WASHINGTON — The re-education of David Kay began just days after the CIA sent him to Baghdad in June to take over the troubled hunt for weapons of mass destruction.
On July 4, Kay reached for his computer and wrote his first weekly progress report to CIA brass back in Virginia. Kay warned that he already had doubts about the agency's prewar assertions that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had vast quantities of nerve gases and germ weapons, and had sought to build nuclear arms.
"I said the emerging picture here is by no means complete, but the emerging picture is very different from what we expected," Kay recalled in an interview Friday.
Kay's message may have been the first indication Washington officials had that a man who had gone to Iraq as an outspoken champion of the view that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to the United States was beginning to undergo a dramatic change of mind.
Just how dramatic became clear when Kay, who resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group on Jan. 23, told a Senate panel last week that Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear programs mostly were eliminated by 1995 and whatever was left collapsed soon after.
"We were almost all wrong," Kay said, blaming inaccurate estimates on a "massive failure" of U.S. intelligence.
Kay's harsh charges and his call for an independent inquiry into the flawed weapons data put the White House on the defensive, stunned senior intelligence officials and sparked fierce partisan debate in Congress. The White House is now studying whether to name a blue-ribbon panel to investigate the prewar intelligence on Iraq, congressional sources said Saturday.
Even colleagues who praised Kay's candor were startled by his about-face on Iraq and his emergence as one of the sharpest critics of U.S. intelligence.
But as the former inspector described his mental journey from advocate to critic during a series of recent interviews, he said the gap between what he had expected and what he saw in Iraq left him no choice but to do a 180-degree turn.
Kay said he had "no eureka moment" or realization "in the middle of the night" that U.S., British and other Western spy services had only a tenuous understanding of the threat posed by Iraq's weapons programs.
"As we found stuff and didn't find stuff, as we connected dots and unconnected others, it became increasingly clear that the reality on the ground clearly didn't match the prewar estimates," he said. "It was a slow build from day one."
