". . .On December 19th, Wa****ngton, for the first time, publicly
identified Niger as the alleged seller of the nuclear materials, in a
State Department position paper that rhetorically asked, “Why is the
Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?” (The charge was denied
by both Iraq and Niger.) A former high-level intelligence official
told me that the information on Niger was judged serious enough to
include in the President’s Daily Brief, known as the P.D.B., one of
the most sensitive intelligence do***ents in the American system. Its
information is supposed to be carefully analyzed, or “scrubbed.”
Distribution of the two- or three-page early-morning re****t, which is
prepared by the C.I.A., is limited to the President and a few other
senior officials. The P.D.B. is not made available, for example, to
any members of the Senate or House Intelligence Committees. “I don’t
think anybody here sees that thing,” a State Department analyst told
me. “You only know what’s in the P.D.B. because it echoes—people talk
about it.”
President Bush cited the uranium deal, along with the aluminum tubes,
in his State of the Union Message, on January 28th, while crediting
Britain as the source of the information: “The British government has
learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa.” He commented, “Saddam Hussein has not credibly
explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.”
Then the story fell apart. On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the
director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna,
told the U.N. Security Council that the do***ents involving the
Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. “The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with
the concurrence of outside experts, that these do***ents . . . are in
fact not authentic,” ElBaradei said.
One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, “These
do***ents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a
serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of
the do***ents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I
would have expected more checking.”
The I.A.E.A. had first sought the do***ents last fall, shortly after
the British government released its dossier. After months of pleading
by the I.A.E.A., the United States turned them over to Jacques Baute,
who is the director of the agency’s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office.
It took Baute’s team only a few hours to determine that the do***ents
were fake. The agency had been given about a half-dozen letters and
other communications between officials in Niger and Iraq, many of them
written on letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were
glaring. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name
of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and
Coöperation, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter,
allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, had a signature
that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so
egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that “they could be
spotted by someone using Google on the Internet.”
The large quantity of uranium involved should have been another
warning sign. Niger’s “yellow cake” comes from two uranium mines
controlled by a French company, with its entire output presold to
nuclear power companies in France, Japan, and Spain. “Five hundred
tons can’t be siphoned off without anyone noticing,” another I.A.E.A.
official told me.
This official told me that the I.A.E.A. has not been able to determine
who actually prepared the do***ents. “It could be someone who
intercepted faxes in Israel, or someone at the headquarters of the
Niger Foreign Ministry, in Niamey. We just don’t know,” the official
said. “Somebody got old letterheads and signatures, and cut and
pasted.” Some I.A.E.A. investigators suspected that the inspiration
for the do***ents was a trip that the Iraqi Ambassador to Italy took
to several African countries, including Niger, in February, 1999. They
also speculated that MI6—the branch of British intelligence
responsible for foreign operations—had become involved, perhaps
through contacts in Italy, after the Ambassador’s return to Rome.
Baute, according to the I.A.E.A. official, “confronted the United
States with the forgery: ‘What do you have to say?’ They had nothing
to say.”
ElBaradei’s disclosure has not been disputed by any government or
intelligence official in Wa****ngton or London. Colin Powell, asked
about the forgery during a television interview two days after
ElBaradei’s re****t, dismissed the subject by saying, “If that issue is
resolved, that issue is resolved.” A few days later, at a House
hearing, he denied that anyone in the United States government had
anything to do with the forgery. “It came from other sources,” Powell
testified. “It was provided in good faith to the inspectors.”
The forgery became the object of widespread, and bitter, questions in
Europe about the credibility of the United States. But it initially
provoked only a few news stories in America, and little sustained
questioning about how the White House could endorse such an obvious
fake. On March 8th, an American official who had reviewed the
do***ents was quoted in the Wa****ngton Post as explaining, simply, “We
fell for it.”
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/attack/armtwist/2003/0331wholied.htm
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