The CIA had no comment on the report which said Kay could leave as early as February, before the group's work is finished.

"He's back here for the holidays and for discussions on what comes next," said a US official, who declined to elaborate.

The 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group that Kay leads has failed to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so far and some of its members have been redirected to intelligence work on the insurgency in Iraq.

The Post said Kay, who reports to CIA director George Tenet, is planning on leaving early for personal and family reasons, and that the only remaining question was when.

It quoted a senior administration official as saying he planned to leave before the Iraq Survey Group submits its final report in late 2004 and possibly even before its next interim report, due in February.

Kay's preliminary report in October said the group found that Iraq was working to acquire chemical and biological weapons before the war, had missile programs under development and only a rudimentary nuclear program.

The United States' insistence that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear program in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions served as the prime justification for the US-led invasion of the country in March.

After his capture on Saturday, former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein is reported to have told interrogators that the weapons of mass destruction did not exist and had been dreamed up by the United States.

In a televised interview Tuesday, President George W. Bush dismissed the question of whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or only had plans to acquire them.

"So what's the difference?" he said in the interview with ABC television.

"If he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger," the president said. "A gathering threat, after 9-11, is a threat that needed to be dealt with, and it was done after 12 long years of the world saying the man's a danger."

As months have gone by without the discovery of any weapons of mass destruction, the Pentagon has shifted intelligence-gathering resources to dealing with a Baathist insurgency that has inflicted steadily mounting casualties on US forces.

Meanwhile, investigations by the House and Senate are looking into the intelligence community's pre-war assessments that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and why they were so wide of the mark.

Democrats have accused the administration of making selective use of the intelligence to make its case for war.

An internal review led by former CIA deputy director Richard Kerr last month expanded its inquiry to include the raw intelligence used to back up the intelligence community's assessments.

Kay, a former UN weapons inspector, was tapped to head the Iraq Survey Group in May to try to give impetus to a search that stalled after searches of suspected Iraqi weapons sites after the US invasion failed to turn up any weapons.

His approach was to focus on interrogations of Iraqi scientists and former officials to try to reconstruct what happened to the weapons.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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