WASHINGTON, 23 March 2003 — CIA officials now say they communicated significant doubts to the administration about the evidence backing up charges that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Africa for nuclear weapons, charges that found their way into President Bush’s State of the Union address, a State Department “fact sheet” and public remarks by numerous senior officials.
That evidence was dismissed as a forgery early this month by United Nations officials investigating Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs. The Bush administration does not dispute this conclusion.
Asked how the administration came to back up one of its principal allegations against Iraq with information its own intelligence service considered faulty, officials said all such assertions were carefully tailored to stay within the bounds of certainty. As for the State of the Union address, a White House spokesman said: “All presidential speeches are fully vetted by the White House staff and relevant US government agencies for factual correctness.’’
Questioned about the forgery during a recent congressional hearing, Secretary of State Colin Powell said, “We were aware of this piece of evidence, and it was provided in good faith to the (UN) inspectors.’’
But in the days preceding the US and British invasion of Iraq, some intelligence officials had begun to acknowledge more openly their doubts about how this and other information was used to support charges that Iraq has a significant covert program to produce weapons of mass destruction.
“I have seen all the stuff. I certainly have doubts,” said a senior administration official with access to the latest intelligence. Based on the material he has reviewed, the official said, the United States will “face significant problems in trying to find’’ such weapons. “It will be very difficult.’’ According to several officials, decisions about what information to declassify and use to make the administration’s public case have been made by a small group that includes top CIA and National Security Council officials. “The policy guys make decisions about things like this,’’ said one official, referring to the uranium evidence. When the State Department “fact sheet” was issued, the official said, “people winced and thought, ‘Why are you repeating this trash?’’’
Some have questioned whether the United States was duped by a foreign government or independent group. “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,’’ Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va., wrote last Friday to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III. An FBI inquiry, Rockefeller wrote, “should, at a minimum, help to allay any concerns” that the US government itself created the documents to build support for the war.
Others have been more direct in suggesting a plot closer to home. In a letter sent to Bush on Monday, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., asked for a full accounting of “what you knew about the reliability of the evidence linking Iraq to uranium in Africa, when you knew this, and why you and senior officials in the administration presented the evidence to the UN Security Council, the Congress, and the American people without disclosing the doubts of the CIA.’’
The first public charge that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium for nuclear weapons in Africa came from Britain, in a document published last Sept. 24. In December, a State Department “``fact sheet” said that the African country in question was Niger, and that Iraq’s failure to declare the attempted purchase was one of the many lies it told about its weapons of mass destruction.
In his State of the Union address in January, Bush said “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.’’ In separate statements in January, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made the same charge, without mentioning the British.
British officials said they “stand behind” the original allegation. They note they never mentioned “Niger,” the subject of the forged documents, and imply, but do not say, that there was other information, about another African country. But an informed UN official said the United States and Britain were repeatedly asked for all information they had to support the charge. Neither government, the official said, “ever indicated that they had any information on any other country.”
US intelligence officials said they had not even seen the actual evidence, consisting of supposed government documents from Niger, until last month. The source of their information, and their doubts, officials said, was a written summary provided more than six months ago by the Italian intelligence service, which first obtained the documents.