Yahoo! News - Spy Work in Iraq Riddled by Failures:
"WASHINGTON — A pair of British-recruited spies in Iraq (news - web sites), whose alarming reports of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s illicit weapons were rushed to the White House shortly before the U.S.-led invasion last year, were never interviewed by the CIA (news - web sites) and are now viewed as unreliable, current and former U.S. intelligence officials say.
The CIA's reliance on the two Iraqis, who were recruited by Britain's MI6 in late 2002 and thought to have access to Hussein's inner circle, is the latest example to come to light of the failures in human intelligence gathering in Iraq. U.S. agencies were also beset by broader, more systemic problems that included failures in analyzing communications intercepts and spy satellite images, the officials interviewed by The Times said.........
The problems the U.S. experienced in gathering and analyzing intelligence mirrored difficulties experienced by other Western intelligence agencies. Investigations of intelligence agencies in at least four countries have found the misjudgments of Iraq's weapons were founded on circumstantial evidence, unverified secondhand accounts, false assumptions, old intelligence and shoddy tradecraft.
Senate Report Due
In Washington, the Senate Intelligence Committee is poised to issue a verdict on what most experts describe as a sweeping intelligence failure by U.S. agencies.
Officials said the committee's still-secret report, based on interviews with 200 intelligence analysts and officials, details major mistakes and misjudgments in collection and analysis by the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon (news - web sites)'s Defense Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies.
Officials portray the 400-page report as an unparalleled effort to gauge how America's $40-billion-a-year intelligence system performed against a critical target during the Clinton and Bush administrations, including the post-Hussein period.
'We can see what worked and what didn't,' said a senior intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the report remains classified. 'Mostly, it didn't.'"
"WASHINGTON — A pair of British-recruited spies in Iraq (news - web sites), whose alarming reports of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s illicit weapons were rushed to the White House shortly before the U.S.-led invasion last year, were never interviewed by the CIA (news - web sites) and are now viewed as unreliable, current and former U.S. intelligence officials say.
The CIA's reliance on the two Iraqis, who were recruited by Britain's MI6 in late 2002 and thought to have access to Hussein's inner circle, is the latest example to come to light of the failures in human intelligence gathering in Iraq. U.S. agencies were also beset by broader, more systemic problems that included failures in analyzing communications intercepts and spy satellite images, the officials interviewed by The Times said.........
The problems the U.S. experienced in gathering and analyzing intelligence mirrored difficulties experienced by other Western intelligence agencies. Investigations of intelligence agencies in at least four countries have found the misjudgments of Iraq's weapons were founded on circumstantial evidence, unverified secondhand accounts, false assumptions, old intelligence and shoddy tradecraft.
Senate Report Due
In Washington, the Senate Intelligence Committee is poised to issue a verdict on what most experts describe as a sweeping intelligence failure by U.S. agencies.
Officials said the committee's still-secret report, based on interviews with 200 intelligence analysts and officials, details major mistakes and misjudgments in collection and analysis by the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon (news - web sites)'s Defense Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies.
Officials portray the 400-page report as an unparalleled effort to gauge how America's $40-billion-a-year intelligence system performed against a critical target during the Clinton and Bush administrations, including the post-Hussein period.
'We can see what worked and what didn't,' said a senior intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the report remains classified. 'Mostly, it didn't.'"
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