Ex-Officials Say Bolton Inflated Syrian Danger

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Ex-Officials Say Bolton Inflated Syrian Danger

John R. Bolton clashed repeatedly with American intelligence officials in 2002 and 2003 as he sought to deliver warnings about Syrian efforts to acquire unconventional weapons that the Central Intelligence Agency and other experts rejected as exaggerated, according to former intelligence officials.

Ultimately, the former intelligence officials said, most of what Mr. Bolton, then an under secretary of state, said publicly about Syria hewed to the limits on which the C.I.A. and other agencies had insisted. But they said that the prolonged and heated disputes over Mr. Bolton's proposed remarks were unusual within government, and that they reflected what one former senior official called a pattern in which Mr. Bolton sought to push his public assertions beyond the views endorsed by intelligence agencies.

The episodes involving Syria are being reviewed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as part of its inquiries related to Mr. Bolton's nomination to become ambassador to the United Nations. Some of the former intelligence officials said they had discussed the issue with the committee, while declassified e-mail messages from 2002 provided to the committee by the State Department allude to one previously unknown episode.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/26/politics/26bolton.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=42d6c9aee2ee4dc2&hp&ex=1114488000&partner=homepage