chief says that he told Mr Tenet something to the effect of 'You know that the [foreign service] reporting has problems'. According to the division chief, Mr Tenet replied with words to the effect of 'Yeah, yeah' and that he was 'exhausted'," the report says.

It continues: "The division chief said that when he listened to the speech... he was surprised the information from Curveball had been included."

Questioned by the commission, however, Mr Tenet denied that the subject of Curveball had ever been raised.

Curveball is reportedly related to a senior member of the Iraqi national congress (INC), then an exile group. However, the commission found that the INC had not brought him forward.

The report is another nail in the coffin of Mr Tenet's reputation and clears the White House and Pentagon of trying to shape intelligence to justify war. It concludes: "The commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programmes."