Shocked? I’m Not

As former secretary of state Colin L. Powell worked into the night in a New York hotel room, on the eve of his February 2003 presentation to the U.N. Security Council, CIA officers sent urgent e-mails and cables describing grave doubts about a key charge he was going to make.

On the telephone that night, a senior intelligence officer warned then-CIA Director George J. Tenet that he lacked confidence in the principal source of the assertion that Saddam Hussein’s scientists were developing deadly agents in mobile laboratories.

Former CIA director George J. Tenet, left, did not pass on to former secretary of state Colin L. Powell doubts relayed to him by a senior intelligence officer.

“Mr. Tenet replied with words to the effect of ‘yeah, yeah’ and that he was ‘exhausted,’ ” according to testimony quoted yesterday in the report of President Bush’s commission on the intelligence failures leading up to his decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.

Tenet told the commission he did not recall that part of the conversation. He relayed no such concerns to Powell, who made the germ- warfare charge a centerpiece of his presentation the next day.

That was one among many examples — cited over 692 pages in the report — of fruitless dissent on the accuracy of claims against Iraq. Up until the days before U.S. troops entered Iraqi territory that March, the intelligence community was inundated with evidence that undermined virtually all charges it had made against Iraq, the report said.

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