"Prober: I knew in days U.S. 'wrong' on WMD"

By James Gordon Meek, Daily News Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - 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. "So I said, 'Fine, I'll wait.'"
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