Multiple visits to the CIA by the United States Vice-President, Dick
Cheney, created an environment in which some analysts felt they were being
pressured to make their assessments on Iraq fit with Bush Administration
policy objectives, intelligence officials said.
They said Mr Cheney and his chief of staff, "Scooter" Libby, questioned
analysts studying Iraq's weapons programs and alleged links to
al-Qaeda.
Mr Cheney took the lead in the Administration last August in advocating
military action against Iraq by claiming it had weapons of mass
destruction.
The visits "sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output
was desired from here", one agency official said.
Other officials said they were not influenced by the visits from Mr
Cheney's office, and some said they welcomed them.
But the disclosure of his unusual hands-on role comes on the heels of
mounting concern from intelligence officials and members of Congress that
the Administration may have exaggerated intelligence it received about
Iraq to build a case for war.
While visits to CIA headquarters by a sitting vice-president are not
unknown, they are unusual, intelligence officials said.
A spokeswoman for Mr Cheney declined to discuss the matter.
In a signal of the Bush Administration's concern over the issue, two
top Pentagon officials held a news conference on Wednesday to challenge
allegations they pressured the CIA or other agencies to slant
intelligence. "I know of no pressure," said Douglas Feith, the
under-secretary for policy.
Britain's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, said on Wednesday that he would
co-operate with a parliamentary inquiry into his Government's use of
intelligence material.
Tom Allard reports: Australian defence intelligence officials
told a Senate committee yesterday that their analysis of the threat of
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction at times had a difference in emphasis
from that of their US and British colleagues.
They still believed such arms would be found but they conceded there
were always doubts about the extent to which Iraq was armed. "We were
cautious about the lack of weaponisation," the director of the Defence
Intelligence Organisation, Frank Lewincamp, said. "That was a consistent
part of our assessment and it remains the case."
The Washington Post
