CIA 'failed' to 'detect' Indian nuke tests in 1998

Washington: Former US Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet has said that "failure" of the American intelligence to "detect" the Indian nuclear tests in 1998 was one of the "mistakes" of his tenure which he cannot "stop remembering" even now.

"Unfortunately when you run a place like CIA, it's the low lights that stand out in the media - the mistakes, the gaffes - things everyone can see and no one, can resist commenting on. For many of those I would like to turn back the clock and erase them. Some, I can't stop remembering," Tenet writes in his book "At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA".

Commenting on the tests by India, he says, "We knew both countries (India and Pakistan) had nuclear desires, intent and capabilities and we new the risks all too well. The India-Pakistan border is one of the most contentious in the world maybe even more than the border that divides Israel and the Palestinians. Unleashing nuclear weapon on the sub continent could kill literally millions".

"That said, the timing of the tests caught us by surprise," he says.

When Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee Chairman Richard Shelby wanted to know what had happened in India, Tenet said, "Senator we didn't have a clue". Shelby announced on television later that it was a "colossal intelligence failure" on the part of CIA.

Disagreeing with Shelby's remark, Tenet writes, it was an intelligence failure "no doubt" but "Colossal is in the eye of the beholder".

Later, on the same day, President Bill Clinton called to say that he had the fullest confidence in his CIA Director.

In the book, Tenet devotes two full pages to the nuclear tests by India and offers a glimpse of the David Jeremiah report that went on to see where things went wrong in the American intelligence community.

The Jeremiah team confirmed that the identification of the Indian nuclear test preparations was a difficult intelligence collection and analytical problem because the Indian programme was not derived from foreign sources such as the American, Chinese, Russian or the French, he says in the book.

"Three years earlier in 1995 we had learned about similar test preparations and strongly urged the Indians to stop. They had but in confronting them we had given them a road map for how to deceive us in the future," Tenet claims.

"We did not sufficiently expect that Indian politicians might do what they had openly promised - conduct a nuclear test, as the incoming ruling party had said it would.

The lesson learned is that sometimes intentions do not reside in secret - they are out there for all to see and hear. What we believe to be implausible often has nothing to do with how a foreign culture might act," Tenet says adding that this was a lesson to be learnt later with respect to Iraq.

"We thought it implausible that someone like Saddam would risk the destruction of his regime over non-compliance with UN resolutions. What we did not account for was the mindset never to show weakness in a dangerous neighbourhood - particularly in regard to a growing Iranian military capability. Relying on secrets by themselves divorced from deep knowledge of cultural mindsets and history, will take you only so far," Tenet explains.