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Yellowcake to 'Plamegate'
The best refueling stop in Africa
Niger is not the center of the universe. Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick realized that when she arrived there to take up the post of US ambassador in the fall of 1999.
One of the only ways she could lure top US officials for a visit was to encourage them to stop for refueling if they were overflying the region.
"I worked very hard to make Niger the best refueling stop in Africa," Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick told congressional investigators.
On Feb. 24, 2002, she snagged a big one: Marine Gen. Carlton Fulford, then deputy commander of US European Command. She decided to use his visit to raise the uranium issue with Nigerien officials. At her urging, General Fulford asked Niger's President Mamadou Tandja about it. President Tandja assured him that Niger's goal was to keep its uranium in "safe hands."
Two days later, Mr. Wilson landed on Owens-Kirkpatrick's doorstep. She'd already raised the issue with Niger's leaders, so she asked her CIA-dispatched visitor to limit his meetings to ex-officials and business contacts.
Wilson agreed. Among the people he met was former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki, who said he was unaware of any yellowcake contracts with rogue states - and that if any existed, he would know. Mr. Mayaki also mentioned that in 1999, when he was still in power, he'd met with an Iraqi delegation to discuss expanding commercial relations. He interpreted this to mean that the Iraqis were interested in yellowcake - it was Niger's biggest export, after all. But he told Wilson he'd steered the conversation to other topics, and then let the matter drop.
Before he left, Wilson told Owens- Kirkpatrick that as far as he was concerned it appeared highly unlikely anything was going on. Back home, he told CIA debriefers the same thing. He figured this information would be distributed to the White House, and Vice President Cheney, directly. Instead, the CIA produced no paper in response to his trip, and gave his effort a middling grade of "good."
It was not surprising that Nigeriens would play down reports of a yellowcake sale, analysts felt. One CIA officer believed Wilson's trip actually provided some confirmation of what the foreign tips were saying. Former Prime Minister Mayaki had acknowledged meeting with an Iraqi delegation, after all.
In the end, the US intelligence community had a fairly consistent response to ex-ambassador Wilson's dip into intelligence-gathering. "No one believed it added a great deal of new information to the Iraq-Niger uranium story," stated the report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
* * *
About one month after Wilson's trip, the CIA's intelligence-gathering arm received a third tip from a foreign government - again unnamed in unclassified US papers - that Niger and Iraq were working a yellowcake deal.
This report had yet more detail. The CIA's Iraq nuclear analyst (who is unnamed in government reports, as are most US intelligence analysts involved in this matter) saw nothing obviously suspicious about it. True, it contained one glaring mistake, but at the time it didn't seem like a big deal. The report placed July 7, 2000, on a Wednesday. That day was actually a Friday.
The relevant folks in Foggy Bottom remained unimpressed. Over at the State Department's INR, the Iraq nuclear analyst continued to argue that the whole thing didn't make sense. The substantial amounts allegedly involved amounted to a large percentage of Niger's yellowcake production. France controlled the mines - and anyway, one of the mines was flooded.
The CIA analyst stuck to his position. Niger wasn't the only place Hussein was supposedly shopping for uranium, he noted. Separate intelligence reports said Iraqi officials had been looking for yellowcake in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In the end the CIA and State counterparts "agreed to disagree," according to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Meanwhile, it was becoming clear to many in Washington that a US-led war to oust Hussein was possible, even likely, in the near future. By late summer 2002, key senators were beginning to complain that they would soon have to vote on a resolution on use of force in Iraq without a comprehensive US intelligence community estimate of the state of Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
So US intelligence began compiling one. On Sept. 25, the CIA hosted a big interagency meeting to discuss a draft of this National Intelligence Estimate. The uranium section was straightforward, repeating that a foreign government passed along reports of Hussein's interest in yellowcake.
TIMELINE
The only analyst present who voiced disagreement was the one from State's INR, which serves as the department's in-house intelligence-analyzing agency.
The uranium text stayed in. But it wasn't included in the "key judgments" section. The consensus in the room held that Iraq's efforts to get more yellowcake weren't crucial to the argument that he was rebuilding his nuclear-weapons program.
"We'll leave it in the paper for completeness. Nobody can say we didn't connect the dots," said the person in charge of the paper, the national intelligence officer for strategic and nuclear programs.
INR added a footnote that it found the uranium claim "highly dubious." But in the finished product, that dissent was all but lost. It was separated from the section on the alleged uranium deal by 60 pages.
Meanwhile, the British government made public its own official conclusions on the Niger subject, on Sept. 24, 2002. In response to unrest in Britain about the possibility of war, it issued a white paper on Iraq's WMD programs that, among other things, stated "there is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
* * *
The story of the documents may begin in Italy, in 1991.
That year - the year the first President Bush launched the first US war against Iraq - someone broke into the Nigerien Embassy in Rome. Reportedly, nothing was taken except paper - official letterhead of the Republic of Niger.
Eleven years later, on Oct. 9, 2002, an Italian journalist named Elisabetta Burba contacted the US Embassy in Rome. Ms. Burba worked for the magazine Panorama, part of the media empire of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and she had a question: Could the US authenticate some interesting documents that had come into her possession?
The papers depicted some sort of contract for uranium between Niger and Iraq. The source, who had provided them to Panorama, wanted 15,000 euros in return for publication, said Burba. Her bosses wouldn't pay that kind of money unless they were sure they weren't being misled.
That was what she told US diplomats in Italy, anyway. The diplomats were glad to oblige.
On Oct. 15 the embassy in Rome faxed the papers to the State Department's Bureau of Nonproliferation in Washington. That same day the bureau passed copies to State's INR.
This is the point when INR's nuclear analyst figured something was really wrong. That paper alleging a military campaign against world powers - it seemed ridiculous. And it had the same authentication stamp as the ones dealing with uranium.
At an interagency meeting the next day, intel analysts from the DIA, the Department of Energy, and the National Security Agency all snapped up copies of the documents. Four CIA employees attended that meeting. None remembers taking the Niger papers, although a postmortem search turned up copies in a CIA vault.
At that point the alleged uranium deal just wasn't a significant part of the CIA's argument that Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear program, the analysts later said. "Getting the documents was not a priority," one told Senate investigators.
Within months, that would change.
For one thing, the IAEA became interested in the alleged Niger-Iraq yellowcake deal. On Jan. 6, 2003, an IAEA official asked the US for any information it had backing up the claim.
And the INR analyst kept at it. On Jan. 13, he sent an e-mail to colleagues outlining his reasoning why the purchase agreement "probably is a hoax."
Reading this e-mail, the CIA's Iraq nuclear analyst realized he didn't have the supposedly ridiculous documents the missive discussed. He asked for copies.
The CIA finally received copies of the original foreign language documents detailing the supposed Niger-Iraq contract on Jan. 16, 2003.
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