The former UN inspector hired by the Bush administration to find evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction will claim in a report next month that Iraqi forces were ordered to fire chemical shells at invading coalition troops, according to US reports.
But David Kay, who heads the 1 400-strong Iraq Survey Group, has admitted he has found no trace of the weapons themselves, and cannot explain why they were never used.
One possibility is that the orders were part of an elaborate bluff, in the hope that they would be intercepted by the US and deter an attack.
According to US officials, all the Iraqi scientists now in custody have insisted that Saddam’s arsenal of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons was destroyed years before the Iraqi invasion.
The Boston Globe reported that Kay, who was hired by the CIA in June to direct the search, had made the claim in a classified briefing to two Senate committees.
The newspaper quoted officials who had seen a summary of his report as saying that Republican Guard commanders had been ordered to launch chemical-filled shells at troops.
”They have found evidence that an order was given,” a senior intelligence official said, adding there was no explanation of why the weapons were not used.
After his congressional briefing, Kay told journalists he was making ”solid progress”, but said he would not make it public until he completed his work and found ”conclusive proof”. He is under pressure from the White House to go public as soon as possible and administration officials say he is expected to publish a report within weeks.
Prewar claims by the Blair government that Iraqi forces were ready to fire chemical weapons at 45 minutes’ notice, and US reports in March that chemical artillery shells had been sent to Republican Guard units ringing Baghdad, were ridiculed when no such ordnance was fired or found.
It is not clear what evidence Kay will present to support his claims.
At the time he was hired by the CIA to direct the hunt for weapons, Kay was working for a hi-tech engineering firm and appearing regularly on television to argue that the Iraqi dictator had a significant arsenal.
Some of his former UN colleagues have said he has a powerful personal incentive to show he was not entirely wrong.
After the war he suggested that the weapons had been dumped in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers but no evidence of this was found to back up the allegation.
Kay believes that the Baghdad regime destroyed or hid its weapons, telling reporters: ”The active deception programme is truly amazing once you get inside it.”
The Bush administration is hoping that the Kay report will bolster its defences against an expected onslaught of Democratic party criticism over the Iraq war once as the 2004 presidential election campaign gathers pace next month.
The White House weathered two weeks of intense media scrutiny last month after it admitted including an unsubstantiated claim about the Iraqi nuclear programme in the president’s state of the union address in January.
The intensity of the coverage has let up considerably while Congress is on holiday this month.
But the Washington Post on Sunday published a three-page investigation on how the administration exaggerated available intelligence on the Iraqi nuclear programme.
”On occasion, administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views,” the investigation found.
”The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied.”
The report focused on administration claims that Iraq was trying to import aluminium tubes to build a gas centrifuge for uranium enrichment, despite persuasive evidence that the specification of the tubes made it much more likely they were intended for the construction of rockets, as the Baghdad regime had claimed. – Guardian Unlimited Â