Uranium from Africa and the Niger Forgeries: When did the CIA first receive copies of the Niger uranium forgeries? - Part 4: The CIA-DGSE Interactions of 2001/2002
by eriposte
[This is part of my ongoing coverage on the uranium from Africa matter; click here to read a consolidated synopsis of my overall findings]
This is the next part of a series (Introduction, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) focused on obtaining an answer to the question of when the CIA (in the U.S.) first received copies of (some or all of) the Niger uranium forgeries. In this part, I discuss the interview that the former Vice-Director of the French intelligence service (DGSE) - Alain Chouet - gave to the intrepid journalists Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D'Avanzo of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica (translation by de Gondi at European Tribune) regarding his agency's previously unreported interactions with the CIA in 2001 and 2002. Chouet's observations by far provide the most direct evidence that the CIA had in their possession some or all of the Niger forgeries well before they claimed to have first received them (from Elisabetta Burba of Panorama magazine in Oct 2002). Not surprisingly, this aspect of the uranium from Africa scandal was never reported or discussed in the woeful Senate (SSCI) Report or the equally woeful Robb-Silberman report.
Since there are a few different aspects to this story that are worth reviewing, let me discuss them in the following sections.
1. CIA information request to DGSE in Summer 2002
2. CIA and the Niger forgeries in Summer 2002
3. The strange French uranium claim in Nov 2002
4. Independent validation of Chouet's claims
5. Conclusions
1. CIA information request to DGSE in Summer 2002
Let's start with de Gondi's translation of La Repubblica's article (emphasis mine, throughout this post):
Alain Chouet wants to put in the right sequence dates and protagonists. A substantial correction: the `Nigergate' prologue was staged in the summer 2001, before September 11th, at the hands of the CIA.
“Early in the summer 2001, the CIA passed us a piece of information both general and alarming. ‘Iraq’ – Langley warned – ‘is apparently trying to purchase uranium from an African country’. The Americans added that they had been put on the alert by a trip, dating back two years, of the Iraqi ambassador to the Holy See to [several] Central-African nations. As standard procedure, the Americans never reveal the source of their information. Washington did not mention Niger but, in more general terms, Africa. The U.S. knew that not a leaf stirs in the African francophone ex-colonies that the French aren’t aware of, especially in the field of counter-proliferation. For that matter, that information, though general, wasn’t just routine for us. From the Gulf War (1991) onwards, France could not afford to be accused of underestimating Saddam Hussein’s rearmament programs. Therefore, when the Americans moved in the summer 2001, I rolled up my sleeves. I instructed my men to get to work in Africa. In Niger, obviously, but also in Namibia (you will soon understand why). The outcome was entirely negative. At the end of August 2001, the alert died down. After the attack against the Towers, between September 2001 and the spring of the following year, that piece of information about the uranium from Niger was once again an indistinct and irrelevant background noise. Then something happened…”
This is what happened according to the Sismi. On September 21st 2001, Admiral Gianfranco Battelli (Pollari’s predecessor) sent a cable to Langley with news of a mission ‘of Iraqi staff to Niger, which took place in 1999. On that trip questions were asked as to the production of uranium ore in the country’s two mines and on the mode of exportation of that material’. On October 15th of the same year, Nicolò Pollari took office at Sismi. On October 18th, with a letter one and a half pages long, Pollari explained to the CIA that ‘the news on Niger come from a reliable source, even though we cannot evaluate its quality’. In February and March 2002, two more reports confirming the Niger lead of Saddam’s atomic re-armament came to Langley from a ‘foreign Service’. Sismi claimed it was ‘French information’. Chouet smiles.
“No, things did not go that way. The CIA knocked on our door once again, with the story of the uranium, only in late spring 2002. The end of April, I would say, beginning of May (therefore after the February and March reports). This time their request had high-priority urgency (on February 2002, Vice-President Dick Cheney demanded the CIA to get information, after receiving a report from the DIA confirming the Iraqi purchase of 500 tons per year of uranium from Niger). Compared to the summer of the previous year, the Americans were more precise. They named a country, Niger. [And] gave a number of details. They actually handed us all the information which only later we found – and I’m stressing ‘only later found’ - were in Rocco Martino’s dossier and which we had never heard about till then. As standard procedure, Langley held back the source. They did not mention Martino or Sismi. They simply asked us to check that stuff. Langley’s pressure was strong. The CIA asked for an immediate answer about the authenticity of the information. Immediately after September 11th, the relations between Dgse and the CIA were excellent (these good relations have always been questioned by Italy) and therefore I arranged a ‘deep undercover’ mission. Between the end of May and June 2002, ‘my men’ were in Njamey, the capital of Niger. The mission – as arranged by the Dgse operative directions – was held back from our Foreign Office as well as from the whole diplomatic network”.
In Niger the Dgse men found nothing at all, nothing different from what had already been found by ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whom the CIA had sent to Njamey in February.
Five of our best men were part of the team. With a deep knowledge of Niger and of all the issues connected to yellowcake. My men stayed in Africa for a couple of weeks and, once back, they told me a very simple thing: ‘the American information on uranium is all bullshit’. When I read their report, I did not doubt their work nor, if you let me say so, my mind. I know Niger well but I can say that I have known Baghdad and Saddam even better. And I know that if Saddam had wanted to purchase yellowcake (which he already owned in great quantities) from Niger he would have never asked an Ambassador to open negotiations. Saddam did not trust anybody in his Foreign Office. He certainly didn’t trust his ambassadors around the world. For such a task he would have sent one of his sons. On the other hand, we knew the reason of the journey of Iraqi Ambassador to the Holy See, Wissam Al Zahawie. He had to identify an African country ready to accept the storage of the regime’s hazardous toxic waste, in exchange for money. In fact Namibia, which had been used as a dumping ground by Iraq, had told Baghdad they couldn’t go on contaminating their soil. I told the CIA the results of our mission in Niger. The Americans seemed very disappointed for what they had to hear.
In summary:
- In late April or early May 2002, the CIA sent a request to DGSE asking them to weigh in on the validity of claims that Saddam Hussein had sought or bought large quantities of uranium from Niger.
- After an undercover investigation in Niger, DGSE sent a message back to the CIA that the Niger uranium claims were total B.S. This appears to have happened no earlier than around mid June 2002.
[There is another interesting piece of information that Chouet shared - that one of the possible motivations of Wissam Al-Zahawie's trip to Niger in 1999 was to "identify an African country ready to accept the storage of the regime’s hazardous toxic waste, in exchange for money". This is new to me and strengthens the already rock-solid case against the British.]
2. CIA and the Niger forgeries in Summer 2002
The response from DGSE to the CIA was evidently received with some disappointment, as Chouet noted. So what did the CIA do then? Back to Chouet's narrative:
The Americans seemed very disappointed for what they had to hear. I understood then the reasons for their frustration and I understood them even better when the CIA, not content with the result, at the end of June 2002, sent us a part of the documents of the Niger dossier, as if they wanted to underline the reasons for their insistence”.
We are at a crucial point. End of June 2002. Langley sent a part of the Niger documents to Paris. Which documents? According to the Italian and American reconstruction, those documents were not yet in the hands of the CIA nor had they ever been in the hands of the Sismi.
“If what I’m saying surprises you, I can’t help it. I tell you I received a ‘sample’ of those documents in the summer 2002 from Langley. They sent the sealed envelope to Paris through the usual intelligence channels. I can remember they were no more than a dozen pages. There was a short introduction where the CIA explained the meaning of the documents and no more than three complete documents, I would say. After a quick scrutiny we decided it was all rubbish. Gross fakes. The document which struck me most referred to the Iraqi Ambassador to the Holy See. Reading that page, I thought back to the odd and general request of the summer 2001 and wondered: ‘Hey, the Americans… they have had this stuff for one year and they tell us only now, after we have already been to Niger twice’. Anyway the Americans didn’t say who they got that stuff from, then or later. But we discovered things ourselves. We may be French but not altogether that stupid. First of all, those documents, as far as one could read, led to the Niger Embassy in Rome. And we definitely know where Rome is. Besides, on those same days when the CIA handed down to us part of the documents, this gentleman appeared. A Rocco Martino, your fellow countryman”.
...
“This story about Rocco Martino working for [the French] is just a falsehood. The first time he knocked on our door was at the end of June 2002. He said he had important documents about an illicit trade of uranium from Niger to Iraq and asked one hundred thousand dollars for the stuff. Now, I’m too used to Arab souks to swallow bait like that. So I told my people to tell him we would look at the stuff first and then, if we were interested, we would discuss the price. This is how things went. Martino turned up at our Embassy in Luxembourg and asked to talk to some of our people. I asked Jaques Nadal, at the Brussels station, to meet the Italian in Luxembourg. Nadal met him at the end of June 2002”.
...
...So, Rocco looked for us. We met him twice. The first time he showed his papers. Nadal took them, sent them to Paris. In Paris we compared them with those the Americans had passed on to us a few weeks before and which we had already judged a forgery. They were identical. We decided Rocco was the source of all the bullshit passed off to the Americans. The very same bullshit which had been going around since the summer 2001. We decided that Rocco was the source that, in those same days, was trying to pass off those same documents to the Germans of the Bundesnachrichtendiens (Bnd, federal intelligence service). The Germans asked for advice and we warned them it was all rubbish. We met the Italian a second time around the end of July 2002. We told him his stuff was a trashy forgery. In the meantime we checked up on Rocco Martino and discovered he was an ex agent of the Italian Intelligence”.
This is an amazing sequence of events, largely unreported in the American press. In summary:
- By the end of June 2002, the CIA sent DGSE copies of some of the Niger forgeries. Chouet is very categorical about this and even acknowledges that this information contradicts the Bush administration claim in the Senate (SSCI) Report that the CIA only saw the documents for the first time in October 2002, after receiving them from Elisabetta Burba.
- Chouet speculates that perhaps the CIA had these documents a year earlier in 2001. I don't discuss this speculation here, since it the focus of my next post in this series.
- Rocco Martino first contacted DGSE in late June 2002, around the same time that the CIA sent DGSE a copy of some of the Niger forgeries. Martino tried to sell them the same forgeries for a huge price of $100,000. Chouet says DGSE agent Jacques Nadal based in Brussels (Belgium) was asked to meet with Martino in Luxembourg.
- It appears that sometime in late June 2002 or early July 2002, DGSE told the CIA (Langley) that the Niger documents they sent DGSE were forgeries. So, the CIA not only heard back in June 2002 that the Niger uranium claims were bunk, they also heard a few weeks later that the Niger documents that the CIA had in their possession were forgeries.
The timing of all this is quite interesting. After all, as I've pointed out before, the CIA's Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis (NESA) office in the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) made a little noticed change in their uranium reporting in summer 2002:
The SSCI Report's discussion of the uranium claim subsequent to March 25, 2002 (the date of the third and final report by CIA's DO on the Niger uranium allegation) is very sparse until we hit the late-September 2002/early October 2002 period. The time period between March 25, 2002 and September 2002 is covered in barely one page (p. 47-48).
The August 1, 2002 date is significant because this is the first date when a CIA intelligence paper explicitly dropped the mention of the uranium claim. In fact, what is most interesting about the August 1, 2002 CIA report is that it was from CIA NESA and it dropped a claim that was present in NESA's May 10, 2002 report. As the SSCI Report notes (emphasis mine):
On May 10, 2002, the CIA's Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis (NESA) in the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) prepared a Principals Committee briefing book updating the status of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs. The document noted that a "foreign government service says Iraq was trying to acquire 500 tons of uranium from Niger."
...
On August 1, 2002 CIA NESA published a paper on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities which did not include the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium information.
Let' connect this back to what Chouet said. The CIA contacted DGSE first in late April or early May 2002, just around the time of the CIA NESA report which mentioned the uranium claim. DGSE responded to the CIA debunking the claim and the forgeries by sometime in June 2002 or early July 2002. The very first report from CIA NESA after that date (as mentioned in the SSCI Report) - August 1, 2002 - dropped the uranium claim. (Thereafter, NESA made multiple attempts to get rid of the uranium claim, especially in October 2002.) Of course, Chouet does not mention who his contacts were at Langley - so it is unclear if NESA had any direct interactions with DGSE in this time period. But this is certainly worth exploring further.
3. The strange French uranium claim in Nov 2002
Chouet also helpfully clarified a seemingly contradictory uranium claim from the French that occurred in late 2002. I discussed this before as part of my series on the SSCI Report. Here is the claim:
On November 22, 2002, during a meeting with State Department officials, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs Director for Nonproliferation said that France had information on an Iraqi attempt to buy uranium from Niger. He said that France had determined that no uranium had been shipped, but France believed the reporting was true that Iraq had made a procurement attempt for uranium from Niger. [page 59]
This obviously appears to contradict Chouet's claim that the French debunked the Niger uranium claims in summer 2002, but that is not the case. First of all, here is what the Senate Report said subsequently:
On March 4, 2003, the U.S. Government learned that the French had based their initial assessment that Iraq had attempted to procure uranium from Niger on the same documents that the U.S. had provided to the INVO [IAEA]. [page 69]
Chouet went a step further and exposed the fact that the narrative in the Senate Report was actually misleading. We return to de Gondi's translation of La Repubblica's article:
Sismi accused the French Intelligence of having kept quiet about the groundlessness of the Niger dossier. Actually Sismi reported that the counter-proliferation director in the French Foreign Office during a meeting on November 22nd 2002, with officials from the State Department, had said that France had information according to which Iraq had tried to purchase uranium in Niger. The information, claimed the French diplomat, had been verified and thought reliable. Quoting the report of the Control Committee on Intelligence of the U.S. Senate, Sismi maintained that ‘only on March 4th 2003, France told Washington that their information about uranium was based on the same information Paris had’.
“I’ll say this again for the umpteenth time. First: our Foreign Office does not know what the Dgse does. That’s the rule. It’s standard procedure not only in the French Services. Second: we told the CIA in the summer 2002. Third: pay attention to the words in the US report. It does not say that France informed the Americans on March 4th 2003. The report says: ‘On March 4th 2003, the American government has learnt that the French had based their initial analysis on the same documents in the hands of Washington’. ‘The government understands that the French…’. Someone sat on that information. In Washington, perhaps. Certainly not in Paris. And then I would be more cautious in saying that our Foreign Office claimed that France had evidence of an attempted illegal trade of uranium. I’ll tell you one thing. In the two years when I was director at Dgse, I happened to meet George Tenet, the then CIA head. I took part in meetings between Paris and Washington. Well, if I said something was ‘possible,’ that word became ‘probable’ in Tenet’s words”.
4. Independent validation of Chouet's claims
In the previous sections I summarized the most important pieces of information that Alain Chouet shared with La Repubblica. Since then, additional information has been published that backs up many of his claims.
4.1 Regarding Chouet's claim that the CIA contacted DGSE in 2001 and the summer of 2002 to get DGSE's input on the validity of the uranium allegations, this was backed up by a former CIA official and a current French Government official. Tom Hamburger et al. reported the following in the Los Angeles Times, subsequent to the La Repubblica piece, after interviewing Chouet as well:
The previously undisclosed exchanges between the U.S. and the French, described in interviews last week by the retired chief of the French counterintelligence service and a former CIA official, came on separate occasions in 2001 and 2002.
The French conclusions were reached after extensive on-the-ground investigations in Niger and other former French colonies, where the uranium mines are controlled by French companies, said Alain Chouet, the French former official. He said the French investigated at the CIA's request.
Chouet's account was "at odds with our understanding of the issue," a U.S. government official said. The U.S. official declined to elaborate and spoke only on condition that neither he nor his agency be named.
However, the essence of Chouet's account - that the French repeatedly investigated the Niger claim, found no evidence to support it, and warned the CIA - was extensively corroborated by the former CIA official and a current French government official, who both spoke on condition of anonymity.
4.2 Chouet claimed that DGSE asked one of their agents based in Brussels (Belgium) to meet Rocco Martino and that Martino gave him the forgeries in an attempt to sell them to DGSE for the huge sum of $100,000. This appears to be consistent with the testimony of "La Signora" who supplied Martino with the forged documents. This is what "La Signora" said in her interrogation session, as reported recently by il Giornale and translated as follows by de Gondi at European Tribune:
Martino always told me that if ever he got hold of an eventual contract between the two parties he would have gained a considerable sum from a certain "intelligence" company in Brussels to which he belonged.
Of course, Martino did not "belong" to DGSE - he was merely trying to sell them the documents. Martino also made this comment in his conversation with Elisabetta Burba - as reported by il Giornale and translated as follows by de Gondi at European Tribune:
On another tape, Burba is together with a reporter from CBS who asks a lot of questions. Martino refers the facts he already told Burba, emphasising the obscure role of Nucera and letting on that many of the documents that he received from "la Signora" were passed on to a diplomat from a "tranquil" country. "One of my friends."
Belgium (or France) certainly qualifies as a "tranquil" country. In fact, Rocco Martino also said the following (translation published at the Cryptome website) in an interview with il Giornale in September 2004:
The hoax began one day when a Nigerian (as published) Embassy source who had proven to be reliable on previous occasions and who had contacts also with the collaborator of a SISMI (Intelligence and Military Security Service) aide, passed on to me a whole lot of information. It is true that that information included some references to a uranium traffic between Niger and Iraq. What did I do at that juncture? I passed it on to the French secret service, with which I am in touch and by which I was remunerated. I passed it on also to Panorama, which assessed it in order to study it, dispatching a reporter to Niger and turning the file over to the US Embassy in Rome for cross-checking.
4.3 Finally, there is another somewhat interesting aspect to what Chouet said:
I tell you I received a ‘sample’ of those [Niger] documents in the summer 2002 from Langley. They sent the sealed envelope to Paris through the usual intelligence channels. I can remember they were no more than a dozen pages. There was a short introduction where the CIA explained the meaning of the documents and no more than three complete documents, I would say. After a quick scrutiny we decided it was all rubbish. Gross fakes.
This struck me as interesting because I remembered how many pages the IAEA said they received from the U.S. Government in early 2003. This is what British reporter Solomon Hughes of Private Eye told me in an email:
Just to reiterate, the IAEA say they received ten to twelve pages of documents [...] and these did not include the “Global Support” paper.
Perhaps this was just a coincidence but I thought it was worth mentioning.
5. Conclusions
According to the former Vice-Director of the French intelligence agency DGSE (Alain Chouet), in late April or early May 2002, the CIA sent a request to DGSE asking them to comment on the validity of claims that Saddam Hussein had sought or bought uranium from Niger. DGSE sent a message back to the CIA, after an undercover investigation in Niger, that the Niger uranium claims were totally bunk. This appears to have happened no earlier than around mid June 2002. A former CIA official and a current French Government official validated Chouet's claims. By the end of June 2002, the CIA sent DGSE copies of some of the Niger forgeries, as a follow-up on their original query. This information contradicts the Bush administration claim in the Senate (SSCI) Report that the CIA saw the documents for the first time only in October 2002, after receiving them from Elisabetta Burba of Panorama magazine.
Rocco Martino, the SISMI-affiliated peddler of the Niger forgeries, first contacted DGSE in late June 2002, around the same time that the CIA sent DGSE a copy of some of the Niger forgeries. Martino tried to sell them the same forgeries for a huge price of $100,000. DGSE agent Jacques Nadal based in Brussels (Belgium) was asked to meet with Martino in Luxembourg. All of this information appears to be broadly consistent with the testimony of "La Signora" who supplied Martino with the forged documents and Martino's comments to Elisabetta Burba.
It appears that sometime in late June 2002 or early July 2002, DGSE told the CIA (Langley) that the Niger documents they sent DGSE were forgeries. So, the CIA not only heard back in June 2002 that the Niger uranium claims were bunk, they also heard a few weeks or so later that the Niger documents they had in their possession were forgeries. The timing of all this is quite interesting because CIA's Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis (NESA) office in the Directorate of Intelligence (DI), made a little noticed change in the uranium reporting in summer 2002 - the August 1, 2002 report from CIA NESA dropped a uranium claim that was present in NESA's May 10, 2002 report.
Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D'Avanzo said this in the concluding sentence of their Chouet interview article:
Alain Chouet’s evidence muddles up the false account given by the [Italian] government to the ineffectual and submissive Parliamentary Control Committee [Copaco] and the public prosecutor[Ionta] in Rome. Will Parliament and the magistracy be able to understand that there is still much more, perhaps too much, to know in the Nigergate story?
It's quite clear they might have been writing about the U.S. as well.