HOW IT BEGAN::Now, besides the Nicolas Kristof piece, this is the marrow of the beast:::
washingtonpost.com
CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data
Bush Used Report Of Uranium Bid
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 12, 2003; Page A01
A key component of President Bush’s claim in his State
of the Union address last January that Iraq had an active nuclear
weapons program — its alleged attempt to buy uranium in Niger — was
disputed by a CIA-directed mission to the central African nation in
early 2002, according to senior administration officials and a former
government official. But the CIA did not pass on the detailed results
of its investigation to the White House or other government agencies,
the officials said.
The CIA’s failure to share what it knew, which has not been
disclosed previously, was one of a number of steps in the Bush
administration that helped keep the uranium story alive until the eve
of the war in Iraq, when the United Nations’ chief nuclear inspector
told the Security Council that the claim was based on fabricated
evidence.
A senior intelligence official said the CIA’s action was the result
of “extremely sloppy” handling of a central piece of evidence in the
administration’s case against then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. But,
the official added, “It is only one fact and not the reason we went to
war. There was a lot more.”
However, a senior CIA analyst said the case “is indicative of larger
problems” involving the handling of intelligence about Iraq’s alleged
chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and its links to al
Qaeda, which the administration cited as justification for war.
“Information not consistent with the administration agenda was
discarded and information that was [consistent] was not seriously
scrutinized,” the analyst said.
As the controversy over Iraq intelligence has expanded with the
failure so far of U.S. teams in Iraq to uncover proscribed weapons,
intelligence officials have accused senior administration policymakers
of pressuring the CIA or exaggerating intelligence information to make
the case for war. The story involving the CIA’s uranium-purchase probe,
however, suggests that the agency also was shaping intelligence on Iraq
to meet the administration’s policy goals.
Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), former chairman of the Select Committee on
Intelligence and a candidate for president, yesterday described the
case as “part of the agency’s standard operating procedure when it
wants to advance the information that supported their [the
administration’s] position and bury that which didn’t.”
Armed with information purportedly showing that Iraqi officials had
been seeking to buy uranium in Niger one or two years earlier, the CIA
in early February 2002 dispatched a retired U.S. ambassador to the
country to investigate the claims, according to the senior U.S.
officials and the former government official, who is familiar with the
event. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity and on condition
that the name of the former ambassador not be disclosed.
During his trip, the CIA’s envoy spoke with the president of Niger
and other Niger officials mentioned as being involved in the Iraqi
effort, some of whose signatures purportedly appeared on the documents.
After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA
that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the
envoy’s conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because
the “dates were wrong and the names were wrong,” the former U.S.
government official said.
However, the CIA did not include details of the former ambassador’s
report and his identity as the source, which would have added to the
credibility of his findings, in its intelligence reports that were
shared with other government agencies. Instead, the CIA only said that
Niger government officials had denied the attempted deal had taken
place, a senior administration said.
“This gent made a visit to the region and chatted up his friends,” a
senior intelligence official said, describing the agency’s view of the
mission. “He relayed back to us that they said it was not true and that
he believed them.”
Thirteen months later, on March 8, Mohamed ElBaradei, director
general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, informed the U.N.
Security Council that after careful scrutiny of the Niger documents,
his agency had reached the same conclusion as the CIA’s envoy.
ElBaradei deemed the documents “not authentic,” an assessment that U.S.
officials did not dispute.
Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation have
described the faked evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi
agents and officials in Niger. The documents had been sought by U.N.
inspectors since September 2002 and they were delivered by the United
States and Britain last February.
The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a panel of
nongovernment experts that is reviewing the handling of Iraq
intelligence, is planning to study the Niger story and how it made its
way into Bush’s State of the Union address on Jan. 28. In making the
case that Iraq had an ongoing nuclear weapons program, Bush declared
that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently
sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
That same month, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and national
security adviser Condoleezza Rice also mentioned Iraq’s alleged
attempts to buy uranium, and the story made its way into a State
Department “fact sheet” as well.
Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the
Government Reform Committee and a leading administration critic, wrote
the president June 2 asking why Bush had included the Niger case as
part of the evidence he cited against Iraq. “Given what the CIA knew at
the time, the implication you intended — that there was credible
evidence that Iraq sought uranium from Africa — was simply false,”
Waxman said.
The CIA’s decision to send an emissary to Niger was triggered by
questions raised by an aide to Vice President Cheney during an agency
briefing on intelligence circulating about the purported Iraqi efforts
to acquire the uranium, according to the senior officials. Cheney’s
staff was not told at the time that its concerns had been the impetus
for a CIA mission and did not learn it occurred or its specific results.
Cheney and his staff continued to get intelligence on the matter,
but the vice president, unlike other senior administration officials,
never mentioned it in a public speech. He and his staff did not learn
of its role in spurring the mission until it was disclosed by New York
Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on May 6, according to an
administration official.
When the British government published an intelligence document on
Iraq in September 2002 claiming that Baghdad had “sought significant
quantities of uranium from Africa,” the former ambassador called the
CIA officers who sent him to Niger and was told they were looking into
new information about the claim, sources said. The former envoy later
called the CIA and State Department after Bush’s State of the Union
speech and was told “not to worry,” according to one U.S. official.
Later it was disclosed that the United States and Britain were
basing their reports on common information that originated with forged
documents provided originally by Italian intelligence officials.
CIA Director George J. Tenet, on Sept. 24, 2002, cited the Niger
evidence in a closed-door briefing to the Senate intelligence committee
on a national intelligence estimate of Iraq’s weapons programs, sources
said. Although Tenet told the panel that some questions had been raised
about the evidence, he did not mention that the agency had sent an
envoy to Niger and that the former ambassador had concluded that the
claims were false.
The Niger evidence was not included in Secretary of State Colin L.
Powell’s Feb. 5 address to the Security Council in which he disclosed
some intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons programs and links to al
Qaeda because it was considered inaccurate, sources said.
Even so, the Voice of America on Feb. 20 broadcast a story that
said: “U.S. officials tell VOA [that] Iraq and Niger signed an
agreement in the summer of 2000 to resume shipments for an additional
500 tons of yellow cake,” a reference to the uranium. The VOA, which is
financed by the government but has an official policy of editorial
independence, went on to say that there was no evidence such shipments
had taken place.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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