US Weapons Inspector: "I Knew Within Days We Were Wrong on WMDs"

Kay: U.S. 'wrong' on WMD

The CIA's former weapons hunter in Iraq realized within days of arriving in Baghdad last summer that dictator Saddam Hussein was no longer stockpiling a banned arsenal, according to a new report.

David Kay, with whom the Bush administration placed its hopes of finding Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, sent a startling E-mail to CIA Director George Tenet in early July 2003.

"I wrote that it looks as though they did not produce weapons," Kay reveals in an interview with the new Vanity Fair.

It wasn't until late January this year that Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee that "we were almost all wrong" on Iraq.

Kay told Vanity Fair, in its 22,000-word opus, "The Path to War," that he was actually ready to come home in mid-December. Tenet said no.

"If you resign now, it will appear that we don't know what we're doing and the wheels are coming off," he said Tenet told him.

Vanity Fair's look at the war in Iraq portrays Vice President Cheney as among the lead advocates for war.

The veep made at least 10 trips to the CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters, said Richard Kerr, a retired CIA official who did an internal review of prewar intelligence. "There was a lot of pressure, no question," Kerr said.

The magazine also bolstered the contention from some critics that President Bush was obsessed with Saddam.

A former British ambassador recounts a dinner meeting Bush had with Prime Minister Tony Blair on Sept. 20, 2001 - nine days after the terror attacks on America - where Bush pressed for an attack on Iraq.

The magazine also details extraordinary pressure on Secretary of State Powell to tie Saddam to the 9/11 attacks. Powell, who on Friday conceded the intelligence in his UN speech making the case for war in Iraq was faulty, refused.