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(U) The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence focused its work in reviewing U.S. intelligence on the quality and quantity of intelligence analysis, the objectivity and reasonableness of the Intelligence Community's (IC) judgments, and whether any influence was brought to bear to shape that analysis to support policy objectives. The Committee also examined the role of intelligence collectors in providing the fundamental information upon which the intelligence analysts based their assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities. To understand how intelligence collectors worked to obtain information on Iraq's WMD capabilities, what the IC's collection efforts entailed, and whether those efforts produced tangible results, Committee staff interviewed the Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Collection (ADCI/C) and various members of the National Intelligence Collection Board (NICB)³². Committee staff also interviewed Iraqi collection officers in the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Directorate for Operations and National Security Agency (NSA) Iraqi signals intelligence analysts to gain further insight into the IC's post-Gulf War human and signals intelligence collection strategies for Iraq. Committee staff also reviewed the National Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Collection Directives on Iraq, which are intended to prioritize and guide collection, to determine where IC collectors were requested to focus their collection efforts.

(U) The NICB told Committee staff that prior to the Gulf War there had been a robust, U.S., all-source intelligence collection program against Iraq and its WMD programs. After the Gulf War, however, most of the IC's knowledge of Iraqi WMD programs was obtained from, in conjunction with, and in support of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) inspections. NICB members and IC analysts told Committee staff that information from UNSCOM provided a significant portion of the information the IC had on Iraq's WMD programs and capabilities. One NICB representative told Committee staff, "it's very difficult to overstate the degree to which we were focused on and using the output from the U.N. inspectors."

(                ) While inspectors were in Iraq from 1991 through 1998, the IC was not aggressively pursuing collection against the WMD target and most of the assets tasked for Iraqi collection were focused on satisfying support-to-military operations requirements, support to UNSCOM inspections, and to indications and warning. Due to competing collection priorities globally:                                                                                                                           and regionally: Operations Northern and Southern Watch, and the emphasis on current, rather than strategic or national, intelligence, there was no focused, collaborative collection effort on the Iraqi WMD target.

(                ) When United Nations (UN) inspectors left Iraq in December 1998, the IC was left with a limited unilateral collection capability against Iraq's WMD. A report from intelligence collectors in 2001³³ noted, "with the end of UNSCOM activity inside Iraq,. . . the IC's collection capability on Iraqi WMD programs diminished significantly. . . .                      SENTENCE DELETED                     

(U) In 1998, a new ADCI/C led a major effort to examine worldwide end-to-end collection.³⁴ To undertake this effort, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) established the Collection Management Task Force. Led by the ADCI for Collection, the Collection Management Task Force identified both the successes and challenges of the IC's collection activities and made several recommendations to improve collection, including bringing "the collection disciplines together in a more synergistic way," looking for "innovative ways that improve collaboration and innovation across the Community," and establishing a center to examine the IC's most intractable intelligence problems and develop new ways to improve collection. In 2000, the Collection Concepts Development Center (CCDC) was created to achieve these goals and took on Iraq's WMD capabilities for its first study.

(                ) In the CCDC study, collectors and analysts within the IC worked together to identify collection gaps and develop new, unilateral collection strategies designed specifically to target Iraq's WMD programs. The study looked at all four aspects of WMD (nuclear, biological, chemical and delivery) and recommended ways to address the collection gaps. The CCDC released its report, titled, Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction: Recommendations for Improvements in Collection, in June 2000. Immediately after the report was released, the IC began to implement the CCDC's recommendations to improve intelligence collection in all disciplines (human intelligence [HUMINT], signals intelligence [SIGINT], imagery intelligence [IMINT], open source intelligence [OSINT] and measurement and signature intelligence [MASINT]) against Iraq's                      . The NICB briefed Committee staff on the how these recommendations were implemented and how intelligence collection improved as a result of these efforts.

footnotes

³² The NICB comprises the most senior collection managers from each intelligence discipline (human intelligence [HUMINT], signals intelligence [SIGINT], imagery intelligence [IMINT], and measurement and signature intelligence [MASINT]).

³³ Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction: Recommendations for Improvements in Collection. The Collection Concepts Development Center, June 2000.

³⁴ End-to-end collection refers to the collection cycle which entails the development of collection requirements, allocating tasks to specific collection assets, collecting, processing, exploiting, and then disseminating the information that is collected.