The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered US troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home and analysts are back at Langley, Virginia.In interviews, officials who served with the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) said the violence in Iraq, coupled with a lack of new information, led them to fold up the effort shortly before Christmas. Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every pre-war assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG’s final conclusions and will be published this spring.Duelfer is back in Washington, finishing some addenda to his September report before it is reprinted. ‘‘There’s no particular news in them, just some odds and ends,’’ the intelligence official said. The Government Printing Office will publish it in book form, the official said. The CIA declined to authorise any official involved in the weapons search to speak on the record for this story. The intelligence official offered an account of the status of the hunt on condition of anonymity.The agency did confirm that Duelfer is wrapping up his work and will not be replaced in Baghdad. The ISG, established to search for weapons but now enmeshed in counterinsurgency work, remains under Pentagon command and is being led by Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Joseph McMenamin. Intelligence officials said there is little left for the ISG to investigate because Duelfer’s last report answered as many outstanding questions as possible.The ISG has interviewed every person it could find connected to programmes that ended more than 10 years ago and every suspected site within Iraq has been fully searched, or stripped bare by insurgents and thieves, according to several people involved in the hunt. —LAT-WP
