DAVID KAY is not running in New Hampshire, but in quitting as head of the team searching for weapons in Iraq, and in explaining his reasons so publicly, he has taken aim at the Bush Administration’s case for war almost as directly as any Democratic presidential candidate.

Why? He told us why, up to a point, in interviews on American national television and in The New York Times at the weekend. He came to feel that it was futile to hunt for weapons that were not there, as he came to conclude. Nor did he welcome the Administration’s panicky decision to redeploy his experts to the hunt for militant terrorists instead.

But the timing of his resignation on Friday may also have been prompted by the credit that President Bush gave him in his State of the Union speech three days earlier — unexpected, and very likely unwanted. In citing Kay’s report in support of US action in Iraq, Bush may have provoked the inspector into his flamboyant denunciation.

For someone who has spent much of his life dealing with Intelligence, Kay has hardly stayed in the shadows. His 15 minutes of greatest fame came in 1991, after the Gulf War, as an inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations nuclear watchdog. Attempting to raid the headquarters of Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme, he and his team were held captive in the car park for some days, killing time by talking to the world’s media on a satellite telephone.

That episode — and others — did not endear him to all his colleagues at the IAEA. Some are still sour about his time at the agency. He was a showman, they gibe, more than a scientist, too interested in headlines and too willing to take credit for months of other people’s unheralded work. He hung around the American Embassy in Vienna rather than the multicultural UN citadel on the banks of the Danube.

His supporters say, in contrast, that he was very bright, ferociously energetic and had the courage to play the Iraqis at their brinksmanship.

Whatever friction there was in Vienna did not hold him back. Kay left the IAEA soon after the Gulf War project was complete. After a brief spell at the Uranium Institute in London — an organisation that promotes the nuclear industry — he set himself up as a consultant in Washington, strengthening his ties with the capital’s defence and intelligence experts.

After the end of the war last year, when Kay was ubiquitous on American television screens talking about Iraq’s past weapons programmes, Bush appointed him to head US efforts to find evidence of Iraq’s illicit endeavours.

Yet he did not find them and quickly came to believe that they probably were not there. In the State of the Union speech, Bush did not actually distort what Kay had reported last year in his preliminary survey, but he came close. “The Kay report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction- related programme activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the UN,” the President said.

Strictly, that is true, but it misrepresents the tone of Kay’s preliminary report, which was sceptical of the existance of large-scale programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction. It was hard to discern much that was favourable to the Administration in its pages.

That is even more true of Kay’s final report, which expresses doubt that there was any sustained illicit effort, on a large scale, after 1991.

However, Kay’s true targets are the intelligence agencies, and the failures of intelligence-gathering, rather than politicians themselves.

The agencies deluded themselves, and so misled the Administration, about the quality of their intelligence after UN inspectors were withdrawn in 1998.

The CIA became too dependent on spy satellites during the years of UN inspections, he argues. It failed to realise that alone, without intelligence on the ground, they delivered a very incomplete picture.

From interviewing Iraqi scientists, Kay now believes that around this time Iraq plunged into a chaos of corruption, as Saddam Hussein became more detached from reality while assuming command of weapons programmes himself.

Kay’s overall message is that the spies are more to blame for presenting inaccurate reports, and not admitting the inadequacy of the information on which they were based, more than the politicians are for exaggerating the intelligence that they were given.

Perhaps that helps Tony Blair, but only by nuance. Politicians did not recognise the poverty of the intelligence that they were given — but should have been told, and probably could have found out had they chosen to ask.

This conclusion does not directly accuse the Bush Administration — or Blair — of distorting the case for war, but it still says the case was wrong.

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