WASHINGTON (REUTERS) — The U.S.-led team hunting for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has not found any stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons but will keep searching the country, CIA adviser David Kay said Thursday.
Kay, heading the search for chemical and biological weapons as well as evidence of any effort to develop nuclear weapons, presented a classified interim report to U.S. lawmakers behind closed doors.
“We have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war, and our only task is to find where they have gone,” Kay said in a statement obtained by Reuters.
The team has also not found any evidence to confirm pre-war reporting that Iraqi military was prepared to use chemical warfare against U.S.-led forces.
The United States went to war against Iraq in March and ousted Saddam Hussein from power in April, largely citing what it said was a threat posed by Baghdad’s development of unconventional weapons.
But no such weapons have yet been found, and critics have questioned whether the Bush administration exaggerated the threat to get support for the war. Others have urged patience, saying that Iraq is a large country and such weapons are relatively easy to hide.
Much evidence has been “irretrievably lost,” Kay said. “It is far too early to reach any definitive conclusions and in some areas, we may never reach that goal.”
“Despite evidence of Saddam’s continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material,” Kay said.
“However, Iraq did take steps to preserve some technological capability from the pre-1991 nuclear weapons program,” he said.
Kay cited several factors making it difficult to determine with confidence what happened to Iraq’s banned weapons, including possible deliberate dispersal and destruction of material and documents.
Some weapons of mass destruction personnel “crossed borders” before and during the conflict and may have taken evidence “and even weapons-related materials” with them, he said. Kay did not identify any such countries, but U.S. officials in the past have expressed suspicions that Iraqi officials were going to Syria, a charge the Syrians have rejected.
Any actual biological or chemical weapons or material was likely to be small, with the bulkiest items able to fit in the space of a two-car garage, he said.
The team has discovered dozens of weapons-related activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during inspections that began in late 2002, Kay said in his statement.
He cited laboratories and safehouses run by the Iraqi Intelligence Service that had equipment suitable for chemical and biological weapons research, a prison laboratory complex possibly used to test biological weapons agents on humans, and strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist’s home, one of which could be used to produce weapons.
There was systematic and deliberate destruction of evidence, including computer hard drives and files. Some suspect equipment was cleaned, apparently to hide its real use.
Information uncovered so far suggests that after 1996, Iraq focused on maintaining “smaller, covert capabilities that could be activated quickly to surge the production of BW (biological warfare) agents,” Kay said.
The search for stocks of chemical weapons is hampered by the huge size of Iraq’s conventional-weapons armory where such weapons were probably hidden, he said.
His team was investigating a foreign company with offices in Baghdad, which was not named, that he said had imported dual-use equipment that could be suitable for a chemical weapons program.
But multiple sources have told the team “Iraq did not have a large, ongoing, centrally-controlled [chemical warfare] program after 1991,” Kay said. And information found so far suggests that Iraq’s large-scale capability to develop and produce and fill new chemical warfare weapons was “reduced — if not entirely destroyed.”
Kay concluded, “Whatever we find will probably differ from pre-war intelligence. Empirical reality on the ground is, and has always been, different from intelligence judgments that must be made under serious constraints of time, distance and information.”