In recent weeks, congressional and intelligence sources say, Hoekstra has prodded the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to follow up on new leads about possible WMD sites in the country. One intelligence official, who asked not to be identified because of political sensitivities, said the agencies have devoted “hundreds of man hours” to the hunt.
The search has not been entirely fruitless. The DIA has discovered another 300 old chemical shells lying around the war-torn country. That’s in addition to the 500 sarin shells mentioned in a declassified Pentagon intelligence report revealed by Hoekstra and Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Rick Santorum last June. But the recently found shells, like the previous ones, dated back to before the 1991 Persian Gulf War and were decayed and essentially useless.
In short, U.S. intelligence-community officials say, the find doesn’t change the conclusion of Charles Duelfer, chief of the U.S. Iraq Survey Group, who said two years ago that Saddam Hussein did not possess a WMD arsenal on the eve of the Iraq invasion, nor did he have any clear plan to revive his dormant weapons programs in the future.
The Bush administration has not been particularly eager to embrace Hoekstra’s mission. In June, after Santorum and Hoekstra touted the allegd discovery of WMD, senior intelligence officials downplayed the find. The shells discovered in Iraq, they said, were all manufactured more than a decade earlier. “This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991,” a senior Defense official told reporters at the time. The munitions “are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had and not the WMDs for which this country went to war.”
Even so, the Michigan Republican, who has clout with the intelligence community by virtue of his committee chairmanship, still insisted that the discovery of the decaying shells proved that “Iraq was not a WMD-free zone, that there are continuing threats from the materials that are or may still be in Iraq.” In June, Hoekstra told reporters that he intended “to put additional pressure on the Department of Defense and the folks in Iraq to more fully pursue a complete investigation of what existed in Iraq before the war.” Since then, intelligence officials say, Hoekstra has made good on his word and has continued to urge agencies to look for fresh evidence that might vindicate the administration’s original pre-war claims.
Jamal Ware, a spokesman for the intelligence-community chairman, confirmed to NEWSWEEK that Hoekstra recently passed along photographs and other reports about possible WMD sites that had been forwarded to the committee by U.S. soldiers, former intelligence officials and Iraqis following the June press conference with Santorum. “People who have been over there [in Iraq] … they’ve sent us information and we’ve referred that on to the appropriate agencies,” Ware said. In one case, he said, some soldiers sent the committee photographs of equipment and other material that the troops “thought were interesting.” Hoekstra then asked the intelligence community to look into the photos and find the location of the sites—a request that apparently explains the involvement of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s mapping unit, in the latest hunt.
Ware said that Hoekstra was not “pressing” the intelligence agencies to do anything other than the “necessary due diligence” and played down any suggestion that the Republican chairman’s motives were political. Hoekstra’s main concern, he said, is that the Pentagon find all munitions dumps and sites that could still pose a hazard to U.S. soldiers. “Any effort that chairman Hoekstra has made in this area has been aimed at insuring the safety of our troops overseas,” he said.
That concern is a valid one, according to one Pentagon official who asked not to be publicly identified talking about sensitive intelligence matters. In at least one case in May 2004, two U.S. soldiers in Iraq became ill after handling homemade bombs, presumably crafted by Iraq insurgents, which were rigged using pre-1991 chemical shells. U.S. intelligence officials believe it is unlikely the insurgents who made the bombs knew the shells contained chemical agents. The soldiers later recovered. The U.S. intelligence official was unaware of any other reports of homemade bombs in Iraq that contained chemical agents.
Though Hoekstra describes his efforts as a safety measure, others in the U.S. intelligence community see it as a futile effort to bolster a dead argument about Saddam’s supposed WMD. They believe Hoekstra is wasting the agencies’ time with offbeat allegations from untested sources. One such source Hoekstra touted was Georges Sada, a one-time Iraqi Air Force general who claimed in a book published earlier this year that he knew of hundreds of tons of chemical weapons being flown from Iraq to Syria prior to the U.S. invasion. Sada, who first made the claims to promote his book, admitted he never actually saw any of the weapons. But his allegations were prominently featured on Fox News and conservative media outlets. Hoekstra met with Sada and later dispatched House Intelligence Committee staffers overseas in an effort to verify the Iraqi’s claims. That search, too, came up emtpy.
