Official suggests Iraq hid weapons in Syria

The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
Official suggests Iraq hid weapons in Syria
Douglas Jehl, New York Times
Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Head of spy agency points to signs of heavy travel before U.S. invasion

WASHINGTON The director of a top American spy agency said Tuesday that he believed that material from Iraq's illicit weapons program was transported into Syria and perhaps other countries as part of an effort by Iraqis to disperse and destroy evidence immediately before the recent war.

The official, James Clapper Jr., a retired air force lieutenant general, said satellite images showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria just before the American invasion in March had led him to believe "unquestionably" that illicit weapons material was moved outside Iraq.

"I think people below the Saddam- Hussein-and-his-sons level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy and disperse," Clapper, who heads the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, said at a breakfast with reporters.

Clapper said he was providing a personal assessment. But other American intelligence officials said his theory was among those being pursued in Iraq by David Kay, who is heading what has so far been an unsuccessful American effort to uncover the weapons cited by the Bush administration as the major reason for going to war against Iraq.

Clapper's comments come as the CIA is preparing to mount a vigorous defense of its prewar assertions that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to reconstitute its nuclear program. The director of central intelligence, George Tenet, has written a private letter to the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence saying the agency will be ready by late November to provide a detailed assessments for members of the panel. In the letter, whose contents were described by several intelligence officials on Tuesday, Tenet proposed that a team headed by John McLaughlin, the deputy director of central intelligence, provide a briefing for the committee sometime after Nov. 20, when the agency's own internal review is expected to be completed. The Senate and House intelligence committees are preparing critical reports about the intelligence work done on Iraq, with congressional officials saying that the CIA overstated Iraq's potential nuclear capability in the months before the war. But the CIA has objected vigorously to that assessment, saying that on the basis of evidence available before the American invasion in March, it would have been foolhardy for the agency to have reached any other conclusion.

Clapper echoed that defense on Tuesday, but in offering what he called his own "educated guess" about what happened to any illicit Iraqi weapons, he went beyond what any other senior American intelligence official has said publicly. "I think probably in the few months running up to the onset of the conflict, I think there was probably an intensive effort to disperse into private hands, to bury it, and to move it outside the country's borders," Clapper said.

He said he believed that "at the level below the senior leadership" of Iraq there were officials who "saw what was coming and went to extraordinary lengths to dispose of the evidence."

Kay, a former UN weapons inspector who is serving in Iraq as a special adviser to Tenet, issued an interim report earlier this month acknowledging the American failure so far to find illicit weapons or weapons material in Iraq. Kay has cautioned that his search is far from complete, and senior intelligence officials say they still expect him to find weapons material. But Kay has said his team is considering a number of theories, including the prospect that Iraq moved weapons material to other countries and that weapons and other weapons material were destroyed before the war, and perhaps in the period immediately preceding it.

Clapper's agency is responsible in particular for interpreting satellite intelligence. He said the heavy volume of traffic leading from Iraq to Syria before and during the American-led invasion had convinced him "inferentially" that illicit weapons material had been smuggled outside the country.

He declined to answer a question about whether he believed that illicit Iraqi weapons material was smuggled into any other country, including Iran.