WMD : French warned CIA various times ...
- From: Skysurfer <notset@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2005 10:06:05 +0100
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-niger11dec11,0,3678379.story?coll=la-home-headlines
French Told CIA of Bogus Intelligence
# The foreign spy service warned the U.S. various times before the
war that there was no proof Iraq sought uranium from Niger,
ex-officials say.
By Tom Hamburger, Peter Wallsten and Bob Drogin, Times Staff Writers
PARIS - More than a year before President Bush declared in his 2003
State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons
material in Africa, the French spy service began repeatedly warning
the CIA in secret communications that there was no evidence to
support the allegation.
The previously undisclosed exchanges between the U.S. and the
French, described in interviews last week by the retired chief of
the French counterintelligence service and a former CIA official,
came on separate occasions in 2001 and 2002.
The French conclusions were reached after extensive on-the-ground
investigations in Niger and other former French colonies, where the
uranium mines are controlled by French companies, said Alain Chouet,
the French former official. He said the French investigated at the
CIA's request.
Chouet's account was "at odds with our understanding of the issue,"
a U.S. government official said. The U.S. official declined to
elaborate and spoke only on condition that neither he nor his agency
be named.
However, the essence of Chouet's account - that the French
repeatedly investigated the Niger claim, found no evidence to
support it, and warned the CIA - was extensively corroborated by the
former CIA official and a current French government official, who
both spoke on condition of anonymity.
The repeated warnings from France's Direction Generale de la
Securite Exterieure did not prevent the Bush administration from
making the case aggressively that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear
weapons materials.
It was not the first time a foreign government tried to warn U.S.
officials off of dubious prewar intelligence.
In the notorious "Curveball" case, an Iraqi who defected to Germany
claimed to have knowledge of Iraqi biological weapons. Bush and
other U.S. officials repeatedly cited Curveball's claims even as
German intelligence officials argued that he was unstable and might
be a fabricator.
The case of the forged documents that were used to support claims
that Hussein was seeking materials in Africa launched a political
controversy that continues to roil Washington.
A special prosecutor continues to investigate whether the Bush
administration unmasked a covert CIA operative in a bid to discredit
her husband, a former diplomat whom the CIA dispatched in February
2002 to investigate the Niger reports. The diplomat, Joseph C.
Wilson IV, like the French, said he found little reason to believe
the uranium story. The investigation into the leak led to the
indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff I.
Lewis "Scooter" Libby on charges of obstruction of justice and
perjury.
The French opposed U.S. policy on Iraq and refused to support the
invasion. But whether or not that made top U.S. officials skeptical
of the French report on Niger, intelligence officials from both
countries said that they cooperated closely during the prewar period
and continued to do so. And the French conclusions on Niger were
supported by some in the CIA.
The CIA requested French assistance in 2001 and 2002 because French
firms dominate the uranium business internationally and former
French colonies lead the world in production of the strategic
mineral.
French officials were particularly sensitive to the assertion about
Iraq trying to obtain nuclear materials given the role that French
companies play in uranium mining in France's former colonies.
"In France, we've always been very careful about both problems of
uranium production in Niger and Iraqi attempts to get uranium from
Africa," Chouet said. "After the first Gulf War, we were very
cautious with that problem, as the French government didn't care to
be accused of maintaining relations with Saddam in that field."
The French-U.S. communications were detailed to The Times last week
by Chouet, who directed a 700-person intelligence unit specializing
in weapons proliferation and terrorism.
Chouet said the cautions from his agency grew more emphatic over
time as the Bush administration bolstered the case for invading Iraq
by arguing that Hussein had sought to build a nuclear arsenal using
uranium from Niger.
Chouet recalled that his agency was contacted by the CIA in the
summer of 2001 - shortly before the attacks of Sept. 11 - as
intelligence services in Europe and North America became more
concerned about chatter from known terrorist sympathizers. CIA
officials asked their French counterparts to check that uranium in
Niger and elsewhere was secure. The former CIA official confirmed
Chouet's account of this exchange.
Then twice in 2002, Chouet said, the CIA contacted the French again
for similar help. By mid-2002, Chouet recalled, the request was more
urgent and more specific. The CIA was asking questions about a
particular agreement purportedly signed by Nigerian officials to
sell 500 metric tons of uranium to Iraq.
Chouet dispatched a five- or six-man team to Niger to double-check
any reports of a sale or an attempt to purchase uranium. The team
found none.
Chouet and his staff noticed that the details of the allegation
matched those in fraudulent documents that an Italian informant
earlier had offered to sell to the French.
"We told the Americans, 'Bull - - - -. It doesn't make any sense,' "
Chouet said.
Chouet said the information was contained in formal cables delivered
to CIA offices in Paris and Langley, Va. Those communications did
not use such coarse language, he said, but they delivered the point
in consistent and blunt terms.
"We had the feeling that we had been heard," Chouet said. "There was
nothing more to say other than that."
The former CIA official could not confirm the specifics of this 2002
communication, but said the general conclusions matched what many in
the CIA were learning at the time.
Chouet left the French government in the summer of 2002, after the
center-right coalition led by President Jacques Chirac won control,
forcing out top officials who had been aligned with the outgoing
Socialist Francois Mitterand.
When Bush gave his State of the Union address in January 2003,
citing a report from the British that Iraq had attempted to purchase
uranium in Africa, other French officials were flabbergasted.
One government official said that French experts viewed the
statement attributed to the British as "totally crazy because, in
our view, there was no backup for this." Nonetheless, he said, the
French once again launched an investigation, turning things
"upside-down trying to find out what was going on."
Chouet's comments come as the FBI and the Italian government reopen
investigations into the origins of the documents that surfaced in
2002 purporting to prove the Iraq-Niger link. The documents in
question originally surfaced in Rome.
Before speaking with The Times last week, Chouet had told part of
his story to La Repubblica, a Rome newspaper, prompting Italian
investigators to resume their inquiry and seek Chouet's testimony.
In the U.S., the FBI recently reopened its inquiry into the
documents in part because it had won access to new information.
Wilson, the former U.S. ambassador sent to Niger by the CIA to
investigate the allegations, said he believed that his trip was
inspired by the forged documents. He said the briefing he received
at the CIA referred to a sales agreement between Iraq and Niger that
sounded like the forged documents.
Bush attributed the African uranium information to British
intelligence in his 2003 address: "The British government has
learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities
of uranium from Africa."
The British government maintains that its conclusions were based not
on the forged documents but on other, more reliable sources. In
fact, British officials have said that they reached their
conclusions long before the forged documents surfaced.
Still, Chouet said in the interview that the question from CIA
officials in the summer of 2002 seemed to follow almost word for
word from the documents in question. He said that an Italian
intelligence source, Rocco Martino, had tried to sell the documents
to the French, but that in a matter of days French analysts
determined the documents had been forged.
"We thought they [the Americans] were in possession of the
documents," Chouet said. "The words were very similar." The former
CIA official said that in fact the U.S. had been offered the same
documents in 2001 but had quickly rejected them as forgeries.
A spokeswoman for the British Embassy in Washington declined to
comment on Chouet's remarks, reiterating that the British government
continued to stand behind its conclusions that Iraq had sought to
purchase uranium in Africa.
A British report on prewar intelligence found the Africa claims in
Bush's speech to be "well-founded," noting that British suspicions
on Iraq's efforts to buy uranium originated with visits in 1999 by
Iraqi officials to Niger and the Congo.
Bush's assertions in his 2003 State of the Union speech had
previously been made by other U.S. officials in speeches and
internal documents.
On Sept. 8, 2002 - within months of the third French warning -
Cheney and then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice spoke in
dire terms of Iraq's alleged efforts to pursue nuclear materials.
Rice warned: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Chouet, asked for his reaction to Bush's speech and the claims of
his lieutenants, said: "No proof. No evidence. No indication. No
sign."
White House officials scrambled to explain how the 16 words found
their way into the 2003 speech when so much doubt surrounded the
claims. Ultimately, then-deputy national security advisor Stephen
Hadley took responsibility for allowing them to remain.
On June 17, 2003, five months after Bush's State of the Union, the
CIA clarified its position on whether Iraq had sought uranium from
Africa.
"Since learning that the Iraq-Niger uranium deal was based on false
documents earlier this spring, we no longer believe that there is
sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq pursued uranium
from abroad," the agency said in an internal memorandum that was
disclosed by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Bush critics now say that - in light of the warnings from the French
and others - the White House owes the public a better explanation.
Former Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who was chairman of the
Intelligence Committee when the Niger claims first surfaced in 2002,
said some officials in the U.S. State Department were also
expressing doubts: "The big mystery is why did the administration,
in the face of at least a very persuasive contrary view, feel the
president should take the risk of stating this?"
--
"The French Were Right" (The National Journal)
http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2003/1107nj1.htm
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