Niger uranium forgeries

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The Niger uranium forgeries refers to falsified classified documents initially revealed by Italian intelligence. These documents depict an attempt by the regime of Iraq's Saddam Hussein to purchase yellowcake uranium from the African country of Niger during the Iraq disarmament crisis.

On the basis of these documents and other indicators, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom asserted that Iraq had attempted to procure nuclear material for the purpose of creating what they called weapons of mass destruction, referred to as WMD, in defiance of United Nations sanctions.

Yellowcake, a mixture of different uranium oxides and other uranium compounds, is a product of an intermediary stage in the production of enriched uranium for use in a nuclear reactor or a nuclear weapon.

Contents 1 Iraq and WMD 2 Initial doubts 3 Oblique reference in Bush speech 4 European and British intelligence reports 5 US doubts 6 Wilson and Niger 6.1 Criticism 7 CIA doubts 8 IAEA analysis 9 Wilson and Plame 10 Butler Report 11 European intelligence services 12 More doubts 13 Statements by Wilson 14 Origin 15 Aftermath 16 Footnotes 17 See also 18 External links and references

[edit] Iraq and WMD

In late 2002, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush was soliciting support for a policy of military force to disarm Iraq. The U.S. government had for some time alleged that Iraq both possessed and was continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction including nuclear, biological, and chemical arms. One of the allegations was that Iraq had attempted to purchase yellowcake. Specifically, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director George Tenet and Secretary of State Colin Powell both cited an attempted yellowcake purchase from Niger in their September testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. At that time, the UK government also publicly reported an attempted purchase from an unnamed African country. In December, the State Department issued a fact sheet listing the alleged Niger yellowcake affair in a report entitled "Illustrative Examples of Omissions From the Iraqi Declaration to the United Nations Security Council."[1] In his January 2003 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush repeated the allegation, citing British intelligence sources. The administration later conceded that evidence in support of the claim was inconclusive and stated "these 16 words should never have been included" (referring to Bush's State of the Union address), attributing the error to the CIA.[2]

[edit] Initial doubts

The classified documents appearing to depict an Iraqi attempt to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger had allegedly been suspected to be fraudulent by some individuals in U.S. intelligence, according to news reports. According to further news accounts of the situation, by early 2002 investigations by both the CIA and the State Department had found the documents to be inaccurate. Days before the Iraq invasion, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) voiced doubt on the authenticity of the documents to the U.N. Security Council. A Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigation into the origin of these documents has been reopened.

[edit] Oblique reference in Bush speech

During the 2003 State of the Union speech, U.S. President George W. Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The British claim has not been substantiated with hard evidence, however the British Government continues to stand by its initial assessment. Critics claim the statement in the speech was a reference to the documents.

A more direct reference to Iraq's reconstitution of its nuclear program may be found in the transcript of President Bush's Cincinnati speech on October 7, 2002. ^[1]

[edit] European and British intelligence reports

The front page of the June 28, 2004 Financial Times carried a report from their national security correspondent, Mark Huband, describing that between 1999 and 2001 three European intelligence services were aware that Niger was possibly engaged in illicit negotiations over the export of its uranium ore with North Korea, Libya, Iraq, Iran, and China. ^[2] "The same information was passed to the US" but US officials decided not to include it in their assessment, Huband added several days later.

The Sunday Times of London dated August 1, 2004 contains an interview with an Italian source describing his role in the forgeries. The source said he was sorry to have played a role in passing along false intelligence. ^[3]

Although the claims made in the British intelligence report regarding Iraq's interest in yellowcake ore from Niger were never withdrawn, the CIA and Department of State could not verify them and are said to have thought the claims were "highly dubious." ^[4]

[edit] US doubts

Previously, in February 2002, three different American officials had made efforts to verify the reports. The deputy commander of U.S. Armed Forces Europe, Marine Gen. Carlton Fulford, went to Niger and met with the country's president. He concluded that, given the controls on Niger's uranium supply, there was little chance any of it could have been diverted to Iraq. His report was sent to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers. The U.S. Ambassador to Niger, Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, was also present at the meeting and sent similar conclusions to the State Department [3].

[edit] Wilson and Niger

At roughly the same time, the CIA sent Ambassador Joseph Wilson to investigate the claims himself. Wilson had been posted to Niger 14 years earlier, and throughout a diplomatic career in Africa he had built up a large network of contacts in Niger. Wilson interviewed former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, who reported that he knew of no attempted sales to Iraq. Mayaki did however recall that in June 1999 an Iraqi delegation had expressed interest in "expanding commercial relations," which he had interpreted to mean yellowcake sales.[4]

Ultimately, Wilson concluded that there was no way that production at the uranium mines could be ramped up or that the excess uranium could have been exported without it being immediately obvious to many people both in the private sector and in the government of Niger. He returned home and told the CIA that the reports were "unequivocally wrong."[5] The CIA retained this information in its Counter Proliferation Department and it was not passed up to the CIA Director, according to the unanimous findings of the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee's July 2004 report.

[edit] Criticism

Mr. Wilson had claimed that he found no evidence of Saddam Hussein ever attempting or buying yellowcake uranium from Niger on his trip to Niger.^{[citation needed]}

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence suggested that the evidence Mr. Wilson found could be interpreted differently:

[ Wilson's] intelligence report indicated that former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki was unaware of any contracts that had been signed between Niger and any rogue states for the sale of yellowcake while he was Prime Minister (1997-1999) or Foreign Minister (1996-1997). Mayaki said that if there had been any such contract during his tenure, he would have been aware of it. Mayaki said, however, that in June 1999,(REDACTED) businessman, approached him and insisted that Mayaki meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq. The intelligence report said that Mayaki interpreted "expanding commercial relations" to mean that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales. The intelligence report also said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to the UN sanctions on Iraq."[6]

This report has led to much criticism.^{[citation needed]} Wilson has responded to this criticism, observing that uranium was not actually discussed at the 1999 meeting. On Meet the Press, Wilson stated:

At that meeting, uranium was not discussed. It would be a tragedy to think that we went to war over a conversation in which uranium was not discussed because the Niger official was sufficiently sophisticated to think that perhaps he might have wanted to discuss uranium at some later date.[7]

[edit] CIA doubts

In early October 2002, George Tenet called Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to ask him to remove reference to the Niger uranium from a speech Bush was to give in Cincinnati on October 7. This was followed up by a memo asking Hadley to remove another, similar line. Another memo was sent to the White House expressing the CIA's view that the Niger claims were false; this memo was given to both Hadley and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] IAEA analysis

Further, in March 2003, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released results of his analysis of the documents. Reportedly, it took IAEA officials only a matter of hours to determine that these documents were fake. Using little more than a Google search, IAEA experts discovered indications of a crude forgery, such as the use of incorrect names of Nigerian officials. As a result, the IAEA reported to the U.N. Security Council that the documents were "in fact not authentic." The U.N. spokesman wrote:

The I.A.E.A. was able to review correspondence coming from various bodies of the government of Niger and to compare the form, format, contents and signature of that correspondence with those of the alleged procurement-related documentation. Based on thorough analysis, the I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents, which formed the basis for the reports of recent uranium transaction between Iraq and Niger, are in fact not authentic. We have therefore concluded that these specific allegations are unfounded.[8]

[edit] Wilson and Plame

Main article: Plame affair

Retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson wrote a critical op-ed in The New York Times in which he explained the nature of the documents and the government's prior knowledge of their unreliability for use in a case for war. Shortly after Wilson's op-ed, in a column by Robert Novak, the identity of Wilson's wife, undercover CIA analyst Valerie Plame, was revealed. The Senate Intelligence Committee report and other sources seem to confirm that Plame gave her husband a positive recommendation. However, they also confirm that she did not personally authorize the trip (and in fact did not have any authority to do so).

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report also claimed that when Wilson briefed the CIA on his trip to Niger, CIA analysts felt the claim that Iraq sought WMD from Africa was further substantiated, though the State Department thought Wilson's findings refuted the claim.^{[citation needed]} But the CIA had warned the President in March 2002 that Wilson's trip had concluded the claims were unsubstantiated.[9]

The "Plame affair" (aka. "CIA leak scandal"), which ensued as a result of the unauthorized disclosure of Plame's identity, is an ongoing political scandal and criminal investigation into the source of the leak which "outed" Plame, and whether or not that person committed a crime.

The actual words President Bush spoke: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" suggests that his source was British intelligence and not the forged documents.[10]

However, the Administration has admitted that making the claim was a mistake. [11]

[edit] Butler Report

The Butler Report issued after a review by the British government concluded that the report Saddam's government was seeking uranium in Africa appeared credible. Nevertheless, the Butler report fails to advance any evidence to substantiate this conclusion. Furthermore, the Butler report concluded that "The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it,"^[5] which again could not be verified. In some ways the Butler Report does dispute the findings with this statement in the review. ^[6] "authorship of the dossier was a mistaken judgement."

[edit] European intelligence services

In June 2004, The Financial Times reported that they had "learnt that three European intelligence services were aware of possible illicit trade in uranium from Niger between 1999 and 2001, [and] human intelligence gathered in Italy and Africa more than three years before the Iraq war had shown Niger officials referring to possible illicit uranium deals with at least five countries, including Iraq." The article stated that "human and electronic intelligence sources from a number of countries picked up repeated discussion of an illicit trade in uranium from Niger, [and that] one of the customers discussed by the traders was Iraq."[12]

In any case, French intelligence had repeatedly warned the Bush administration a year before his State of the Union address that the allegation could not be supported with evidence.[13]

[edit] More doubts

In January 2006, the New York Times revealed the existence of a memo which stated that the suggestion of uranium being sold was "unlikely" because of a host of economic, diplomatic and logistical obstacles. The memo, dated March 4, 2002, was distributed at senior levels by the office of former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and by the Defense Intelligence Agency.[14]

[edit] Statements by Wilson

In a July 2003 op-ed, Ambassador Wilson recounted his experiences and stated "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."[15] Although the president had cited "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," British intelligence have failed to show any other source of information.

Wilson told The Washington Post anonymously in June 2003 that he had concluded that the intelligence about the Niger uranium was based on the forged documents because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." The relevant papers were not in CIA hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip. Wilson had to backtrack and said he may have "misspoken" on this.[16] The Senate intelligence committee, which examined pre-Iraq war intelligence, reported that Wilson "had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports."

[edit] Origin

By late 2003, the trail of the documents had been partially uncovered. They were obtained by a "security consultant" (and former agent of the precursor agency to SISMI, the SID), Rocco Martino, from Italian military intelligence (SISMI). An article in The Times (London) quoted Martino as having received the documents from a woman on the staff of the Niger embassy, after a meeting was arranged by a serving SISMI agent. ^[7] Martino later recanted and said he had been misquoted, and that SISMI had not facilitated the meeting where he obtained the documents. It was later revealed that Martino had been invited to serve as the conduit for the documents by Col. Antonio Nucera of SISMI, the head of the counterintelligence and WMD proliferations sections of SISMI's Rome operations center. [17]

Martino, in turn, offered them to Italian journalist Elizabetta Burba. On instructions from her editor at Panorama, Burba offered them to the U.S. Embassy in Rome in October, 2002. [18] Burba was dissuaded by the editors of the Berlusconi-owned Panorama from investigating the source of the forgeries.

An August 2004 Financial Times article indicated French officials may have had a role in the forged documents coming to light. The article states:

According to senior European officials, in 1999 [Rocco Martino] provided French officials with genuine documents which revealed Iraq may have been planning to expand 'trade' with Niger. This trade was assumed to be in uranium, which is Niger's main export. It was then that Mr Martino first became aware of the value of documents relating to Niger's uranium exports. He was then asked by French officials to provide more information, which led to a flourishing 'market' in documents. He subsequently provided France with more documents, which turned out to have been forged when they were handed to the International Atomic Energy Agency by US diplomats.

The Times article also stated that "French officials have not said whether they know Mr Martino, and are unlikely to either confirm or deny that he is a source."[19]

It is as yet unknown how Italian intelligence came by the documents and why they were not given directly to the U.S. In 2005, Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of counterterrorism operations at the CIA and the intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, expressed the opinion that the documents had been produced in the United States and funneled through the Italians: "The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein ...." [20]

According to a 2003 article in The New Yorker by Seymour Hersh, the forgery may have been a deliberate entrapment by current and former CIA officers to settle a score against Cheney and other neoconservatives. Hersh recounts how a former officer told him that "somebody deliberately let something false get in there." [21] Hersh continues:

He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

"The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney," the former officer said. "They said, 'O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.'" My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. "Everyone was bragging about it—'Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.'" These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.

In an interview published April 7, 2005, Cannistraro was asked by Ian Masters what he would say if it was asserted that the source of the forgery was former National Security Council and State Department consultant Michael Ledeen. (Ledeen had also allegedly been a liaison between the American Intelligence Community and SISMI two decades earlier.) Cannistraro answered by saying: "you'd be very close." [22] Ledeen has denied this - see [23] - an article which mentions, though, that he has worked for the aforementioned Panorama magazine.

In an interview on July 26, 2005, Cannistraro's business partner and columnist for the "American Conservative" magazine, former CIA counter terrorism officer Philip Giraldi, confirmed to Scott Horton that the forgeries were produced by "a couple of former CIA officers who are familiar with that part of the world who are associated with a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy." When Horton said that must be Ledeen, he confirmed it, and added that the ex-CIA officers, "also had some equity interests, shall we say, with the operation. A lot of these people are in consulting positions, and they get various, shall we say, emoluments in overseas accounts, and that kind of thing." [24]

In a second interview with Horton, Giraldi elaborated to say that Ledeen and his former CIA friends worked with Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. "These people did it probably for a couple of reasons, but one of the reasons was that these people were involved, through the neoconservatives, with the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi and had a financial interest in cranking up the pressure against Saddam Hussein and potentially going to war with him." [25]

The suggestion of a plot by CIA officers is countered by an explosive series of articles [26] in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.[27][28][29] Investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.

Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. What may be most significant to American observers, however, is La Repubblica's allegation that the Italians sent the bogus intelligence about Niger and Iraq not only through traditional allied channels such as the CIA, but seemingly directly into the White House. That direct White House channel amplifies questions about the 16-word reference to the uranium from Africa in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address -- which remained in the speech despite warnings from the CIA and the State Department that the allegation was not substantiated.[30][31][32]

[edit] Aftermath

In March 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, agreed not to open a Congressional investigation of the matter, but rather asked the FBI to conduct the investigation.

In 2003, unidentified "senior officials" in the administration leaked word to columnist Robert Novak that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative. The CIA requested an investigation into whether this public disclosure was illegal, thus the Niger uranium controversy spawned an on-going legal investigation and political scandal.

In September 2004, the CBS News program 60 Minutes decided to delay a major story on the forgeries because such a broadcast might influence the 2004 U.S. presidential election. A CBS spokesman stated, "We now believe it would be inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election." [33]

Nicolo Pollari, director of the SISMI intelligence agency,[34] told an Italian parliamentary intelligence committee that the dossier came from Rocco Martino, a former Italian spy.

The Los Angeles Times reported on December 3, 2005, that the FBI reopened the inquiry into "how the Bush administration came to rely on forged documents linking Iraq to nuclear weapons materials as part of its justification for the invasion." According to the Times, "a senior FBI official said the bureau's initial investigation found no evidence of foreign government involvement in the forgeries, but the FBI did not interview Martino, a central figure in a parallel drama unfolding in Rome."

On May 11 2006, New American Media reported how pre-Iraq War Italian forged documents were delivered to the White House alleging that Saddam Hussein had obtained yellowcake uranium ore from Niger. New links implicating Italian companies and individuals with then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi now raise the question of whether Berlusconi received a payback as part of the deal -- namely, a Pentagon contract to build the U.S. president's special fleet of helicopters.

Christopher Hitchens has suggested that the forged documents were made to be such bad forgeries in order that they would be "discovered" in short order.^[8]

The irony is that the Tuwaitha facility south of Baghdad already possessed yellow cake uranium. This factory contained the remains of nuclear reactors bombed by Israel in 1981 and the United States in 1991. The facility was monitored and frequently inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency after the 1991 Gulf War. About 1.8 metric tons of "yellow cake" and 500 tons of unrefined uranium went missing as the Iraqis left Tuwaitha unattended during the war.^[9]When the facility was first encountered by U.S. Marines, they thought they had stumbled upon an illegal weapons cache; according to nuclear experts, however, they actually wound up breaking the IAEA seals that are "designed to ensure the materials aren't diverted for weapons use or end up in the wrong hands."^[10] The Pentagon dispatched a team to survey the site "after a month of official indecision," finding it heavily looted.^[11]

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] See also

• Downing Street memo
• Plame affair
• Movement to impeach George W. Bush
• 2003 invasion of Iraq
• Iraq disarmament crisis
• Iraqi aluminum tubes order

[edit] External links and references

• Niger-Iraq Yellowcake documents
• Plame's Lame Game: What Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife forgot to tell us about the yellow-cake scandal, from Slate
• Italy's intelligence chief met with Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley just a month before the Niger forgeries first surfaced by Laura Rozen, American Prospect Online, October 25, 2005
• Italian Faces Pre-War Intelligence Probe October 25, 2005 By ARIEL DAVID in the Guardian
• "Bush's "16 Words" on Iraq & Uranium: He May Have Been Wrong But He Wasn't Lying" - FactCheck
• "Senate Report on PreWar Intelligence on Iraq" - US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
• "Report on Intelligence of Weapons of Mass Destruction" - Report of a Committee of Privy Counsellors chaired by Lord Butler of Brockwell
• "Transcript of UN speech by Colin Powell" - CNN, February 6, 2003
• Detailed timeline of Africa-uranium allegation - Center for Cooperative Research
• "Who Lied to Whom?" by Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker, March 31, 2003.
• "Fake Iraq documents 'embarrassing' for U.S." CNN, March 14, 2003.
• Joseph Wilson. What I Didn't Find in Africa, New York Times, July 6, 2003.
• "Who Forged the Niger Documents?" interview of Vincent Cannistraro by Ian Masters, Alternet, April 7, 2005.
• "Cheney's Plan to Nuke Iran" interview of Philip Giraldi by Scott Horton, WeekendInterviewShow.com, July 26, 2005
• "Agent behind fake uranium documents worked for France" by Bruce Johnston, News. Telegraph, September 19, 2004
• "Italy blames France for Niger uranium claim" by Bruce Johnston, The Telegraph, 05/09/2004
• The Plame Game: Was This a Crime? By Victoria Toensing and Bruce W. Sanford. Wednesday, January 12, 2005; Page A21
• "Tenet admits error in approving Bush speech" CNN, December 25, 2003