Transcript: David Kay on Nightline

Saddam is so far along in his nuclear weapons program. Do you want to continue living with that risk which will only grow with time?

And this is tonight. If we can't rely on our intelligence, on what basis do we preemptively go to war?

I think you cannot have a preemptive foreign or military policy unless you have pristine, perfect intelligence.

(Off Camera) Last week, David Kay resigned his post as Chief US Weapons Investigator in Iraq. Since then he has told reporters, and today he told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that, in his opinion, Iraq did not have stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons before the war last spring. Nor, for that matter, was its nuclear program anywhere close to developing a bomb. Since the President, the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense made the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction the very centerpiece of their argument for going to war against Iraq, and for doing so sooner rather than later, the debate seems to have boiled down to this. Either the intelligence community here and among all of our major allies totally screwed up or the Bush Administration and Tony Blair's government selectively went through the intelligence and cherry picked it, ignoring anything that might have argued against going to war, emphasizing whatever might support the notion that Iraq was an imminent threat to the US and its allies. For the record, Mr. Kay has already indicated that he thinks the intelligence community screwed up. He does not believe that the President or senior members of his Administration pressured intelligence analysts to skew the information they had. And he seems as bewildered as anyone about what precisely happened to those weapons of mass destruction that Saddam certainly had back in 1998 when he kicked UN weapons inspectors out of Iraq. David Kay joins me now here in our Washington studio.

(Off Camera) And I'd like to begin on that last point. What's your best theory as to what did happen to the weapons?

Ted, I think in '92, they started reducing the stockpile as they realized that the inspectors were better than they thought they would have been, the UN inspectors. I think in '95, there was a major reduction when Hussein -one of Saddam's two son-in-laws defected. They were afraid that he, who knew everything, was going to point the inspectors exactly where stuff was and they would be caught lying and cheating again. So, there was a major reduction there. I think the rest dribbled away in dribs and drabs between '95 and 2001, 2002.

(Off Camera) But in 1998, when Saddam kicked the inspectors out, there was a clear sense at that time that some of the weapons remained, had not been accounted for?

There was a clear sense that they had not been accounted for. If you read the reports very carefully, it's an assertion that they cannot verify destruction. They cannot account for and the Iraqis refused to account for them. I think by that point, he was major protection of the technology, the individuals and the capability to restart rather than actual weapons. And that's where we missed it then.

(Off Camera) You're giving the Bush Administration pretty much a clean bill of health saying, if mistakes were made they were made by the intelligence community. How do you come to that conclusion?

Well, first of all, I've had a large number of the intelligence analysts working very directly for me over the last seven months. I've dealt with them as we've come across evidence that contradicts their earlier estimates. I've seen how they react to it. They had every opportunity to come to me and say, I didn't really believe this, I was pressured into doing it. Instead, the reaction, uniform reaction among most analysts was, "I really screwed up. I apologize, I wish I'd known this. I didn't know it. The evidence we had led us to this conclusion." I'm convinced they honestly believed, and you must remember, it was not just the US intelligence community. It was not only our allies even. It was some states that were not generally our allies. Everyone believed and that's because the Iraqis wanted to create the impression, in part, that they still retained those weapons.

(Off Camera) Let me -just read you a couple of reports from, this would be February 14th, 2003. "UN warns White House that no WMD have been found." February 15, "IAEA warns White House, no nuclear evidence." February 24th, this is all 2003. "CIA warns White House no direct evidence of WMD." March 7th, "IAEA reiterates to White House no evidence of nukes." Now, you worked with the UN Weapons inspectors, and actually they did a pretty good job. You were -leading one of those groups back -in the '90s. Why didn't anybody believe what these folks were telling us?

Well, I think partly because the inspectors themselves, those who were kicked out in 1998, didn't believe they had done as good a job as it turns out they had done. We were always, we thought that we had not really penetrated the Iraqi program. The Iraqis, we now know, believed we were more powerful, better than we in fact thought we were. But it's also Iraqi behavior. Why not throw the country open and say, go anywhere you want to, and not try to restrict? Iraqi behavior over time convinced everyone that Iraq continued to cheat.

(Off Camera) Or that Iraq, as I suspect you now think, that Saddam Hussein in particular wanted to convince his neighbors that he was a tougher cookie than they might have thought or a more dangerous man.

Not only his neighbors. I think that is true. But we often forget that he used those weapons on the Shi'as and the Kurds, his internal opposition. I think he was quite frankly afraid to let them think that, A, he didn't have the weapons and, B, that he had given in to external pressure, for fear that that would again ignite an uprising among them.

(Off Camera) Among the Iraqi scientists that you've now had a chance to talk to, among the Iraqi leaders like Tariq Aziz that you've had a chance to talk to, have you learned anything that surprised you?

I learned a lot. Tariq Aziz, for example, goes in great lengths describing the Iraq post-'98. A Saddam that was more isolated, was more caught up into a fantasy world, a novelist, a playwrighter. Not concerned with affairs of state, but yet awarding money to scientists, for example, directly without any sort of external review. It was literally the heart of darkness, a society coming apart. And I think we missed, by and large, what had happened after 1998.

(Off Camera) Missed in what sense? Missed that something had -I mean, how would we have known that Saddam was that disengaged or, for that matter, that remove from reality?

Well, better human intelligence and we might have known. There's a history of missing this. We missed how far the Soviet Union had descended into economic incapacity and decayed military might before its collapse. And the stories of the great surprise of what the Soviet Union, this giant of a superpower, looked like when we really saw it from the inside. So, I think we missed that. We missed a society coming apart.

(Off Camera) Doesn't that -sort of mitigate against a preemptive foreign policy, the kind of foreign policy that the Bush Administration is talking about right now? If we can't rely on our intelligence in places like the former Soviet Union, in places like Saddam Hussein's Iraq, on what basis do we preemptively go to war?

I think you cannot have a preemptive foreign or military policy unless you have pristine, perfect intelligence. The lessons are right now.

We don't have it and it may not be physically possible, intellectually possible.

I reach a conclusion that as a democracy, you be very careful about it and require extraordinarily high levels of evidence. Though, I must say, in the case of Iraq, you can't spend any time there but doubt that Iraq is better off without Saddam. The hundreds of thousands of people that simply disappeared under his rule, ripped apart society there. And also I quite frankly think we were on the verge of Iraq becoming more dangerous as it decayed into this storehouse of huge amounts of military equipment, including WMD capability and technology, just at the time that other groups and countries were seeking that.

(Off Camera) It raises a couple of interesting questions, David Kay, as to what some of those scientists may yet choose to do and as to what may yet happen in Iraq, whether it is indeed a safer place. We have to take a short break. We'll be back with David Kay in just a moment.

(Off Camera) And I'm back once again with David Kay, former chief weapons inspector in Iraq for the Bush Administration. It's not necessarily the weapons that are the most dangerous. The weapons can be old and decayed. What's most dangerous is what's up here in the minds of some of those Iraqi scientists. Are you satisfied that we're taking good care of them? Are you satisfied that they haven't gone off to other places like Syria or Libya or Lord knows where in the world, Korea?

No, Ted, I'm not satisfied. Iraq is a place where a lot of things happened. We know scientists disappeared. They left, for lack of economic opportunity, fear, personal safety, they left. We didn't always know where they left. Keeping track of them was very difficult. You're quite right, the real threats of weapons of mass destruction is not necessarily in the weapons, it's in the technology. Here again, it's not a new problem, it's a problem we faced and still face in the Soviet Union. Former Soviet Union now, of technology disappearing as people seek economic opportunities in other places.

(Off Camera) In part because you felt that you didn't have the resources and the assets that you needed, that they were being diverted to other ends and that you didn't have the necessary resources to do the job properly. Is that a fair statement?

That's partly the statement. The other was that I had, as a condition of going in, insisted that the Iraqi survey group, which was the instrument for carrying out the search, be exclusively focused on WMD and reporting through the CIA. I did not want a typical Washington inter-agency task force that has multiple -voices, bosses and missions, and you're never sure who's leading what. That was changed and force protection, counter-terrorism became a larger issue.

(Off Camera) So what should we conclude then about the -task confronting your successor? He's a very able man but if he's not going to get the money, if he has to report to various and sundry bosses, my assumption is that if you thought that job would have worked, you would have stayed and done it yourself?

No, I think -Charlie Delfer is a very different person than I am. I have great confidence in him. I think he will work, I hope in some sense by speaking out he may regain some of the assets, some of the freedom of action and some of the concentration that, in fact, I had lost during my tenure.

(Off Camera) If you are saying, as you have now said repeatedly over these last few day, you don't think those weapons of mass destruction are there now or were there before the war, what's the point in continuing the search?

Well, there's a lot to be found yet. First, you need certainty that I'm right in this conclusion. But you also need knowledge, for example, about who were the foreign countries, companies and individuals that assisted the Iraqi program? That program in the late '90s, just like in the '80s, had a lot of foreign assistance. You need to know that because you need to know who else might those individuals, companies or countries be helping? You also need certainty about where the scientists are. What are they doing? What's happened to the technology? There are a lot of unanswered questions that really do need pursuing.

(Off Camera) Let me go back to that point that you just raised of, who all was helping them, who all was providing the material? You know that the joke was before the war, we know they have weapons of mass destruction, we've got the receipts. I mean, back in the '80s, we were helping Saddam Hussein. Back in the '80s, the Brits certainly were, the Germans were, the French were. Who do you think was helping them in the late '90s?

I don't think it was us in the late '90s. I think, as this Iraq survey group goes through that, you will have certain knowledge. That still remains classified by and large, and I can't speak about it. But let me tell you, it was not from the West.

(Off Camera) Well, without asking you to reveal anything that was classified, if it wasn't from the West, then it has to be from some other source. The Russians? I mean, is that a reasonable ...

Well, this is probably not the time to play a Chinese menu and try to guess whether it's A, B, or C.

But let me give you an example. In the case of Libya, a great surprise for me is that we discovered that the centrifuge parts that were going to Libya were actually produced in Malaysia under Pakistan order for it. There's a vast, a range today of weapons suppliers in the world. And that's why the world in terms of proliferation is really a lot more dangerous than it was when the Iraqis began.

(Off Camera) I want to pick up on that. Indeed, that's really the question. The degree to which we can control the spread of these weapons of mass destruction. And we'll focus on that when we come back with David Kay, in just a moment.

(Off Camera) I'm back once again with David Kay. The President has said repeatedly, Mr. Kay, that the world is a safer place without Saddam Hussein. Inarguably, it is a better place with Saddam Hussein in prison now. But given what you know about the dissemination of weapons of mass destruction, about what has or hasn't happened to the Iraqi scientists, what is going on in the rest of the world, you buy into the notion that the world is necessarily a safer place?

I think the world is safer without Saddam. You eliminated certain threats there. The world in general is not a safer place than it was ten years ago.

(Off Camera) Tell me what you mean by, the world is a safer place without Saddam. From what you yourself have described, this was a disengaged man who was off writing his novel, didn't know what was going on in his own country and, apparently, didn't have the weapons of mass destruction we thought he had.

And that's what's frightening Ted. If in the world's marketplace you had wanted technology for weapons of mass destruction, you'd wanted the technical skills and some of the equipment and knowledge that goes with that, it's perfectly possibly, I think, if Saddam had remained in power and this regime continued to crumble, you could have gone there and got it in one-stop shopping. And people would have sold it, not fearful of a Saddam regime that would have kept them from it. He was less and less in control of it. So I think by removing that, we've removed that threat. That doesn't make the world safer completely, but it does take one major threat down.

(Off Camera) I was about to say, if you want one-stop shopping, it sounds as though the Pakistanis have been very active. Not the government itself but certainly the nuclear scientists in Pakistan seem to have had their own supermarket for nuclear technology?

I think that's a real shock of what the Pakistanis were doing, apparently over a large number of years. Again, a fundamental problem of collection of intelligence. Not the distortion of intelligence by one political party or another.

(Off Camera) Knowing what you know now, when we hear, as we have heard several times over the past few months, that the Syrians, for example, or the Iranians may have weapons of mass destruction, and hearing from some people, not necessarily within the government, but with close access to top people in the government, that maybe the same sort of preemptive strike is called for. What would David Kay say about that, knowing what he now knows about Iraq?

I think it's certainly better to find other than use of military force. And in fact, I am encouraged both in the case of Iran and in the case of Libya, a combination of force, threat of force, diplomacy has seemed to start a new process in place. I hope in the case of North Korea and the case of Syria, others will come to their senses. I think Iraq has been -we see all the shortcomings and I certainly see many of them. But from the other side, you see the costs that you can incur. Saddam lost his regime. He lost his country. He's lost his two sons by his behavior. I think others may well come to a different calculus of what's worth it. But you need a combination of the threat of military force, which cannot be force useful and probably can't be legitimate without better intelligence. You also need a strong diplomacy to play it out. I don't think anyone views using military force as the first option. It should be the last option.

(Off Camera) Given your -and of course, the President said it was going to be the last option. Now the fact of the matter is -let's assume for a moment, this is a question I haven't heard anyone ask you yet. Let's assume for a moment that the President said, "okay, let the UN inspectors continue with their job." Now they wouldn't have had the kind of freedom to search, the freedom to look at documents, the freedom to interview scientists that you had in a post-war period. How would we ever have been satisfied after six months, after a year, after two years, that the UN inspectors had been able to do their job effectively and that there were no weapons?

I can only give you the answer that Iraqi scientists gave me when I asked them, did you talk to the UN? Did you disclose this and why or why did you not? Their answer was, we were interviewed by the UN. We did not tell them this. We didn't take -them to the facilities we're now taking you and describe the program. I said, why? We were afraid that if we had done this, we would have personally been killed by the security service. So I think the UN could have stayed there a vast period of time and never discovered what we had. And that's why I think the threat in fact would not remove. Saddam was, in many ways, the toughest case.

(Off Camera) How do you improve the intelligence? I mean, you decry the fact or the lack of human intelligence. The fact of the matter is, Saddam ruthlessly rooted out anyone that he thought might be useful to anyone on the outside, anyone who might be in opposition to him. As best I understand it from people I've talked to in the intelligence community, we really didn't have any -human intelligence on the ground. Do you think that's a fair statement?

I think that's a fair statement, from what I know, if you mean US citizens operating there. Look, I think the first thing is to recognize that you have a problem. If you don't recognize that intelligence has been adequate, has possibly misled the political leadership and maybe the country, you'll never find what the root causes are. We've now had surprises, proliferation surprises in Libya, in Iran, in Iraq, certainly North Korea is there. But we've had others. Khobar Towers. The USS Cole. Innumerable -what Senator Roberts today referred to as "oh my God" reasons to have hearings because things, surprises took place. That tells me there may be a fundamental fault structure there and that you've got to solve that. I think you've got to recognize you have a problem and search for what are the commonalities. I don't know what all the answers are. And I don't even know what all the questions are. I do believe it's a necessary and important effort that cuts across all political lines.

(Off Camera) Mr. Kay, I thank you very much. Always a pleasure seeing you and talking to you.

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(Off Camera) And that's our report for tonight. I'm Ted Koppel in Washington. For all of us here at ABC News, good night.

I think you cannot have a preemptive foreign or military policy unless you have pristine, perfect intelligence

Well, there you have it. We can't do anything until we're perfect. No wonder we haven't found too much yet with this brainchild leading the way.

I wonder (hope!) that the congressional investigations -- especailly since they will be headed by republicans -- will fully explore the destruction of US intelligence capability in the years just prior to Bush's election.

Bush inherited a sorry mess. All we need is J.F. Kerry and his "cut the CIA (etc.) to the bone" attitude with a war on terror going on for well into the future.

Kay says the downward trend of our intelligence capability went back to the Carter administration and the Church committee.

I believe other things have been imposed on them since then. I seem to recall Torricelli and a rule about not dealing with unsavory characters(the irony of that just made me smile!LOL)

I never heard Kay use the "Pristine" intelligence statement in the Senate hearing.

It is a bit much.He is talking about preemptive strike and I believe Iraq was somewhat different as they has broken the cease fire agreement and numerous UN resolutions.

We gave Saddam the offer of going into exile,too.

Kay's testimony before the Senate committe warmed me up to him because he would not let Levin and Kennedy put words in his mouth,blame the President,take statements out of context,misrepresent what he said.He did it very nicely and firmly.

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