Kay Addresses U.S. Intelligence Failures

Former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay said the United States “connected the dots” and made a series of intelligence failures in their search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum last night.

In his talk entitled “Iraq, WMD: Lessons Learned and Unlearned,” Kay told a packed crowd that the false belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was based on the government’s outdated intelligence system.

“The real lesson from Iraq is that preemption requires pristine intelligence. Clearly, we don’t have pristine intelligence,” he said in his speech sponsored by the Institute of Politics.

Kay said that while old systems were based on cracking borders, new programs must be able to infiltrate enemy organizations.

“The intelligence community that we have today was built around the problem of denied territory. The problem that we face now is one of denied networks and denied minds,” he said.

Kay said that U.S. attempts to improve intelligence on the ground came too late and were largely ineffective.

The former chief weapons inspector said that as late as 1994, the United States had no agents in Iraq.

Intelligence directors tried to remedy the problem by better sharing information with U.N. inspectors already in the country.

“It was like crack cocaine. Recruiting shadowy Iraqi agents was dangerous, so [working with scientists allowed us] to gather intelligence without running a lot of risk,” Kay said.

But according to Kay, the dependency on U.N. scientists was only a quick fix that caused greater problems in the long run.

“But in 1998, when the inspectors were withdrawn, the U.S. found itself without anybody inside Iraq, and there was a rush to find agents among defectors,” he said.

Additionally, Kay said that intelligence experts felt an increased pressure to answer critics’ post-Sept. 11 complaints that experts failed to put together intelligence to prevent the al Qaeda attack.

“Connecting the dots is a dangerous two-way street. If you don’t collect [good intelligence] then connecting the dots can be dangerous because you’ll make the wrong conclusions,” he said.

Even with such large-scale institutional failures, Kay said he believes other factors contributed to the intelligence void inside Iraq—and that the inefficiency of the Iraqi government made the problem worse.

Kay said that the rest of the world had so much trouble solving the Iraqi puzzle because the state itself was unable to function like a normal government.

“Iraqi society had disintegrated into a vortex of terror, corruption and fear...It was only capable of rape, pillage and the worst kinds of fraud,” he said.

Kay also said he fears the effects of the intelligence failures on the long term fate of the United States.

“The cost of our mistakes—and I think we made fundamental mistakes with why we went to war—are far greater than Iraq itself,” said Kay. “We are in danger of destroying our capability to warn about future problems.”

Kay said that he believed the United States faced the danger of not being able to warn the world about potential threats.

“Now, if a [U.S.] President or Secretery of State warns about country X, the immediate response is going to be, ‘Why should we believe you?’” he said.

In addition to citing the failures of the current intelligence community, Kay made suggestions for future improvement.

“The real challenge today is to make sure that we can make inspections effective,” said Kay. “We have to find a way to make inspectors smarter and more capable. Do I believe the U.N. inspection mechanism could have gotten rid of Saddam? No.”

Jordan S. Fox ’07, however, thought Kay could have offered more suggestions.

“I agreed with everything he said, but I wish he had offered more solutions,” he said.

But Fox said that he felt Kay’s remarks were refreshing.

“It’s nice to hear more facts than politics,” he said.

Sandy Alexander, a student at both the Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Law School, agreed.

“He was definitely less political than he could have been,” he said. “And I feel like his greatest usefulness is his intimacy with the situation.”