The New York Times February 08, 2004
Reading Satellite Photos, Then and Now
By Douglas Jehl
WASHINGTON What a difference a year makes.
Last Feb. 5, before the hushed chamber of the United Nations Security Council, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell unveiled this photograph and others as key pillars in an indictment of Saddam Hussein's regime. The photograph was taken in May 2002, from a spy satellite about 400 miles above the earth, and Mr. Powell offered no room for second-guessing what it might show.
It was "unusual activity,'' he said, at a site called Al Musayyib, involving cargo vehicles and "a decontamination vehicle associated with biological or chemical weapons activity.'' The site, Mr. Powell said, had been used by Iraq "for at least three years to transship chemical weapons from production facilities to the field.''
In fact, intelligence experts inside and outside government now say, the photograph provides no such concrete evidence. Instead, it is an example of how intelligence analysts and the Bush administration apparently made too much out of too few facts about Iraq and its alleged stockpiles of illicit weapons.
Al Musayyib had indeed been used by Iraq during the late 1980's for the transshipment of chemical weapons. And the activity observed by the spy satellites in 2002 tracked closely with what had been seen at the site before the Persian Gulf war of 1991, when Iraq was producing chemical weapons.
But United Nations inspectors who scoured the site later in 2002, and American inspectors who have scoured the site and hundreds of others since March have found no evidence of chemical weapons stockpiles or production. Most experts now believe that the cargo vehicles and the "decontamination vehicle'' were most likely tanker trucks and fire engines, used for commercial activity or some kind of rehearsal for weapons production that had not resumed.
One fragile element in the administration's case, said John Pike, an intelligence expert who heads GlobalSecurity.org, is that even the most advanced spy satellites provide only a piece of any intelligence puzzle. They can show buildings, but not what is inside; they can show vehicles, but not what they are carrying; they can even show people, but not what they know.
That is why satellite imagery is almost always "cross-cued'' against other information, including human and signals intelligence, which is what Mr. Powell said was done in the case of the photograph above. "We have a human source who has corroborated that movement of chemical weapons occurred at this site at that time,'' he told the Security Council at the time.
But no synergy is stronger than its weakest link, as George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, essentially acknowledged in his speech at Georgetown University last week. Most of the human intelligence obtained by American spy agencies about Iraq's chemical weapons program, Mr. Tenet said, had come from third-hand sources whose reports were relayed by friendly foreign governments but which the United States still has not been able to verify.
For the certainty that Mr. Powell had expressed, Mr. Tenet substituted a hint of uncertainty. "Only when analysts saw what they believed to be satellite photos of shipments of material from ammunition sites,'' he said, "did they believe that Iraq was again producing chemical weapons agents.''
© Copyright 2004, The New York Times Company
