The CIA and members of Congress said they want to know how a presidential commission unearthed details on intelligence failures about Iraq's prewar weapons programs that previous investigations missed.
Of particular interest is information that emerged in last week's report about how doubts were handled regarding a leading source on former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's alleged mobile biological weapons labs -- an Iraqi scientist who defected to Germany, code named "Curveball."
CIA Director Porter Goss has instructed officials to determine what happened and why the details did not come to light earlier, said spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise.
"It was an unhappy surprise to the director that his first understanding of this issue was when he first read" the commission's report, Millerwise said on Wednesday.
Senate Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts also acknowledged President George W. Bush's intelligence commission had details that did not emerge during his committee's yearlong investigation into the Iraq assessments, released last July.
If Bush's intelligence commission learned "something obvious," Roberts said, "we want to make sure the intelligence community does fill in those gaps so we have a clear picture."
Other lawmakers are angrier.
"As far as I am concerned, the CIA threw us a curve ball," said Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat who is also a member of the Intelligence Committee.
The White House, Congress and US intelligence agencies have launched a number of investigations into the faulty prewar intelligence on the Iraq threat. The most definitive to date came last week from Bush's intelligence commission. According to the report, CIA officials tried to tell the agency's top officials that Curveball was a suspected fabricator and may have been mentally unstable.
The new information includes an alleged warning in a late-night phone call to former director, George Tenet.
Tenet and his top deputy have both released statements emphatically denying that they received such warnings. Tenet called it "deeply disturbing" that the information didn't get to him.
Levin wants Tenet to testify under oath.
"I don't think the intelligence committee was given some of that detail on Curveball, but I think it should have been," Levin said.
US intelligence agencies and the Bush administration have come under fire since 2001 for not sharing information with lawmakers who oversee some of the government's most sensitive intelligence activities. Some in Congress have been particularly concerned about US detention policies and the botched Iraq intelligence that was used to justify the invasion.
When asked how the new investigation got more detail, Senator John McCain, a Republican and a commission member, said that the panel conducted numerous long interviews.
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