So Much For the WMD

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COMING UP EMPTY: Kay faces members of the Senate Armed Services Committee

CIA chief George Tenet was certain David Kay was the best bloodhound to set loose in Iraq last summer to sniff for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Tenet reasoned that if anyone could find the stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and biological arms on which the Bush Administration had predicated its unprecedented, pre-emptive attack on Saddam Hussein's regime, it was Kay. The Texan had spent 20 years as an international weapons inspector, with several tours in Iraq.

Hard-nosed and fiercely independent, Kay, 63, had a vast network of friends at the Pentagon and the CIAand among Iraqis in Baghdad. A political conservative, he sent the Bush campaign a check for $200 not long after Bush began his quest for the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 1999, and he supported a tough line on Saddam. When Tenet tapped Kay as the "ideal person" to lead a 1,400-strong WMD search party last June, Kay sounded neither daunted nor doubtful. "I'm confident," he told NBC, "that we will reach the goal of understanding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, including where weapons are, where weapons may have been moved and the exact status of that program at the time the war commenced."

Ideal is about the last word anyone on Team Bush is using to describe what Kay is saying now. After his Iraq Survey Group spent seven months visiting hundreds of sites, interviewing thousands of Iraqis and sifting through millions of documents, Kay announced last week that it had uncovered no WMD in Iraq and was "highly unlikely" to turn up any in the future.

In two separate turns before Senate committees, Kay politely shredded some of the Administration's most resilientand repeatedclaims of Saddam's vaunted weapons programs, fingered flawed analysis at the CIA and only halfheartedly encouraged his colleagues to keep looking for the mystery arms. "Let me begin by saying, we were almost all wrong," said Kay. "It is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed militarized chemical and biological weapons there."

Kay's findings were far more sweeping than the Administration had anticipatedand had several unsettling effects. They raised new doubts about the Administration's conduct in the weeks leading up to a war that cost hundreds of American lives and billions of dollars and alienated many allies. They sparked a new round of finger pointing between the CIA and the White House about who ginned up the weapons that apparently never existedand why. They put new pressure on Tenet, who has survived in his post longer than many might have imagined and may no longer be able to write his own exit lines. And they revived plans, long abandoned, of a badly needed reform of the nation's numerous, mysterious, overlapping and often quarrelsome intelligence agencies. Bush had shelved the idea of a massive, one-time overhaul after 9/11, lest the undertaking distract the nation's spooks from their job of protecting the country from further calamity. But if the resulting work has not been effective, as Kay's findings suggest, there's little reason to put off a fix much longer.

Kay is not the only CIA employee to unload on the agency. Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director who just completed an internal review of the Iraq intelligence at Tenet's request, told TIME, "We may have relied too heavily on our prior knowledge and were not as careful as we should [have been]." Kerr spent six months looking at the secret U.S. intelligence on Saddam's WMD, including the crown jewels presented every morning to Bush and his top advisersthe President's daily brief. Kerr said one problem may have been that the CIA tried to distill complex matters too simply in the top-secret brief, with the result that its claims about Saddam's arsenal were not always adequately conditioned and caveated. "You're trying to make an argumentyou often are caught up in that," he said. Looking at the Iraq intelligence in general, "you can find places where they're fairly careful and cautious," Kerr told TIME, "and other times where they carried the argument probably farther than they had evidence for ... There can clearly be some improvements."

Tenet may hope Kerr's internal review will take some of the steam out of an even more scathing review, expected this week, by the Senate Intelligence Committee. That panel, controlled by Republicans, has worked for weeks on its own 300-page confidential draft report on the prewar WMD intelligence. Knowledgeable sources tell TIME that the Senate report will probably tag the agency for failing to conduct a zero-based assessment of Saddam's arsenalthat is, a brand-new study with no underlying assumptions about his weapons. Such a review was performed in 1991 before the first Gulf War, but not this time around. The product of 175 interviews by staff members on the panel, the Senate committee report is expected to take particular aim at Tenet, sources said, for giving lawmakers his personal assurance in closed-door hearings that WMD stocks would be found in Iraq. "He was telling the senior people in the Administration," said one source, "that the weapons were absolutely there, that they were certain the stuff was there." Tenet, as a result, "is locked in. He has nowhere to go." A senior intelligence official said Tenet will be perfectly comfortable telling the Senate committee that the Iraq Survey Group is still at work and that it is premature to come to any conclusions about WMD in Iraq.