Washington, D.C.

WMD search leader considers leaving post

The American team searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq may soon lose its chief, and has been reassigning some personnel from the hunt to fighting the insurgency, U.S. officials said Thursday.

While officials insisted they remain committed to the seeking weapons, the developments raise new questions about the future of a $900 million effort that the Bush administration has hoped would corroborate one of its main rationales for invading Iraq.

David Kay, who has led the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group since June, has told superiors at the Central Intelligence Agency that he was considering leaving the team, which has yet to find stockpiles of banned weapons, a U.S. official said. The official said Kay, a former U.N. weapons inspector, had not made a decision.

Washington, D.C.

U.S. plans to hire Iraqi WMD scientists

The United States Thursday announced a new program to hire Iraqi scientists once involved in developing weapons of mass destruction, putting them to work on reconstruction projects as a way of preventing their defection to other countries.

The two-year project seeks to discourage hundreds of scientists, technicians and engineers who worked on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as well as ballistic missiles from helping other countries now secretly trying to build the world’s deadliest arms.

The project is modeled on a similar effort to prevent Russian and other scientists from selling their talents to other nations after the Soviet Union’s demise, a much larger effort that has had mixed results over the past dozen years, Iraq and arms experts say.

The failure by U.S. investigators to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq doesn’t diminish the importance of the new program there, arms experts say.