That could have been the end of it, but in early February 2002, the CIA got what seemed to be fresh information from SISMI—a “verbatim” text of the supposed Iraq-Niger yellowcake agreement, showing that the deal was not for “several tons” as originally reported but for a staggering 500 tons. This was more alarming, and the report’s specificity seemed to impress some intelligence analysts. The CIA’s operations directorate assured agency analysts that the information had come from “a very credible source.” But a State Department analyst strongly doubted the transaction—even more so because of its size. (Five hundred tons was about one sixth the total annual output of Niger’s uranium mines, hardly a small, on-the-side diversion.) In any case, no one within the intelligence community bothered to ask the Italians to see an actual copy of the Iraq-Niger contract. Nevertheless, the DIA distributed a report, on February 12, 2002, with an unambiguous title: “Niamey signed an agreement to sell 500 tons of uranium a year to Baghdad.”
The report landed on Dick Cheney’s desk. The vice president was ever on the watch for any scrap of intelligence that would confirm his worst suspicions about Iraq’s WMDs—especially its nuclear weapons program. And a revived Iraqi nuclear program would be the most powerful argument to justify the overthrow of Saddam. As soon as he read the DIA report on Niger, Cheney asked his daily morning briefer from the CIA to follow up. He wanted to know what the agency could tell him about the Niger matter.
The CIA snapped to. On learning of the vice president’s interest, WINPAC—the agency’s analytical shop dealing with unconventional weapons—immediately circulated a memo cautioning that the report lacked “crucial details” and that the U.S. Embassy in Niger had obtained information undermining the allegation. At the same time, though, WINPAC sent word to the DO’s Counterproliferation Division that the vice president had been intrigued by the Niger report. This was a big deal, recalled a CPD official: “A call from the vice president’s office makes you feel important. The young staffer who took this call was practically shaking with excitement.”
In response to the query from Cheney’s office, the Counterproliferation Division began considering how it could unearth more details about the purported uranium deal that had caught Cheney’s attention. Fortunately—or so it seemed at the time—the operations chief of the division’s Joint Task Force on Iraq, Valerie Wilson, was married to a former U.S. ambassador who was something of an expert on African uranium. The CPD could turn to him for help.
JOSEPH WILSON IV was no quiet diplomat. He was brash and confident, smooth but blunt, with a flair for the dramatic and a fondness for cigars. He came from an old California family of well-established Republicans (one governor, one congressman); his parents were expatriate journalists and authors, who dragged Wilson and his brother across Europe in his teenage years. Wilson graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1971; he escaped the Vietnam draft when the Nixon administration temporarily suspended it. He became a carpenter—and a ski and surf bum. He married the first of what would be three wives (Valerie was the third), and in 1975 he passed the Foreign Service examination and was offered a job at the State Department. Citing his knowledge of French, he suggested a posting in France. Instead, his rookie assignment was to the former French colony of Niger.
Wilson first garnered headlines for defying Saddam Hussein during the run-up to the first Persian Gulf War. At the time, Wilson was deputy chief of mission in the Baghdad embassy (and acting ambassador), and he engaged in a months-long standoff with Saddam Hussein that produced one notable stunt. The Iraqis were demanding that the U.S. Embassy force American citizens who had taken refuge at the U.S. ambassador’s residence to register at an Iraqi government office. Failure to comply was punishable by death. With 125 Americans already held hostage by the Iraqi government, Wilson refused to turn over the 40 Americans under his protection, and he appeared at an off-the-record press conference wearing a hangman’s noose. If Saddam “wants to execute me for keeping Americans from being taken hostage, I will bring my own fucking rope,” he told the journalists, one of whom reported the event. Wilson’s tenure in Baghdad and his efforts to protect the hostages won him praise from President George H. W. Bush. He received kind words from conservative newspaper columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. Wilson, they wrote in a 1990 column, “shows the stuff of heroism.”
But it wasn’t Wilson’s past heroic deeds that interested the officers of the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division in the winter of 2002. When Wilson was a junior diplomatic officer in Niger in the 1970s, the U.S. Embassy was tracking the growth of Niger’s uranium industry. As ambassador to Gabon, another uranium-producing African nation, in the mid-1990s, he had again paid attention to the uranium business. And when Wilson was chief of the Africa desk at the National Security Council in 1997 and 1998, his portfolio included the continent’s uranium trade, and he maintained frequent contact with Nigerien officials. Now retired from the government and pursuing a career in international finance, Wilson was probably as familiar with both the Niger government and the uranium business as anyone in Washington.
There later would be a heated dispute over how much of a role Valerie Wilson played in CPD’s decision to dispatch her husband to Niger. A Senate intelligence committee report would note that Valerie Wilson “suggested his name for the trip” and pointed to a memo she had written stating that her husband had “good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines.” Wilson would insist his wife had merely been “the conduit” for a message from a colleague in her office asking if he would be willing to come by and talk about Niger’s uranium industry. Valerie Wilson would tell friends that she had written an e-mail—not a memo—to the Counterproliferation Division’s deputy chief explaining her husband’s qualifications only after a CPD officer had approached her and asked if her husband might be willing to help out the agency. (The CIA had no officers in Niger.)
The CPD officer knew that Joe Wilson had done this sort of work before. In 1999, after Valerie Wilson mentioned to her supervisors that her husband was planning a business trip to Niger, the CPD asked if Wilson would be willing, while he was in Niger, to ask his contacts there about A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist who was running a secret international proliferation network. The CIA had picked up intelligence indicating a possible Niger connection involving Khan. Wilson agreed to do so but returned with no fresh information on the subject. When Valerie Wilson’s colleague inquired in 2002 if Wilson could help on the latest Niger matter, this mother of two-year-old twins was not especially eager to have her husband trek to Niger (for no pay). Just see if he’ll come in to talk to us, her fellow CPD officer asked. Valerie Wilson would later tell a friend, “My supervisor said, ‘Why don’t we set up a meeting and have Joe come in?’ My job was to go home and say, ‘Honey, will you come into the office next week?’ ”
On February 19, 2002, Joseph Wilson made the ten-minute drive from the Wilsons’ Washington town house across the Potomac to Langley to discuss Niger and uranium with assorted analysts. Valerie met him at the front entrance of CIA headquarters and escorted him to a basement meeting room. People were filing in when Wilson arrived, and, he later recalled, he asked his wife, “Why don’t you stay?” According to Wilson, she said, “No, this is not my thing. I have my own work to do.” Later—once this session had become a matter of controversy—Valerie Wilson told friends that she had merely introduced her husband to the assembled analysts and officers and then left.
But Douglas Rohn, an INR Africa analyst who attended the meeting, afterward wrote what would become a fateful memo that noted that the session was “apparently convened” by Valerie Wilson. His one-page report made it seem as if she indeed had been responsible for the meeting—and for the mission that would follow. But years later, Rohn said that he had arrived after it had started and “really didn’t understand who had done the organization work for the meeting.” He explained that he had used the word “apparently” in
his memo because he hadn’t been sure who had actually initiated the gathering. Valerie Wilson was not there when he entered. “I have never met her,” he said. Rohn, who wrote the only known account of the meeting, acknowledged that his memo may have created a misimpression about Valerie Wilson’s involvement.
In the meeting, Joe Wilson was told that a report of a uranium sale from Niger to Iraq had caught Cheney’s eye. He shared with the CIA officers present what he knew of the uranium industry in Niger and the Nigerien officials who would have been in power at the time of the supposed Niger-Iraq agreement. He told them that the former minister of mines, who was overseeing the uranium business during the alleged sale, was a friend of his. Wilson was skeptical of the report, especially given its vague sourcing. Rohn, the INR analyst, was more dismissive.
Rohn was a career foreign service officer, who, like Wilson, had spent years serving in Africa, including one stint, in the 1990s, as deputy chief of mission in Niger. And, according to his memo, he pointed out that a 500-ton deal meant that “twice a year 25 semi tractor trailer loads of yellow cake would have to be driven down roads where one seldom sees even a bush taxi. In other words, it would be very hard to hide such a shipment.” And temperatures of up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, drifting sands, and wear and tear on the vehicles would make such a trip “difficult in the extreme.” Rohn added that “the French appear to have control of the entire mining, milling and transportation process and would seem to have little interest in selling uranium to the Iraqis.” He “gently” noted that the U.S. Embassy in Niamey had good contacts with the government and that Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick was a “confidante” of the country’s president. He also “a little less gently” made the point that the U.S. Embassy in Niger was a “reliable interlocutor and could be trusted to protect U.S. interests.” Rohn was saying that there was no need for the CIA to send Wilson. The U.S. Embassy in Niamey and the State Department had the situation covered.
At the end of the meeting, Wilson was asked if he might be willing to travel to Niger and check out the yellowcake allegation. Given Rohn’s objections and Wilson’s own skepticism, why would the CPD even bother? The best explanation was Cheney—that is, the division was eager to do whatever it could in response to a request from the vice president. Wilson told the CIA officers he was game. But according to his own later account, he reminded them he was hardly a low-profile guy, especially in Africa.
Shortly after the meeting, the CPD officially requested that Wilson make the trip for the agency. Wilson agreed to go on a pro bono basis with the CIA covering his expenses. He was granted an “operational” security clearance, up to the “secret” level. He was not asked to sign a confidentiality agreement. He set off for Niamey in late February. One CIA official later recalled thinking how pathetic it was that the agency, which had shut down many of its African stations in the 1990s, had no sources of its own in Niger and that it had to turn to a retired diplomat—who would end up talking to the same sort of people the ambassador had already contacted. “What’s this going to get us?” the agency official remembered thinking at the time.
It took Wilson five days to reach Niamey. (Two days before he arrived, the president of Niger had told Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick and the visiting General Carlton Fulford, the deputy commander of the U.S. European Command, that his goal was to keep Niger’s uranium “in safe hands.”) Once in Niger, Wilson met with Owens-Kirkpatrick, and she asked him to talk only to former Nigerien officials and private-sector officials, not any current government officials. The ambassador didn’t want any CIA emissary mucking around on her turf.
Wilson went about talking to his contacts: former officials, Nigerien businesspeople, European expatriates, international aid workers. He confirmed what he already knew: the uranium consortium was strictly regulated and most of the uranium produced was for use in the nuclear energy plants of the countries represented by the French-led consortium. The yellowcake from Niger was not sold on the open market. It was mined in amounts determined by the needs of the consortium members. A significant boost in production to cover the 500 tons mentioned in the supposed Niger-Iraq deal would have been, Wilson subsequently noted, “absolutely impossible to hide.”
And any such sale would have required multiple levels of approval from the Nigerien bureaucracy going all the way up to the prime minister. A secret sale, Wilson saw, would have been difficult, too, for it would have required the movement of thousands of barrels. Former Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki, who had led the nation from 1997 to 1999 (shortly before the deal was supposedly signed) told Wilson that he knew of no such accord between Niger and Iraq. Mayaki, however, did say that at an Organization of African Unity meeting in 1999 a Nigerien businessman had approached him and asked him to talk to an Iraqi delegation about expanding trade between the two nations. Mayaki interpreted this to mean the delegation might be interested in discussing uranium sales. Mayaki told Wilson that he had met briefly with a member of the Iraqi delegation. But, aware of the UN sanctions on Iraq, Mayaki insisted he had avoided any substantive conversation.*13 After eight days in Niger, Wilson concluded there was nothing to support the charge that Iraq had either sought or obtained the yellowcake.
While Wilson was in Niger, the State Department’s INR produced a report, drafted by Rohn, entitled, “Niger: Sale of Uranium to Iraq Is Unlikely.” It spelled out the multiple reasons to doubt the deal, including the fact that Niger was heavily dependent on foreign aid and would not risk jeopardizing its good relations with Washington by permitting such a transaction. “A payoff from Iraq of $50 million or even $100 million would not make up for what would be lost if the donor community turned off the taps to Niger,” Rohn wrote. The INR called the original intelligence a “report of questionable credibility.” Its paper was sent to the White House Situation Room and to various embassies in Africa and around the world. A summation of this report was forwarded to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.
But Cheney hadn’t forgotten about the first intriguing DIA report of a Niger-Iraq deal. In early March, he asked his morning CIA briefer a second time about the Niger uranium matter. In response, WINPAC sent an update to Cheney’s briefer, noting that the Niger government had said it was doing everything possible to guarantee that its uranium wasn’t heading toward any nuclear weapons programs. WINPAC’s update reported that the Italian service “was unable to provide new information, but continues to assess that its source is reliable.” WINPAC also told Cheney’s briefer that the CIA would soon “be debriefing a source who may have information related to the alleged sale”—a reference to Joseph Wilson.
On March 5, two CIA officers debriefed Wilson at his home; Valerie Wilson didn’t take part in the session. The former ambassador summarized his discussions with the ex–Nigerien leaders and explained his view that a uranium deal of this kind would be nearly impossible to pull off. One of the CIA officers wrote up a report and sent it to a colleague, who (as often happens in the intelligence community) rewrote the report. The rewritten report was then disseminated within the intelligence community. DO officials made sure to tell WINPAC analysts about the report because they knew, as a Senate intelligence report later noted, “the high priority of the issue.” The report noted Wilson’s judgment that it was unlikely such a uranium sale could have taken place. But it also included what Wilson had heard from Mayaki, the former prime minister, about the 1999 overture from an Iraqi delegation looking to talk about reestablishing commercial relations.
CIA analysts, according to a report of the Senate intelligence committee, considered Wilson’s information nothing startling. They hadn’t expected the Nigeriens to acknowledge such a deal had been signed. Moreover, the analysts focused on the part about an Iraqi representative having sounded out the Nigerien prime minister about expanded commercial relations in 1999. They thought this could be indirect confirmation of the Italian reporting—even though the Italian report had said the uranium transaction was a done deal. The CIA didn’t brief Ch
eney on Wilson’s trip.
Wilson assumed his report would be conveyed to Cheney. After all, it was Cheney who had asked the question that had led to Wilson’s trip. But about this time, Cheney took off for an important trip to the Middle East to line up regional support for a confrontation with Saddam. Having heard nothing definitive from the agency, he seemingly lost interest in—or simply forgot about—the Niger deal. After the debriefing at his house, Wilson would have no more official contact with the CIA for a year and a half.
AT SOME point, Rocco Martino, who was trying to sell his hot (and bogus) documents on the Iraq-Niger uranium transaction, approached his contacts at the DGSE, the French intelligence service. Martino had previously attempted to peddle to the French information apparently obtained from SISMI on matters related to Bosnia and Kosovo. It was information the French service had already received directly from SISMI via official channels (for free). So when Martino came knocking with papers on a secret Niger-Iraq yellowcake agreement, French intelligence was skeptical—and a bit worried. Niger was a former French colony, and a French corporation led the international consortium that managed Niger’s tightly controlled uranium industry. If the documents were authentic, French executives would be implicated in a massive illicit scheme. DGSE officials even wondered if someone was trying to set France up.
Martino wanted “a lot of money” for the material, recalled Alain Chouet, a deputy director of the French intelligence service. The going price for this sort of freelance intelligence was about $100,000. But the DGSE talked Martino down, paid him a small amount for a sample, and then quickly concluded the documents were phony. It was “no deal,” Chouet said. “We dropped the whole thing.”
Back at the CIA, the grounds for disbelieving the Italian report grew stronger—or should have—partly because of the DGSE. That summer, the French service received a request from the CIA for any information it could provide about a possible uranium deal between Iraq and Niger. The DGSE had already sent Martino packing, according to Chouet, but to reassure the Americans, the DGSE dispatched a team to Niger to determine if there had been any diversion to Iraq of uranium from the French-controlled mines. The team’s report was conclusive: there was nothing to the allegation. “Our answer was that the information was not reliable at all and probably based on faked intelligence,” Chouet subsequently said. DGSE officials considered the case closed. So, too, did Bill Murray, the CIA station chief in Paris. He had been sending report after report to Langley dismissing the whole idea. He finally wrote one frustrating cable that asked, “Do you want me to send a weekly report that the Eiffel Tower is still standing as well?”
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