NSA had 'mountain of evidence' on Saddam's WMDs

Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, director of the National Security Agency, said last week that NSA analysts had high confidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Testifying on his nomination to be deputy director of national intelligence, Hayden said he asked NSA analysts on the eve of the Iraq war about their confidence in the intelligence on the weapons programs.
"And without betraying their privacy I got some pretty high numbers. They had confidence," Hayden said.

Hayden said NSA had a "mountain of evidence" from its electronic intelligence-gathering efforts on the WMD program. However, he said the "mountain was essentially inferential."

"No smoking gun. It was indirect. It was oblique. It was dual-use chemicals, it was dual-use equipment. It was suspicious equipment bought in a very suspicious way," he said.

As to the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi WMD, Hayden said: "There was nothing in that NIE that signals intelligence contradicted."

The signals intelligence ranged from "ambiguous to confirmatory" in support of the judgment that Iraq had covert stocks of chemical weapons and covert nuclear and biological programs and missile systems.

Hayden said the fault was "a process that wasn't good enough."

"We had a process that didn't allow the right wholeness of view, holistic view, and we ended up where we were," he said.