Botched Iraqi Arms Deal Is Detailed

As for the botulinum, Kay said an Iraqi scientist, whom he did not identify, had stored a single vial of the live toxin, as well as a more virulent pathogen, in his home refrigerator in 1993. Kay said the scientist had small children and grew fearful "after a couple of days," so he returned the more toxic vial to his boss.

But Kay said the stored sample of botulinum was still "viable" after a decade and thus could be used to create a biological warfare agent. His report notes that the scientist passed a polygraph test about Hussein's plans to reconstitute a bioweapons programs and that he told investigators about "a large cache" of microbe agents. Teams are "actively searching for this second cache," Kay reported.

Kay, who is special advisor to CIA Director George J. Tenet, testified on Capitol Hill for a second day Friday, briefing the Senate Armed Services Committee behind closed doors. On Thursday, he presented his highly classified interim report to the House and Senate intelligence committees.

A senior congressional aide who attended one of Kay's closed briefings said the presentation was disappointing.

"At the end of the day it looks like the U.N. inspection process was more effective," the aide said.

"The U.N. had better intelligence than the CIA." In particular, the aide said, the U.N. inspectors and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world body's nuclear watchdog, appear to have produced more accurate assessments than the U.S. intelligence community about the status of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.

"I think the U.N. and the IAEA were not victims of a mind-set with predetermined sort of views," said the aide, who requested anonymity. "They were more empirical in their approach. I think they were less likely to draw sinister conclusions from ambivalent evidence or dual-use technologies."

Kay declined to answer questions about the quality of prewar U.S. intelligence but said he was deliberately not using those reports as the "template" for his investigations in Iraq.

Kay said he and his top aides meet every Saturday afternoon to discuss why they have not found Hussein's weapons. Among the "five or six working hypotheses," he said, was that the weapons were moved out of Iraq before the war, that they were hidden immediately before or after the war "in ways that are inherently difficult for us to find," and that the people who know their location "are still carrying out the resistance movement" against the postwar occupiers.

Another viable option, he said, was that the weapons program was an elaborate bluff -- and that perhaps even Hussein was deceived by scientists and aides too frightened to tell him the truth.

"We call it 'Red on Red' deception," Kay said. "Saddam had become so isolated, so the argument goes, that in the last couple of years they consciously told him they were doing things that they in fact were not doing, just to continue to be rewarded by him."

Times staff writers Greg Miller, Maura Reynolds and Edwin Chen contributed to this report.