David A. Kay, Who Searched for Nuclear Weapons in Iraq, Dies at 82

David A. Kay, a nuclear weapons expert who led a fruitless hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the United States invasion in 2003, then resigned his position after determining that the case for going to war over Saddam Hussein’s suspected stockpile of unconventional weapons was deeply flawed, died Aug. 13 at his home in Ocean View, Delaware. He was 82.

His wife, Anita Kay, said the cause was cancer.

David Kay had extensive experience in Iraq. As an official with the International Atomic Energy Agency, he had led a similar hunt for evidence of a chemical, biological or nuclear weapons program in the country after the Persian Gulf War of 1991. The Iraqi government repeatedly stymied that effort, and it continued to do so after he left the agency in 1993.

As the George W. Bush administration began to build a case for invading Iraq in 2002, Kay became one of the most prominent defenders of its assertion that Saddam had, despite United Nations surveillance, continued and expanded his efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction.

But when Kay returned to Iraq, in the summer of 2003, he found that Saddam’s unconventional weapons program had been largely abandoned, aside from some rudimentary efforts to acquire basic materials and an illicit program to develop long-range ballistic missiles.

Days after he resigned, in January 2004, Kay spent several hours testifying about what he had found — or, rather, what he had not found — before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“Let me begin by saying we were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here,” he said.

He also called on Bush to admit that the case for going to war had been deeply flawed, and to create an independent, nonpartisan commission to investigate what went wrong.

“It’s about confronting and coming clean with the American people,” he told The Guardian in 2004. “He should say we were mistaken, and I am determined to find out why.”

Bush did not go that far, but he did take Kay’s advice, charging former Sen. Charles Robb and Judge Laurence Silberman with examining the intelligence failure. Their report, released in March 2005, agreed with Kay’s conclusions.

Kay insisted that the decision to topple the Saddam regime was the right one, on humanitarian grounds. But as time wore on he became outspokenly critical of the intelligence community, concluding that George Tenet, director of the CIA, had pushed bad information on the president as a way of currying favor.

“He understood that if you didn’t give the policymakers what they wanted, he believed, I think wrongly, that you weren’t a player, and therefore your views wouldn’t be taken, and you wouldn’t be invited into the closed meetings,” he told the PBS program “Frontline” in 2006. “He traded integrity for access.”

David Allen Kay was born June 8, 1940, in Houston, where his father, Elwin Kay, was a real estate broker and his mother, Ruth (Banks) Kay, was a homemaker.

Intellectually driven as a boy, he later said he lost his South Texas accent through years of traveling the country as a high school debater. He intended to study physics at the University of Texas but realized he despised lab work, and he ended up getting a degree in business in 1962.

He also took courses in political science and economics, and he pursued both at Columbia University, where he received a master’s degree in 1964 and a doctorate in political science in 1967.

He taught briefly at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, but soon decided that he was more interested in nonprofit and government work. He moved to Washington, where he did research for the National Science Foundation and other organizations before joining the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organization in New York City.

His first marriage, to Jane Agnew, ended in divorce. Along with his wife, Anita, whom he married in 1978, he is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Karen Simmons, and two grandchildren.

With his abiding interest in physics, Kay jumped at the chance, in 1983, to join the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, where he oversaw nuclear-safety inspection programs in more than 70 countries. He was in the middle of a two-week trip to China when the Gulf War broke out.

Soon after the fighting there ended, he was tapped to lead a U.N. inspection team into Iraq to identify and neutralize the country’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.

Almost immediately, he found himself in a series of high-profile standoffs with Iraqi officials over access to suspected weapons sites.

In one instance, he and his team managed to get several boxes of confidential documents from a government building, only to find themselves surrounded by armed men in the parking lot. Kay, who always traveled with a satellite phone — which required two huge suitcases to carry — immediately established a communications link to Washington.

He also started calling the global news media. Over the next four days, as he and his team faced off with the Iraqis, he became something of a cable-news star, chatting with CNN, the BBC and anyone else who would listen. When a reporter with a Chicago radio program asked what he wanted, he asked for a few pizzas.

Eventually the Iraqis backed down, and Kay and his team were able to leave the parking lot, documents in hand. They did not, however, get their pizza.

Kay spent more than a year in Iraq, after which he resigned from the nuclear agency to become a senior vice president at the Science Applications International Corp., a government-focused consulting firm.

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He also became a frequent face on TV news, commenting through the 1990s on Iraq’s persistent refusal to come clean on its weapons programs. In 2002, he was a leading voice supporting the case that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and that the United States needed to go to war to stop him.

Even after the invasion, he believed that it was just a matter of time before the weapons were discovered, and he was openly critical of what he saw as the military’s flawed efforts to find them.

When the Bush administration decided in the summer of 2003 to hand the job to the CIA, Tenet immediately tapped Kay to lead the 1,400-person Iraq Study Group. He flew to Baghdad and spent several weeks in the field himself, a gun strapped to his belt, scouring abandoned warehouses and decrepit laboratories.

He soon suspected that he had been wrong the entire time.

“I had a habit of sending a weekly confidential ‘eyes only’ report to the director of Central Intelligence and his deputy,” he told “Frontline.” “From very early on I said, ‘Things are not panning out the way you thought they existed here.’”

He submitted his final report just before resigning. He was replaced by another seasoned weapons expert, Charles A. Duelfer, whose own report, 18 months later, likewise found no evidence of Iraqi weapons programs.

Kay returned to the private sector, where he took lightly the inevitable drubbing he got for being wrong — and for admitting it. At one point in 2004 his wife showed him a joke article about him online: “Kay to Search on Mars for WMD,” read the headline.

“It’s going to become my desktop image on my computer,” he told ABC News, “and I’m threatening to make it my next Christmas card.”