FBI: Iraq-Niger papers part of scheme
Says forgeries committed for profit
WASHINGTON -- A set of forged documents outlining an alleged Iraqi deal to buy nuclear materials from an African country -- a claim that famously wound up in President Bush's State of the Union speech in 2003 -- was probably ''part of a criminal scheme for financial gain," the FBI said yesterday.
The FBI said it had ''discounted" widely discussed theories that the documents ''were part of an effort to influence US policy" in the months leading up to the US invasion of Iraq.
But much mystery remains about the documents alleging a deal between Saddam Hussein and Niger for a uranium byproduct called yellowcake. The FBI did not issue details other than a one-paragraph statement, and a spokesman did not say whether the agency had been able to determine who forged the documents.
The FBI issued its statement a day after the Italian intelligence chief testified before a parliamentary inquiry and named Rocco Martino, a former Italian policeman and spy, as the source who provided the documents to an Italian magazine in October 2002. But the Italian investigators did not say who originally made the documents, or who passed them on to other US allies, including the British government.
The FBI statement appears to rule out the possibility that US officials had a hand in the forgeries in an effort to promote a war with Iraq. Still, many questions remain unanswered, including why the White House took the documents so seriously after the State Department had determined that they were forgeries and the CIA found them to be baseless.
The documents also are at the heart of the special-counsel investigation into who in the White House may have leaked the name of a CIA agent whose husband cast doubt on a Niger-Iraq deal. The probe has so far led to the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis ''Scooter" Libby, for allegedly lying to a grand jury.
The question of the documents' authorship could be one focus of a Senate Intelligence Committee probe beginning next week to investigate how faulty prewar intelligence was handled by top Bush administration officials.
''It is very important to find out where they come from," said David Kay, who headed the futile CIA search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and who immediately deemed the documents as fake when he reviewed them in 2003. ''I am not sure that's possible, but we have to understand why our process let them gain so much credence."
Kay and other specialists said the alleged Iraq-Niger connection was central to the White House's argument that Hussein had restarted his nuclear weapons program because very little other intelligence existed. ''The administration had almost no evidence for its claim," said Kay.
Added Joseph Cirincione, a nuclear arms specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: ''It was important because the administration said it indicated current active intent to build nuclear weapons."
The FBI began its investigation into the documents in March 2003, at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. During that time, investigators have delved into many theories about the case, including suggestions from some former US intelligence officials that a secretive Pentagon office set up before the war had the documents produced to persuade President Bush to go to war. Former Pentagon aides, in turn, have accused rogue ex-CIA officers of creating the documents for unknown reasons.
In 2002, Valerie Plame Wilson, a covert CIA agent, suggested that her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, go to Niger to investigate the claim of an Iraq- Niger deal. Joseph Wilson once worked in Niger, had been US ambassador to the West African nation of Gabon, and had been the acting US ambassador in Baghdad at the time of the 1991 Gulf War.
On Feb. 26, 2002, Joseph Wilson arrived in Niger, where he met with former government officials and business contacts. He concluded there was ''nothing to the story" of a Niger-Iraq deal. The State Department, meanwhile, quickly dismissed the documents when they surfaced later in 2002. Wayne White, who served as the deputy director of the State Department's intelligence unit until March of this year, and was the principal Iraq analyst, reviewed the papers in fall 2002 and said that after a 15-minute review he doubted their credibility.
Despite these qualms about the report, Bush said in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address that ''The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Bush's statement, which had been removed from a previous speech at the request of the CIA, stunned those who thought they had put the Niger rumors to rest, including the senior State Department officials and CIA analysts.
Last week, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported that the documents were facilitated by the Italian intelligence service, possibly as a favor to the Bush administration. Italian officials denied producing the documents. The newspaper said a former Italian intelligence agent, Martino, was a go-between who provided the papers to a reporter for the Italian magazine Panorama, which is owned by Premier Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, a supporter of the Iraq war.
The Panorama reporter who received the documents, Elisabetta Burba, said in Rome that she had known the man who gave her the document since 1995 ''and twice he had given me reliable information regarding Islamic terrorism and the Bosnia war."
''I feel angry about what happened," Burba said in the phone interview. ''I feel used. I feel very uneasy because those documents were used to justify a war where people have been killed every day."
Globe correspondent Sofia Celeste in Rome contributed to this report. 