Treasongate: The Niger Forgeries v. INR Reports - "Global Support", Part A
by eriposte
One of the most interesting comments in the Senate (SSCI) Report comes from an INR analyst who had immediately reviewed the Niger forgeries when he received them (emphasis mine, through this post):
...The embassy faxed the documents to the State Department's Bureau of Nonproliferation (NP) on October 15, 2002, which passed a copy of the documents to INR.
(U) Immediately after receiving the documents, the INR Iraq nuclear analyst e-mailed IC colleagues offering to provide the documents at a previously planned meeting of the Nuclear Interdiction Action Group (NIAG) the following day. The analyst, apparently already suspicious of the validity of the documents noted in his e-mail, "you'll note that it bears a funky Emb. of Niger stamp (to make it look official, I guess)."
(U) The INR Iraq nuclear analyst told Committee staff that the thing that stood out immediately about the documents was that a companion document - a document included with the Niger documents that did not relate to uranium - mentioned some type of military campaign against major world powers. The members of the alleged military campaign included both Iraq and Iran, and was, according to the documents, being orchestrated through the Nigerien Embassy in Rome, which all struck the analyst as "completely implausible." Because the stamp on this document matched the stamp on the uranium document, the analyst thought that all of the documents were likely suspect. The analyst was unaware at the time of any formatting problems with the documents or inconsistencies with the names or dates. [page 58]
The above paragraph - and a similar one that appears in page 62 (discussed below) - are of great significance for at least a couple of reasons. I highlight one of those reasons in this post. I demonstrate that the INR analyst's observation provides evidence that the CIA (and INR) must have had in their possession one or more forged Niger uranium documents that have not yet been publicly revealed. (I hinted at this in my post last night by comparing an Oct 2003 Seymour Hersh article to a prior Elisabetta Burba article).
1. Summary of INR analyst's observations
2. Which forged documents was the INR analyst referring to?
3. Conclusions
APPENDIX A: Table of known documents in forged Niger dossier along with images of stamps in each document
APPENDIX B: Were the documents in the Niger dossier, without transcriptions, among the ones referred to by the INR analyst?
1. Summary of INR analyst's observations
Let's start again at page 58 of the SSCI Report:
...The embassy faxed the documents to the State Department's Bureau of Nonproliferation (NP) on October 15, 2002, which passed a copy of the documents to INR.
(U) Immediately after receiving the documents, the INR Iraq nuclear analyst e-mailed IC colleagues offering to provide the documents at a previously planned meeting of the Nuclear Interdiction Action Group (NIAG) the following day. The analyst, apparently already suspicious of the validity of the documents noted in his e-mail, "you'll note that it bears a funky Emb. of Niger stamp (to make it look official, I guess)."
(U) The INR Iraq nuclear analyst told Committee staff that the thing that stood out immediately about the documents was that a companion document - a document included with the Niger documents that did not relate to uranium - mentioned some type of military campaign against major world powers. The members of the alleged military campaign included both Iraq and Iran, and was, according to the documents, being orchestrated through the Nigerien Embassy in Rome, which all struck the analyst as "completely implausible." Because the stamp on this document matched the stamp on the uranium document, the analyst thought that all of the documents were likely suspect. The analyst was unaware at the time of any formatting problems with the documents or inconsistencies with the names or dates. [page 58]
The "completely implausible" document that the INR analyst was referring to is the forged document commonly referred to as the "Global Support" document (TLC Niger Doc 8).
Fast-forward to page 62:
(U) On January 13, 2003, the INR Iraq nuclear analyst sent an e-mail to several IC analysts outlining his reasoning why, "the uranium purchase agreement probably is a hoax." He indicated that one of the documents that purported to be an agreement for a joint military campaign, including both Iraq and Iran, was so ridiculous that it was "clearly a forgery." Because this document had the same alleged stamps for the Nigerien Embassy in Rome as the uranium documents, the analyst concluded "that the uranium purchase agreement probably is a forgery." When the CIA analyst received the e-mail, he realized that WINPAC did not have copies of the documents and requested copies from INR. CIA received copies of the foreign language documents on January 16, 2003.
[So, twice in the period of 3 months - well ahead of Bush's SOTU - the INR analyst had repeatedly warned IC colleagues (including the CIA) that the Niger documents - which were the basis of Bush's SOTU claim - were bogus.]
Note that there is a slight discrepancy in how the INR analyst's comments are described in the SSCI Report. The discrepancy is as follows:
...it bears a funky Emb. of Niger stamp...Because the stamp on this ["Global Support"] document matched the stamp on the uranium document...[page 58]
Versus:
...Because this document had the same alleged stamps for the Nigerien Embassy in Rome as the uranium documents... [page 62]
The discrepancy, obviously, is that the first statement refers to a single stamp (of the Nigerien Embassy in Rome) in the "Global Support" document and to a single uranium document for comparison. The second statement refers to multiple stamps in the "Global Support" document and to multiple uranium documents for comparison.
This discrepancy is probably because of the use of imprecise language in page 62 by the author of this section of the SSCI Report. The reason I believe that is none of the known documents in the Niger dossier (including "Global Support") have more than one stamp. That said, there could be more than one uranium document with the same stamp.
For the purpose of this analysis it is sufficient to consider the first statement (page 58), but assume that for comparison, we should look for one or more uranium documents which have the same stamp as the "Global Support" document.
2. Which forged documents was the INR analyst referring to?
Appendix A is a table listing the known documents to-date (18 pages in all, 1 of which relates to China and not Iraq) in the forged Niger dossier, along with images of the stamps in each document. In this section, I make use of that data to answer the question posed in the title.
2.1 Scenario 1: Well-known "Global Support" document, Single Stamp, Single Uranium Document
TLC Niger Doc 8 (the document in the foreground in this image, marked "CONFIDENTIEL") has historically been the one referred to as the "Global Support" document. It refers to an alleged meeting held on June 14, 2002. The only stamp in that document is at the bottom left of the document (image of stamp). A quick skim through the last column of the table in Appendix A shows that there is no other known document in the dossier (which mentions uranium in the context of Iraq) that has the same stamp (additional explanation for this conclusion in Appendix B).
So, if the INR analyst's comments are true - and there is absolutely no reason to think they are not - either there is at least one uranium document that exists in the Niger dossier that has not been made public yet or the "Global Support" document the analyst is referring to is different than what I think it is. Even though the probability of the latter is low, I take a look at it below.
2.2 Scenario 2: Different "Global Support" document, Single Stamp, Single Uranium Document
One reason to consider this scenario is a statement made by Panorama reporter Elisabetta Burba back in July 2003:
The icing on the cake is topped by a cherry: two documents that reveal an action plan dubbed Global Support. During the FAO conference in Rome in 2002, Niger, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya and Iran formed a holy Islamic alliance. The six rogue states agreed to support governments “under international embargo”, suspected of “manufacturing nuclear, bacteriological and chemical” weapons and accused of international terrorism. But also “Islamic patriots accused of membership in criminal organizations” Well, what do you know...
Mister Patacca goes home to pick up the code book to decrypt the ciphered message.
There are some notable points in Burba's statements.
The first point is that she talks about an "FAO conference in Rome in 2002". What she's referring to is the FAO World Food Summit that was held from June 10-13, 2002. It should be noted that this summit wrapped up before the June 14, 2002 date associated with the well-known "Global Support" forgery. More interestingly, the "Global Support" document (TLC Niger Doc 8) makes no mention of the FAO or this summit. So, it would seem that Burba saw this information in some other document in the dossier or reached this conclusion through some other means. Since she also explicitly refers to "two documents" that relate to "Global Support", we can assume that the former scenario is the relevant one.
Clearly, one of the two "Global Support" documents had to be TLC Niger Doc 8 (the document in the foreground in this image, marked "CONFIDENTIEL") - because that is the document which contains the specific quotes she has in the paragraph cited above (and which has the information mentioned by the INR analyst). So, what is the second document and does it contain a reference to the FAO summit?
This alleged second document, if it exists, has to be one of the three publicized documents in the list (of 17 pages - leaving out the unrelated one talking about China) whose contents are not clear or currently unavailable - TLC Niger Docs (iii), (iv) and (v). This is because none of the other documents except TLC Doc 8 has anything to do with "Global Support" and none of the others includes any mention of an FAO conference.
From the sequence of events described by Burba above, it is obvious that she was able to view and understand the contents of the "Global Support" documents without the help of a code book. So, she could NOT have been referring to Doc (iv) which was in CODE (and dated Feb 7, 2001). Further, as discussed in Appendix B, this document is allegedly from "the Minister of Foreign Affairs". That would seem to summarily rule out the possibility that it would contain the stamp of the Nigerien embassy in Rome - so this becomes irrelevant to the analysis. That leaves Docs (iii) and (v).
Doc (iii) is a "A telex published by Panorama, partially visible and illegible, dated February 5, 1999". It is exceedingly unlikely that a document relating to an alleged "Global Support" activity on June 14, 2002 is one that is dated February 5, 1999. Moreover, as discussed in Appendix B, being a telex, this document almost certainly did not have any Niger Embassy stamp. Which therefore leaves Doc (v) for our consideration.
As it turns out, TLC Niger Doc (v) is dated May 3, 2002 - which is very close to the June 14, 2002 date of "Global Support". Additionally, it happens to be the document which is hidden right behind the well-known "Global Support" DOC 8 - in this scanned image. It also has a "funky" Embassy of Niger stamp to boot - at the bottom right of the page (image of stamp). The only problem is that because much of this document is covered up in the scanned image, by the well-known "Global Support" document (TLC Niger Doc 8), its contents are not clear at all (de Gondi of European Tribune has kindly provided a tentative partial translation for me). So, I can't be sure whether this document mentions the FAO summit or the alleged "Global Support" meeting. (Hopefully someone can get access to the whole document to confirm this?)
However, since none of the other documents fit the bill, let me hypothetically assume that TLC Niger Doc (v) dated May 3, 2002 is one of two documents that relates to "Global Support". Assuming this is true, and assuming that it is this document that the INR Analyst was referring to, the question we have to ask is whether there are any documents containing a mention of "uranium" (in the context of Iraq) that appear in the remaining list of 16 pages, which also have the same Nigerien Embassy of Rome stamp.
As we can tell by perusing the images in Appendix A, the answer is NO (additional explanation for this conclusion in Appendix B).
In fact, the only other known document in the dossier which has a similar stamp is TLC Niger Doc 1A (image of stamp) which does NOT mention uranium and is probably an authentic document.
In summary, both the scenarios above lead to the conclusion that there are one or more uranium documents that exist in the Niger dossier - which the CIA and INR had access to - that have not been made public yet.
3. Conclusions
Yesterday, I published a note pointing out that although Elisabetta Burba mentioned on 7/24/03 that there were only 17 pages in the Niger dossier that she received from Rocco Martino (18 if an irrelevant document relating to China is included), Seymour Hersh stated in an article on 10/20/03 - after talking to Burba - that there were 22 pages in the dossier. That raised the prospect that there are a number of additional forged documents in the dossier which have not been made public yet. (For instance, the actual "Accord" of the alleged uranium deal has mysteriously yet to surface.)
UPDATE 2/22/06: A careful re-read of Burba's article shows that she did acknowledge there were more than the 17+1 pages in the dossier, but that those additional pages were faxed to her after she had handed off the first set of documents to the U.S. Embassy in Rome. Notably, she does not say that she went back to the U.S. Embassy in Rome to hand over the additional pages she received, even though she mentions she called the Embassy subsequently to check if the first set she gave them were genuine (something the Embassy declined to confirm one way or the other). For some reason, she and Panorama magazine have not publicly revealed the contents of those documents.
It is therefore quite clear that based on an INR analyst's observation to the SSCI, that the CIA (and INR) must have had in their possession one or more forged Niger uranium documents that have not yet been publicly revealed. It also appears that these additional documents may not have been received from Elisabetta Burba. This calls for a more thorough investigation of what was in the dossier, what the Bush administration knew and when they knew it. The importance of publicly revealing the additional documents cannot be understated. Such documents may hold additional clues on who forged the documents, and when and how they forged it.
APPENDIX A: Table of known documents in forged Niger dossier along with images of stamps in each document
This table (listing 18 pages worth of known documents in the Niger dossier) is based on the information previously summarized on all the known Niger documents to-date. Note that some relevant information has been included in the Key to the table (below the table).
TLC Niger Doc# |
# of pages |
Was this a forgery? |
Does it mention uranium? |
Letterhead insignia on document [##] |
Stamp on document |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 |
Probably authentic |
No |
None |
None |
|
1 |
Probably authentic |
No |
 |
 |
|
1 |
Yes |
Yes |
 |
 |
|
2 |
Yes |
Yes |
 |
 |
|
1 |
Yes |
Yes |
None |
 |
|
2 |
Yes |
Yes |
None |
 |
|
1 |
Yes |
No** |
None |
None |
|
1 |
Potentially yes |
Yes |
 |
 |
|
1* |
Yes |
No |
None |
 |
|
1 |
Yes |
See # |
None |
None |
|
1 |
Probably authentic |
No |
 |
 |
|
1 |
Yes |
No |
 |
None |
|
1 |
|||||
1 |
|||||
1 |
Likely* |
 |
 |
||
1 |
KEY TO TABLE:
N/R = Not Relevant to this particular analysis - click on each N/R link to see why
N/A = Not Applicable to this particular analysis - click on each N/A link to see why
* Doc (v) might be an accompanying document to Doc 8 (see Sec. 2.2); it is therefore likely a fake (much of the document is covered up so it is hard to tell whether or not it also mentions "uranium")
** Doc 6 mentions "metal", not uranium
# This was supposedly the cover page of the "uranium" accord; so, while it does not mention uranium, it is related to the alleged uranium transaction (also see Doc 5)
## This column header originally used the word "seal" and I just realized that "seal" is often used synonymously with "stamp" - and could be confused with "stamp". All references to "seal" in this page have been deleted accordingly.
APPENDIX B: Were the documents in the Niger dossier, without transcriptions, among the ones referred to by the INR analyst?
A fundamental question I am trying to answer in my analysis is this: which "uranium document(s)" was the INR analyst referring to when he said that those documents had the same stamp of the Nigerien embassy in Rome as the "Global Support" document? Although most of the known Niger forgeries have scanned images which make such an analysis possible (see Appendix A), there are three pages among the 18 mentioned or released by Panorama magazine that do not have a translation of their contents or any pictures of the documents available. So, in order to answer the question correctly, it requires us to rule out these three documents as potential candidates. That is the goal of the discussion in this appendix.
Cryptome's summaries of these documents are reproduced as-is, below [but the numbering has been changed]:
TLC Doc (iii): A telex published by Panorama, partially visible and illegible, dated February 5, 1999.
TLC Doc (iv): A letter in code from the Minister of Foreign Affairs dated February 7, 2001. Panorama does not furnish a deciphered version.
TLC Doc (vi): An eighteenth page in code was also published by Panorama. According to the author of the service, it refers to a presumed sale of uranium to China. The letter is hand dated August 9, 2001. Ms. Burba's source affirmed that he had received the documents from someone within the Niger embassy while he was investigating a presumed China-Niger uranium sale. A similar transaction seems remote. Although China- and not only China- was involved in the Pakistani atomic and has been accused of furnishing high tech to Iran, it certainly doesn't need Niger uranium. The China link appears more likely to be part of the scam.
Doc (vi) is irrelevant here because it does not directly relate to Iraq (not to mention it was encoded - see B.3 below). So, we can discard it from all of our analysis - for now.
At face value, it is impossible to be certain whether this document mentions uranium in the context of Iraq because we don't have a transcription of its contents. However, the fact that it was not translated in the first place, when it was made public, suggests that it probably does not mention uranium. More importantly, though, even if we assume this document mentions uranium in the context of Iraq, it is virtually certain that Doc (iii) did not contain a Nigerien Embassy stamp in it because it was a telex (just like TLC Niger Doc 1). So, for example, if you compare the scanned copy of Doc 1, a telex, to the corresponding letter which has basically the same content as the telex - scanned copy of Doc 1A, you will notice that Doc 1A does have a stamp (bottom right) and letterhead insignia (top right), but Doc 1, the telex has neither. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that we can eliminate TLC Doc (iii) as being a document which both contains a mention of "uranium" in the context of Iraq and a Nigerien Embassy stamp.
That leaves us TLC Doc (iv). First of all, this document is allegedly from "the Minister of Foreign Affairs". That would seem to summarily rule out the possibility that it would contain the stamp of the Nigerien embassy in Rome.
Further, this document is a letter in code. There are two other documents in code in the publicized list. One of these documents in code is TLC Niger Doc 6. As the scanned image shows (see document with title "MESSAGIO B") - and so does the translation - such a document does/will NOT overtly mention the word "uranium" (hence the use of code). The second document is TLC Doc (vi). In this context, reading Elisabetta Burba's observation makes it clear that this document - the one relating to China and uranium - could not be deciphered without a code book and that she was only able to establish that it mentioned uranium after referring to a Niger code book. The bottom line is that, as far as the INR analyst was concerned, TLC Doc (iv) could definitely NOT have been the "uranium document" that the analyst referred to, simply because the analyst said that he figured out "immediately" that the Global Support document was bogus and that it had a stamp similar to the stamp in the uranium document(s). There is no mention that the analyst actually consulted a code book to figure out which documents mentioned uranium in order to do the "immediate" analysis.
Based on these observations, I conclude that the INR analyst could NOT have been referring to TLC Docs (iii), (iv) or (vi) as the "uranium document(s)" in his initial analysis. There must have been some other, yet-to-be-publicly-released, forged Niger document(s) that reference uranium.
UPDATE: I just realized that the term "seal" is often used synonymously with "stamp" - and could be confused with "stamp". All references to "seal" in this page have therefore been deleted.