Here are some of the highlights from George Tenet's address on WMD.
Transcript of Tenet address on WMD intelligence from Thursday, February 5,
2004
From the national intelligence estimate of October 2002:
They never said there was an imminent threat.
About Saddam's WMD programs of the 1990's:
...intelligence services of the world had significantly underestimated his
progress.
And finally, we could not forget that Iraq lied repeatedly about its
unconventional weapons.
Intel for today:
Our second stream of information was that the United Nations could not and
Saddam would not account for all the weapons the Iraqis had,
In intercepts of conversations and other transactions, we heard Iraqis seeking
to hide prohibited items, worrying about their cover stories and trying to
procure items Iraq was not permitted to have.
Satellite photos showed a pattern of activity designed to conceal movement of
material from places where chemical weapons had been stored in the past.
Since the war we have found an aggressive Iraqi missile program concealed from
the international community.
We have confirmed that Iraq had new work under way on prohibited
solid-propellant missiles that were also concealed from the United Nations.
My provisional bottom line today: Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon, he still
wanted one, and Iraq intended to reconstitute a nuclear program at some point.
...Iraq intended to develop biological weapons. Clearly, research and
development work was under way that would have permitted a rapid shift to agent
production if seed stocks were available. But we do not yet know if production
took place. And just as clearly, we have not yet found biological weapons.
...Saddam had the intent and capability to quickly convert civilian industry to
chemical weapons production. However, we have not yet found the weapons we
expected.
About what we thought before the war:
...from a source who had direct access to Saddam and his inner circle said Iraq
was not in the possession of a nuclear weapon. However, Iraq was aggressively
and covertly developing such a weapon. ...The same source said that Iraq was
stockpiling chemical weapons and that equipment to produce insecticides under
the oil-for-food program had been diverted to covert chemical weapons
production.
A stream of reporting from a different sensitive source with access to senior
Iraqi officials said he believed production of chemical and biological weapons
was taking place, that biological agents were easy to produce and hide, and that
prohibited chemicals were also being produced at dual-use facilities. ...The
source said that there was an elaborate plan to deceive inspectors and ensure
prohibited items would never be found.
Finally:
So what do I think about all this today? Based on an assessment of the data we
collected over the past 10 years, it would have been difficult for analysts to
come to any different conclusions than the ones reached in October of 2002.
About human intelligence inside of Saddam's regime:
We did not have enough of our own human intelligence. We did not ourselves
penetrate the inner sanctum.
Human intelligence success stories:
A CIA spy led us to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11th
attacks.
Al Qaeda's operational chief Nashiri, the man who planned and executed the
bombing of the USS Cole, was located and arrested because of our human
reporting.
Human sources were critical to the capture of Hambali, the chief terrorist in
southeast Asia, who organized and killed hundreds of people when they bombed a
nightclub in Bali.
Only through intelligence did we know each of the major programs Libya had
going. Only through intelligence did we know when Libya started its first
nuclear weapons program and then put it on the back burner for years. Only
through intelligence did we know when the nuclear program took off again. We
knew because we had penetrated Libya's foreign supplier network.
And through intelligence last fall, when Libya was to receive a supply of
centrifuge parts, we worked with the foreign partners to locate and stop that
shipment.
And in repeated talks, when CIA officers were the only official Americans in
Libya, we and our British colleagues made clear just how much insight we had
into their weapons of mass destruction and missile programs.
When the Libyans said they would show us their Scud-Bs, we said, "Fine. We want
to examine your longer range Scud-Cs."
It was only when we convinced them that we knew Libya's nuclear program was a
weapons program that they showed us their weapons design.
Last but not least:
One final spy story. Last year in my annual worldwide threat testimony before
Congress in open session, I talked about the emerging threat from private
proliferators, especially nuclear brokers. I was cryptic about this in public,
but I can tell you now that I was talking about A.Q. Khan. His network was
shaving years off the nuclear weapons development timelines of several states,
including Libya.
Now, as you know from the news coming out of Pakistan, Khan and his network have
been dealt a crushing blow and several of his senior officers are in custody.
Malaysian authorities have shut down one of the network's largest plants. His
network is now answering to the world for years of nuclear profiteering.
What did intelligence have to do with this? First, we discovered the extent of
Khan's hidden network. We tagged the proliferators, we detected the networks
stretching across four continents offering its wares to countries like North
Korea and Iran.
Working with our British colleagues, we pieced together the picture of the
network, revealing its subsidiaries, its scientists, its front companies, its
agents, its finances and manufacturing plants on three continents. Our spies
penetrated the network through a series of daring operations over several years.
Through this unrelenting effort, we confirmed the network was delivering such
things as illicit uranium enrichment centrifuges. And as you heard me say in the
Libya case, we stopped deliveries of prohibited material.
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