In 2001, U.S. intelligence learned that Iraq was trying to buy 60,000 high-strength aluminum tubes. They were made of 7075-T6 aluminum, 81 millimeters across and 900 millimeters long. Tubes that hard and that wide were a controlled item, because they could have nuclear uses.
A centrifuge analyst at the CIA judged that the tubes were probably meant for centrifuges to enrich uranium. On April 10, 2001, the CIA published its first assessment: the tubes “have little use other than for a uranium enrichment program.”
One day later, the Department of Energy published its own analysis. The Senate Intelligence Committee would later call DOE’s analysts “the Intelligence Community’s nuclear experts.” The tube diameter, DOE wrote, was “only marginally large enough for practical centrifuge applications,” and the specifications and quantity looked “generally consistent” with rocket casings. By May it had found a closer match. Iraq had bought similar tubes before to make 81-millimeter rockets at the Nasser factory in Baghdad. It had 160,000 of them on hand in 1989 and 66,737 in 1996.
The argument ran for a year and a half. In July 2001 the CIA reported that the tubes’ dimensions matched a 1950s design known as the Zippe centrifuge. They didn’t, the Committee later found: the tube walls were more than three times as thick as in any of Zippe’s designs. The CIA tested the tubes without inviting DOE. “We were trying to prove some things that we wanted to prove with the testing,” a CIA analyst told Committee staff. “It wasn’t a joint effort.” An independent Defense Department rocket expert said CIA analysts seemed to be trying “to encourage us to come up with [the] answer” that the tubes weren’t for rockets.
There was even an outside check. CIA contractors reviewed the tubes analysis. They got their information only from the CIA, didn’t question the other agencies, and did the work in one day.
In October 2002, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons programs said “most agencies” saw the tubes as compelling evidence that Saddam was reconstituting a uranium enrichment effort. DOE’s dissent sat in parentheses. The State Department’s intelligence bureau went further and doubted that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program at all. The Director of Central Intelligence told the Committee he hadn’t known there were dissenting views on the tubes until the estimate was drafted in September 2002, though the agencies had been arguing since the spring of 2001.
When inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency returned to Iraq late in 2002, they found Iraq’s claim that the tubes were for artillery rockets completely consistent with the evidence on the ground. The CIA produced reports rejecting their conclusions.
In July 2004, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence published its review. The information available, it concluded, “indicated that these tubes were intended to be used for an Iraqi conventional rocket program and not a nuclear program.” The estimate’s judgment that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program “was not supported by the intelligence.”
The Committee also named a cause. The intelligence community had suffered from “a collective presumption” that Iraq had an active and growing weapons of mass destruction program, a “group think” dynamic. The presumption was so strong, it wrote, that mechanisms built to challenge it, such as red teams and devil’s advocacy, were not used. As for the contractors’ one-day review, the Committee did not count it as a challenge at all. It called it “an example of the collective rationalization that is indicative of ‘group think.’”