WASHINGTON — The leader of the U.S. search for banned weapons in Iraq resigned Friday and said he thought that Iraq was not engaged in large-scale production of chemical or biological weapons in the 1990s and that it did not have stocks of banned munitions before the U.S.-led invasion last year.
Special CIA advisor David Kay's decision to step down was a blow to the White House, which based its case for the war in Iraq largely on claims that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed large quantities of chemical and biological weapons and had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.
"I don't think they existed," Kay said in an interview with Reuters news agency. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last Gulf War, and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s."
CIA Director George J. Tenet said Friday that the search for illicit arms in Iraq would continue and that Charles W. Duelfer, a former United Nations weapons inspector, would replace Kay as head of the Iraq Survey Group.
Duelfer also has expressed skepticism that there are weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq, and his appointment was seen by some as an indication that the Bush administration might be trying to figure out why prewar intelligence on Iraq was apparently so wrong.
Speaking to Reuters after his departure was announced, Kay voiced deep skepticism that the administration's prewar claims that Iraq was hiding large caches of illegal munitions would be validated.
Citing interviews, documentation and an on-the-ground look at evidence, Kay said, "You just could not find any physical evidence that supported a larger program."
Reuters released a transcript of the interview, in which Kay said he also decided to leave a job he described as 85% completed in part because resources were being pulled away from the weapons hunt to focus on the insurgency.
"When I had started out, I had made it a condition that ISG be exclusively focused" on weapons of mass destruction, he said. "That's no longer so."
The draining of resources, Kay said, would make it difficult to conclude the search by the time the United States was scheduled to turn over control of the country to a new Iraqi government.
"We're not going to find much after June," he said, suggesting that the new government probably would interfere or impose obstacles to interviews and searches.
