THE
NEW YORKER:
Who lied to whom?
By Seymour M. Hersh
Why
did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq’s nuclear program?
March 31, 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 Iraq’s
weapons capability. It was an important presentation for the Bush
Administration. Some Democrats were publicly questioning the President’s 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 committee’s 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 Blair’s government made public a
dossier containing much of the information that the Senate committee was being
given in secret—that 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 Iraq’s
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 President’s 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 don’t think anybody here sees that thing,” a
State Department analyst told me. “You only know what’s in the P.D.B.
because it echoes—people 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
agency’s 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. Niger’s “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 can’t 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 don’t 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 MI6—the branch of British
intelligence responsible for foreign operations—had become involved, perhaps
through contacts in Italy, after the Ambassador’s 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.”
ElBaradei’s 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 ElBaradei’s 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 program—part of its
Information Operations, or I/Ops—was 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 tips—data known as inactionable intelligence—to 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 British—President
Bush said as much in his State of the Union speech—and 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
President’s State of the Union speech? Was the message—the threat posed by
Iraq—more 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 Britain’s MI6. Harlow’s 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 weren’t trustworthy. “It’s not a question as to
whether they were marginal. They can’t be ‘sort of’ bad, or ‘sort of’
ambiguous. They knew it was a fraud—it 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 world—in part because one side is a superpower and the other is not. It
can’t help the President’s case, or his international standing, when his
advisers brief him with falsehoods, whether by design or by mistake.
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