Person of the Week: David Kay
Jan. 30, 2004 -- David Kay, the former top U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, testified before the Senate this week, telling the country he found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after eight months of looking. Simply put, according to Kay, U.S. intelligence got it wrong.
"Turns out we were all wrong probably and that is the most disturbing thing," Kay said during his testimony.
The senators' questioning made it very clear what a highly charged political issue the discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had become. Democrats pressed their point that President Bush took the country to war under false pretenses. The Republican questions emphasized that the world was safer without Saddam Hussein and that the search for weapons wasn't over.
Kay, however, chose not to focus on the political aspects.
"What was running through my mind as I was sitting there for six hours was it's rather like a football fan who goes to the Super Bowl parties and all the other guests are advertising executives and they want to discuss the commercials, and I want to watch the football game," he said.
Kay told the senators he, in fact, thought the world was safer without Saddam Hussein. He dismissed the notion of whether there had ever been undue influence on his team to reach a certain conclusion.
Said Kay during the hearing: "You know, almost in a perverse way, I wish it had been undue influence because we know how to correct that. We get rid of the people who were in fact exercising that. The fact that it wasn't tells me that we have got a much more fundamental problem of understanding what went wrong."
Standoff With Saddam
In 1991, a few months after the end of the Persian Gulf War, Kay was working for the United Nations. He flew to Iraq to oversee the elimination of the country's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
"We went there with the expectation, or at least the hope, that the Iraqis were at least going to cooperate," he said. "[It] didn't take very long on my first mission to find out that wasn't going to be the case." He and his team found valuable evidence at Iraq's Ministry of Labor. But when they tried to leave the parking lot, they were surrounded by the Iraqi army. The team was not permitted to leave without turning over film and videotape of their findings.
The world watched the standoff on television — Kay and his 43 inspectors vs. Saddam Hussein.
A journalist called Kay's wife at one point to ask if she was nervous.
"She said, 'No, I'm not, he's often gotten into situations like this and he's always gotten out.' Well they faxed the article to us in the parking lot, and I had 42 other people wanting to know if I would explain exactly what situation like this I'd been in and did I remember how we had gotten out," Kay said.
During the standoff, Kay was publicly accused by the Iraqis of working for the CIA.
At the time, then-Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said, "Our information is that [David Kay] is a CIA officer. Each time this man came to Baghdad there was a problem created by him, fabricated by him intentionally."
"I reminded Tariq when I was interviewing him just months ago of that and he sort of laughed," Kay said.
The confrontation lasted for four days, and then the Iraqi leader let them go with the documents.
It was not Kay's only confrontation with the Iraqis. He and his team once spotted several trucks trying to get away from a nuclear facility they were investigating. He had no alternative but to inform the Iraqi government of their violation of the U.N.'s Security Council resolution.
‘Small in Stature, Large in Spirit ’
A colleague once said of Kay that "he's small in stature but large in spirit." He is, after all, from Texas. "I grew up on the east side of Houston. I didn't realize we were poor until I went away to college and saw how others lived," said Kay.
"I was interested in international affairs from a pretty early age," he said. "Believe it or not given my current weight, I was less than 100 pounds then and high school debating and those sorts of things intrigued me. So I knew I wanted to go somewhere else and do other things."
At the University of Texas at Austin, Kay studied political science, economics and international relations. He joined the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1983, where he monitored 800 weapons programs in 70 countries. Iraq was a major focus.
In Kay's other life, for which he does not seem to have had much time, he is an amateur photographer. He says he takes pictures of almost anything.
Since testifying before the Senate, Kay, 63, is trying to satisfy his wife's request that he do a few domestic chores and stay home for a while. While Kay was in Iraq, his daughter had his second grandchild.
Kay's wife found a spoof about him online the other day. The headline read: "Kay to Search on Mars for WMD."
"It's going to become my desktop image on my computer and I'm threatening to make it my next Christmas card," Kay said.
Last week, David Kay resigned from his job, citing a lack of resources to continue the job in Iraq, which he estimates is 85 percent finished.
He wants a full scale independent investigation into why U.S. intelligence failed leading up to the war in Iraq. The American people, he said, need to know.
"Our best protection — none of us likes to fight a war — you avoid wars by good intelligence. You win also by good intelligence, but only at the cost of blood. I've seen too much blood in my lifetime. I would prefer avoiding conflict."