Former Chief U.S. Weapons Inspector in Iraq David Kay tells a packed house at the John F. Kennedy Jr. forum that the United States failed to get accurate intelligence mainly due to a lack of trained American agents on the ground.

Former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay said the United States “connected the dots” and made a series of intelligence failures in their search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum last night.

In his talk entitled “Iraq, WMD: Lessons Learned and Unlearned,” Kay told a packed crowd that the false belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was based on the government’s outdated intelligence system.

“The real lesson from Iraq is that preemption requires pristine intelligence. Clearly, we don’t have pristine intelligence,” he said in his speech sponsored by the Institute of Politics.

Kay said that while old systems were based on cracking borders, new programs must be able to infiltrate enemy organizations.

“The intelligence community that we have today was built around the problem of denied territory. The problem that we face now is one of denied networks and denied minds,” he said.

Kay said that U.S. attempts to improve intelligence on the ground came too late and were largely ineffective.

The former chief weapons inspector said that as late as 1994, the United States had no agents in Iraq.

Intelligence directors tried to remedy the problem by better sharing information with U.N. inspectors already in the country.

“It was like crack cocaine. Recruiting shadowy Iraqi agents was dangerous, so [working with scientists allowed us] to gather intelligence without running a lot of risk,” Kay said.

But according to Kay, the dependency on U.N. scientists was only a quick fix that caused greater problems in the long run.

“But in 1998, when the inspectors were withdrawn, the U.S. found itself without anybody inside Iraq, and there was a rush to find agents among defectors,” he said.

Additionally, Kay said that intelligence experts felt an increased pressure to answer critics’ post-Sept. 11 complaints that experts failed to put together intelligence to prevent the al Qaeda attack.

“Connecting the dots is a dangerous two-way street. If you don’t collect [good intelligence] then connecting the dots can be dangerous because you’ll make the wrong conclusions,” he said.

Even with such large-scale institutional failures, Kay said he believes other factors contributed to the intelligence void inside Iraq—and that the inefficiency of the Iraqi government made the problem worse.

Kay said that the rest of the world had so much trouble solving the Iraqi puzzle because the state itself was unable to function like a normal government.