The White House repeated a familiar retort last week to defend itself against allegations that President Bush used discredited information in his State of the Union speech about Iraq shopping for uranium oxide in Africa: "If we knew [then] what we knew today, we wouldn't have done it," as a White House official, demanding anonymity, said to a roomful of reporters Friday.
But recent revelations by officials at the CIA, the State Department, the United Nations, in Congress and elsewhere make clear that the weakness of the claim in the State of the Union speech was known and accepted by a wide circle of intelligence and diplomatic personnel scrutinizing information on Iraqi weapons programs months before the speech.
"Everyone knew" the letters purporting to prove Iraq's effort to acquire uranium in Niger "were not good," said one senior administration decision-maker who otherwise supported the president's decision to go to war in Iraq. "The White House response has been baffling. This is relatively inconsequential. Why don't they tell the truth?"
Inconsequential or not, even the Italian journalist who gave the documents to the U.S. Embassy in Rome nine months ago told reporters yesterday that when she returned from a trip to Niger to check them out, she told her editor that "the story seemed fake to me" and published nothing on it.
Elisabetta Burba, a foreign correspondent for the Italian news magazine Panorama, said in an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, "I realized that this could be a worldwide scoop, but that's exactly why I was very worried. If it turned out to be a hoax, and I published it, I would have ended my career."
For the past weeks, White House efforts to explain how that hoax, and other information about African uranium purchases, ended up in government releases and speeches have contradicted information from other U.S. officials involved in verifying the president's remarks before he speaks.
For instance, on Friday the White House briefer said that the only statement CIA Director George J. Tenet had successfully persuaded deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley to take out of the president's Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati was a reference to "over 500 tons of uranium." He said that was removed because it was "single-sourced" intelligence.
But yesterday, a senior administration official with knowledge of the Tenet-Hadley conversation disputed the White House version. "The line he asked to take out wasn't about 500 tons of uranium or a single source. It was about Africa and uranium," the official said. Even the broader assertion about Africa "wasn't firm enough. It was shaky."
Technically, the Niger documents were publicly declared to be forgeries on March 7 by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. agency that had monitored Iraq's nuclear-related activity and had received the documents from U.S officials a month earlier, on Feb. 5.
But "long before the journalist came up with the documents," said the senior administration official, "there were broader concerns that the government couldn't verify."
Those concerns dated from late 2001, when U.S. intelligence officials obtained information "from two western intelligence sources" and other overt sources, according to an April 29 letter to Congress from the State Department "on behalf of the President."
In February 2002, the CIA dispatched former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, a 23-year career diplomat with postings in Africa and Iraq, to check out those reports. He returned unconvinced, and the CIA cabled his doubts around the intelligence community and to the National Security Council on March 9, 2002. While not definitive, Wilson's assessment fit with the skepticism already existing on the subject. Wilson's report was "not memorable" because it confirmed previously held doubts, said several U.S. officials.
In September 2002, the story of Iraq's interest in uranium from Africa was first made public in a British government dossier on Iraq's weapons program. Tenet and top aides, who appeared days later before two congressional committees, were asked about the British claim.
Tenet told lawmakers that there were reports of Iraqi attempts to buy uranium but that there were doubts about the reports' accuracy. Not a week later, the CIA circulated a classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq. Neither allegation -- that Iraq sought uranium in Africa or Niger -- made it into the document's "key judgments" section, according to portions of the NIE made public Friday.
On page 25, however, the NIE stated that a foreign government had reported that Niger "planned to send several tons of pure uranium (probably yellowcake) to Iraq. . . . We do not know the status of this arrangement." On the same page, it cites reports indicating Iraq's approaches to Somalia and Congo. "We cannot confirm whether Iraq succeeded in acquiring uranium ore and/or yellowcake from these sources," the NIE stated.
On page 84, the State Department's intelligence bureau, in a dissenting analysis, said "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are . . . highly dubious." No references to Iraq seeking yellowcake from Niger, Congo, Somalia or anywhere else appeared in the NIE that was publicly released on Oct. 4.
One reason for the public omission was the widespread skepticism about the claims, described by the senior official as "so much for so long."
Days after the Italian journalist Burba handed the documents to the U.S. Embassy in Rome on Oct. 11, intelligence officials had nearly completely discounted their substance, which mirrored the reports Wilson and others had discounted eight months earlier. In fact, when the State Department's intelligence branch distributed the documents on Oct. 16 to the CIA and other intelligence agencies, it included a caveat that the claims were of "dubious authenticity."
Similar caveats were included by the U.S. Mission to the IAEA in Vienna when the documents were turned over there on Feb. 5, said an official familiar with documents submitted.
Four months later, in June, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice insisted that the White House had been unaware of these previous doubts. "We wouldn't have put it in the speech if we had known what we know now," Rice said. "I can assure you that the president did not knowingly, before the American people, say something that we thought to be false. It's outrageous that anybody would claim that."
Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.
