Intelligence Veteran Faults Iraq Arms Data

WASHINGTON — The newly retired head of the State Department's intelligence arm said Tuesday that the U.S. intelligence community "badly underperformed" for years in assessing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and should accept responsibility for its failure.

The assessment by Carl W. Ford Jr., former assistant secretary of State for intelligence and research, marked the first time a senior official involved in preparing the prewar assessments on Iraq has asserted that serious intelligence errors were made.

Before the war, the intelligence community concluded that Iraq possessed biological and chemical weapons and that Saddam Hussein had restarted a nuclear weapons program. After nearly six months of occupation, no such weapons have been discovered.

The intelligence community "has to bear the major responsibility for WMD information in Iraq and other intelligence failures," Ford said in two interviews with The Times. The Vietnam veteran worked for years in U.S. military intelligence, the CIA and the Defense Department and retired Oct. 3. "We badly underperformed for a number of years," he added, "and the information we were giving the policy community was off the mark."

Ford could not pinpoint what had gone wrong, but the question, he said, must be answered.

The entire intelligence community -- including Ford and the bureau he ran -- should have done a better job of ferreting out the truth about Iraq's capabilities, he said. The first step in improving the performance of the agencies, he added, is to admit error.

"It's sort of like the first step in a 12-step program," he said. "You have to have that moment of clarity to realize that you've got a problem. We in the community have not yet accepted that we have a problem. The worst thing, for me, is we could do better

Ford's comments contrast sharply with the defiant statements by other senior administration officials, including President Bush.

At a news conference Tuesday, Bush defended the intelligence on Iraq and noted that much of it preceded his taking office.

"We took action based upon good, solid intelligence," Bush said. "It was the right thing to do to make America more secure and the world more peaceful."

CIA Director George J. Tenet has vigorously defended the community's performance and disputed any suggestion that its prewar conclusions were wrong.