<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.6000.16414" name=GENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT size=5>How a Bogus Letter Became a Case for
War<BR></FONT>Intelligence Failures Surrounded Inquiry on Iraq-Niger Uranium
Claim<BR></STRONG>
<P><FONT size=-1>By Peter Eisner<BR>Washington Post Staff Writer<BR>Tuesday,
April 3, 2007; A01<BR></FONT></P>
<P></P>
<P>It was 3 a.m. in Italy on Jan. 29, 2003, when President Bush in Washington
began reading his State of the Union address that included the now famous --
later retracted -- 16 words: "The British Government has learned that Saddam
Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."</P>
<P>Like most Europeans, Elisabetta Burba, an investigative reporter for the
Italian newsweekly Panorama, waited until the next day to read the newspaper
accounts of Bush's remarks. But when she came to the 16 words, she recalled, she
got a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach. She wondered: How could the
American president have mentioned a uranium sale from Africa?</P>
<P>Burba felt uneasy because more than three months earlier, she had turned over
to the U.S. Embassy in Rome documents about an alleged uranium sale by the
central African nation of Niger. And she knew now that the documents were
fraudulent and the 16 words wrong.</P>
<P>Nonetheless, the uranium claim would become a crucial justification for the
invasion of Iraq that began less than two months later. When occupying troops
found no nuclear program, the 16 words and how they came to be in the speech
became a focus for critics in Washington and foreign capitals to press the case
that the White House manipulated facts to take the United States to war.</P>
<P>Dozens of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and
policymakers in the United States, Britain, France and Italy show that the Bush
administration disregarded key information available at the time showing that
the Iraq-Niger claim was highly questionable.</P>
<P>In February 2002, the CIA received the verbatim text of one of the documents,
filled with errors easily identifiable through a simple Internet search, the
interviews show. Many low- and mid-level intelligence officials were already
skeptical that Iraq was in pursuit of nuclear weapons.</P>
<P>The interviews also showed that France, berated by the Bush administration
for opposing the Iraq war, honored a U.S. intelligence request to investigate
the uranium claim. It determined that its former colony had not sold uranium to
Iraq.</P>
<P>Burba, who had no special expertise in Africa or nuclear technology, was able
to quickly unravel the fraud. Yet the claims clung to life within the Bush
administration for months, eventually finding their way into the State of the
Union address.</P>
<P>As a result of the CIA's failure to firmly discredit the document text it
received in February 2002, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was called
in to investigate the claim. That decision eventually led to the special
counsel's investigation that exposed inner workings of the White House and ended
with the criminal conviction of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was forced to
resign as chief of staff to Vice President Cheney.</P>
<P>"You know I feel bad about it," Burba said later, discussing her frustrations
about her role in giving the dossier to the Americans. "You know the fact is
that my documents, with the documents I brought to them, they justified the
war."</P><B>The Tip</B><BR>
<P>In early October of 2002, a man mysteriously contacted Elisabetta Burba at
her Milan office.</P>
<P>"Do you remember me?" the deep voice said, without identifying himself
outright. It was Rocco Martino, an old source who had proved reliable in the
past. He was once again trying to sell her information.</P>
<P>Martino said he had some very interesting documents to show her, and asked
whether she could fly down to Rome right away.</P>
<P>They met at a restaurant in Rome on Oct. 7, where Martino showed Burba a
folder filled with documents, most of them in French. One of the documents was
purportedly sent by the president of Niger to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein,
confirming a deal to sell 500 tons of uranium to Iraq annually. This was the
smoking gun in the package, claiming to show the formal approval of Niger's
president to supply Iraq with a commodity that would in all likelihood only be
used for a nuclear weapons program: Iraq had no nuclear power plants.</P>
<P>Though the document was in French it would later come to be known as "The
Italian Letter." It was written in all capital letters, in the form of an old
telex, and bore the letterhead of the Republic of Niger. The letter was dated
July 27, 2000, and included an odd shield on the top, a shining sun surrounded
by a horned animal head, a star and a bird. The letter was stamped Confidential
and Urgent.</P>
<P>The letter said that "500 tons of pure uranium per year will be delivered in
two phases." A seal at the bottom of the page read "The Office of the President
of the Republic of Niger." Superimposed over the seal was a barely legible
signature bearing the name of the president of Niger, Mamadou Tandja.</P>
<P>Burba listened without saying much as she took a first look at the documents.
She recognized right away that the material was hot, if authentic. But
confirming the origin would be difficult, she recalled thinking at the time. She
didn't want to fall into a trap.</P>
<P>Burba and Martino made an agreement; she would take the documents, and if
they checked out as authentic, then they could talk about money.</P><B>'Let's Go
to the Americans'</B><BR>
<P>Back in her magazine's Milan newsroom, Burba told her editors she thought it
would make sense to fly to Niger and check around for confirmation. The editor
of the magazine, Carlo Rossella, agreed. He then suggested they simultaneously
pursue another tack.</P>
<P>"Let's go to the Americans," Rossella said, "because they are focused on
looking for weapons of mass destruction more than anyone else. Let's see if they
can authenticate the documents." Rossella called the U.S. Embassy in Rome and
alerted officials to expect a visit from Burba.</P>
<P>On Wednesday morning, Oct. 9, Burba returned to Rome and took a cab to the
U.S. Embassy, which is housed at the old Palazzo Margherita.</P>
<P>Burba came to a security gate and walked through a magnetometer, where an
Italian employee of the embassy press department came down to meet her.</P>
<P>After a few formalities, an Italian aide introduced her to Ian Kelly, the
embassy press spokesman. Kelly and Burba walked across the embassy's walled
grounds and sat down for a cup of coffee in the cafeteria.</P>
<P>Burba told Kelly that she had some documents about Iraq and uranium shipments
and needed help in confirming their authenticity and accuracy.</P>
<P>Kelly interrupted her, realizing he needed help. He made a phone call
summoning someone else from his staff as well as a political officer. Burba
recalled a third person being invited, possibly a U.S. military attache. She
didn't get their names.</P>
<P>"Let's go to my office," Kelly said. They walked past antiquities, a tranquil
fountain, steps and pieces of marble, all set in a tree-lined patio garden.</P>
<P>The Italian journalist's chat with Kelly and his colleagues was brief. She
handed over the papers; Kelly told her the embassy would look into the matter.
But Kelly had not been briefed on what others in the embassy knew.</P><B>CIA
Role</B><BR>
<P>One person who refused to meet with Burba was the CIA chief of station. A few
days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, Sismi, the Italian
intelligence agency, had sent along information about the alleged sale of
uranium to Iraq. The station chief asked for more information and would later
consider it far-fetched.</P>
<P>On Oct. 15, 2001, the CIA reports officer at the embassy wrote a brief
summary based on the Sismi intelligence, signed and dated it, and routed it to
CIA's Operations Directorate in Langley, with copies going to the clandestine
service's European and Near East divisions. The reports officer had limited its
distribution because the intelligence was uncorroborated; she was aware of
Sismi's questionable track record and did not believe the report merited wider
dissemination.</P>
<P>The Operations Directorate then passed the raw intelligence to the CIA's
Intelligence Directorate and to sister agencies, including the Defense
Intelligence Agency. A more polished document, called a Senior Executive
Intelligence Brief, was written at Langley three days later in which the CIA
mentioned the new intelligence but added important caveats. The classified
document, whose distribution was limited to senior policymakers and the
congressional intelligence committees, said there was no corroboration and noted
that Iraq had "no known facilities for processing or enriching the
material."</P><B>Pushing the Africa Claim</B><BR>
<P>Almost four months later, on Feb. 5, 2002, the CIA received more information
from Sismi, including the verbatim text of one of the documents. The CIA failed
to recognize that it was riddled with errors, including misspellings and the
wrong names for key officials. But it was a separate DIA report about the claims
that would lead Cheney to demand further investigation. In response, the CIA
dispatched Wilson to Niger.</P>
<P>Martino's approach to Burba eight months later with the Italian letter
coincided with accelerating U.S. preparations for war. On Oct. 7, 2002, the same
day Martino gave Burba the dossier, President Bush launched a new hard-line PR
campaign on Iraq. In a speech in Cincinnati, he declared that Iraq under Saddam
Hussein was a "grave threat" to U.S. national security.</P>
<P>"It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking
nuclear weapons," the president warned.</P>
<P>CIA Director George J. Tenet had vetted the text of Bush's speech and was
able to persuade the White House to drop one questionable claim: that Iraq was
seeking uranium in Africa. The information was too fishy, Tenet explained to the
National Security Council and Bush's speechwriters.</P>
<P>Bush dropped the shopping-for-uranium claim, but ratcheted up the bomb
threat. He said in Cincinnati that if Hussein obtained bomb-grade uranium the
size of a softball, he would have a nuclear bomb within a year. This particular
doomsday scenario had first been unveiled several weeks earlier, on Aug. 26, by
Cheney. In a speech in Nashville to the 103rd national convention of the
Veterans of Foreign Wars, he declared with no equivocation that Hussein had
"resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons."</P>
<P>On Oct. 16, Burba sat on a plane on her way to Niger, while in Washington,
copies of the Italian letter and the accompanying dossier were placed on the
table at an interagency nuclear proliferation meeting hosted by the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.</P>
<P>At this point, State Department analysts had determined the documents were
phony, and had produced by far the most accurate assessment of Iraq's weapons
program of the 16 agencies that make up the intelligence community. But the
department's small intelligence unit operated in a bubble. Few administration
officials -- not even Secretary of State Colin L. Powell -- paid much attention
to its analytical product, much of which clashed with the White House's
assumptions.</P>
<P>The State Department bureau, nevertheless, shared the bogus documents with
those intelligence officials attending the meeting, including representatives of
the Energy Department, National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency.
Four CIA officials attended, but only one, a clandestine service officer,
bothered to take a copy of the Italian letter.</P>
<P>He returned to his office, filed the material in a safe and forgot about
it.</P>
<P>The Niger uranium matter was not uppermost in the minds of the CIA analysts.
Some of them had to deal with the issue in any case, largely because Cheney, his
aide Libby and some aides at the National Security Council had repeatedly
demanded more information and more analysis.</P><B>A Fraud Unravels</B><BR>
<P>Burba arrived in Niamey, Niger's capital, on Oct. 17 and began tracking down
leads on the Italian letter. Burba's investigation followed a series of similar
inquiries by Wilson, the former ambassador, who investigated on behalf of the
CIA eight months earlier. It became clear that Niger was not capable of secretly
shipping yellowcake uranium to Iraq or anywhere else.</P>
<P>Burba found that a French company controlled the uranium trade, and any
shipment of uranium would have been noticed. If a uranium sale had taken place,
the logistics would have been daunting. "They would have needed hundreds of
trucks," she said -- a large percentage of all the trucks in Niger. It would
have been impossible to conceal.</P>
<P>Burba returned to Milan and reported her findings to her bosses in detail.
She didn't believe the evidence provided by Martino; it was impossible. Her
editors agreed. There was no story.</P>
<P>Five months later, on March 7, 2003, as preparations for the Iraq invasion
were in their final stages, the director of the International Atomic Energy
Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, told the U.N. Security Council that the report that
Iraq had been shopping for uranium in Niger was based on forged documents. The
agency had received the document from the United States a few weeks earlier.</P>
<P>Not long after the invasion, other news media in Italy, elsewhere in Europe
and then in the United States reported that the source of the information about
a Niger yellowcake uranium deal had been a batch of bogus letters and other
documents passed along several months earlier to an unnamed Italian reporter,
who in turn handed the information over to the United States.</P>
<P>Although Burba knew that the Bush administration had also received
information about the forged documents from Italian intelligence, she wished she
could have acted earlier to reveal the fraud.</P>
<P>It remains unclear who fabricated the documents. Intelligence officials say
most likely it was rogue elements in Sismi who wanted to make money selling
them.</P></DIV></BODY></HTML>