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Interview on Iraq and North Korea with US Secretary of State Colin Powell, July 22

'Interview, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, with The Washington Times Editorial Board, Washington, D.C., July 22, 2003'; US Department of State, Office of the Spokesman, News Release 2003/768, July 23.

Question: How has the wrangling over intelligence data in this country and in Great Britain impacted our efforts in Iraq? ...

Secretary Powell: I don't know that it really is impacting opposition. If you mean those Baathists and the Fedeyeen...

Question: Right, people who are shooting us.

Powell: I'd be surprised if they are sitting around reading about the 16 words in the State of the Union Address, and what Mr. Blair said, or what [CIA Director] George [Tenet] said, or what Condi [National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice] said, or what I said. I really don't think this is motivating them. To the extent that they believe that Mr. Blair and President Bush have been weakened in some way, I think that gives them - you know, that's certainly something they would welcome, but they're deceiving themselves if they welcomed it very long because I think this will all pass in due course. People will see that what President Bush and Prime Minister Blair and the other members of the coalition did was right. As more graves are opened, as more mass killings are made known, and as Mr. [David] Kay completes his work in Iraq searching for additional - or the evidence needed to make it clear to everybody that we knew what we were talking about with respect to weapons of mass destruction. I think this issue of what was in the State of the Union Address will fade into insignificance. ... You know intelligence is not always perfect knowledge. Information comes along, you take the information and try to assess its validity, and you convert it into a piece of intelligence. Sometimes it comes with lots of qualifiers on it, and it is up to policymakers to make judgments as to whether you can - that intelligence is something you can make a policy decision about. I have been through it many times where something looked very good at a particular point in time and looked better over time or looked worse over time, as more information came in. With respect to the State of the Union Address, they were looking for things that could make the case to the American people. This was an item that was in the intelligence world. It was referred to in NIEs [National Intelligence Estimates] and other documents, and it went into the State of the Union Address. On reflection, did it meet the standard that might have been appropriate for a State of the Union Address? You have heard the judgments that have been rendered on that. But by the time I was prepared and ready to go up and present it to the world, I had to make sure that there wasn't any more questioning of what I was going to put forward because I had a heck of an audience. The audience I was most worried about was not the audience in the Security Council. It wasn't even the massive television audience waiting for the Adlai Stevenson moment. It was the Iraqis who, if they knew more than me, could shoot down anything I said if I didn't have it right. I wasn't worried about you guys. I was worried about the Iraqis showing up that afternoon or the next morning with something that would shoot down something I said. So that is why mine was done in the way that it was done. The only thing anybody came up with was the Iraqis, of course, said it's all lies. The only challenge was debate about the centrifuges, which I acknowledged at the time I presented it. There was a debate. Then a couple of days later, a week or so later, there was some question about one of the overheads I used of a bunker complex, as to whether everybody agreed with my characterization of what made a particular bunker look like a chemical weapons storage bunker. Otherwise, do your Lexis-Nexis [search] and see how many Iraqi attacks I got on my presentation. ...

Question: ... [C]ould you address briefly the issues of the [divisions in the] intelligence community [over Iraq] that we hear reports about. I have been talking to people last week. There are people who tell me in this building that some of the high officials at the Department don't trust the [Department's own] INR [Bureau of Intelligence and Research] Bureau. There are people who say in the entire community - on the other side of the issue, there are many people hired by the previous administration who are trying now to politicize their analysis, something which should be very clear-cut, now they are trying to sneak in political advice or their own opinion. So it seems to me there are two groups of people at least, the one group who is doing this with political views and opinions, another group that supposedly sexed up or hyped up intelligence of their own analysis after a call from the Vice President or the Vice President walked to analyst's desk of the CIA, and then I hear these things very often these days. In terms of your own bureau here, how much do you trust these people? Are they over stretched? Do you have enough people to work on these issues? And how do you see their relationship with the rest of the IC?

Powell: I trust my intelligence bureau, INR. I think as this story spills out, they look pretty good in terms of what they told me. I spoke to all of them yesterday in an awards ceremony, and I spoke to them at a swearing in the other day when one of their Deputy Assistant Secretaries was appointed to be an ambassador. And what I said to them is your job is to tell me the truth as you see it. Your job is to get all of this information and convert it into intelligence that is usable to a policymaker. I expect you to tell me what you believe is true, tell me what you don't know. When you are not sure then speculate with me, but tell me you are speculating, and then it is my job to make the judgment as to how I respond to this intelligence you are giving me and I bear responsibility for that. You do not serve me loyally, and you do not serve the President loyally, and above all, you do not serve the American people if you do not tell us what you believe to be the truth. The only one they have to worry about approving or disapproving of their work is me. I am not sure what senior officials you are talking to, but the only one they are answerable to is to me. When they see that I am off what they think is base, or they think I have said something, "You ought to be careful, boss." Carl Ford shoots me a memo, as he has done in the course of these proceedings, if I can put it that way, which says, you know, "I don't quite come to the same conclusion as others have." It is then my job to make sure that his information is made known to other members of the intelligence community, and that is between me, George, Don, Condi, the Vice President, the rest of us, to determine the policy implications of that. So I have confidence in INR, and they know I have confidence in them, and they know that I respect them for their intellectual judgment and their honesty. INR is in no way politicized because I am the one who would politicize them and I have not. I am the political appointee, not them. ...

Question: Let's go to Korea, if we can. ... What's going on? Is it still the most dangerous place in the world?

Powell: It is a dangerous place. It is a country that says it has nuclear weapons. It says - it told us 10 years ago it had nuclear weapons. We know of two programs that it has to develop materials for nuclear weapons - the Yongbyon facility and its plutonium reprocessing capability, and the enriched uranium facility that we detected a couple of years ago and called to their attention last year. So, yes, it is dangerous, and we are responding to that danger. Not every situation gets the same solution. In this case, we discovered the enriched uranium facility and we confronted them with it last October, and told them, "You know this is not going to do anything for you and you need to stop, and we need to find a diplomatic solution to this." The President said that. They didn't respond. What we did was then mobilize the international community, got the IAEA to condemn their actions. What has not been I think commented on enough is the way in which, over the last six months or so, we have pulled every neighbor of North Korea into alignment on this issue. The Chinese are now publicly committed in support of the denuclearized Peninsula. They always were. But now they are more publicly committed and it comes out of the top leadership of the Chinese Government. South Korea always uneasy about its relationship with the North is solidly on our side of the issue looking for a multilateral forum in which to discuss this issue. The Japanese, which - they made a big overture to North Korea last year with Mister Koizumi's visit to Pyongyang, once we had the kidnapped victims go back, and that didn't turn out as well as they thought it might - but once he also got wind of what they were doing in nuclear weapons, he pulled back. There were billions of dollars that were about to help North Korea. It's all been pulled back. The Russians, after equivocating for some months, now also support what we are trying to do.

Why are we doing it this way? Because we tried it the other way last time. The last time was a two-party deal. And although I always give credit to my predecessors in the Clinton administration for freezing Yongbyon for eight years, they didn't shut down Yongbyon and it was still there waiting to pop out at a time of the North Koreans' choosing. And while everybody was watching Yongbyon, they were doing another one. "Hey, if we can sell it once, let's sell it twice." This Administration has decided, "Fellows, you in the region have more at stake than we do, and we're not going to allow this to become just a US-DPRK problem." Some of my severest critics have been out all over television on the weekend saying that we should do this, we should do that, meaning go speak to the North Koreans directly, show them how, you know, scared you are, and see what it is we have to pay to get them to do - what? - What they did last time? No, we need a comprehensive solution, and it has to involve all of the neighbors. Now, some delicate diplomacy is necessary to get us to a point where we can move forward on the diplomatic track, and that diplomacy is underway. I had the Chinese Vice Foreign Minister here on Friday night for two-and-a-half hours. We have good discussions. They know our position. Our position reflects also the position of our friends in the region. The Chinese are serving as our interlocutor with the North Koreans. I think that is pretty good diplomacy. The Chinese are involved, and they now have an equity in finding the right solution to this. So it takes time. North Koreans do things which are troubling. It appears that there is reprocessing taking place. Some of the other stories of last week about second plants, and the like, as you noted in your paper today, don't really - nobody can establish that at this point, but we are not treating this lightly. And, of course, the President has removed no option from the table. ...

Question: Are we going to give them any security guarantees?

Powell: They have been given security assurances in the past.

Question: What are those?

Powell: They had an agreement with the South Koreans in 1991. They had the Agreed Framework. President Clinton and Dr. Albright in the course of the '90s, put out communiqués and other statements that essentially talked about this issue. Now, they still are saying they need security guarantees. Well, we will see what we will see when we go forward.

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