Forging Their Way
to War
By Seymour M.Hersh
1 April, 2003
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 Iraqs weapons capability. It was
an important presentation for the Bush Administration. Some Democrats
were publicly questioning the Presidents 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 committees 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 Blairs government made public a dossier containing much of
the information that the Senate committee was being given in secretthat
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 Iraqs 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 Presidents
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 dont think anybody here
sees that thing," a State Department analyst told me. "You
only know whats in the P.D.B. because it echoespeople 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 agencys
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 Tandja Mamadou, 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. Nigers "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 cant 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 dont 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 MI6the
branch of British intelligence responsible for foreign operationshad
become involved, perhaps through contacts in Italy, after the Ambassadors
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."
ElBaradeis 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 ElBaradeis 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 programpart
of its Information Operations, or I/Opswas 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 tipsdata
known as inactionable intelligenceto 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 BritishPresident Bush said as much in his State of the
Union speechand 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 Presidents State of
the Union speech? Was the messagethe threat posed by Iraqmore
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 Britains MI6. Harlows 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
werent trustworthy. "It's not a question as to whether they
were marginal. They cant be sort of bad, or 'sort
of' ambiguous. They knew it was a fraudit 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
worldin part because one side is a superpower and the other is
not. It cant 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.
(This article first appeared
in
The New Yorker)