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F.B.I. Is Still Seeking Source of Forged Uranium
Reports
By DOUGLAS JEHL
10/28/05 "New
York Times" -- -- WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 - A two-year
inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation has yet to uncover
the origin of forged documents that formed a basis for sending an
envoy on a fact-finding trip to Niger, a mission that eventually
exploded into the C.I.A. leak inquiry, law enforcement and
intelligence officials say.
A counterespionage official said Wednesday that the inquiry into the
documents, which were intended to show that Iraq was seeking uranium
for a nuclear weapons program, had yielded some intriguing but
unproved theories. One is the possibility that associates of Ahmad
Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile who was a leading champion of the
American campaign to topple Saddam Hussein, had a hand in the
forgery. A second hypothesis, described by some officials as more
likely, is that the documents were forged at Niger's embassy in
Rome, in a moneymaking scheme. The official said the matter was
being investigated as a counterintelligence case, not a criminal
one.
The United States government did not receive the papers until
October 2002, eight months after the Central Intelligence Agency
sent Joseph C. Wilson IV, a retired ambassador, to Niger on the
fact-finding mission, according to a review completed last year by
the Senate intelligence committee. The C.I.A. decided in March 2003
that the papers were forgeries.
But a little-noticed passage in another government report said the
C.I.A. had determined that foreign intelligence passed to the agency
in the months before Mr. Wilson's trip also contained information
that was "based on the forged documents and was thus itself
unreliable."
That early foreign reporting, never endorsed by American
intelligence analysts, prompted questions from the office of Vice
President Dick Cheney, which in turn led to Mr. Wilson's trip, a
chain of events spelled out in the reviews of prewar intelligence
issued this year and last year.
The continuing inquiry into the source of the forged documents has
been conducted separately from the investigation by the special
prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald into the leak case, which has to do
with whether Bush administration officials committed crimes related
to disclosing the identity of Mr. Wilson's wife, an undercover C.I.A.
officer.
Law enforcement officials say they do not believe that the two
issues are related. The documents were among the sources of
President Bush's claim in a 16-word passage of his State of the
Union speech in 2003, later retracted, that Iraq was seeking to
obtain uranium from Africa.
The question of who forged the documents remains of intense interest
on Capitol Hill, where Senators Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas,
and John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, have received
classified briefings on the status of the F.B.I. inquiry. The two
are chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the intelligence
committee.
That the initial reports prompting Mr. Wilson's trip were based on
forged documents was reported in March by the Robb-Silberman
commission on intelligence involving weapons of mass destruction. A
footnote in the commission's report said, "It is still unclear who
forged the documents and why." But it added that a classified
version of the report had included discussion of "some further
factual findings concerning the potential source of the forgeries."
Among American allies, Britain was the most vocal proponent of the
argument that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium, but former senior
intelligence officials said the reporting had actually come from
Italy's military intelligence service.
An Italian journalist handed the documents over to the United States
government in October 2002, months after the Wilson mission to
Africa, according to the review by the intelligence committee.
A month earlier, the deputy national security adviser at the time,
Stephen J. Hadley, met in Washington with the head of an Italian
intelligence service, according to a report that was published this
week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. The White House has
confirmed that the meeting took place, but a spokesman for Mr.
Hadley described it as a courtesy call of 15 minutes or less.
"No one present at that meeting has any recollection of yellowcake
being discussed or documents being provided," Frederick Jones, Mr.
Hadley's spokesman, said Thursday, referring to a form of uranium.
The Italian government denied on Wednesday that its intelligence
services had played any role in the "manufacture or spreading" of
such a falsified dossier.
Wendy Morigi, a spokeswoman for Mr. Rockefeller, would say only that
he and Mr. Roberts had been briefed by the F.B.I. about the Niger
inquiry. An aide to Mr. Roberts said only that "ongoing
investigations of that type are the kinds of things they are briefed
on."
According to the review by the committee, the C.I.A. produced
intelligence documents in October 2001 and February 2002 describing
reports by "a foreign government service" that Niger planned to send
several tons of uranium to Iraq, but cautioned that the information
was uncorroborated. The second report provided what the C.I.A.
described as the "verbatim text" of what the foreign service had
said was an Iraq-Niger agreement.
The Defense Intelligence Agency then issued a Feb. 12, 2002, report
repeating the details in the C.I.A. report, but its assessment "did
not include any judgments about the credibility of the reporting,"
the Senate report said. It said Mr. Cheney, after reading the
report, asked for the C.I.A.'s analysis of events.
In response to those questions, the Senate report said, the C.I.A.'s
counterproliferation division decided to contact Mr. Wilson, who was
posted early in his career in Niger. His wife, Valerie Wilson, also
known as Valerie Plame, was an undercover officer in that division.
The Senate report says that when the division decided to send Mr.
Wilson to Niger, she approached him on behalf of the agency and told
him "there's this crazy report" on a possible deal for Niger to sell
uranium to Iraq.
David Johnston and Ian Fisher contributed reporting for this
article.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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