Just 1 day after FTW published
Part II of The Perfect Storm, veteran investigative journalist
Seymour Hersh
- fresh on the heels of his coup in forcing the resignation
of Richard Perle from the Defense Policy Board - confirms
that powerful forces and mysterious events are auguring
the fall of the Bush regime. -- MCR
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this
material is distributed without profit to those who
have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research and educational purposes.)
Why
did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq's nuclear program?
Issue
of 2003-03-31
Posted 2003-03-24
Last September 24th, as Congress prepared
to vote on the resolution authorizing President George
W. Bush to wage war in Iraq,
a group of senior intelligence officials, including George
Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, briefed
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq's
weapons capability. It was an important presentation
for the Bush Administration. Some Democrats were publicly
questioning the President's claim that Iraq still
possessed weapons of mass destruction which posed an
immediate threat to the United States.
Just the day before, former Vice-President Al Gore had
sharply criticized the Administration's advocacy of preëmptive war, calling it a doctrine that would replace
"a world in which states consider themselves subject
to
law" with "the notion that there is no law but the
discretion of the President of the United
States."
A few Democrats were also considering putting an alternative
resolution before Congress.
According to two of those present at the briefing, which
was highly classified and took place in the committee's
secure hearing room, Tenet declared, as he had done before,
that a shipment of high-strength aluminum tubes that
was intercepted on its way to Iraq had been meant for
the construction of centrifuges that could be used to
produce enriched uranium. The suitability of the tubes
for that purpose had been disputed, but this time the
argument that Iraq had a nuclear program under way was
buttressed by a new and striking fact: the C.I.A. had
recently received intelligence showing that, between
1999 and 2001, Iraq had attempted to buy five hundred
tons of uranium oxide from Niger, one of the world's
largest producers. The uranium, known as "yellow cake,"
can be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors; if processed
differently, it can also be enriched to make weapons.
Five tons can produce enough weapon-grade uranium for
a bomb. (When the C.I.A. spokesman William Harlow was
asked for comment, he denied that Tenet had briefed the
senators on Niger.)
On the same day, in London, Tony Blair's government
made public a dossier containing much of the information
that the Senate committee was being given in secret—that
Iraq had sought to buy "significant quantities of uranium" from
an unnamed African country, "despite having no active
civil nuclear power programme that could require it." The allegation attracted
immediate attention; a headline in the London Guardian declared, "african gangs offer route to uranium."
Two days later, Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing
before a closed hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, also cited Iraq's
attempt to obtain uranium from Niger as
evidence of its persistent nuclear ambitions. The testimony
from Tenet and Powell helped to mollify the Democrats,
and two weeks later the resolution passed overwhelmingly,
giving the President a congressional mandate for a military
assault on Iraq.
On December 19th, Washington, 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 documents in the American system. Its information
is supposed to be carefully analyzed, or "scrubbed." Distribution
of the two- or three-page early-morning report, 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 documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale
were fakes. "The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence
of outside experts, that these documents . . . are in
fact not authentic," ElBaradei said.
One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, "These
documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they
came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses
me, given the low quality of the documents, 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 documents 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 documents 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 TandjaMamadou, 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 documents. "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 documents 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 Washington or London. Colin Powell, asked about the
forgery during a television interview two days after ElBaradei's report, 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 documents was
quoted in the Washington Post as
explaining, simply, "We fell for it."
The Bush Administration's reliance on
the Niger documents
may, however, have stemmed from more than bureaucratic
carelessness or political overreaching. Forged documents
and false accusations have been an element in U.S. and
British policy toward Iraq at
least since the fall of 1997, after an impasse over U.N.
inspections. Then as now, the Security Council was divided,
with the French, the Russians, and the Chinese telling
the United States and
the United Kingdom that
they were being too tough on the Iraqis. President Bill
Clinton, weakened by the impeachment proceedings, hinted
of renewed bombing, but, then as now, the British and
the Americans were losing the battle for international
public opinion. A former Clinton Administration official
told me that London had resorted to, among other things,
spreading false information about Iraq.
The British propaganda program—part of its Information
Operations, or I/Ops—was known to a few senior officials
in Washington. "I knew that was going on," the former
Clinton Administration official said of the British efforts.
"We were getting ready for action in Iraq,
and we wanted the Brits to prepare."
Over the next year, a former American intelligence officer
told me, at least one member of the U.N. inspection team
who supported the American and British position arranged
for dozens of unverified and unverifiable intelligence
reports and tips—data known as inactionable intelligence—to
be funnelled to MI6 operatives
and quietly passed along to newspapers in London and
elsewhere. "It was intelligence that was crap, and that
we couldn't move on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories
in England and
around the world," the former officer said. There was
a series of clandestine meetings with MI6, at which documents
were provided, as well as quiet meetings, usually at
safe houses in the Washington area. The British propaganda
scheme eventually became known to some members of the
U.N. inspection team. "I knew a bit," one official still
on duty at U.N. headquarters acknowledged last week,
"but I was never officially told about it."
None of the past and present officials I spoke with
were able to categorically state that the fake Niger documents
were created or instigated by the same propaganda office
in MI6 that had been part of the anti-Iraq propaganda
wars in the late nineteen-nineties. (An MI6 intelligence
source declined to comment.) Press reports in the United
States and elsewhere have suggested
other possible sources: the Iraqi exile community, the
Italians, the French. What is generally agreed upon,
a congressional intelligence-committee staff member told
me, is that the Niger documents were initially circulated
by the British—President Bush said as much in his State
of the Union speech—and that "the Brits placed more stock
in them than we did." It is also clear, as the former
high-level intelligence official told me, that "something
as bizarre as Niger raises
suspicions everywhere."
What went wrong? Did a poorly conceived
propaganda effort by British intelligence, whose practices
had been known for years to senior American officials,
manage to move, without significant challenge, through
the top layers of the American intelligence community
and into the most sacrosanct of Presidential briefings?
Who permitted it to go into the President's State of
the Union speech? Was the message—the threat posed by Iraq—more
important than the integrity of the intelligence-vetting
process? Was the Administration lying to itself? Or did
it deliberately give Congress and the public what it
knew to be bad information?
Asked to respond, Harlow,
the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had not obtained
the actual documents
until early this year, after the President's State of
the Union speech and after the congressional briefings,
and therefore had been unable to evaluate them in a timely
manner. Harlow refused to respond to questions about
the role of Britain's
MI6. Harlow's statement
does not, of course, explain why the agency left the
job of exposing the embarrassing forgery to the I.A.E.A.
It puts the C.I.A. in an unfortunate position: it is,
essentially, copping a plea of incompetence.
The chance for American intelligence to challenge the
documents came as the Administration debated whether
to pass them on to ElBaradei.
The former high-level intelligence official told me that
some senior C.I.A. officials were aware that the documents
weren't trustworthy. "It's not a question as to whether
they were marginal. They can't be ‘sort of' bad, or 'sort
of' ambiguous. They knew it was a fraud—it was useless.
Everybody bit their tongue and said, 'Wouldn't it be
great if the Secretary of State said this?' The Secretary
of State never saw the documents." He added, "He's
absolutely apoplectic about it." (A State Department
spokesman was
unable to comment.) A former intelligence officer told
me that some questions about the authenticity of the Niger documents
were raised inside the government by analysts at the
Department of Energy and the State Department's Bureau
of Intelligence and Research. However, these warnings
were not heeded.
"Somebody deliberately let something false get in there," the
former high-level intelligence official added. "It could
not have gotten into the system without the agency being
involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone
set someone up." (The White House declined to comment.)
Washington's case that the Iraqi regime had failed to
meet its obligation to give up weapons of mass destruction
was, of course, based on much more than a few documents
of questionable provenance from a small African nation.
But George W. Bush's war against Iraq has
created enormous anxiety throughout the world—in part
because one side is a superpower and the other is not.
It can't help the President's case, or his international
standing, when his advisers brief him with falsehoods,
whether by design or by mistake.
On March 14th, Senator Jay Rockefeller, of West Virginia,
the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee,
formally asked Robert Mueller, the F.B.I. director, to
investigate the forged documents. Rockefeller had voted
for the resolution authorizing force last fall. Now he
wrote to Mueller, "There is a possibility that the fabrication
of these documents may be part of a larger deception
campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign
policy regarding Iraq." He
urged the F.B.I. to ascertain the source of the documents,
the skill-level of the forgery, the motives of those
responsible, and "why the intelligence community did
not recognize the documents were fabricated." A Rockefeller
aide told me that the F.B.I. had promised to look into
it.
