A weapons inspector’s lot is not necessarily a happy one, as David Kay discovered in the course of a long and distinguished career. The onetime political science professor, whose youthful interest in physics led him to serve the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the CIA as a nuclear weapons expert in dozens of countries around the world, learned this lesson to his dismay — and in the long run, to his credit — in Iraq, both during and after Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.
In 1991 it was Kay who, under a UN/IAEA mandate to find and destroy nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and materials in post-Gulf War Iraq, led a team on a series of unannounced inspections that, in one famous episode, found incriminating evidence at an army installation in Baghdad. This was not the first time that Kay and his colleagues found and secured evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction, including ingredients for a nuclear bomb. But when they tried to remove documents and videotapes from the facility, Saddam’s troops forbade them to do so and detained them in the parking lot, where they remained during a four-day standoff.
The team slept in its vehicles and subsisted on meager rations. But because Kay possessed an early, unwieldy version of a satellite telephone, he was able to communicate with his bosses at the U.N. and IAEA — and with journalists, who transformed the parking lot siege into a global sensation.
“The chemical program was huge,” Kay later recalled. There was also evidence of a nascent nuclear weapons program, spread over two dozen secret facilities in Iraq, with which Saddam was “probably six to 18 months away from [a] working nuclear device. It wouldn’t have been pretty, and it wouldn’t have launched on a missile, but it would have been a working device.” Kay also found evidence that, before the war, Saddam had transported and successfully hidden “a very large [and] quite accomplished biological program.”
In 1993, Kay joined a Washington consulting firm.
Throughout the 1990s, a series of U.N.-sponsored delegations, continually harassed and stymied by Iraqi officials, managed to cripple Saddam’s programs and destroy his cache of existing weaponry. But international inspectors were expelled from Iraq in 1998, and later, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Bush administration officials, and Kay as well, were persuaded that Saddam had resumed development of WMDs, including a nuclear bomb. This became the principal pretext for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and Saddam’s overthrow.
In the war’s aftermath, the Pentagon was unable to find WMDs in Iraq. Accordingly, when President George W. Bush commissioned the CIA to search for evidence, Kay was the logical choice to head its newly formed 1,400-person Iraq Survey Group. Based on his wide and detailed experience, anecdotal evidence from multiple sources, and personal support for the war, Kay arrived in Baghdad fully expecting to find what he sought. He and his team searched abandoned sites, derelict labs, suspicious dumps, remote facilities, and warehouses — but found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
As he ruefully noted in congressional testimony, in 2004, Saddam had made furtive efforts to acquire materials and was seeking to build long-range ballistic missiles. But there were no WMDs. “Let me begin by saying we were almost all wrong,” he declared, “and I certainly include myself here.”
It is worth noting that Kay remained a supporter of the invasion, arguing that the suffering of the Iraqi people justified the overthrow of Saddam’s brutal regime. It is also worth noting that Bush was publicly grateful for Kay’s efforts, appointing a bipartisan commission to investigate the CIA’s intelligence failures, and that the commission confirmed what Kay had concluded. By then, however, Kay was persona non grata at the White House and the CIA.
When he died last week, in retirement at 82, Kay had the melancholy satisfaction of a public servant whose honor and integrity had served the truth, and his country, as well as he had served his faithless political chiefs.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
