E-mail a friendDr. David Kay
airdate October 12, 2004
From June '03 to January '04, scientist David Kay led government inspections to determine Iraq's nuclear weapons production capability. He took the CIA post, in part, because of his knowledge of Iraqi WMD efforts following the '91 Gulf War. Dr. Kay previously worked as chief scientist for the Pentagon and is now Senior Research Fellow with the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. As a result of CIA findings, he's recently called for major intelligence reform.
Dr. David Kay
Tavis: David Kay is the former chief U.S. weapons inspector who resigned his position earlier this year after concluding that there were no stockpiles of WMDs in Iraq as the war started. He's now a senior research fellow with the Potomac Institute in Washington, which is where we find him tonight. Mr. Kay, nice to have you on the program, sir.
David Kay: Happy to be with you.
Tavis: Glad to have you. Let me start with a quote that I found of interest yesterday, at least to me, by the columnist Bob Herbert in the New York Times. I don't know I you saw it yesterday...
Kay: Yes, I did.
Tavis: You saw the story. Let me read a quote for you from his piece, and I quote Bob Herbert...
The problem for President Bush, with the election just three weeks away, is that the bad news keeps cascading in and there is very little good news to tout. So the President and his chief supporters have resorted to the odd tactic of claiming that the bad news is good.
Is Mr. Herbert right? Are we seeing an administration trying to turn bad news into good?
Kay: I think in some ways that's what politicians always do. How you make lemonade out of lemons. I think it's particularly tough for the President this time because--not only on the foreign front, although there is good news. The election in Afghanistan seems to have gone with very little violence, and I think that's very good news. But sure, there's a tendency to do that.
Tavis: Let me take you back to 1991 because I'm glad I've got you on for a few minutes tonight to try to talk about some of these issues that are clearly at the center of this very hotly debated contest for the White House. But I want to go back to 1991 when you became the chief U.S. weapons inspector. Tell me about the team that you assembled and what you set out to do initially back in 1991.
Kay: Well, in '91 I was actually working for the U.N., or more correctly, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq. We went in to look particularly at their nuclear program. And you'll recall at that time most people, including the U.S. intelligence community, didn't think Iraq had much of a nuclear program. Instead we found a program that was quite well advanced, over 10,000 people involved, about $10 billion spent over a decade on it. And it put them within probably 6 to 18 months of having their first nuclear device.
Tavis: You went in then as part of a team, as I recall, that included about 44 U.N. personnel.
Kay: That's true at one time. I led numerous teams.
Tavis: Right. OK, I want to stay with '91 just for a second, though. When you went in, in 1991, take us back and remind us of what you were met with in terms of resistance, or in terms of cooperation in '91.
Kay: Well, there was one particular raid, and that is where we did--look, a weapons program is a lot like white-collar crime. It requires purchasing and documentation. We found out where the Iraqis were hiding their documentation. We raided it, we got the documents, and the Iraqis held us hostage--refused to let us get out of a parking lot, as a matter of fact, for 4 days and 4 nights. We sat there, said we weren't going to turn the documents back to the Iraqis, which is what they wanted. And we waited them out, and indeed we got out with the documents.
Tavis: OK, so that's '91. I want to fast forward now to 2003, to your earlier point. Because you've led so many delegations, let me remind you, that at one point in '03 you had a team of about 1,400 people... in 2003. So you had 44 back in '91. You go in a few years later with 1,400 people. Tell me what happened when you went in with those 1,400 personnel.
Kay: Well, it was 1,400 people, but in a funny sort of way, '91 had been a little easier. 1,400, we started, really, in late June of '03. The insurgency was starting to flare. Iraq was in chaos. I've never seen looting anywhere in the world the way I've seen looting in Iraq. We had documents that were scattered all over the country, had been dispersed. We had to find them. So we had a major effort just to sweep up the evidence, try to find the Iraqi scientists, and try to get them to talk to us.
Tavis: What happened from 1991 to 2003--and I ask this question not with any sense of naiveté, but I'm trying to get your perspective on what you think happened from 1991 to 2003 that justified us going back in there with 1,400 inspectors to look for weapons of mass destruction.
Kay: Well, in '91 we uncovered a nuclear program that was very large, a biological weapons program that was much larger. In fact, it was at that time probably the most advanced biological weapons program on the face of the earth. A very large chemical program, and a missile program. The U.N. inspectors destroyed a great deal, but not everything, and there were many gaps in that program. Inspections--U.N. inspections continued until 1998. The inspectors withdrew. A military action by the U.S. called "Desert Fox" in the Clinton administration was carried out, and after that, sanctions continued. Some controls over what the Iraqis were importing, but a vast degree of uncertainty about the Iraqis' WMD program. In fact, most people, and that's not only in the United States, and certainly not just in this administration--it was true in the Clinton administration, and it was true in the western countries that I've had access to their intelligence...believed that Iraq was continuing with a clandestined weapons program that was at least producing chemical and biological arms. So the 1,400 people that I led back in were designed to find those arms, understand the program, and destroy them.
Tavis: Let me pick up the story there. And I'm walking though this exercise again because this is, as you well know, the most hotly contested issue in this campaign. Never mind all of the important domestic issues that Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry will debate tomorrow night. But this, again, remains at the center of this contest. I'm just trying to set a time line up here. So you go back in. Ultimately you didn't find anything. You came back to the states in January of this year and testified before Congress. And remind us again what you said to Congress in January after you returned from Iraq.
Kay: I think probably the most memorable line was the line that we were almost all wrong, and that certainly includes myself, about Iraq's intentions and capabilities in the WMD area.
Tavis: OK, why were we almost wrong?
Kay: You know, there are multiple reasons, one of which you have to give the Iraqis credit. The Iraqis continued to act as if they had weapons. For example, Hans Blix, the U.N. inspector, in December of '02, right before the war, right after his first inspections, reported to the Security Council Iraq had not made a clear determination to give up its weapons program. The reason was the Iraqis kept restricting inspectors. So that's one reason. The second reason was the U.S. had, to everyone's surprise, no human agents of its own in Iraq. It instead relied on defectors who told us what we wanted to know in order to get us to do what they wanted us to do. That is, replace the Saddam Hussein regime. Those were the 2 major ones. There were a lot of others.
Tavis: If I could borrow a line, tell me how much you think the intelligence community is to be blamed for your and your team's having been bamboozled, hoodwinked, run amuck and led astray.
Kay: This is a major...probably the most major failure of this generation of the intelligence community. It misled not just our team, which is relatively unimportant, it misled the President, the Congress, and the American people about the extent of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction activities.
Tavis: So you decided to resign and the main reason you stepped aside was...
Kay: Look, this was so important, I thought the Congress needed to know in order to start the renovation of the intelligence process. Intelligence is important not--although most people think it's important because it helps you win wars, it's not. A good intelligence community and intelligence helps you avoid wars. I thought this was a disaster of the first order and we needed to immediately bring it to the attention of the Congress, the President, and the public so we could do something about it.
Tavis: All right. So you testify in January of this year. You lay out that nothing essentially was found. You then decide for the reasons you just articulated to resign. Mr. Duelfer, Charles Duelfer takes over that position. He is now the chief U.S. weapons inspector, having been to Iraq. He puts out a report, as we fast forward again, last week and his report, unless I'm misreading something, pretty much said the same thing you said in January.
Kay: It said exactly the same thing on the major lines, that is, there were no weapons stockpiles at the beginning of the war. Iraq's weapons activities had stopped somewhere in the early-to-mid nineties, and while Saddam himself had intentions, the actual capabilities of Iraq to carry out a weapons program had sharply declined and steadily declined since the 1991 period.
Tavis: You use that word intention with regard to Mr. Hussein, the same word, of course, that Mr. Duelfer used. Let me ask you how American voters, come November 2, should square, should juxtapose Mr. Suddam--Mr. Hussein's, rather, intentions with what we actually did about his quote intentions in terms of our going into Iraq.
Kay: Well, I think intentions are an important part of understanding Saddam, but, look, intentions without capabilities--and you have to remember, both I and Charles Duelfer reported that Iraq's capabilities had sharply declined--intentions without capabilities are not a threat, at least not an imminent threat.
Tavis: All right. To that point, let me ask you--this is a political question--I don't mean to make you or to get you into a political debate here, but I am curious to get inside your mind as a former chief U.S. weapons inspector--when you say intentions does not equal capability, I think we now all know that, for better or worse, we've figured that out now. Let me ask you though what your thoughts are on this so-called Bush doctrine of preemptive strike, where we think someone has the intention, where we think someone has the capability, we come in and blow you to bits and we find out afterwards that you didn't have anything, but we justify what we did by your intentions, by your actions, by what we thought your capability was. That is the essential doctrine of this Bush administration with regard to preemptive strike. What are your thoughts about that? Never mind Iraq, but just going forward as a U.S. policy of military engagement potentially?
Kay: Well, I guess I have 2 thoughts. First of all, if that is going to be your policy, you'd better have pristine and accurate intelligence, because to go around blowing people off simply because you think they might be dangerous is certainly an intolerable policy for a democracy. The second aspect is, look, you have to realize every administration, every American administration understands that there may be circumstances where in a world of weapons of mass destruction you cannot wait around and take the first blow. But you have to be extraordinarily cautious and believe in your intelligence before you can do that. That's one reason I believe if you really believe genuinely in preemption, you ought to be out there leading the charge to reform American intelligence. Without it, it's an extraordinarily dangerous and foolish policy.
Tavis: Let me ask you to that end then what progress you think we are making. Congress has certainly taken this up in the last session. The Senate just passed legislation last week about this reforming our intelligence community, at least starting the process--what's your sense of what kind of progress we are making in that regard?
Kay: I think, first of all, you recognize it's a journey. It's not a silver bullet. You're not going to do it in one step. I'm happy Congress has shown some enthusiasm about taking it up, but very often what Congress takes up does not get completed. It's very easy to lose the ball on this one and simply pay attention to something else. It is not going to be easy. We're talking about something that took at least 30 years to get our intelligence system in the sad state that it is today. It's going to take a lot of determined action by the President, by the Congress, and really, attention by the American people to the importance of doing it or it will not be done.
Tavis: This is unfair to do to you in 20 seconds literally, but what should we do about North Korea and Iran?
Kay: Ha ha, I'm tempted to say pray. These are far tougher cases. In one sense, we're going to suffer because of Iraq in both of those cases. That is, if we sound the warning, other people are going to say, "Yes, that's what you said about Iraq. How do we know you're right today?" Look, unless you want to do it unilaterally, and there's no doubt the U.S. militarily could destroy both the countries at a horrible cost to the countries and to their neighbors and a significant cost to ourselves. We're going to need allies and I'm convinced that if the Iranians, for example, believe that military action is a real possibility...
Tavis: Right.
Kay: And that they face a united world, we'll be able to delay, if not dismember their program.
Tavis: I hate to cut you off here, Mr. Kay, but I promise I will get back to this. This issue's not going to go away, even after the election. We'll do it again and thank you for your time, sir.
Kay: Thank you very much.
Tavis: I appreciate it. Up next, fitness expert Donna Richardson. Stay with us.
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