New chief named in Iraq weapons hunt

By Greg Miller and Bob Drogin
Los Angeles Times

	David Kay
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Special CIA adviser David Kay's decision to step down, anticipated for more than a month, was a blow to the White House, which based its case for war with Iraq largely on claims that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed large quantities of chemical and biological weapons and had reconstituted its nuclear-weapons program.

"I don't think they existed," Kay said in an interview with Reuters news agency. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last Gulf War, and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s."

Citing interviews, documentation and an on-the-ground look at evidence, Kay said, "you just could not find any physical evidence that supported a larger program."

Asked what happened to Iraq's weapons, he said, "I think there were stockpiles at the end of the first Gulf War and ... a combination of U.N. inspectors and unilateral Iraq action got rid of them."

He said Iraq's nuclear program "wasn't dormant because there were a few little things going on, but it had not resumed in anything meaningful."

Kay will be replaced as head of the Iraq Survey Group by Charles Duelfer, a former United Nations weapons inspector who recently expressed skepticism that there are any weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq. His appointment was seen by some as an indication that the Bush administration may now be trying to figure out why prewar intelligence on Iraq was apparently so wrong.

In a column published by The Washington Post in October, Duelfer said Saddam had long differentiated between actually retaining weapons and maintaining a capability to produce them quickly.

The absence of weapons stocks "does not mean Saddam did not pose a WMD threat," Duelfer wrote. "But clearly this is not the immediate threat many assumed before the war."

In the conference call yesterday, Duelfer said his earlier comments were those of an outsider, and his job now is to be an investigator.

"My goal is to find out what happened on the ground, what is the status on the Iraqi weapons programs, what was their game plan, what were the goals of the regime," he said.

He said no one had pressured him to shade his investigation to substantiate prewar claims by the White House about Iraq's suspected weapons.

CIA Director George Tenet, Duelfer said, "wanted one thing — the truth, wherever that may lay. That's what I hope to achieve."

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report

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