Their grievances echoed what the Tuareg had been complaining about for decades—corruption, racial discrimination, and unequal distribution of money from uranium mining. They also were angry about radioactive dust blowing onto their grazing fields, and the way that exploratory drills had started to show up on the plain where they held an annual salt cure rendezvous each September.
This was almost certainly the group that had attempted to hijack the bus that I had been riding in.
The spine of all of these attacks is the same highway on which trucks bear away the only tangible expression of wealth that the country has to offer, en route to its eventual consumption in French power plants. Niger’s government has effectively lost control of this road.
The violence in the uranium fields is a classic outgrowth of what economists call the “resource curse,” the unique misery laid upon those nations that sit atop a stockpile of a single desirable material—gold or rubber or lumber or (especially) oil. These nations ought to be prosperous, but are actually driven deeper into poverty. The natural treasure is locked up by a Western company, and whatever tax revenues there are are partially diverted to the president and his associates for their discretionary pleasure, leaving only scraps for the people. There is little incentive to develop a more healthy multilayered economy. If such a nation were a person, its diet would be of sugar and lard. Periodic insurrections force the government to use a heavy hand against troublemakers.
This is an old story in Africa, and Niger’s uranium would be only one more example of a metal collar, except that a chain of bizarre events put it near the middle of one of the great foreign policy disasters of recent times. The uranium—or more precisely, the fear of it—would become a centerpiece of the American rationalization for invading Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in March 2003.
The specter of uranium was something that H. G. Wells and William L. Laurence had understood perfectly. Now it was a royal road to war.
The uranium business in Niger was born in the mid-1970s, when the price of uranium was buoyant and the country was suffering from a crushing drought in which more than a million people died of malnutrition, starvation, and disease. Money was found, however, to construct a bold new headquarters for the Ministry of Mines, a building whose curved and glassy exterior bulges outward like a pregnant woman’s skirt. A major street in the capital was rechristened Avenue de l’Uranium.
The president at that time, Seyni Kountché, had seized power in a military coup, and he was eager to use Niger’s only dependable industry to boost the treasury. “We will sell uranium even to the devil if we have to,” he said. This sentiment was mostly bluster, but it was remembered in Western intelligence circles.
On October 7, 2002, long after Kountché had been overthrown, a man named Rocco Martino took a woman out to lunch at the fashionable Bar Ungaro restaurant in Rome, which was down a short flight of steps from the street. Martino was an elegantly dressed man in his early sixties with gray hair and a thick mustache and something of the aspect of a faded lothario. He was there not to seduce, but to sell a scoop.
His companion was Elisabetta Burba, a reporter with the Italian magazine Panorama. She knew that Martino had contacts with the Italian intelligence agency, called Sismi, and he had previously sold her some newsworthy tidbits about peace talks in Kosovo and terror links at an Islamic charity. Such deals would be anathema in an American newsroom, but they are routine in the world of Italian journalism.
Over lunch, Martino asked her, “Do you know anything about the country that has sold uranium to Iraq?”
He handed Burba a file folder. One of the papers inside was a letter written in French, bearing the national seal of Niger and stamped with the words CONFIDENTIAL and URGENT. On the seal was the fuzzy-looking signature of the current president, Mamadou Tandja, and the papers appeared to confirm a secret deal under which Niger would agree to sell a massive amount of uranium to Iraq, apparently for use in that nation’s attempt to build a nuclear weapon. Rendered in all capital letters, and in the style of the outdated telex machine, the communiqué announced that SAID PROVISION EQUALING 500 TONS Of PURE URANIUM PER YEAR WILL be DELIVERED IN TWO PHASES. Martino also provided supplementary documentation, including memos from the Foreign Ministry and a photocopy of a twenty-five-year-old embassy codebook.
Where did he get such sensitive papers? “A source,” was all he would say.
Martino wanted $12,000 for this information, according to accounts of the lunch published years later in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. But all Burba could promise him was that she would try to validate their authenticity and get back to him. She related the exchange to her editor, who was a friend of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, himself a key ally of U.S. president George W. Bush. “Let’s go to the Americans because they are focused on looking for weapons of mass destruction more than anyone else,” said her editor. He told her to take Martino’s documents to the U.S. embassy on the Via Veneto. She complied with the request and handed over copies of some of the documents—including the bombshell sales agreement—to the press attaché, Ian Kelly. The papers, later called “the Italian letter” by the journalists Peter Eisner and Knut Royce, were then forwarded to the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and into the chute of the U.S. intelligence network.
Their arrival in Washington that October coincided with a fervent campaign by Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials to sell the invasion of Iraq to the American electorate, and uranium was beginning to play a central role. Rocco Martino’s lunch with Burba, as documented by Eisner and Royce, had been only one of the routes through which the tip reached the Bush administration. But this was apparently the first time anyone had seen the letter allegedly signed by Tandja. The CIA had been given a version of the same information by Sismi back in October 2001 and had been skeptical. The British government had also received the information through channels that have never been disclosed. On September 24, 2002, the British issued a dossier claiming (in the passive voice and without elaboration) that “uranium has been sought from Africa that has no civil nuclear application in Iraq.”
This dossier served to fortify an emerging narrative. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice had appeared on CNN previously that month and conjured an image that would soon become a Bush administration mantra. “There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam Hussein] can acquire nuclear weapons,” she said. “But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” The threat of sarin or smallpox was simply not frightening enough to justify an invasion. An invocation of the highest fear—nuclear apocalypse—was necessary.
Bush told an audience in Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 7, “If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed. Saddam Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression.... He would be in a position to threaten America.”
The biggest applause came near the end of the speech, when the president declared, “We refuse to live in fear!”
One of the many doubtful aspects of these claims was that Iraq already had uranium mines in its desert interior, as well as 550 tons of yellowcake stored in warehouses inside the country. This was the legacy of a long-dormant nuclear program that had been shuttered in the early 1990s. There would have been no need to make such a risky and foolish deal with Niger.
There was also the problem of enrichment. Making yellowcake into the kind of “softball” described by Bush takes an industrial facility the size of a college campus. No such complex had been located by Western intelligence or the IAEA. Bush administration officials were then sent out to leak the dubious claim that Iraq had tried to build centrifuges, and as proof, they cited the interception of a shipment of sixty thousand high-strength aluminum tubes in Jordan that wer
e almost certainly intended to be fashioned into surface-to-air missiles for conventional battlefield use.
These metal tubes were about the length of a baseball bat and had the circumference of a large grapefruit. U.S. Energy Department analysts considered them too small for the kind of rotations needed to separate the isotopes. The IAEA believed that they would have required elaborate retrofitting to be used to enrich uranium—their thickness ground down from three millimeters to one. Some of the tubes were even stamped ROCKET. The design perfectly matched the shafts of the same rockets that Iraq had used in its lengthy ground war with Iran in the 1980s. But in the New York Times, the lead paragraph of this story came out as “Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials say.”
Skeptics within the CIA and the State Department questioned the aluminum tubes story, as well as that of the African uranium sale, but the exhibits kept reappearing in the administration’s public statements.
Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, later complained that neoconservative officials close to Cheney had always insisted that the intelligence be taken at face value, despite grave internal doubts. His criticisms were later echoed by a host of ex-administration and intelligence officials who felt the uranium fears were being hyped. To their chagrin, the Italian letter had even found its way into the National Intelligence Estimate, an annual report that supposedly represented the very best information and analysis that the United States had to offer. It was now made to hint at midnight reagents simmering in the Mesopotamian desert—an apocalypse plot of The Other.
The selling of the Iraq war reached its apogee on January 28, 2003, less than three months before the war commenced, when Bush made his annual State of the Union address to Congress and uttered the now-notorious “sixteen words” that echoed the documents passed across the table of a Rome restaurant:
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
“Impossible!” This was the verdict of Moussa Souley, the local director of operations for Areva, the French company that has controlled nearly every aspect of Niger’s uranium output for forty years.
I had been sitting with Souley inside his office near the Ministry of Mines and had asked him if there was any scenario, even a remote one, in which a foreign government or a terrorist group could have secretly bought yellowcake from the mills at Arlit.
“If somebody comes to us and says ‘I want uranium,’ they would have to go through the government. And then the government has to come and see us. This would mean we’d have to discontinue our existing contracts. And anytime we ship uranium there are multiple documents to sign. We know where it goes.”
There would be, he went on, dozens of people who would have to be in on the conspiracy. Such a large shipment would have to be hauled by a flotilla of trucks, an operation that would attract widespread attention. Whenever uranium is transferred in Niger, there is a stack of paperwork that must be signed and stamped: bills of lading, bills of delivery, transport contracts, receipts, and tax documents. Concealing the paper trail would be a major undertaking. And it would be extremely unlikely that a French monopoly company would sell its radioactive product to a pariah state such as Iraq at the same time that its government was pushing the United Nations for more sanctions against the regime.
Souley showed me a graph depicting the historic output of the Akouta mine. It told the story of a long, dull marriage. The French company was extracting a reliable two thousand tons of yellowcake per year, every year, with almost no deviations.
“This is a conservative strategy,” he said. “France likes the security of having its own mine, even though it would be cheaper to buy it on the open market.” The letter furnished by Rocco Martino described a purchase of five hundred tons. That would amount to a quarter of the Akouta mine’s annual production—a staggering pile of yellow grit the absence of which would have created immediate alarm in Paris and resulted in a scandal.
Souley summed up, “This kind of engagement would be visible by its nature. Somebody would see, and somebody would tell.”
After she handed the Italian letter over to the U.S. embassy, the Panorama journalist Elisabetta Burba traveled to Niamey and reached much the same conclusion as Souley. Too many people would have been in the loop, and it made no sense that a pro-American government that depended on a healthy stream of foreign aid would have jeopardized its existence that way. Burba had already spent some time on the Internet looking up some of the names in the memos and had come up with disturbing inconsistencies. One cover document was signed by a foreign minister who had long since left that position. Another passage—laughably—was written in Italian. The fuzzy signature from President Tandja appeared to be a photocopied snippet glued to the page. Others noted that the letter made reference to the antiquated Niger constitution of 1966. The papers were forgeries, and not very good ones.
When she returned to Italy, Burba told her editor the papers were worthless and that Martino shouldn’t get a cent for them. She offered to write a story on the deception, but it was never published.
Burba could not have known it then, but a retired U.S. diplomat named Joseph Wilson had visited Niamey earlier that year in a CIASPONSORED attempt to verify the story. He spent eight days at the Ganwye Hotel, the nicest in town, drinking mint tea at poolside with some of the people he had known in the government and at Areva from his days as a diplomat there in the 1970s. Wilson has an open face and a bearish charm, and the hotel staff took to calling him “Bill Clinton.” He went back to Washington with the report that a midnight sale to Iraq, or anyone, was extremely unlikely.
“You’re talking about a lot of trucks going north to south,” he told me, years later, in a telephone interview. “How would you do this without anybody knowing?”
After the invasion of Iraq was over, and when it was becoming clear that “Saddam’s nuclear program” had been a fantasy, Wilson made his African mission a matter of public knowledge in a New York Times op-ed. The administration sought to discredit him by leaking the news that his wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA agent who had recommended him for the task. The belief that such a fact would somehow invalidate his findings was exceeded in puerility only by the ham-fisted way in which the innuendo was fed to a series of Washington reporters. In the subsequent probe, Cheney’s top aide, I. Lewis Libby, was convicted of lying to federal investigators.
The capital soap opera over Valerie Plame overshadowed a more essential question: Who forged the documents that Rocco Martino wanted to sell?
The answer seems forever lost in the swamp of Italian spy craft, though many theories have been advanced. It was neoconservative elements in the CIA who wanted to launder bad intelligence through the magazine Panorama. Or it was associates of Silvio Berlusconi, trying, as a favor, to give his American allies the excuse necessary for war. The journalist Craig Unger has speculated that the genteel paper peddler Rocco Martino was being used as a “cutout”—that is, an easily dismissed puppet—for the Italian intelligence agency, Sismi, which, though ridden with waste and incompetence, has known since the early cold war how to build mansions of smoke. Sismi itself has floated the story that the documents were a plant from the French government, which was eager to make Bush’s atomic claims look ridiculous. Martino told several stories before refusing all further comment, but he has blamed a cabal within Sismi for perpetuating the hoax. Others have pointed to a middle-aged Italian woman working in the Nigerien embassy (known as La Signora by Italian prosecutors) who may have cut and pasted fragments of legitimate correspondence onto the documents, photocopied them, and then sold them to Martino, her only motivation being greed. Separate Italian and FBI investigations have yielded no solid answers.
“We may never know who forged them,” Jacques Baute, the director of safeguards technology at the
International Atomic Energy Agency, told me.
The IAEA was finally given an electronic copy of Rocco Martino’s memo on February 11, five weeks before the Iraq invasion, and Baute, a courtly man with a trim white beard, had gone immediately to work. He told me it took him only fifteen minutes of investigation to conclude the papers were shoddy fakes and that the uranium deal was a fiction. A last-minute appeal to the United Nations could not stop the war.
Few things inspire the collective dread of the West as much as the suggestion that a poor country—particularly an Islamic one—is busy trying to acquire or enrich uranium. This apparition convinced the American public to support the dubious adventure in Iraq, and it continues to excite tensions with Iran, which has made no secret of its ambitions to enrich uranium.
The Iranian bomb project was apparently suspended after the 2003 invasion of neighboring Iraq, but its enrichment facility still exists. Capable of enriching as much as 165 pounds a day, the plant is hidden in the mountain town of Natanz, which is also known for its pear trees, its sharp cool air, and minarets that date to the thirteenth century. The highest local peak is named Vulture Mountain. A local legend says that a nearby valley was the spot where an invader from the West, Alexander the Great, slew the Persian king Darius III in battle in 330 B.C. But this is apocrypha. Darius was actually assassinated by one of his friends in a spot much farther away.
Tom Zoellner Page 27