WASHINGTON, May 17: Easily evaded spy satellites. A shortage of clandestine sources. A failure to heed clear warnings. Each of these, observers say, contributed to the CIA's failure to foresee India's nuclear tests.The US spy agency's self-examination is revealing more than a last-minute failure to grasp the significance of satellite photos that indicated nuclear tests were imminent.
US Intelligence officials, lawmakers who oversee the CIA and outside experts point to a wide range of flaws -- technical, organisational and human -- that contributed to what Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Shelby called a "colossal failure" by the CIA.
India's five underground nuclear blasts last Monday and Wednesday sent tremors through the already tense region and threatened to undermine global arms control efforts.
Had a warning of the tests surfaced, critics of the agency said, top policy makers might have been able to dissuade India's newly installed government from going forward.
Initially, thefocus was on apparent failings at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, where analysts pore over spy satellite photography looking for signs of trouble in a variety of overseas hot spots.
US Intelligence officials said recent pictures showed no signs of unusual activity at India's test range. As a result, none of the imagery analysts responsible for India were on alert late last Sunday night when the first clear indications of impending tests emerged.
CIA Director George Tenet named retired Adm. David Jeremiah to lead an inquiry into the agency's performance leading up to the nuclear tests, with his first findings expected next week.
Some nuclear experts credit India with knowing when to hide from US spy satellites rather than American spies being asleep at the wheel. "It's not a failure of the CIA," said Indian nuclear researcher G Balachandran. "It's a matter of their intelligence being good, our deception being better."
R R Subramanian, a nuclear physicist with New Delhi's independent Institutefor Defence Studies and Analyses, said hiding preparations for the tests was merely a matter of choosing the hours when the satellites were looking elsewhere to move the necessary people and chemicals.
Tenet told lawmakers in closed session that India deliberately chose a period of frequent sandstorms as the time to conduct the underground blasts.
Rep. Porter Goss, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the fault was not a question of technology -- "We're overinvested in technology," he said -- but in a shortage of human sources who might have warned of the impending tests.
Duma Speaker backs India
MOSCOW: Gennady Seleznyov, Speaker of the Lower House of the Russian Parliament, said that India acted correctly when it staged a series of nuclear tests last week, Itar-Tass reported today.
"I believe that India acted correctly. In this respect, it acts very consistently and it was a correct decision not to curtail its research programme halfway despite US pressure. I canonly admire their national pride," he commented.
Seleznyov also spoke against imposing sanctions on India, noting that the country has already expressed its willingness to "join all programmes upholding nuclear non-proliferation and banning underground nuclear tests."
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
