According to former CIA head George Tenet, "There were many Iraqi officials who said both publicly and privately that Iraq had no WMD."

Tenet's statement is accurate. Moreover, there were high level CIA officials who believed Iraq possessed no WMD. In addition, foreign governments stated there was no hard evidence Iraq had WMD, as did the heads of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC).

All were ignored by the Bush administration. Neither of the two main government investigations of the WMD issue, by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the WMD Commission, investigated how or why this occurred. Indeed, almost no references to the below information appear in either report.

Iraqi government sources

Tahir Jalil Habbush al Takriti:
Habbush was head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service from 1999 until the U.S. invasion, and thus one of the top officials in the Saddam regime.

According to Ron Suskind's book The Way of the World, Habbush met with intelligence agents from Britain's MI6 in Jordan in the run up to war. Habbush told MI6 that Iraq possessed no WMD or WMD programs. Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, flew to Washington in late January, 2003 to deliver this information directly to George Tenet. Soon afterward Tenet briefed the highest levels of the Bush administration, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, on Dearlove's report. Bush responded: "Why don't they ask him to give us something we can use to help make our case?"

After the publication of The Way of the World, Tenet acknowledged that Habbush had indeed told MI6 that Iraq had no WMD, but claimed Habbush "offered no evidence to back up his assertion."

Naji Sabri Ahmad Al-Hadithi:
Sabri was Foreign Minister of Iraq from 2001 until the U.S. invasion. While in New York in September, 2002, he communicated to the CIA that—according to Tyler Drumheller, the CIA's then-head of covert operations in Europe—"[Iraq] had no active weapons of mass destruction program." Bush was briefed on this on September 18, 2002. Drumheller states: "The group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they're no longer interested...And we said, 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said, 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.'"

Hussein Kamel Hassan al-Majid:
Kamel was Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, and head of all Iraqi WMD programs during the 1980s. After defecting to Jordan in 1995, Kamel told the UN, CIA and MI6 that Iraq had not possessed any WMD since 1991. (This was exactly what Habbush would say eight years later, and what the CIA eventually determined to be the truth in its 2004 WMD report.) Kamel was lured back to Iraq in 1996 and assassinated by the Saddam regime.

What Kamel had said in 1995 was not publicly known until late February, 2003, when Newsweek published an article based partly on the notes from his debriefing by the UN. Soon afterward CIA spokesman Bill Harlow stated the article "incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue." Harlow later served as ghostwriter for George Tenet's book At the Center of the Storm.

Before the Newsweek article was published, Kamel was mentioned by Bush, Cheney and Powell as having supported US claims on WMD. Footnote 429 of the WMD Commission Report indicates that in January, 2002, the White House requested a CIA report on Kamel's 1995 statements.

U.S. government sources

Alan Foley:
Foley was head of the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC). WINPAC bore primary responsibility for the CIA's evaluation of the Iraq WMD issue.

The Italian Letter by Peter Eiser and Knut Royce states:

One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center's analysts: "If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so."...

Several days after Bush's State of the Union speech [in January, 2003], Foley briefed student officers at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, DC. After the briefing, Melvin Goodman, who had retired from the CIA and was then on the university's faculty, brought Foley into the secure communications area of the Fort McNair compound. Goodman thanked Foley for addressing the students and asked him what weapons of mass destruction he believed would be found after the invasion. "Not much, if anything," Goodman recalled that Foley responded.

International and foreign government sources

IAEA:
On January 27, 2003, IAEA Director General Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei reported to the UN Security Council:

[W]e have to date found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear weapons programme since the elimination of the programme in the 1990s...we should be able within the next few months to provide credible assurance that Iraq has no nuclear weapons programme. These few months would be a valuable investment in peace...

On March 7, 2003, ElBaradei stated that:

After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq...

The detailed knowledge of Iraq's capabilities that IAEA experts have accumulated since 1991 - combined with the extended rights provided by resolution 1441, the active commitment by all States to help us fulfil our mandate, and the recently increased level of Iraqi co-operation - should enable us in the near future to provide the Security Council with an objective and thorough assessment of Iraq's nuclear-related capabilities.

UNMOVIC:
On March 7, 2003, UNMOVIC director Hans Blix reported to the Security Council that any remaining uncertainties about the WMD issue could likely be clarified with several more months of inspections:

How much time would it take to resolve the key remaining disarmament tasks? While cooperation can and is to be immediate, disarmament and at any rate the verification of it cannot be instant. Even with a proactive Iraqi attitude, induced by continued outside pressure, it would still take some time to verify sites and items, analyse documents, interview relevant persons, and draw conclusions. It would not take years, nor weeks, but months.

Russian government:
On October 11, 2002, Russian president Vladimir Putin stated that his government had seen no evidence that Iraq possessed WMD. At the same time, British prime minister Tony Blair explicitly acknowledged that Russia disagreed with the U.S. and U.K. WMD claims:

With a tense Mr Blair alongside him at his dacha near Moscow, the Russian president took the unusual step of citing this week's sceptical CIA report on the Iraqi military threat to assert: "Fears are one thing, hard facts are another"...

After confirming his foreign ministry's assessment that No 10's Iraqi dossier "could be seen as a propagandistic step" to sway public opinion, he made it plain.

"Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that supports the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we have not received any such information from our partners as yet. This fact has also been supported by the information sent by the CIA to the US Congress."...

"There may be a difference of perspective about weapons of mass destruction, there is one certain way to find out and that is to let the inspectors back in to do their job. That is the key point on which we are both agreed," Mr Blair said.

French government:
News reports from September, 2002 stated the French intelligence service did not believe Iraq possessed a nuclear weapons program:

According to secret agents at the DGSE, Saddam's Iraq does not represent any kind of nuclear threat at this time…It [the French assessment] contradicts the CIA's analysis...French spies said that the Iraqi nuclear threat claimed by the United States was a "phony threat."