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| The Sunday Times November 06,2005 Spy story that has enmeshed Bush THERE was no hint in the few small pieces of intelligence that came into the MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross, London, in February 1999 of what was to follow. There was certainly no indication that nearly seven years later they might rock America. By last week, however, the fallout from that intelligence had caused a senior White House aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, to be indicted on charges of perjury over the naming of a CIA officer. Speculation mounted that two of the most powerful figures in Washington — Dick Cheney, the vice-president, and Karl Rove, political adviser to President George W Bush — would also be implicated in the scandal. This is no Watergate or Lewinsky affair. It is a relatively arcane matter reflecting the mutual contempt of the vice-president and the CIA. But because it feeds on the increasingly bitter debate about the war in Iraq, it threatens the authority of an increasingly lame-duck second-term president. The background to the scandal lies in Saddam Hussein’s attempts to rekindle his clandestine nuclear weapons programme in the 1990s, despite the United Nations sanctions regime, and in Cheney’s determination to see the dictator fall from power. The information that reached London in 1999 came from MI6’s French counterpart, the DGSE. It arose from a visit made by Wissam al-Zahawie, an Iraqi diplomat, to Niger, the former French colony in west Africa. According to the DGSE, he was alleged to have asked President Ibrahim Bare Mainassara of Niger to supply Baghdad with the semi- processed uranium ore known as yellowcake. The French had a finger in every pie in their former colony and their atomic energy commission controlled its uranium mines. They knew that Niger had provided Iraq with uranium in the 1980s. It was only two months after UN weapons inspectors had left Iraq and both MI6 and the DGSE had been expecting Saddam to test the sanctions regime. So MI6 saw the intelligence as entirely credible. There were other reports that backed it up, including intercepted Iraqi communications, but only the French intelligence was conclusive. Crucially, MI6 also believed that Saddam would be unable to restart his nuclear weapons programme until sanctions came to an end, a view which concurred with that of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog. The DGSE began an intelligence operation to block Saddam from obtaining uranium, urging its agents to find out all they could about his efforts. One of those who got involved was Rocco Martino, a former police officer who had worked for the Italian intelligence service between 1976 and 1985, when he was sacked for being a “chancer”. He tapped up contacts at the Niger embassy in Rome. The French did not at the time pass their information to the CIA. Under the rules that govern intelligence exchange, MI6 could not do so without French permission, although it did pass on its own less conclusive evidence. The Iraq-Niger nexus vanished from intelligence screens for two years. By the time it reappeared, global politics had been transformed by the September 11 attacks on America. In October 2001, as Bush launched his war on terror, the CIA raised the yellowcake affair in its intelligence assessments for the first time. Its information came, however, from Italian sources, not French. The CIA cited the Italian intelligence service as saying that Niger had agreed to send several tons of uranium to Iraq. There was little detail in the report and the State Department dismissed it as “highly suspect”. Indeed, western intelligence officials say now that the Italians had told the Americans to treat it with caution and that there was no evidence that any uranium had changed hands. In February 2002, however, the Italians provided more details. Niger had allegedly signed a deal in 2000 to sell Iraq 500 tons of yellowcake. This was again circulated by the CIA to top American officials. Anxious to make the case for war against Iraq, which was under fierce debate within the administration, Cheney wanted to know more. Unable to provide further information, the CIA asked Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, to go to Niger to investigate. In his own words, he “spent the next eight days drinking mint tea with dozens of people” who all assured him that there was no deal to supply Iraq with yellowcake. However, they left open the possibility that Iraq had tried and failed to obtain it. At the time his visit was not seen as significant. A number of US officials pointed out that even if there had been a deal, there was not much chance of anyone admitting it to Wilson. The yellowcake made its next appearance in September 2002 in the British dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which said that “there is intelligence that Iraq has sought significant quantities of uranium from Niger”. Martino then re-entered the picture. In October 2002 he presented the DGSE with documents which appeared to show that Niger had signed a deal in July 2000 to supply Iraq with yellowcake — similar to the story Italian intelligence had told the CIA. The DGSE rejected the documents as fake. Martino offered them for €15,000 to a journalist working on Panorama, the Italian magazine, who took them to the US embassy in Rome for authentication. Copies were sent to Washington. Then, a few weeks later, on November 22, the French opened up. They told the Americans about their original 1999 intelligence and said they were now certain that Iraq had tried and failed to obtain yellowcake. Washington was receptive. When Iraq complied with a UN demand for details of its WMD programmes, the State Department accused it of omitting its “efforts to procure uranium from Niger”. By now the yellowcake was at the top of Bush’s agenda. He wanted to mention it in his state of the union address on January 28, 2003 but it was agreed that rather than use disputed classified CIA intelligence, he should cite the British WMD dossier. He used what have become infamous in America as “the 16 words”: “The British government has learnt that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Six days later, in response to an IAEA request for evidence of Iraq’s attempts to procure uranium, the United States handed over the Martino documents. But in March, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, the IAEA told the UN security council that the documents were fakes. Shaken, the CIA eventually withdrew any suggestion that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. Neither Cheney nor Wilson let go, however. That July, in the wake of the war, Wilson wrote an angry article in The New York Times accusing the Bush administration of twisting the intelligence on Niger to exaggerate the threat from Iraq. This prompted a campaign from within the White House to discredit both Wilson and the CIA. Journalists learnt “on double super secret background” that his wife, Valerie Plame, was one of the CIA analysts who had come up with the yellowcake intelligence in the first place. As a result Robert Novak, a columnist on the Chicago Sun-Times, named her as “a CIA operative”. Outing a covert CIA officer is illegal under US law and the resultant criminal investigation under a special federal prosecutor has reached right into the White House. The DGSE, meanwhile, is standing by its original intelligence that in early 1999, Iraq tried to obtain uranium from Niger. So is MI6, despite having ditched every other contentious report that it made on Iraqi WMD.
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