Yellowcake to 'Plamegate'

The ones dealing with a purported uranium deal between Niger and Saddam Hussein's Iraq bore a validation stamp that seemed a bit funky, for one thing. And that companion paper! It outlined some kind of bizarre military campaign against world powers. Iraq and Iran were supposedly in it together - preposterous, given their enmity - and the whole thing was being run out of the Nigerien Embassy in Rome.

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"Completely implausible," the analyst later recounted for investigators.

Because the documents had come from the same source, and were similar in appearance, they were probably all suspect. Maybe now the CIA and the rest of the US intelligence community would believe what the State Department had said for months: These allegations from a foreign intelligence service that Hussein was hunting for "yellowcake" - a uranium concentrate - in Africa were unlikely to be true.

But the CIA didn't look at the documents. A little over three months later President Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union speech, said 16 fateful words: "... the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

This is the story of how those words came to be, and how their effect rippled through the years, ultimately resulting in the criminal indictment of a high administration official, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Culled primarily from US government reports and congressional testimony, it deals with nuclear materials, foreign spies, and a secret trip to the finest refueling stop in Africa. It centers on a peculiar set of documents - provenance as yet unknown - that a presidential inquiry three years later found to be "transparently forged."

Much about the affair remains to be discovered. But one thing now seems clear: If US intelligence agencies had spent more time studying the evidence in their possession, the president might never had said those words. Scooter Libby probably would be in his White House office today.

The intelligence community's "failure to undertake a real review of the documents - even though their validity was the subject of serious doubts - was a major failure of the intelligence system," the presidentially appointed Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States concluded last March.

* * *

In its natural state uranium occurs in tiny concentrations. Thus, the first stop for crushed rock from many uranium mines is a mill, where it is bathed in sulfuric acid, dried, and filtered. The result is a coarse uranium oxide power that is often yellow in color. That's where it gets its nickname, "yellowcake."

Yellowcake is itself a raw material. Enriched, it can serve as the beating heart of a nuclear power plant. Enriched to a higher level, it can serve as the fissile core of a nuclear bomb. For that reason, the destinations of yellowcake shipments are of interest to intelligence officials around the world.

Sometime in October 2001, a foreign government told US intelligence it had information indicating that Niger was planning to ship several tons of yellowcake to Iraq. (This government goes unnamed in official US accounts, but it is widely reported in the media to have been Italy.)

Several things about this allegation made sense. Along with Canada and Australia, Niger is one of the globe's largest producers of uranium. And Hussein knew all about yellowcake. He already had 550 tons, subject to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections.

Still, US analysts were unimpressed. The report lacked detail. The US Embassy in Niger checked with the head of the French-led consortium that ran Niger's mines. According to an embassy cable, the reply was indignant: There was "no possibility" of such a diversion.

In February 2002, US intelligence received a second foreign government tip - from a country unnamed by unclassified US material. This contained more information, including an alleged verbatim text of the Niger-Iraq accord.

The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), its in-house intelligence-analysis agency, thought the whole thing baloney, since any nation that tried to transfer such a large quantity of a suspicious material was likely to be caught.

But the rest of US intelligence was taking notice. The source of this information was credible, claimed the CIA's intelligence-gathering directorate. So on Feb. 12, the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a finished intelligence product on the topic.

"Iraq probably is searching abroad for natural uranium to assist in its nuclear weapons program," concluded the DIA analysis.

It was at this point that the matter of Niger, Iraq, and yellowcake rocketed from intelligence ephemera to prime policy concern. The reason? Dick Cheney.

* * *

Vice President Cheney read the DIA product on the day it was produced, according to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which investigated prewar intelligence and reported on it in July 2004. That day he asked his intelligence community briefer what the CIA thought about the Niger issue.

The result was a very unbureaucratic scurry of activity.

First, the CIA fired back an assessment that in so many words said, "We're working on it." It promised to see if the information could be corroborated.

Second, CIA experts began to confer as to how this corroboration could be done. Who could make discreet inquiries in the region? One Counterproliferation Division expert offered up a name: ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who happened to be her husband.

The subsequent exposure of that expert - the clandestine operative Valerie Plame - led to the naming of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the leak. In turn, that led to the indictment of Mr. Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, on charges of false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice.

But that was all in the future that February day. Ms. Plame was just someone talking up her husband's credentials - he "has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines," stated her memo to superiors.

She was blunter with her husband. She told congressional investigators that when she approached him on behalf of the CIA she said, "there's this crazy report" about Niger selling uranium to Iraq. Could he go to Niger and check out the deal?

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