On Iraq and illicit weapons, the intelligence agency that got it least wrong, it now turns out, was one of the smallest — a State Department bureau with no spies, no satellites and a reputation for contrariness.

Almost alone among intelligence agencies, this one, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or I.N.R., does not report to either the White House or the Pentagon. Its approach is purely analytical, so that it owes no allegiance to particular agents, imagery or intercepts. It shuns the worst-case plans sometimes sought by military commanders.

In recounting where their bureau got it right on the question of Iraq, State Department officials acknowledge that the success was hollow, in large part because Secretary of State Colin L. Powell ultimately sided with the C.I.A. and not with his own intelligence shop.

In February 2003, Mr. Powell spent several days at C.I.A. headquarters reviewing intelligence in preparation for his Feb. 5 speech to the United Nations Security Council, in which he laid out the administration's case for a possible war against Iraq. Mr. Powell did not invite any officials from the bureau to accompany him as part of the review, and his speech endorsed the very view on Iraq's nuclear weapons from which the bureau had dissented so strongly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/19/politics/19INTE.html?pagewanted=all&position=