The city had not changed much over time. There were a few new buildings, and the south side of the river had grown considerably; but, mostly, it remained a sleepy town of low-slung earthen dwellings, dirt alleys, and open sewers. I could see the cooking fires in the court-yards where the foufou stews of millet, okra, and bits of goat meat were being prepared for the evening meal.
We set down on the airport tarmac on the edge of town, and I noticed the remnants of a DC-8 cargo jet that had crashed, killing two of its four crewmen, when I had been posted there. The jet had landed a half mile short of the runway and erupted in a fireball as it skidded down the tarmac. It had been carrying a cargo of cigarettes and record albums that were strewn for miles across the hardscrabble landscape. Hundreds of French expatriates and Nigeriens had witnessed the horror from the airport observation deck while waiting for a passenger plane from Abidjan carrying friends and relatives scheduled to arrive at about the same time. For several minutes after the crash, they had feared they had just watched that plane and the deaths of its two hundred-plus passengers. The two crewmen actually killed in the crash were Americans, and those of us working at the embassy immediately became responsible for the repatriation of their remains to the U.S. The DC-8 had never been removed, and it served as a kind of rusted memorial to the crewmen that now reminded me of my earlier years in the city.
After deplaning, I made my way through immigration, controlled in Niger by the military. Here young officers, chosen primarily because they were among the literate minority in the country, staffed the checkpoints and were trained to be suspicious of any foreigner entering the country. I wondered why it was that bureaucratic functionaries so often seemed to have been born with chips on their shoulders. I decided to trot out my few words of Hausa, the local language, and succeeded in breaking through to the friendly, humorous, and welcoming African lurking just beneath my interrogator’s stern veneer. I mentioned that I had lived in Niger probably before he had been born and, suddenly, we had established a friendly rapport. After he amiably told me about an American Peace Corps volunteer he had known a decade earlier, he left the counter, commandeered a baggage handler, and with a flourish packed me into a dilapidated and filthy Renault taxicab. Soon I was rattling down the highway toward the city less than five miles away.
I checked in at the Gaweye, a modern hotel in downtown Niamey, and took a room with a view of the river. The site of the hotel, right next to the bridge and across from the National Museum, had been a refugee camp when I lived in the city. Filling it had been Tuaregs, desert nomads, driven to the capital by the devastating droughts of the 1970s that had decimated their cattle herds. But now in its place was a gleaming concrete-and-glass seven-story L-shaped structure, and the Tuaregs were back in the desert, returned to their pastoral wanderings.
Communications in West Africa are always problematic. Antiquated telephone systems, not modernized since the end of the French colonial period in 1960, are frequently out of order. But cities like Niamey are small enough that everybody knows everybody else, and word of mouth is often the best way to make contact. I managed a couple of phone calls, hired a cab driver to deliver a message, and settled in for the night, knowing that within a day friends, contacts, and people who simply wanted to meet me would start dropping by. Appointments were not easy to schedule, but that didn’t matter. The first day would be slow, but then the pace would pick up as it became known around town that I was there for a visit.
My first formal stop was to meet with Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick. She was a career foreign service officer who had been in Niger for two years. Though this was her first post in Africa, my impression was that she had penetrated the local culture and society and enjoyed a position of trust and confidence. She understood both the needs of Niger and the limitations of Washington’s willingness and ability to help, managing to satisfy the most urgent priorities of the one without alienating the other with unrealistic demands. I liked her.
Her briefing was crisp. She gave me an update on the progress the government had made since the last time we had met, on my visit two years earlier. President Tandja and Prime Minister Hama had managed to consolidate their authority and keep the military in the barracks. Last year’s rains had been good, so the harvest was satisfactory and the population content. The political parties were still traumatized from the period of military rule and were on their best behavior. Debates no longer degenerated into the impasses that had long paralyzed Nigerien governance and opened the way to the military interventions.
In return, I explained what I hoped to achieve from my mission. At this point, she told me that she had already discussed the allegation with President Tandja and said she was satisfied with his denial and his explanation of why such a uranium deal could not possibly have taken place. She had also, she said, accompanied Marine General Carleton Fulford—the deputy commander in chief of U.S. armed forces in Europe, and the officer in charge of our military relations with the armed forces of African nations—to meetings with President Tandja and members of his government. General Fulford, she told me, was equally persuaded that the story of Niger uranium sales to Iraq could not be true. Their reports to the State and Defense Departments, respectively, had been widely circulated in the American intelligence community. It was a surprise to her when she learned of my mission because she had believed she and General Fulford had already definitively discredited the yellowcake rumor.
While this was the first I had heard that the allegations I was here to investigate had already been looked into, she and I agreed that the contribution I could make would be to establish contact with officials from the former government. While they were still invited to embassy functions, they were no longer among her principal contacts. By contrast, I had spent many hours with them over the years, working on the most sensitive issues they had faced as they tried to maneuver the military junta out of office, and I had no doubt that I might still learn much from them.
Over the next several days, I renewed my relationships with these former government ministers and bureacurats. We spoke of many things, uranium among them. The pace of business in Niger—as it is around the world in places where time isn’t measured in fifteen-minute segments—is unpredictable, to put it politely. Meetings may not occur at the time agreed upon, or may not happen at all. Patience is crucial.
When meetings do finally take place, business is often the last thing to be discussed. Even in relationships that are already well established, the rituals are to be observed. In the local Hausa and Djerma languages, rituals are enshrined in the greetings, which often last several minutes. “Hello, how are you?” is only the beginning. Each question is answered “Thanks be to Allah,” even if one is not Muslim. Only after both parties are satisfied that everything is well, and that God is indeed all-merciful, is the guest invited to sit and offered a drink, which cannot be refused without giving offense. The choices range from traditional sweet tea or instant coffee to Johnny Walker Black Label scotch. Despite being Muslim, many Nigeriens drink or do not object to others drinking. The local beer, Campari and soda, and Johnny Walker are the favorites. Another popular drink, and my personal favorite, is a shredded ginger juice, sweet and tangy, poured over a full glass of ice. With the drinks are served locally produced peanuts, or, on special occasions, cashews imported from neighboring Benin. They are not packaged in hermetically sealed tins, like we buy, but in old liquor bottles, retrieved from the trash, cleaned (more or less), filled with the nuts, capped, and sold on street corners. You ask yourself how many dirty hands have handled the bottles and the contents, and wonder if the frequent bellyaches that residents of Niamey suffer might just be on account of the lack of simple sanitation. But soon the tasty nuts become too tempting to resist.
Then and only then does conversation begin, a conversation that moves at its own pace, meandering like the Niger River itself, from topic to topic.
Nigeriens are naturally reserved and wary. Unlike the tribes along the coast of We
st Africa, they remained isolated from European contact far longer and resisted colonization more vigorously. Even after the French triumphed as the colonial power there, Niger was always considered an exotic outpost of little commercial value to its foreign masters. While trade flourished and French communities prospered in other West African countries, Niger remained a backwater, its people regarded even by neighboring Africans as quaint and simple “country folk.”
I was soon having a steady series of appointments with former officials, European expatriates, Nigerien businessmen, and international aid workers. Not all of the conversations focused on the uranium industry; some of my callers were interested in discussing the local business climate, while others wanted to talk about America and Americans.
From these conversations, three pertinent areas of discussion emerged: the business of uranium mining; the bureaucracy that would have governed any decision to sell yellowcake; and the general atmosphere in the country at the time of the alleged sale.
Niger’s uranium is extracted from two mines, both located in the center of the country in the Sahara Desert, a day and a half’s drive from the capital along the road to Algeria. The mines are owned by a consortium, comprising foreign companies, along with the Niger government through a state-owned corporation. The day-to-day management of the mines is in the hands of a French mining company, COGEMA. German, Spanish, and Japanese companies are partners, but only COGEMA has actual possession of the ore from the time it is in the ground until it arrives at its destination.
In the 1980s, when large Canadian deposits of uranium began to be exploited at a much lower cost than the mineral could be mined for in Niger, it coincided with the general decline of the worldwide nuclear power industry. This meant that Niger’s two mines were soon producing yellowcake at a loss. The mines are kept open in order to ensure a dedicated supply of product for the nuclear power industries in the consortium countries. No market for Niger’s uranium exists, however, beyond these countries. In fact, the Nigerien government has sold no uranium outside the consortium for two decades.
Uranium production schedules are established annually at a meeting of the consortium partners and are set to meet their current needs. They are reviewed every couple of months to take into account possible changes within those narrow parameters. In order to accommodate some hypothetical extraordinary demand by the Nigerien government for an extra supply of the product, the partners would have had to meet to adjust everything from the volume of production to the size of the workforce, as well as ramping up transportation and security. The volume of the alleged sale—five hundred tons—would have represented close to a 40 percent production increase. There is no doubt that such a significant shift from historic production schedules would have been absolutely impossible to hide from the other partners, and most certainly from the managing partner, COGEMA. Everyone involved would have known about it.
A government decision authorizing the sale of five hundred tons of uranium to Iraq would have required several decisions, each of which would have been fully documented. Because the conduit for Niger’s participation in the uranium consortium was via a state-owned corporation, the government ministry in charge of the corporation, the ministry of mines, would have had to be informed and to concur in the decision to make the sale. The alleged transaction was between two sovereign countries, so the foreign ministry would also have had to agree to the sale, taking into consideration such niceties as international law, at a time when Iraq was subject to international sanctions. The sale would also have been subject to a Council of Ministers decision representing the interests of the government as a whole. In short, any documentation covering the sale would have to carry the signatures, at a minimum, of the prime minister, the foreign minister, and the minister of mines. If any documents did not contain the valid signatures of those officials, then they could not be authentic.
Furthermore, a government decision authorizing such a sale would have automatically been published in the Nigerien equivalent of the Federal Register, and it would have had tax and revenue implications that would quickly have become known to the bureaucracy, which would be salivating at the prospect of such a windfall. In a country chronically short of cash, an unexpected infusion of money would have been eagerly anticipated and much talked about. A five-hundred-ton sale would have had to be negotiated at a premium of above-market prices, both to cover the costs of production and to ensure a reasonable profit. Even with uranium prices down 80 percent from their mid-1970s peak of over fifty dollars a pound, the premium on five hundred tons might still have yielded up to tens of millions of dollars, quite a sum to sweep under the rug in a poor country.
But what about an off-the-books transaction? Theoretically, this was a possibility, given that a military junta had been in power at the time of the alleged sale. Neither the Mainassara regime, nor the short-lived Wanké regime, had been responsible to any other authority in the land. But the transfer of five hundred tons of uranium yellowcake would have been impossible to conceal. Even an illegitimate transaction would have led to the acquisition of thousands of barrels, adjustment of shipping schedules with bills of lading and other documentation to cover the lightly refined ore’s movement out of the country. There would have been records somewhere reflecting this significant increase in production. It simply could not have happened without a great many people knowing about it, and secrets widely known do not remain hidden for long. And again, COGEMA, as the managing partner, would have had to know and be complicit.
Finally, the American response to the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s had prevented mass starvation in the country. Mainassara and Wanké, who were in power respectively in 1999-2000 at the time of the alleged sale, were career officers of an age to recall the American response to the country’s humanitarian crises. Though unschooled in many areas ofleadership, Mainassara nonetheless was acutely aware of his dependence on the West, and the U.S. in particular. I had personally observed this on many occasions, such as the time we flew to Agadez, in 1998. On that trip Mainassara had asked me to sit with him in his small forward cabin.
Shortly after I’d taken my seat, al Kuma, the ubiquitous Libyan envoy had muscled his way into the same cabin, asserting what he believed was his right as the dean of the diplomatic corps, and sat down across the aisle from us. Al Kuma had served in Niger for well over a decade by that time, and was suspected of having coordinated rebellions by northern nomadic Tuareg tribes that convulsed Niger for several years. While he strained to eavesdrop on our conversation, President Mainassara whispered in my ear about his continuing concerns over Libyan efforts to undermine the country’s security. He clearly understood where the threats to Niger came from—Libya—and where he would have to turn for help: The United States of America. And getting involved in a secret transaction with Iraq was certainly not going to help him win America’s favor.
During the eight days of my fact-finding visit, not all of my time was spent in formal meetings. After many years of friendship with local residents, I was invited to dinners at private homes. There I was introduced to family and friends as the American who had finally persuaded the military to return to their barracks, and stay there, after the nightmare era of military coups and assassinations. Goat mechouis, a special delicacy, were prepared in my honor. (To make a mechouis, a whole goat is stuffed with couscous and roasted on a spit for several hours. The meat is served to the women on plates, but the men, typically, stand around and pull the meat directly from the carcass. Experience counts in goat grabs. Not all meat is the same. Some is tender and some is sinewy. I always found the meat along the backbone of the goat to be the tastiest, so I pulled mine from there.)
As is common in Muslim practice, only the right hand is used for eating, with a bucket full of water on the side to rinse after the meal. Utensils are rarely in evidence, and the men never touch them, at least not at informal gatherings. Mechouis are social events where the male guests remain standing around the goat until the last mor
sel has been stripped from the carcass. Many subjects are touched upon, and the fact that a foreigner is present never inhibits the flow. If he has been included in such a private gathering, then he is, by virtue of the invitation, already accepted into the inner circle. Local politics always dominate the conversation, and gossip is as animated as at any Georgetown dinner party. After a couple of these occasions, as well as dinners with Americans and other expatriates living in Niamey, it was clear to me that there had been no underlying change in Nigerien attitudes toward Americans, despite the cutbacks in U.S. assistance that followed the military coups.
Before dawn one morning, I slipped out of the hotel to indulge one of the pleasures I had always relished during my many postings in Africa: observing indigenous wildlife up close. Niger had long been home to Africa’s most northern and western herd of giraffes, though it was thought that they had died off during the droughts of the recent decades. Now I had learned that a herd had survived the privations, so I hired a guide and we drove sixty miles east of town to a rudimentary reserve. Amid the small landholdings of the local population and the millet fields were majestic giraffe families elegantly strolling among the scrub trees, oblivious to the comings and goings of the local population; these wild animals were wholly integrated into their world. My guide pointed out a family with twin foals. The gangly kids were unsteady but rambunctious, not unlike my own two-year-old twins back home with Valerie.
Before I left Niger, I provided a member of the American Embassy staff with an extensive briefing. In it, I outlined all that I had learned about the uranium operations. Additionally, I described a conversation with one of my sources. He had mentioned to me that on the margins of a ministerial meeting of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1999, a Nigerien businessman had asked him to meet with an Iraqi official to discuss trade. My contact said that alarm bells had immediately gone off in his mind. Well aware of United Nations sanctions on Iraq, he met with the Iraqi only briefly and avoided any substantive issues. As he told me this, he hesitated and looked up to the sky as if plumbing the depths of his memory, then offered that perhaps the Iraqi might have wanted to talk about uranium. But since there had been no discussion of uranium—my contact was idly speculating when he mentioned it—there was no story. I spoke with this Nigerien friend again in January 2004, and he recollected our conversation in 2002. He told me that while he was watching coverage of press conferences in Baghdad prior to the second Gulf War, he recognized the Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, known to Americans as “Baghdad Bob,” as the person whom he had met in Algiers. He had not known the name of the Iraqi at the time he told me about the conversation in 2002, and so this had not been included in my report.
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