The CIA had no comment on Thursday's Washington Post report that Kay planned to leave the Iraq Survey Group 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 so far to find any of the banned weapons that President George W. Bush cited as justification for war against Iraq.

Some survey group members have been redirected to intelligence work on the insurgency in Iraq.

The White House, meanwhile was silent Thursday on whether Kay would quit.

"I wouldn't presume to speak for him," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

"I would point out that the search is an important priority and the work of the Iraq Survey Group continues."

The Post said Kay, who reports to CIA director George Tenet, is planning to leave 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 had been working to acquire chemical and biological weapons before the war, had missile programs under development, but only a rudimentary nuclear program.

The US 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.

In a televised interview Tuesday, 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 nine-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."

Meanwhile, investigations by the House and Senate are looking into the intelligence community's pre-war assessments that Iraq possessed banned weapons.

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.

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