WASHINGTON, Feb 5: A defiant CIA Director George Tenet on Thursday denied US intelligence got it all wrong on Iraq's weapons programmes, saying the under-fire agency never described them as an "imminent threat."

In a spirited defence of the embattled Central Intelligence Agency, Tenet also rejected claims the CIA bent to political pressure to hype the threat from Saddam Hussein.

Tenet broke his silence on the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, pleading for "time and patience" to assess estimates of Saddam Hussein's arsenal.

"When the facts of Iraq are all in, we will neither be completely right nor completely wrong," said Tenet in a speech at Georgetown University, defending an October 2002 intelligence estimate which warned Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of banned weapons.

"Let me be clear: analysts differed on several important aspects of these programmes, and those debates were spelled out in the estimate." They never said there was an imminent threat.

A political firestorm consumed the CIA after former Iraq weapons hunter David Kay told a Senate committee last week "we were almost all wrong" on the Iraqi threat.

Tenet spoke as the Bush administration rolled out an operation to rebut claims led the United States into an unnecessary war, fanned by Democrats hoping to throw President George W. Bush out of the White House in November.

Bush said on Thursday "America did the right thing in Iraq," in a speech coinciding with the first anniversary of Secretary of State Colin Powell's dramatic presentation on Iraq's alleged threat at the United Nations.

Tenet stood by CIA assessments that Iraq intended to reconstitute a nuclear programme at some point but admitted the agency may have "overestimated the progress Saddam was making."

He dismissed the search for "instant answers" on weapons of mass destruction, calling for the work of US weapons hunters in Iraq to go on.

"The search for biological weapons in Iraq will take time and it will take patience," he said, and argued that Saddam Hussein had the "intent and capability" to convert civilian programme to chemical weapons production.

Tenet also denied claims that fierce pressure from the Bush administration had prompted CIA analysts to inflate the threat from Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.-AFP