January 8, 2004

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 — The Bush administration has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment, according to senior government officials.

The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March.

A separate military team that specializes in disposing of chemical and biological weapons remains part of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, which has been searching Iraq for more that seven months at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. But that team is "still waiting for something to dispose of," said a survey group member.

Some of the government officials said the most important evidence from the weapons hunt might be contained in a vast collection of seized Iraqi documents being stored in a secret military warehouse in Qatar. Only a small fraction have been translated.

A report published Wednesday in The Washington Post cited a previously undisclosed document that suggested that Iraq might have destroyed its biological weapons as early as 1991. The report said investigators had otherwise found no evidence to support American beliefs that Iraq had maintained illicit weapons dating from the Persian Gulf war of 1991 or that it had advanced programs to build new ones.

The report also documented a pattern of deceit that was found in every field of special weaponry. It said that according to Iraqi designers and foreign investigators, program managers exaggerated the results they could achieve, or even promised results they knew they could not accomplish — all in an effort to appease Saddam Hussein. In some cases, though, they simply did it to advance their careers, the report said, or preserve jobs or even conduct intrigues against their rivals.

Senior intelligence officials acknowledged in recent days that the weapons hunters still had not found weapons or active programs, but in interviews, they said the search must continue to ensure that no hidden Iraqi weapons surfaced in a future attack.

"We worry about what may have happened to those weapons," Stuart Cohen, the vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said in an interview broadcast late Tuesday on the ABC News program "Nightline." "Theories abound as to what may have happened."

The search for Iraqi weapons remains "the primary focus" of the survey group, a senior Defense Department official said. But he acknowledged that most of the dozens of new linguists and intelligence analysts to join the team had recently been given assignments related to combating the Iraqi insurgency rather than to the weapons search.

David Kay, the head of the survey group, made it known last month that he might leave his post. Government officials said Wednesday that he had not reached a decision but that both he and his top deputy, Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton of the Defense Intelligence Agency, were in Washington, in part to discuss what direction the hunt should take.

"I am sure that if they had found important evidence, we would know about it," said Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who has said the administration exaggerated the Iraqi threat.

Bill Harlow, the top spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency, said Wednesday that "the team needs to compete its work, and no one should jump to any conclusions before it has an opportunity to examine all of the circumstances."

American intelligence officials who described the seized documents said they hoped the documents might eventually help to unravel the mystery of whether Iraqi weapons remained hidden or whether they were destroyed long before what the Bush administration initially portrayed as a mission "to disarm Iraq."

In the television interview, Mr. Cohen, who as vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council led the team that formally concluded in October 2002 that Iraq possessed both chemical and biological weapons, insisted that "it is too soon to close the books on this case."

A report to be released Thursday by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has concluded that it was unlikely that Iraq could have destroyed, hidden or sent out of the country the hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons and related production facilities that American officials claimed were present "without the United States detecting some sign of this activity."

Through their spokesmen, Dr. Kay and General Dayton have declined repeated requests for interviews.

The cache of Iraqi documents cover subjects extending far beyond illicit weapons, according to senior military officials, and are so voluminous that, if stacked, they would rise 10 miles high, according to estimates by senior government officials.

The warehouse in Qatar has become the center of work by the Defense Intelligence Agency to translate and analyze the documents, the officials said.

The 400-member team withdrawn from Iraq, known as the Joint Captured Matériel Exploitation Group, was primarily composed of technical experts and was headed by an Australian brigadier, Defense Department officials said. Its work included searching weapons depots and other sites for missile launchers that might have been used with illicit weapons, the officials said, and it was withdrawn "because its work was essentially done."

"They picked up everything that was worth picking up," one official said. The weapons disposal team still in place, known as Task Force D/E, for disablement and elimination, has been used to collect suspicious material, although none has proved to be part of any illicit weapons program.

In an interim report in October, Dr. Kay acknowledged that his team had failed to find illicit weapons or active weapons programs in Iraq, but said they had discovered evidence that Mr. Hussein intended to develop such weapons and might have retained the capacity to do so.

Dr. Kay has not said when he intended to issue his next report, and that remains a subject of debate within the administration, government officials said.

American intelligence officials, including Mr. Cohen, have vigorously defended their estimates of Iraq's weapons program, saying the evidence was strong, credible and backed up by a number of sources. But staff members of the Senate and House intelligence agencies are preparing reports suggesting that the administration and intelligence agencies had seriously overestimated the nature of the threat posed by illicit Iraqi weapons.

Ms. Harman said in a telephone interview that she expected that Dr. Kay, appointed last June 11 as a special adviser to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, was probably stepping down, a development that she said would be "very disappointing."

"I have to believe that if they were about to pounce on a large stockpile of chemical or biological weapons, he would be there for the announcement," Ms. Harman said.