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....

(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

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

34End-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.

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.

A. Human Intelligence (HUMINT)

In order to more fully understand why the CCDC recommended certain changes to the Intelligence Community's (IC) HUMINT collection activities, Committee staff interviewed HUMINT collection officers in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, including collection officers in the Near East (NE) Division and the Counterproliferation Division (CPD). These officers briefed Committee staff on the IC's HUMINT collection posture against Iraq from the end of the Gulf War until the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). CIA officers told staff that the IC's HUMINT collection efforts throughout this period were dedicated to

intelligence on a variety of issues. Most of this information obtained through CIA's sources was related to political and military issues, not WMD, however. The CIA had no dedicated WMD sources on the ground in Iraq until the late nineties.

The CIA

did not have any WMD sources in Iraq after 1998. When asked about the lack of sources with access to WMD, the Deputy Chief of CPD told Committee staff that "despite an intense, vigorous recruitment campaign against Iraq WMD targets... we were never able to gain direct access to Iraq's WMD programs."

The recommendations in the CCDC study responded to these deficiencies in HUMINT WMD collection. The CCDC study found that HUMINT operations against Iraq WMD were extremely limited. HUMINT was heavily dependent on liaison sources and although, by 2001, there were sources inside the country and outside the country, HUMINT collection against the Iraq WMD

and said that Iraq was a "tough

that the IC focus its HUMINT strategy

recommended the

problem." the CCDC recommended instead The CCDC study team

The NICB told Committee staff that even before the CCDC study was finalized, the IC began implementing many of these recommendations and aggressively pursued HUMINT collection. The NICB said both the CIA and the DIA developed well organized efforts

cers tol

These operations failed to provide any usable intelligence. The NICB told Committee

staff that the negative results were reported in intelligence reports.

In September, 2001, the DCI established a Joint Task Force within CIA's Counterproliferation Division (CPD) of the Directorate of Operations (DO). According to the Deputy Director of CPD, "there was a full complement of UNSCOM inspectors inside Iraq from '91 until December '98, so the focus wasn't as intense as it was after that in recruiting sources on WMD." The DCI's Iraqi WMD issue manager for the clandestine service told staff that "before the Task Force was set up, there were fewer than half a dozen at some times, individuals working on Iraq. There were very few assets at all reporting on Iraq's WMD efforts." After the Task Force was established, the CIA recruited sources, whose information resulted in the production and dissemination of over 400 intelligence reports. This was an increase from only 90 reports in 2000.

From late summer 2002 until the start of OIF in March 2003, the CIA "dramatically picked up the pace" of HUMINT collection according to a CIA collector.

provided information on Iraq's biological, chemical or nuclear weapons programs.

Committee staff asked why the CIA had not considered placing a CIA officer in the years before Operation Iraqi Freedom to investigate Iraq's WMD programs. A CIA officer said, "because it's very hard to sustain... it takes a rare officer who can go in and