At CIA, the item from Italy was not given much prominence. It was thirdhand information without any corroboration, and on its face seemed improbable. It was certainly not solid enough to include in the President’s Daily Brief. Nevertheless, what was fool’s gold to the CIA was real gold to the Feith-Wurmser intelligence unit, which quickly and secretly passed the item on to Vice President Cheney.
The next morning, during his regular CIA intelligence briefing, the Niger item was not included. Nevertheless, Cheney himself brought up the topic and asked the briefer to get him more information. A day or so later, the briefer came back and said there was such a report but that there were few other details. As background he was told that Iraq had acquired a large supply of uranium ore from Niger in the early 1980s but that following the Gulf War, the material was seized and placed under the protection of the United Nations.
Spurred on by Cheney’s interest, the CIA began giving the highly questionable Niger item more prominence. On January 30, 2002, the agency issued an unclassified report to Congress containing the phrase “Baghdad may be attempting to acquire materials that could aid in reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program.” Still, it was not highlighted and it was couched in very ambiguous-sounding language.
Yet only a week or so later, in early February, as the item moved from intelligence professionals to the Bush inner circle, it made a Herculean leap in credibility. Speaking before a House International Relations Committee, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared, “With respect to the nuclear program, there is no doubt that the Iraqis are pursuing it.” In fact, there was every doubt.
It was a reckless charge. Even Powell’s own intelligence agency at State, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), thought the Italian intelligence report was junk and sent him a memo saying so. At the time, Greg Thielmann was a senior official in INR. “A whole lot of things told us that the report was bogus,” he later said. “This wasn’t highly contested. There weren’t strong advocates on the other side. It was done, shot down.”
At the CIA, the item was still on the bottom rung of the credibility ladder. “The DO thought this smelled,” said one official. Nevertheless, as a result of Cheney’s unusual special interest, it was decided to give it the equivalent of a quick diagnostic check rather than expend the time and money on a full-scale clandestine operation. The idea was to get someone from the agency’s retirement community with African experience to go to Niger and check it out.
Hearing about the suggestion was Valerie E. Wilson, a DO employee whose husband, Joseph Wilson, had been a former ambassador to nearby Gabon and served in Niger and in several other African countries. He had also served as an envoy to Iraq. For many years, Valerie Wilson worked for the agency in the non-official cover (NOC) program, often under her maiden name, Plame. According to a congressional intelligence source, hers was one of the names that former CIA employee, and longtime Russian mole, Aldrich Ames turned over to the KGB.
Later, Plame worked as a case officer in Europe, and more recently was assigned to the nonproliferation division. There she posed as an energy analyst for a nonexistent front company known as Brewster-Jennings & Associates, located in Boston. In reality, her job was as a weapons proliferation analyst. Wilson suggested that her husband might be a good candidate for the brief, nonpaying check-out mission to Niger, and he was given the assignment. “Rather than waste a lot of time on this caper, this was a way to find out quickly if it merited more effort,” said one intelligence official.
“The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the Vice President’s office,” said Joseph Wilson. “In late February 2002, I arrived in Niger’s capital, Niamey. . . . The city was much as I remembered it. Seasonal winds had clogged the air with dust and sand. Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger River [over the John F. Kennedy Bridge], the setting sun behind them. Most people had wrapped scarves around their faces to protect against the grit, leaving only their eyes visible.”
The next morning, Wilson met with U.S. Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick at the embassy. “For reasons that are understandable, the embassy staff has always kept a close eye on Niger’s uranium business,” he said. “I was not surprised, then, when the ambassador told me that she knew about the allegations of uranium sales to Iraq—and that she felt she had already debunked them in her reports to Washington. Nevertheless, she and I agreed that my time would be best spent interviewing people who had been in government when the deal supposedly took place, which was before her arrival.”
Over the next eight days, Wilson sipped sweet mint tea and chatted with several dozen people, from current officials to businesspeople associated with the uranium mines. “It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place,” he said. “Given the structure of the consortiums that operated the mines, it would be exceedingly difficult for Niger to transfer uranium to Iraq.”
The government of Niger is not in control of the uranium. Instead, the nation’s two mines, Somair and Cominak, are run by a French, Spanish, Japanese, German, and Nigerian consortium. From the time the ore is extracted from the ground; packed in hermetically sealed, numbered, and dated drums; and transported to Benin, where it is loaded onto ships, it is heavily guarded by gendarmes and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
“If the government wanted to remove uranium from a mine,” said Wilson, “it would have to notify the consortium, which in turn is strictly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Moreover, because the two mines are closely regulated, quasigovernmental entities, selling uranium would require the approval of the minister of mines, the prime minister, and probably the president. In short, there’s simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired.”
Wilson returned to Washington in early March and verbally gave his negative assessment to CIA officials, and later met with the State Department’s African Affairs Bureau. There was no substance to the Italian intelligence report. On March 9, the CIA cabled Wilson’s doubts around the intelligence community and passed a memo with his comments to the White House.
As the move toward war began gaining momentum in late August 2002, Feith created another new organization, the Office of Special Plans. Its purpose was to conduct advance war planning for Iraq, and one of its most important responsibilities was “media strategy.” Hidden away on the Pentagon’s fifth floor, one floor above Feith’s office, it was a crowded warren of blue cubicles and narrow hallways packed with unused equipment and rolled-up maps. The musty scent of old concrete never seemed to leave the air.
Above all, the office was Top Secret. “We were instructed at a staff meeting that this office was not to be discussed or explained,” said Kwiatkowski, “and if people in the Joint Staff, among others, asked, we were to offer no comment.”
Picked to head the OSP was still another longtime Perle protégé, Abram N. Shulsky. He had worked with Perle both in Senator “Scoop” Jackson’s office and at the Pentagon when Perle was Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Reagan years. Although the office appeared small on paper, with about eighteen full-time Pentagon employees, its ranks were beefed up with outside contractors and consultants.
According to a report in London’s
Guardian
newspaper, the OSP also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence unit within Ariel Sharon’s office in Israel. It was designed to go around the country’s own intelligence organization, Mossad. The purpose of the unit, said
The
Guardian,
was to provide key people in the Bush administration “with more alarmist reports on Saddam’s Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorize.” Thus, the OSP was getting cooked intelligence not only from its own intelligence unit but also from a similar Israeli cell.
“None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels,” one source familiar with the visits told
The
Guardian
. Instead, Feith would wave them through without their having to sign the normal papers. “The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr. Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel’s Likud party,” said the paper.
Colonel Kwiatkowski noticed the same sort of activity when she was assigned to escort a number of Israeli generals who had come to the Pentagon to visit Feith. “Once in Feith’s waiting room,” she said, “the leader continued at speed to Feith’s closed door. An alert secretary saw this coming and had leapt from her desk to block the door.” Nevertheless, the curious general seemed annoyed. “The leader craned his neck to look around the secretary’s head as he demanded, ‘Who is in there with him?’” Kwiatkowski recalled. Then, when she asked them to sign in, it was made clear to her that she had made a mistake. “No, no, no,” Feith’s secretary said quickly, frantically waving her hands. “It is not necessary, not at all.”
Although deliberately kept in the shadows, Israeli intelligence worked closely with Feith and other parts of the Pentagon. But a study produced by Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies indicates that Israel’s vaunted intelligence services could find no indication that Iraq possessed banned weapons, despite their location and access to Middle East sources. “On the eve of the war,” said the report, “Israeli intelligence on Iraqi capabilities resembled its counterparts in the United States and other Western countries. It had not received any information regarding weapons of mass destruction and surface-to-surface missiles for nearly eight years.”
The report was written by Shlomo Brom, a retired brigadier general who was the former head of the Israeli military’s Strategic Planning Division on the General Staff. Brom also charged that despite the fact that Israeli intelligence, like that of the United States, had no evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the Israeli government, along with the media, deliberately hyped the dangers of Iraq before the war. “A review of statements made by the establishment during the two months leading up to the war,” the report said, “shows that as the war drew nearer, the Israeli establishment began to sense that it had exaggerated its presentation of the threat.”
As an example, said the report, “when Israeli intelligence became aware that certain items had been transferred by heads of the regime from Iraq to Syria, Israeli intelligence immediately portrayed it—including in leaks to the media—as if Iraq was moving weapons of mass destruction out of Iraq in order to conceal them.”
Finally, following the discovery that there were no weapons of mass destruction, officials began asking, with regard to Saddam Hussein, “Why did he not do everything possible to convince Western governments that he was ‘clean,’ retaining no weapons of mass destruction? The answer is that from Saddam Hussein’s perspective, he did do everything to respond to every whim of UNMOVIC [the UN inspectors], but to no avail, since the real aim of the United States was regime change and not Iraq’s disarmament of weapons of mass destruction.”
The bad Israeli intelligence also led to the creation of a special panel of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, to investigate the actions of the Israeli intelligence services in the lead-up to war. Led by Yuval Steinitz (Likud Party), chairman of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, the panel held over fifty sessions and called more than seventy witnesses, including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. In March 2004, the panel found that Israeli intelligence warnings about Iraq’s unconventional weapons were based not on facts, but simply on assessments and speculation.
According to Yossi Sarid, a prominent member of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, Israeli intelligence knew beforehand that Iraq had no weapons stockpiles and misled President George W Bush. Israeli intelligence, he said, knew the threat was “very, very, very limited. . . . [But] Israel didn’t want to spoil President Bush’s scenario, and it should have.” He also dismissed Britain’s claim that Iraq could launch deadly weapons on forty-five minutes’ notice. “It was known in Israel that the story that weapons of mass destruction could be activated in forty-five minutes was an old wives’ tale,” he said.
Sarid’s charges were confirmed by former American weapons inspector Scott Ritter. He spent seven years as a senior U.N. inspector in Iraq and also served as the group’s liaison with the Israeli intelligence service. Israel, he said, had long known that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. “The Israeli intelligence reached this conclusion many years ago,” he said in 2004. He added that when he met with Israeli intelligence officials in 1998, they told him that Iraq had been reduced to the number-six threat, down from number one four years earlier.
Like Chalabi, Israel had a history of providing questionable information when it came to Iraq. Within days of 9/11, Israel’s military intelligence service, Aman, was claiming that Iraq was behind the attacks. “Aman,” said a September 19, 2001, article in the respected Jane’s
Foreign Report,
“suspects that Iraq is the state that sponsored the suicide attacks on the New York Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington.”
During a closed meeting in Brussels in June 2002, Efraim Halevy, chief of Mossad, offered to NATO chiefs just the kind of intelligence later studies said Israel did not possess. “We have clear indications,” he said, “that the Iraqis renewed their efforts” to develop nuclear weapons. He added, “Together with these efforts, we have reason to believe that the Iraqis have succeeded in preserving parts of their capability in the fields of biological and chemical warfare. We have partial evidence that they have renewed production of VX and perhaps even anthrax germs. Regarding launching systems, we have sufficient evidence to determine that they are investing every possible effort to preserve the capability they still have, and to increase them through new means.”