WASHINGTON — Disorganization, delays and faulty intelligence have hampered the Pentagon-led search for Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction, causing growing concern about one of the most sensitive and secretive operations in postwar Iraq, according to U.S. officials and outside experts familiar with the effort.
The slow start has created so many interagency squabbles that a National Security Council military staffer at the White House has been assigned to mediate among the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the CIA, the Energy Department and other government agencies involved in the hunt.
And some weapons experts warn that the lapses have even raised the threat of arms proliferation from Iraq.
Two classified videoconferences involving commanders in Iraq, at the U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar and in Washington, were organized over the last week to help straighten out the mess, officials said. The DIA's deputy director for intelligence operations, Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, also flew to Baghdad to investigate the disorder and organize reinforcements for the hunt.
"Everybody recognizes that it's gotten off to a rocky start," said one official who helped draft the Pentagon's weapons search plans and has seen reports coming back from Iraq. "Frankly, the whole situation is very confusing at the moment."
David Kay, a former U.N. weapons inspector, was critical of the initial U.S. effort. "Unity of command is not present," said Kay, who is now a senior fellow at the nonprofit Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. "There's not even unity of effort.... My impression is this has been a very low priority so far, and they've put very little effort into it."
While the administration has urged patience over a weapons search in a country that has yet to be stabilized, President Bush hinted at the problems last week when he noted that U.S. teams had visited 90 sites so far without finding any evidence of illegal activity. Bush raised the possibility for the first time that Hussein's regime may have destroyed, rather than simply hidden, any chemical and biological weapons.
Bush previously had cited Iraq's failure to account for allegedly vast stockpiles of anthrax material, botulinum toxin, mustard gas, sarin and VX nerve agents -- as well as more than 30,000 munitions, ballistic missiles and mobile biological weapons laboratories -- as the chief justification for going to war. Despite numerous false alarms, no weapons of mass destruction have been found.
