WASHINGTON, 7 July 2003 — A former US ambassador who investigated reports of sales of processed uranium by Niger to Iraq has concluded the government twisted intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat, according to an opinion piece published in the New York Times yesterday.
Joseph Wilson, who served in the US foreign service from 1976 to 1998, was asked by the CIA in February 2002 to travel to Niger to investigate a report that it had sold processed uranium to Iraq in the late 1990s, Wilson revealed in his column, titled “What I didn’t find in Africa.”
The CIA was seeking to answer questions from Vice President Dick Cheney about an intelligence report citing a memorandum of agreement between the two countries documenting the sale.
Before the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) gave its verdict, the report was cited by President George W. Bush and Britain to support their charges that Saddam was trying to obtain nuclear weapons and to justify their invasion of Iraq in March.
Wilson said he spent eight days talking to dozens of people in Niger and concluded “it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.”
Niger’s two uranium mines are run by French, Spanish, Japanese, German and Nigerian interests, he said. “If the government wanted to remove uranium from a mine, it would have to notify the consortium, which in turn is strictly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency.”
“In short, there’s simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired,” he said.
Wilson briefed the US ambassador to Niger, the CIA and the State Department African Affairs Bureau of his conclusions, he wrote.
“Though I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in the United States government archives confirming my mission,” he said. “While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure.”
Wilson was surprised when, in December, the State Department published a fact sheet mentioning the Niger sale, and in January, President George W. Bush repeated the charges that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa. “If the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them,” Wilson said.
“If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why.) If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses,” Wilson wrote. “Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat,” he said.
The top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee clashed yesterday over whether to open another probe into alleged White House manipulation of intelligence to make the case for war against Iraq.
Michigan Sen. Carl Levin told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the accusations by Wilson added fuel to an investigation he was opening with his own staff.
But the committee chairman, Virginia Republican Sen. John Warner, said he favored letting the Senate Intelligence Committee finish its probe before deciding whether his panel should dig further.
“We cannot sort out this morning, in one minute, this situation. It is being carefully reviewed and objectively reviewed by the Senate in the Intelligence Committee,” Warner said. He said he did not see any compelling evidence that the administration twisted intelligence for its own purposes.
Controversy is raging in both Britain and the United States over charges that the governments of the two countries manipulated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the war. No evidence of such weapons has been found by the occupying forces in Iraq. According to news reports, the allegations of an Iraq-Niger deal were based on forged letters obtained by Italian intelligence from an African diplomat. The allegations were apparently passed to British intelligence and then to the CIA.
