The Christian Science Monitor

On Jan. 27, 2003, at a National Security Council meeting at the White House, someone handed George Tenet a paper copy of Bush's State of the Union address, to be delivered the next evening.

Then director of Central Intelligence, Mr. Tenet was a busy man, and he dealt with this document in the manner of busy people everywhere. He didn't read it, he testified later.

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Instead, he handed it to an executive assistant, who presumably wasn't supposed to read it, to give to a top official in the CIA's intelligence directorate, who was. That official, being as busy as his boss, didn't read it either.

Thus nobody at the CIA's top levels saw that the president's signature speech of the year contained an assertion, sourced to British intelligence, that Hussein was seeking uranium oxide from Africa.

Three months earlier, Tenet had called the White House and insisted that similar words be excised from another speech.

But on Jan. 28, Tenet could only stand by while the president repeated the allegations for a TV audience of tens of millions.

"The Director of Central Intelligence should have taken the time to read the State of the Union speech and fact-check it himself," later concluded the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Of course, the White House had been trying for some time to get CIA clearance for the president to publicly mention this allegation. Truth be told, the CIA had been sending back a message that was mixed.

Mid-level CIA analysts had no problem with Bush mentioning yellowcake. Throughout the fall of 2002, when the NSC would send over proposed presidential language on the subject, they would merely edit it, making minimal changes such as inserting "up to" before a reference to "500 metric tons."

But Bush had never publicly brought up the subject. By October, CIA higher-ups seemed chary.

On Oct. 6, 2002, the NSC sent over the sixth draft of a big speech the president was to give in Cincinnati. It contained a reference to Iraq "having been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide."

Tenet and other top CIA officials told the White House to take it out. Reporting on this was weak, Tenet said. Bush should not be a "fact witness" on the issue. On Oct. 7, he delivered the speech in Cincinnati, without any uranium reference.

Down in the CIA's ranks, some continued to believe that Iraq and Niger were probably working a deal, they later testified. They believed that right up to the moment when the primary evidence for it was exposed as a fraud.

* * *

At some point in the process of drafting the State of the Union speech in 2003, White House officials decided that the speech's assertions about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction would look better if they were sourced.

Discussions with mid-level CIA officials led speechwriters to believe that the reference to yellowcake was sensitive, and that the agency preferred it to be laid on the British, who had mentioned it publicly in the fall of 2002.

Stephen Hadley, then deputy national security adviser, said at the time that the White House was not aware of any question about the solidity of British sourcing. But Mr. Hadley had been involved in the decision to strike a reference to Hussein's interest in uranium from a Bush's Cincinnati speech in October 2002. "I should have recalled at the time ... that there was controversy associated with the uranium issue," said Hadley in 2003.

* * *

On Feb. 4, 2003 - a week after the State of the Union speech - the US finally sent electronic copies of the Niger documents to IAEA offices in Vienna. Jacques Bute, then head of IAEA's Iraq Nuclear Verification Office, was in New York that day, and the US sent him copies as well.

On March 3, the IAEA told the US Mission in Vienna its conclusion: The documents were obvious fakes.

The little mistakes were telling. The papers referred to a Nigerien Constitution of 1965, which had been passed in 1999. The foreign minister who purportedly signed the papers was not in office at the time. The letterhead was obsolete, years old; and references to various Nigerien state agencies were riddled with errors.

"We have therefore concluded that these specific allegations are unfounded," IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei told the UN Security Council on March 7.

US intelligence began backpedaling with alacrity. Within weeks an internal intelligence community memo concluded the yellowcake deal was "unlikely." On June 17, 2003, a CIA memo for the Director of Central Intelligence said, "we no longer believe that there is sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad."

Story continues below

IRAQ, JUNE 2003: Bursting, rusting barrels stood outside a US-protected Iraqi facility for storing 'yellowcake,' which Saddam Hussein was known to have already acquired.

Then, on July 6, Wilson wrote his now-famous op-ed for The New York Times, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," which outlined why he had never believed the Niger story. Wilson also appeared on "Meet the Press." The Washington Post published a story on the Niger subject based in part on a Wilson interview.

On July 7, Scooter Libby had lunch with White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, according to court papers. This guy Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, Libby is said to have told Mr. Fleischer. That information wasn't widely known.

Soon, it would be.

* * *

The question of who forged the Niger documents remains open. The FBI this month closed a two-year investigation of the subject, saying only that agents believe the whole scheme was "for financial gain."

News reports have focused on Italy - and specifically on Italian intelligence. The Italian newspaper La Repubblica has published a series alleging that Italian intelligence passed the documents to Washington and London knowing they were fake. Italian intelligence chief Nicolo Pollari denied this charge in a closed-door briefing for Italian lawmakers this month.

Britain has not retracted its claim of the Iraq-Niger connection, saying it has other evidence confirming the deal.

The US now believes all the evidence it has seen, including the multiple foreign government reports, came from one source: the tainted papers.

"The CIA concluded the original reporting was based on the forged documents and was thus itself unreliable," says the report of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States.