That might be a good thing to outsource ;-)

U.S. analysts also erred in their analysis of high-altitude satellite
photos, repeatedly confusing Scud missile storage places with the short,
half-cylindrical sheds typically used to house poultry in Iraq. As a
result, as the war neared, two teams of U.N. weapons experts acting on U.S.
intelligence scrambled to search chicken coops for missiles that were not
there.

"We inspected a lot of chicken farms," said a former inspector who asked
not to be identified because he now works with U.S. intelligence. His U.N.
team printed "Ballistic Chicken Farm Inspection Team" on 20 gray T-shirts
to mark the futile hunt.


here's the whole story:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?
tmpl=story&u=/latimests/20040617/ts_latimes/spyworkiniraqriddledbyfailures&c
id=2026&ncid=1480
Spy Work in Iraq Riddled by Failures

By Bob Drogin Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — A pair of British-recruited spies in Iraq, whose alarming
reports of Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons were rushed to the White House
shortly before the U.S.-led invasion last year, were never interviewed by
the CIA and are now viewed as unreliable, current and former U.S.
intelligence officials say.

The CIA's reliance on the two Iraqis, who were recruited by Britain's MI6
in late 2002 and thought to have access to Hussein's inner circle, is the
latest example to come to light of the failures in human intelligence
gathering in Iraq. U.S. agencies were also beset by broader, more systemic
problems that included failures in analyzing communications intercepts and
spy satellite images, the officials interviewed by The Times said.

U.S. experts, for example, still have not been able to determine the
meaning of three secretly taped conversations that Secretary of State Colin
L. Powell played to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 in
making the case for war. Investigators have been unable to identify who was
speaking on the tapes or precisely what they were talking about.

U.S. analysts also erred in their analysis of high-altitude satellite
photos, repeatedly confusing Scud missile storage places with the short,
half-cylindrical sheds typically used to house poultry in Iraq. As a
result, as the war neared, two teams of U.N. weapons experts acting on U.S.
intelligence scrambled to search chicken coops for missiles that were not
there.

"We inspected a lot of chicken farms," said a former inspector who asked
not to be identified because he now works with U.S. intelligence. His U.N.
team printed "Ballistic Chicken Farm Inspection Team" on 20 gray T-shirts
to mark the futile hunt.

The problems the U.S. experienced in gathering and analyzing intelligence
mirrored difficulties experienced by other Western intelligence agencies.
Investigations of intelligence agencies in at least four countries have
found the misjudgments of Iraq's weapons were founded on circumstantial
evidence, unverified secondhand accounts, false assumptions, old
intelligence and shoddy tradecraft.

In Washington, the Senate Intelligence Committee is poised to issue a
verdict on what most experts describe as a sweeping intelligence failure by
U.S. agencies.

Officials said the committee's still-secret report, based on interviews
with 200 intelligence analysts and officials, details major mistakes and
misjudgments in collection and analysis by the CIA, the National Security
Agency, the Pentagon (news - web sites)'s Defense Intelligence Agency and
other U.S. intelligence agencies.

Officials portray the 400-page report as an unparalleled effort to gauge
how America's $40-billion-a-year intelligence system performed against a
critical target during the Clinton and Bush administrations, including the
post-Hussein period.

"We can see what worked and what didn't," said a senior intelligence
official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the report remains
classified. "Mostly, it didn't."

Officials said the report criticizes the Pentagon's creation of an
independent intelligence "cell" called the Office of Special Plans to
review raw intelligence about Baghdad's alleged ties to the Al Qaeda
terrorist network, and to funnel its analysis to the White House without
going through normal channels.

It also reviews the CIA's insistence before the war that Iraq's attempts to
buy high-strength aluminum tubes — using websites and faxes — was proof
that Iraq was seeking to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Evidence found
since the war confirms that, as Iraqi officials had insisted, the tubes
were designed for conventional artillery rockets.

The CIA and the committee are negotiating how much of the report to release
to the public.

But independent of the report, current and former intelligence officials,
plus outside experts, have detailed extensive problems in accumulating and
analyzing data.

Most important, they say, was the fact that the CIA was unable to recruit a
spy in or close to Hussein's inner circle before the U.S.-led invasion in
March 2003. The lack of access was especially glaring because U.S.
intelligence had made Iraq a priority target since the 1980s.

"We had zilch in terms of direct sources," said David Kay, who led the
search for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq last year as
special advisor to CIA director George J. Tenet.

CIA leaders refused to accept Kay's stark assessment when he returned from
Iraq last December that most prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons were
wrong. Kay was assigned a tiny office far from the executive suites,
without a working computer or secure telephone.

"I heard about meetings after the fact," Kay recalled. "It was like a bad
novel."

After several weeks of isolation, Kay quit and went public with his
concerns.

U.N. inspectors who scoured Iraq for four months before the war and U.S.-
led teams who have investigated for the last 15 months have found no
arsenals of poison gases or germ weapons and no resurgent nuclear program,
contrary to CIA predictions.

The CIA's record in Iraq was never strong. The agency not only failed to
predict Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, but then could not
evacuate its operatives from Baghdad. Poland's spy service ultimately got
them out under cover of a Polish industrial project in Iraq, officials
said.

Discredited Claims

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the CIA and other Western spy services
infiltrated U.N. teams sent to disarm Iraq, and used the cover to spy on
the regime. MI6, in particular, recruited low-level informants from Iraq's
military, intelligence, security service and secret police.

"All were given code names starting with 'black,' as in 'Black Star'
and 'Black Horse,' " recalled Scott Ritter, who served as the U.N.
inspectors' liaison to intelligence agencies. "They were very good. We
could send questions in. They had real access."

Some of the MI6 informants came from the Iraqi National Accord, a London-
based exile group run by Iyad Allawi, now Iraq's interim prime minister. In
1995, the CIA station chief in London took over the INA account from
British intelligence. And in June 1996, the CIA backed an attempted INA
coup in Baghdad that ended in mass arrests and executions.

Most remaining Western spying networks and collection efforts were crippled
in December 1998, when U.N. teams were ordered out of Iraq. At that point,
the CIA and other groups increasingly turned to defectors presented by
Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, another London-based exile group
that was working to overthrow the Baghdad regime.

A stream of defectors were debriefed at safe houses outside London, a
German castle east of Berlin, a Thai resort south of Bangkok, a Dutch
government office in The Hague and elsewhere.

The Times first reported in March that an INC defector code-
named "Curveball," who defected to Germany after 1998, was the chief source
of now-discredited claims by the Bush administration that Iraq had modified
trucks and railway cars to produce lethal germ agents.

Classified CIA reports after 2000 similarly cited details about Iraq's
supposed germ weapons factories from another defector, codenamed "Red
River." His account, which previously has not been disclosed, is also now
viewed as inaccurate and possibly fabricated, intelligence officials said.

Information from other defectors turned out to be equally inaccurate.

Gary Dillion, who headed the Iraq action team at the International Atomic
Energy Agency from 1997 to 1999, interviewed about six Iraqi defectors who
had been vetted by U.S., British or other intelligence authorities. All
insisted that Iraq was secretly rebuilding a nuclear weapons program.

"In no instance did we get anything that was credible," Dillion
said. "There were some very wild stories. One gentleman told me that Saddam
was hiding thin sheets of plutonium under … the roof of a mosque."

Political 'Hangers-On'

Help seemed to arrive in late 2002, as the Bush administration prepared for
war, when MI6 recruited two Iraqi spies in Baghdad and gave them specially
encrypted satellite phones to protect secret communications, officials
said. In a Feb. 5 speech at Georgetown University defending the CIA's
prewar performance, Tenet paid tribute to the two spies, who he said had
been "characterized by our foreign partners as established and reliable."

The first source, Tenet said, had "direct access to Saddam and his inner
circle." According to Tenet, the source said that the Baghdad regime "was
aggressively and covertly developing" a nuclear weapon and "stockpiling
chemical weapons," and that equipment to produce pesticides "had been
diverted to chemical weapons production."

The second source, Tenet said, had "access to senior Iraqi officials"
and "believed" that Iraq was producing chemical and biological weapons and
had "an elaborate plan" to deceive U.N. weapons inspectors. "Now, did this
information make any difference in my thinking? You bet it did," Tenet
said.

The reports "solidified and reinforced" the CIA's earlier judgments about
the growing danger from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, he said. "I
conveyed this view to our nation's leaders," he added.

Tenet, however, did not disclose in the Georgetown speech that both spies
are now viewed as highly suspect and that no evidence has been found to
support their major claims.

"It's all fallen apart," said a former CIA official, who asked not to be
identified because the case remains classified. "Neither one had direct
knowledge. They were describing what they had heard. They claimed to have
knowledge, but they didn't. They were hangers-on in the corridors of power,
not insiders."

A senior CIA official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it
is "unresolved at this point as to whether their information was true."

The CIA official said the two spies may have "believed things that might
well not have been true. The question" is whether other Iraqi officials
were attempting to deceive the spies, or to mislead Washington in hopes of
deterring a U.S. attack.

The official confirmed that the CIA never interviewed either spy, although
agency operatives were listening when one was debriefed outside Iraq.

"We knew for a fact that's what he was saying," said a senior U.S.
official. "The other guy was reported to us by a reliable foreign service.
We had to take their word for it."

High-Tech Intelligence

America's high-tech collection of communications intelligence and imagery
from satellites and sensors is also under fire.

Experts say the NSA's powerful eavesdropping equipment netted hints of
illicit activities in intercepted e-mails, telephone calls and military
messages. In many cases, however, intelligence analysts were unable to
identify who was talking to whom, or even about what, according to
officials.

Powell played three such tapes to the U.N. Security Council in February
2003. He said all were recent electronic intercepts of officers or
commanders of Iraq's elite Republican Guard. Citing U.S. intelligence
analysis, he argued that they proved Iraq's army was hiding banned weapons.

"We tried to figure those out and never got anywhere," Kay, the former head
of U.S. weapons hunters in Iraq, said of the tapes. "We really had no idea
who it was, or the location. All we knew is someone was hiding something
somewhere and saying, 'Don't talk about it.' "

Corruption under Hussein's rule added to the challenge of unraveling Iraqi
subterfuge. The regime's efforts to circumvent U.N. trade sanctions spawned
such rampant smuggling and corruption that normal commercial transactions
and government dealings often were conducted under a cloak of secrecy and
suspicion.

Other frustrating intelligence came from the constellation of U.S. spy
satellites and other high-altitude surveillance systems.

Between March and May 2002, for example, senior CIA officials paid close
attention to a stream of photos of heavily guarded truck convoys in Iraq's
western desert, officials said. Similar trucks had hauled chemical weapons
in the 1980s. But the orbiting satellites couldn't track the convoys, and
their cargo and destination were never identified.

Other pictures, from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, also
caused concern. Before the war, U.S. photo analysts repeatedly spotted what
they thought were "Samarra" trucks, Japanese-built vehicles used to
decontaminate people or equipment from chemical exposure. They said the
trucks were a clear "signature" that chemical weapons were produced or
stored nearby.

But U.N. and, later, U.S. weapons hunters who searched the suspect sites
never found a Samarra truck. They instead found water tankers and other
fire suppression vehicles.

"It's scandalous," said Sharon Squassoni, an intelligence expert at the
Congressional Research Service. "The satellite analysts couldn't tell the
trucks were red."

Foreign Complications

The CIA's reliance on foreign spy services was problematic on several
fronts. In recent months, parliamentary inquiries in Britain, Australia,
Denmark and Israel have publicly identified problems similar to those that
beset the CIA.

The reports show the spy services all relied on sketchy, speculative
evidence and, in some cases, exaggerated or misrepresented their findings.
They thus reinforced collective misjudgments.

In Israel, the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee concluded in
March that the Mossad intelligence agency and Israeli military
intelligence "magnified" the Iraqi threat as the war approached. Over a
period of months, official estimates of the number of Iraqi ballistic
missiles able to hit Israel inexplicably surged "from several to tens" and
finally to between 50 and 100.

The Knesset committee blamed, in part, Israel's exchange of secrets with
other spy services, "particularly with those of the U.S., with whom the
cooperation very much tightened as the war approached."

The result "was a vicious cycle of sorts, in the form of reciprocal
feedback that at times was more damaging than beneficial," the committee
found. In some cases, unconfirmed data were passed to Washington, then
relayed back in another form, creating the impression of "validation by a
reliable source."

Layers of secrecy within the CIA compounded the problem.

"We have found cases in which a single source has different source
descriptions, increasing the potential for an analyst to believe [there
was] a corroborating source," Jami A. Miscik, deputy director of
intelligence, said in a speech to CIA analysts in February.

In other cases, analysts weren't told that information came from secondary
sources "about whom we know little," Miscik said.

Several mysteries remain concerning the prewar intelligence.

Still unexplained is Britain's claim, cited by President Bush (news - web
sites) in his 2003 State of the Union speech, that Baghdad recently had
sought to buy uranium from the West African nation of Niger. Some experts
speculate that British intelligence misinterpreted or misrepresented Iraq's
rejection of an unsolicited and perhaps bogus offer. U.S. officials said a
document found in the basement of Iraq's intelligence headquarters, for
example, showed Baghdad had received a similar offer for uranium, cobalt
and other minerals from a Congolese businessman in Nairobi, Kenya. A note
attached to the document shows that an Iraqi official declined the deal.

David Albright, a former U.N. nuclear inspector, said Iraqi officials told
him they received numerous such offers in the late 1990s.

"They said not a week goes by when they don't get an offer for nuclear
weapons, uranium, red mercury, or something," he said. "Everything was sent
back to Baghdad, where the general policy was to turn it down. It could be
fundamentalists, it could be a scam, it could be an intelligence dangle.
They didn't turn everything down. But their general reaction was, 'Forget
it.' "

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *