WASHINGTON (AP) -- Easily evaded spy satellites. A shortage of clandestine sources. Overworked satellite photo analysts. A failure to heed clear warnings. Each of these, observers say, contributed to the CIA's failure to foresee India's nuclear tests.
As the spy agency searches for what went wrong, the self-examination is revealing much more than a last-minute failure to grasp the significance of satellite photos that indicated nuclear tests were imminent.
U.S. intelligence officials, lawmakers who oversee the CIA and outside experts point to a wide range of flaws -- technical, organizational and human -- that contributed to what Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., called a "colossal failure" by the CIA.
India's five underground nuclear blasts last Monday and Wednesday sent tremors through the already tense region and threatened to undermine global arms control efforts.
Had a warning of the tests surfaced, critics of the agency said, top policy makers might have been able to dissuade India's newly installed Hindu nationalist government from going forward.
Others turn that view around, arguing that if only policy makers had responded to clear warning signs from India, the CIA would have been more attuned to signs of trouble.
Initially, the focus was on apparent failings at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, where analysts pore over spy satellite photography on computer screens and light tables looking for signs of trouble in a variety of overseas hot spots.
U.S. intelligence officials said recent pictures showed no signs of unusual activity at India's test range, a desert site some 70 miles from the border of arch-rival Pakistan. As a result, none of the imagery analysts responsible for India were on alert late last Sunday night when the first clear indications of impending tests emerged.
"These guys don't always look at every picture that's taken," said John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists, a CIA watchdog group. "The system acquires significantly more imagery for archival purposes than is immediately exploited."
CIA Director George Tenet named retired Adm. David Jeremiah to lead an inquiry into the agency's performance leading up to the nuclear tests, with his first findings expected next week.
Some nuclear experts credit India with knowing when to hide from U.S. spy satellites rather than American spies being asleep at the wheel.
"It's not a failure of the CIA," said Indian nuclear researcher G. Balachandran. "It's a matter of their intelligence being good, our deception being better."
R.R. Subramanian, a nuclear physicist with New Delhi's independent Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, said hiding preparations for the tests was merely a matter of choosing the hours when the satellites were looking elsewhere to move the necessary people and chemicals.
CIA Director Tenet told lawmakers in closed session that India deliberately chose a period of frequent sandstorms as the time to conduct the underground blasts.
Those sand clouds would effectively blind the two KH-11 "Keyhole" photo-imagery spy satellites. And even when the clouds cleared, the shifting sand would conceal tire and tread tracks that might signal intense activity around the test site.
Two other "Lacrosse" satellites that use cloud-penetrating radar signals were also available to the CIA, according to Jeffrey Richelson, author of several books on U.S. intelligence.
But the orbit of such satellites is easily predictable, and U.S. officials now believe India's nuclear test operators were able to halt suspicious activity during the periods when the spy satellites were passing overhead.
CIA searching for answers behind its India-Nuclear failure
