"I'm sitting here, and frustrated isn't the word anymore," said the official, who has a senior role in the hunt and spoke on condition of anonymity. "I feel almost duped."
The Iraq Survey Group hopes to change all that. Instead of revisiting old U.N. sites, the group will focus on interviewing Iraqis and analyzing documents that already fill three warehouses. The goal is to find fresh clues about any lethal microbes or chemical agents, long-range missiles or enrichment technology for nuclear weapons -- all forbidden to Iraq under U.N. resolutions.
The intelligence officer said that common-sense approach should have been taken long ago. "These guys are reinventing the obvious," he said. "And that means they didn't see the obvious before."
Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, who ran a Defense Intelligence Agency program that debriefed Iraqi defectors before the war, arrived Tuesday as head of the Iraq Survey Group. He declined an interview request, but a spokesman, Ken Gerhart, said the new search for clues has produced "very promising results."
Navy Capt. Richard Weyrich, who directs 18 rocket scientists, intelligence analysts, chemical weapons and biowarfare experts who have been waiting here since March to disable or destroy unconventional weapons, also defended the new plan.
"What we have been doing to this point is just going through a target list," Weyrich said. "The Iraq Survey Group is bringing the 50-pound brains. They can bring us the intelligence to follow the clues from one place to the next."
The weapons hunt is based here at Camp Slayer, a former Hussein palace complex near the Baghdad airport that also holds U.S. eavesdropping and other classified operations. Two Iraqi trucks that the CIA says are most likely mobile biowarfare production facilities are stored here. There is also a stockade for some of the Iraqi weapons scientists and other top regime officials in custody.
Once renovations are done, Dayton and his staff, including a White House aide, will work in Hussein's Perfume Palace. The ornate building has a lagoon-like indoor pool on the ground floor, huge military murals on the second and a cavernous blue-domed ballroom on top.
The rest of the camp is equally odd.
Most of the 1,200 or so troops here, plus CIA and FBI officials, covert Special Forces teams, civilian experts and others, camp in two dozen or so garish guest houses that line three artificial lakes. Others bunk in a palace that boasts its own underground bunker, complete with thick steel doors and gold wallpaper. At night, street lights designed to look like gas lamps twinkle in the gloom.
