CIA Rejects Blame for Bush's Iraq Uranium Claim
Thu June 12, 2003 03:06 PM ET


By Jim Wolf
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA rejected any blame on Thursday for the use of a faulty intelligence report by President Bush as he built his case for war against Iraq.

A spokesman, Bill Harlow, voiced confidence that "a careful reading" of documents supplied to congressional oversight committees would show the spy agency "did not withhold information from appropriate officials" about Iraq's purported attempt to buy uranium in Niger.

The Central Intelligence Agency, he said, had shared hundreds of pages of material with the panels looking into charges, from lawmakers and others, that the administration and the intelligence community oversold the weapons threat to foster public support for ousting President Saddam Hussein.

The latest challenge to the CIA involved a claim in Bush's State of the Union address that Saddam had been trying to buy "significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Bush aides have given somewhat conflicting accounts of how this claim made it into the speech. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said intelligence officials declared the charge incorrect "as the information was received."

On Sunday, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said "someone may have known" the information was false 11 months before Bush's speech, but the White House believed it to be true at the time.

But she said the claim, attributed in the speech to the British government, was what "the intelligence community said we could say."

CIA MISSION

The uranium tale had been disputed by a CIA-directed mission to Niger early last year, the Washington Post reported in its Thursday edition.

The CIA did not pass on the results of this mission to the White House or other government officials, the Post reported, citing unnamed senior administration officials and a former government official.

Any such CIA failure to share fully what it knew would have helped keep the uranium story alive until the eve of the March invasion of Iraq.

The supposed uranium quest in Africa first surfaced in a now widely contested Sept. 24, 2002, report on Iraq released by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The claim was quickly embraced by the Bush administration, though many mid-level intelligence officials knew it was bogus, several people with first-hand knowledge told Reuters.

"I remember being told to discount the information about uranium purchases in Africa in our own assessments of Iraq's nuclear weapons capabilities," said David Albright, a nuclear physicist and former U.N. nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq who heads the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.

He said he had been told the story was wrong in late September by people who had access to classified intelligence information.

The CIA declined comment on the Washington Post report, which said the spy agency sent a retired U.S. ambassador to investigate in February 2002 the purported Iraqi bid to buy uranium in Niger.

After returning, the envoy reported to the CIA the uranium purchase attempt story was false, based on talks with Niger officials purportedly involved, said the Post.

Thirteen months later, on March 7, Mohamed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told the Security Council his agency had reached the same conclusion and that the underlying documents were "not authentic," an assessment that U.S. officials have not disputed.

But the spy agency put out the denials by Niger officials in a March 2002 intelligence report that was "widely disseminated throughout the U.S. government," a U.S. intelligence official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.

Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat seeking to pin down why Bush cited forged evidence about Iraq, said: "We must find out whether the CIA deceived the president ... or whether it is deceiving the public now to protect the president and the vice president."