Niger uranium forgeries

Did You Know?

• The Bush administration used the political slogan 'coalition of the willing' to refer to the Multinational Force – Iraq.
• The International Atomic Energy Agency judged the documents to be counterfeit days before the Iraq invasion.
• The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate contained a dissenting opinion from the State Department that the intelligence connecting Niger to Saddam Hussein was 'highly suspect'.

Abbreviated timetable

The first mention of these documents appeared in a CIA Senior Executive Intelligence brief on 18 October 2001, titled "Iraq: Nuclear Related Procurement Efforts," though the information was not considered certain and was not immediately promoted. SISMI sent the documents to the CIA office in Rome. On 10 May 2002, a CIA briefing book for the Principals Committee noted that a "foreign government service says Iraq was trying to acquire 500 tons of uranium from Niger. SISMI disseminated the forged documents to the United States a second and third time in early September 2002, with one source being a suspicious former SISMI agent selling the documents. On 9 September 2002, SISMI chief Nicolò Pollari met secretly in Washington with Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley to present the Niger yellowcake story. That month, the Defense Intelligence Agency published an assessment stating Iraq had been "vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake. On 11 September 2002, NSC staff contacted the CIA to clear language for President Bush, which stated Iraq had resumed efforts to obtain large quantities of yellowcake.

British inquiries

The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, comprising fourteen MPs from government and opposition parties, investigated the uranium claim in the September Dossier. In June and July, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw testified that the claim rested on separate evidence from the fraudulent documents, and that this intelligence, obtained from a foreign government, was still under review and had not been shared with the CIA. Lynne Jones MP contacted the IAEA, and spokesman Mark Gwozdecky responded in May 2004 that the IAEA had received information from member states but had learned nothing to change its conclusion that the documents were forgeries, and had received no information appearing to be based on anything other than those documents. The committee judged the evidence that Iraq was trying to procure uranium was not strong enough to justify absolute terms, finding it "very odd" that the government asserted it was not relying on the forged evidence yet eight months later was still reviewing other evidence, and that the assertion should have been qualified to reflect uncertainty.

Origin of forged documents

No one has been convicted of forging the documents. By late 2003, the trail was partially uncovered: the documents were obtained by Rocco Martino, a security consultant and former agent of SISMI's precursor agency, from Italian military intelligence. An article in The Times quoted Martino as receiving the documents from a woman on the staff of the Niger embassy in Rome after a meeting arranged by a serving SISMI agent; Martino later recanted, saying SISMI had not facilitated the meeting. Martino offered the documents to Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba, who, on instructions from her editor at Panorama, offered them to the U.S. Embassy in Rome in October 2002. Burba was dissuaded by Panorama's editors from investigating the source. An August 2004 Financial Times article indicated French officials may have had a role in the documents coming to light. According to a 2003 New Yorker article 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.

Aftermath

In March 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller agreed not to open a congressional investigation but asked the FBI to conduct one. In 2003, unidentified senior officials leaked to columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame, wife of critic Joseph Wilson, was a CIA operative, leading to a legal investigation and political scandal. In September 2004, CBS News's 60 Minutes delayed a major story on the forgeries, with a spokesman saying it would be inappropriate to air it so close to the 2004 presidential election. Nicolò Pollari told an Italian parliamentary intelligence committee that the dossier came from Rocco Martino. The Los Angeles Times reported on 3 December 2005 that the FBI had reopened its inquiry into how the Bush administration came to rely on the forged documents; a senior FBI official said the initial investigation found no evidence of foreign government involvement but did not interview Martino. In 2008, the United States facilitated shipping more than 550 tons of yellowcake out of Iraq to Canada; this yellowcake had been stockpiled before the first Gulf War and was under IAEA safeguards.