David Kay, inspector who did not find nuclear weapons in Iraq, dies at 82

David Kay, a weapons expert who famously led an inspection team into Iraq in 2003 to search for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and faced the ire of the Bush administration after he reported he did not find any nuclear arms or other WMDs, died on Aug. 13 at 82.

Kay died in Ocean View, Del., and the cause was cancer, according to an obituary written by his loved ones. The Washington Post first reported the news.

Before he traveled to Iraq in 2003, Kay served as a chief weapons inspector for the United Nations (U.N.) Special Commission from 1991 to 1992 and as an agent with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Kay led multiple expeditions into Iraq after the Persian Gulf War ended in 1991. He was tasked with determining if the Middle Eastern country was developing WMDs in violation of a U.N. agreement.

The weapons inspector found evidence of uranium enrichment processes, which are used to develop nuclear weapons, located a major assembly plant for the creation of nuclear arms and seized key documents about the Iraqi weapons program.

In one famous incident, during a sweep of Iraq in the 1990s, Kay was stuck in a parking lot for four days as a hostage after seizing documents from a building in Baghdad. Iraqi forces would not let him and his team walk out of the parking lot with the documents in hand.

In a 1999 interview with “PBS Frontline,” Kay recalled how he tried to “make the Iraqis more uncomfortable” than he was.

“It was dangerous, from our point of view, for us, but you forget, it was also dangerous for the Iraqis. Here they had a group of 43 inspectors stuck in a parking lot, not letting them go,” Kay said. “We kept trying to emphasize to them that they didn’t know how, and that it could be dangerous for them.”

The inspection team was eventually released after it used a satellite phone to communicate with the outside world, including media outlets such as CNN. The Iraqi soldiers grew concerned that military action could take place if they did not let the team go.

Kay told PBS that his work in Iraq in the ’90s was a huge milestone in holding nations accountable for violating peace accords.

“I think we were able to accomplish something that, even in retrospect, I’m still amazed at,” he said. “We were able to uncover a clandestine weapons program.”

But Kay is best known as the man who led a team to Iraq in 2003 to search for nuclear weapons and the development of WMDs — and finding no evidence of such activity.

The Bush administration had claimed ahead of its March 2003 invasion of Iraq that then-leader Saddam Hussein had violated the post-Gulf War U.N. agreement by developing nuclear weapons and other WMDs. In June 2003, Bush tasked the CIA with finding hard evidence of weapons in the country.

Given his experience, the CIA appointed Kay as the head of a 1,400-member task force known as the Iraq Survey Group. In January 2004, Kay submitted a report that determined Iraq did not have any such weapons in the country.

His findings rankled the CIA and the White House and spurred congressional investigations into U.S. intelligence prior to the Bush administration’s invasion.

In a 2011 interview with NPR, shortly after the U.S. announced it would pull troops out of Iraq for the first time since the 2001 invasion, Kay reflected on his controversial role in the war.

“What I miss most are the friendships that were shattered by that; just had staked too much of their career on there being weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “And not only didn’t we find them, we found they didn’t exist prior to the war.”

Kay was born in Houston. He graduated from the University of Texas and earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

He served with the Department of State and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in addition to his service as a weapons expert.

Kay also taught at universities and was a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. He won an IAEA Distinguished Service Award and a commendation medal from the secretary of State.