The apologia of the Weekly Standard's
Stephen F. Hayes today pointed me to an inconsistency in the Niger forgery piece of Plame/Wilson saga. It has to do with the differences in the documents the CIA obtained from a friendly intelligence service and the documents eventually given to the IAEA. The entry is in the extended due to extensive quotes from the relevant documents.
We all know (and
dkospedia helpfully documents) that
Also in early October 2002, an Italian journalist, Elisabetta Burba, received copies of documents from Rocco Martino that indicated the Iraqi government had arranged the purchase of 500 tons of "yellowcake" uranium from Niger in 1999 and 2000. The documents were signed by officials of the government of Niger and appeared to be on official letterhead. Under instructions from her magazine's editor, Burba gave copies of the letters to officials at the U.S. Embassy in Rome, and then left for Niger to investigate the situation herself. Once there, her discussions with businessmen involved in the uranium business and investigations into the companies mentioned in the documents led her to the conclusion that the documents were fake. She returned to Rome and dropped the story, though there is no evidence she shared her conclusion with the officials at the U.S. Embassy with whom she had already shared the documents.
The U.S. Embassy in Rome sent the documents on to the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) at the State Department in Washington, D.C., which conducted its own investigation and also forwarded the documents to the CIA. Both the INR and the CIA soon came to the conclusion that the documents were fake. As the International Atomic Energy Agency would later point out, the documents contained a number of inconsistencies which were relatively trivial to check out on the Internet, such as references to the wrong date for the Nigerien constitution, signatures by a foreign minister who had been out of office for several years, and letterhead bearing obsolete emblems which were not in use at the time the letters were purported to have been written.
From what I remember (and what CNN seems to confirm) that the documents were given to the UN inspectors by U.S.:
The documents, given to International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, indicated that Iraq might have tried to buy 500 tons of uranium from Niger, but the agency said they were "obvious" fakes.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to the documents directly in his presentation to the U.N. Security Council outlining the Bush administration's case against Iraq.
"I'm sure the FBI and CIA must be mortified by this because it is extremely embarrassing to them," former CIA official Ray Close said.
Responding to questions about the documents from lawmakers, Powell said, "It was provided in good faith to the inspectors and our agency received it in good faith, not participating ... in any way in any falsification activities."
"It was the information that we had. We provided it. If that information is inaccurate, fine," Powell said on NBC's "Meet the Press" last Sunday.
Here's my problem.
Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq mentions Willson's account of the document on page 45 (Part II, Niger, subsection B, Former Ambassador):
The former ambassador also told Committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article ("CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data; Bush Used Report of Uranium Bid," June 12,2003) which said, "among the Envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because `the dates were wrong and the names were wrong."' Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports. The former ambassador said that he may have "misspoken" to the reporter when he said he concluded the documents were "forged." He also said he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct and may have thought he had seen the names himself. The former ambassador reiterated that he had been able to collect the names of the government officials which should have been on the documents.
And yet there is this gem from page 46:
As in the two previous reports, the government service was not identified as the foreign government service. The foreign government service did not provide the DO with information about its source and the DO, to date, remains uncertain as to how the foreign government service collected the information in the three intelligence reports. There were no obvious inconsistencies in the names of officials mentioned or the dates of the transactions in any of the three reports. Of the seven names mentioned in the reporting, two were former high ranking officials who were the individuals in the positions described in the reports at the time described and five were lower ranking officials. Of the five lower ranking, two were not the individuals in the positions described in the reports, however, these do not appear to be names or positions with which intelligence analysts would have been familiar. For example, an INR analyst who had recently returned from a position as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Niger told Committee staff that he did not notice any inconsistencies with the names of the officials mentioned. The only mistake in any of the reports regarding dates, is that one date, July 7,2000, is said to be a Wednesday in the report, but was actually a Friday.
And in the Additional Views by Roberts, joined by Bonds and Hatch, the name/date issue is mentioned in a very suggestive manner (page 444):
...The former ambassador told Committee staff that he, in fact, did not have access to any of the names and dates in the CIA's reports and said he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct. Of note, the names and dates in the documents that the IAEA found to be incorrect were not names or dates included in the CIA reports.
(Emphasis mine). What the heck does it mean? The documents that the U.S. gave to the U.N. were not seen by the CIA? Did the CIA "augment" the "original" forgeries before handing them over to the U.N.? If the latter is true, it would have been Valerie Plame or her immediate co-workers who did it. If that is the case, did Plame or her co-workers sabotage the forgeries to make their fakeness more obvious? Do I need a tin hat, or am I missing something trivial?