http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39500-2003Aug9.html
Washington Post Sunday, August 10, 2003; Page A01
By Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus
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."
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Staff writers Glenn Kessler, Dana Priest and Richard Morin and staff researchers Lucy Shackelford, Madonna Lebling and Robert Thomason contributed to this report.