NOTE from eriposte at The Left Coaster: This post is a mirrored version of the one posted at this location. This mirror is provided because the original may randomly appear truncated for reasons beyond the control of this author.

WMDgate: Fixing Intelligence Around Policy, Part 4A -- CIA's WINPAC and Uranium from Africa

This post is part of a series (see Introduction and Parts 1, 2A-1, 2A-2, 2A-3, 2A-4, 2A-5, 2B-1, 2B-2, 2C, 3, 3A) focused on building a case to demonstrate the Bush White House's intelligence manipulation, fixing and misrepresentation, mostly using published Congressional reports like the Phase I Senate (SSCI) Report, the Robb-Silberman WMD Commission Report, etc. In previous parts of this series, the focus has largely been the misrepresentation of intel reports by the White House through the use of deliberately misleading or false statements (mostly in the context of the aluminum tubes issue and partly on the uranium from Africa issue). I now turn the focus onto how raw intelligence was deliberately cooked to create dubious or false intel for the White House. In this context, there has been a lot of focus on the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) and other entities (like the Iraqi National Congress - INC), but there is one particular group which has received less attention (in my view) than it deserves. I am referring here to the role played by certain individuals in CIA's WINPAC, especially individuals who were often the White House's co-conspirators contacts within the CIA, in manipulating or misrepresenting raw intel to generate false claims regarding Iraq's alleged quest for WMDs, in order to satisfy the expectations of the Bush White House.

In this part I focus on the role played by a few individuals in WINPAC in perpetrating the uranium from Africa hoax. The picture that emerges is that the uranium from Africa claim was stovepiped to the White House by those individuals using bogus raw "intel", in order to meet the White House's expectations, while a parallel communication channel from the CIA that even included then-DCI George Tenet was trying hard (and ultimately unsuccessfully) to get the WH to drop the uranium claim. Thus, a rogue operation involving some personnel in a WH-created group within the CIA (WINPAC) who were cooperative with the WH, was conveniently used to paint the "CIA" as a monolithic entity that got the intel "wrong". In other words, the scapegoating of the CIA for WMDgate was a deliberate act of deception by the Bush administration - to falsely paint the CIA (and other IC agencies) as organizations that had no internal dissenting views regarding the fabricated or misrepresented "intelligence". Additionally, in the first week of October 2002, the NSC/WH was evidently receiving two opposing views on the uranium matter from the CIA - the WINPAC view and the official view of the CIA conveyed by someone as high as George Tenet in a far more aggressive and categorical manner. Yet the WH did not tell their WINPAC contacts that they were wrong, and that they should be following the lead of George Tenet. The reason for this is quite obvious.

This is a long post that is divided into the following sections (for a high-level summary read the conclusions section).

1. Introduction: SSCI Report on the Role of WINPAC

2. Analysis Timeline

2.1 Focus: 8/1/02 though 1/28/03
2.2 Timeline: The CIA's expressed position on "uranium from Africa"

3. The NIE claim on uranium from Africa

3.1 How the NIE claim came about: Not from a CIA Paper
3.2 The CIA did not stand by the NIE claim
3.3 WINPAC knew that uranium claim was bogus/not credible
3.4 The Stovepiping: Most pipes lead back to WINPAC

4. Uranium from Africa: WINPAC v. The Others in the CIA - in a Nutshell

5. Conclusions

Appendix 1: Acronyms used in this post

The Senate (SSCI) Report has this cryptic statement in their Niger conclusions (emphasis mine):

Conclusion 20. The Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) comments and assessments about the Iraq-Niger uranium reporting were inconsistent and, at times contradictory. These inconsistencies were based in part on a misunderstanding of a CIA Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) Iraq analyst's assessment of the reporting. The CIA should have had a mechanism in place to ensure that agency assessments and information passed to policymakers were consistent. [page 78]

What does the section in bold really mean?

It's hard to tell exactly since a casual read of the SSCI Report makes it quite difficult to reach this conclusion. With the use of imprecise language and obfuscation, the main body of the SSCI report makes it appear that the CIA was one confused mess on the uranium matter - but then shocks the casual reader with its conclusion (above) that almost seems to come out of the blue.

However, if one were to read the SSCI Report with a fine toothed comb it becomes apparent that:

• the uranium from Africa hoax in the Bush SOTU was largely due to the "cooperation" (with the White House) of a few individuals at WINPAC (it was more than just one analyst)
• there were significant opposing views within the CIA on the uranium claim (especially within CIA NESA, even setting aside INR's well-known dissent that the claim was "highly dubious"), and
• the position of the CIA's top management (including then-DCI George Tenet) was that the uranium claim was not credible

Indeed, the picture that emerges is that the uranium from Africa claim was stovepiped to the White House by certain individuals at WINPAC using bogus raw "intel", in order to meet the White House's expectations, while a parallel communication channel that even included then-DCI George Tenet was trying hard (and ultimately unsuccessfully) to get the WH to drop the uranium claim. Thus, a rogue operation involving select WH-cooperative personnel in a WH-created group within the CIA (WINPAC) was conveniently used to paint the "CIA" as a monolithic entity that got the intel "wrong".

All of this becomes evident by analyzing the Senate Report and the positions on the uranium claim expressed by different individuals or groups within the CIA (discussed in the rest of this post and summarized in Section 4).

In this section, I discuss my analysis timeline and provide a chronology of the CIA's known positions on the uranium from Africa claim largely using information in the Senate (SSCI) Report.

The timeline picked for analysis is 8/1/02 through 1/28/03.

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.

Note that, like WINPAC, NESA is part of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence (DI). So, the timing of NESA's backtracking on the uranium claim is more than interesting. After all, Tom Hamburger et al. reported in the Los Angeles Times recently that (emphasis mine):

More than a year before President Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons material in Africa, the French spy service began repeatedly warning the CIA in secret communications that there was no evidence to support the allegation.

The previously undisclosed exchanges between the U.S. and the French, described in interviews last week by the retired chief [Alain Chouet] of the French counterintelligence service [DGSE] and a former CIA official, came on separate occasions in 2001 and 2002.
...
Chouet recalled that his agency was contacted by the CIA in the summer of 2001 — shortly before the attacks of Sept. 11 — as intelligence services in Europe and North America became more concerned about chatter from known terrorist sympathizers. CIA officials asked their French counterparts to check that uranium in Niger and elsewhere was secure. The former CIA official confirmed Chouet's account of this exchange.

Then twice in 2002, Chouet said, the CIA contacted the French again for similar help. By mid-2002, Chouet recalled, the request was more urgent and more specific. The CIA was asking questions about a particular agreement purportedly signed by Nigerian officials to sell 500 metric tons of uranium to Iraq.

Chouet dispatched a five- or six-man team to Niger to double-check any reports of a sale or an attempt to purchase uranium. The team found none.

Chouet and his staff noticed that the details of the allegation matched those in fraudulent documents that an Italian informant earlier had offered to sell to the French.

"We told the Americans, 'Bull - - - -. It doesn't make any sense,' " Chouet said.

Chouet said the information was contained in formal cables delivered to CIA offices in Paris and Langley, Va. Those communications did not use such coarse language, he said, but they delivered the point in consistent and blunt terms.

"We had the feeling that we had been heard," Chouet said. "There was nothing more to say other than that."

The former CIA official could not confirm the specifics of this 2002 communication, but said the general conclusions matched what many in the CIA were learning at the time.
...
Before speaking with The Times last week, Chouet had told part of his story to La Repubblica, a Rome newspaper, prompting Italian investigators to resume their inquiry and seek Chouet's testimony.
...
Still, Chouet said in the interview that the question from CIA officials in the summer of 2002 seemed to follow almost word for word from the documents in question. He said that an Italian intelligence source, Rocco Martino, had tried to sell the documents to the French, but that in a matter of days French analysts determined the documents had been forged.

"We thought they [the Americans] were in possession of the documents," Chouet said. "The words were very similar." The former CIA official said that in fact the U.S. had been offered the same documents in 2001 but had quickly rejected them as forgeries.

The LA Times report (and the preceding La Repubblica article) makes it clear that the French communicated to the CIA no later than mid-2002 ("summer 2002") that the Niger uranium claims were essentially "bull----". Almost certainly "mid-2002" and "summer 2002" occurred between May 10, 2002 and August 1, 2002.

NOTE: I hope to have more on this in a future post. I am told that the reports on the French feedback in 2001/2002 are pretty solid and yet, it is particularly interesting that there is NO mention of this communication (from the DGSE to the U.S. dismissing the uranium claim) in the Senate Report. Was this hidden from the SSCI? If so, why - and what is the SSCI going to do about it?

The end date for my analysis is intentionally chosen to be the date of George Bush's 2003 SOTU, for obvious reasons.

The following table provides a timeline that tracks the position expressed on the uranium claim by different individuals or groups within the CIA during the time period of 5/10/02 (shortly after the SSCI Report's discussion of the 3/25/02 CIA DO Niger uranium intel report) through 2/11/03 (shortly after Powell's UN speech). This information is used in subsequent sections for my analysis.

Now to the analysis.

In this section I discuss a number of pieces of background information that are highly relevant to understanding how the uranium claim made it into the NIE and the role that some individuals in WINPAC played in sustaining a claim that others in the CIA (and INR) had considered bogus or not credible.

3.1 How the NIE claim came about: Not from a CIA Paper

3.2 The CIA did not stand by the NIE claim

3.3 WINPAC knew that uranium claim was bogus/not credible

3.4 The Stovepiping: Most pipes lead back to WINPAC

One of the many interesting pieces of information in the SSCI Report is this (emphasis mine):

On September 12, 2002, the DCI officially directed the National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Strategic and Nuclear Programs to begin to draft an NIE. The National Intelligence Council (NIC) staff drew the discussion of nuclear reconstitution for the draft NIE largely from an August 2002 CIA assessment and a September 2002 DIA assessment, Iraq's Reemerging Nuclear Weapons Programs. [page 52]

The SSCI Report also mentions an August 2002 CIA assessment and a September 2002 DIA Assessment earlier in the report and here's what those assessments had to say about the uranium claim (emphasis mine):

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.

...In September 2002, the DIA published an intelligence assessment (Defense Intelligence Assessment, Iraqs Reemerging Nuclear Program) which outlined Iraq's recent efforts to rebuild its nuclear program. The report focused on a variety of issues related to Iraq's nuclear efforts, including procurement efforts, nuclear facilities, consolidation of scientists and uranium acquisition. On the latter issue, the assessment said "Iraq has been vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake." The report described the intelligence on the Iraq-Niger uranium deal and several other intelligence reports on Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The assessment said that "DIA cannot confirm whether Iraq succeeded in acquiring uranium ore and/or yellowcake from these sources." [page 48]

Isn't that fascinating? The August 2002 CIA assessment (drafted by NESA) did not actually mention the uranium from Africa claim at all (as I also discussed in Sec. 2.1.1); only the September 2002 DIA report did (how's that for irony, considering that the CIA was blamed for the uranium claim by the Bush administration).

The question, then, is: how did the uranium claim get into the NIE?

Here's the relevant Senate Report discussion on this (emphasis mine):

(U) At the NIE coordination meeting, the only analyst who voiced disagreement with the uranium section was an INR analyst. Several analysts from other agencies told Committee staff that they did not recall even discussing the uranium reporting at the meeting. All of the analysts said that the bulk of the time at the meeting was spent debating other issues such as the aluminum tubes, time lines for weapons designs, and procurement of magnets and other dual use items. CIA, DIA and DOE analysts all said that at the time the NIE was written, they agreed with the NIE assessment that Iraq was attempting to procure uranium from Africa. Some analysts said, in retrospect, the language should have been more qualified than it was, but they generally agreed with the text.

(U) The uranium text was included only in the body of the NIE, not in the key judgments section because the interagency consensus was that Iraq's efforts to acquire uranium were not key to the argument that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. According to the NIO, the key judgments were drawn from a CIA paper which only highlighted the acquisition of aluminum tubes as the reason Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. The NIO said that at the NIE coordination meeting, analysts added other reasons they believed Iraq was reconstituting, such as acquiring magnets, machine tools, and balancing machines, and reestablishing Iraq's nuclear scientists cadre. When someone, the NIO was not sure who [7 - eRiposte note: this may have been a DOE analyst per the footnote] suggested that the uranium information be included as another sign of reconstitution, the INR Iraq nuclear analyst spoke up and said that he did not agree with the uranium reporting and that INR would be including text indicating their disagreement in their footnote on nuclear reconstitution. The NIO said he did not recall anyone else at the coordination meeting who disagreed with the uranium text, but also did not recall anyone really supporting including the uranium issue as part of the judgment that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, so he suggested that the uranium information did not need to part of the key judgments. He told Committee staff he suggested that "We'll leave it in the paper for completeness. Nobody can say we didn't connect the dots. But we don't have to put that dot in the key judgments."

(U) Because INR disagreed with much of the nuclear section of the NIE, it decided to convey its alternative views in text boxes, rather than object to every point throughout the NIE. INR prepared two separate boxes, one for the key judgments section and a two page box for the body of the nuclear section, which included a sentence which stated that "the claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are, in INR's assessment, highly dubious." [page 52-53]

Thus, the NIO's statement confirms that the uranium claim did not get into the NIE based on the August 2002 CIA report, but through a different mechanism. But the mystery here is why the CIA analyst (or analysts) who attended the NIE coordination meeting did not support INR considering that the CIA (NESA) paper in August 2002 had dropped the claim and that the CIA had communicated to the British on 9/11/02 (just 2 weeks earlier) that they did not consider the claim to be credible.

Here is what I conclude is the most likely explanation. The CIA analyst or analysts who attended the NIE coordination meeting were likely from WINPAC and not from NESA.

NESA not only withdrew the uranium claim in their August 2002 paper, but made multiple attempts in October 2002 to downplay or eliminate the uranium claim (as is evident from Sec 2.2). NESA's effort to get rid of the uranium claim after the publication of the NIE actually started on the day the NIE was released (Oct 1, 2002)! So, it is implausible that the NESA Iraq analyst responsible for the uranium issue was present in the NIE coordination meeting. The NIO said that "he did not recall anyone else [other than INR] at the coordination meeting who disagreed with the uranium text" - which implies that the CIA NESA uranium analyst must not have been present.

On the other hand, some WINPAC personnel, unlike NESA and unlike other senior CIA officials who raised serious questions about the credibility of uranium claim (on Sep 11, 2002 and Oct 2002), were repeatedly allowing the WH to use the uranium claim in their drafts (on Sep 11, 2002, Sep 24, 2002 and beyond). (This is discussed further in Sec. 3.4 of this post.)

Therefore, using the fragmentary statements in the SSCI Report, I conclude that the reason the uranium claim even made it into the NIE was because the uranium analysts who attended the NIE coordination meeting to represent the CIA were likely from WINPAC and they likely did not object to including the claim in the body of the NIE even though CIA NESA had dropped the uranium claim in their August 2002 report and others in the CIA had communicated their lack of trust in the uranium claim to the British on Sep 11, 2002.

One of the myths perpetuated by the Bush administration after they retracted the 2003 SOTU uranium claim is that the CIA actually stood by the uranium claim in the NIE at the time of the SOTU. I've covered this myth before and it is worth repeating here.

Let's start with a couple of quotes from then-NSA Condoleezza Rice, on this issue.

Condi Rice (7/11/03):

I'm saying that when we put it together, put together the Secretary's remarks, the Secretary decided that he would caveat the aluminum tubes, which he did -- he said there's some disagreement about what this might be -- and he decided that he would not use the uranium story. The Secretary also has an intelligence arm that happened to hold that view. But the NIE, which, by the way, the Agency was standing by at the time of the -- the time of the State of the Union, and was standing by at the time of the Secretary's speech, has the yellow cake story in it, had the aluminum tube story in it. Now, if there were doubts about the underlying intelligence to that NIE, those doubts were not communicated to the President, to the Vice President, or to me.

Condi Rice (7/13/03):

And had there been even a peep that the agency did not want that sentence in or that George Tenet did not want that sentence in, that the director of Central Intelligence did not want it in, it would have been gone.

The claim that the CIA was standing by the uranium claim in the NIE at the time of the State of the Union was at best deliberately misleading, and objectively speaking, just false. One of the reasons why is explained in brief by the Iraq on the Record report:

Ms. Rice was responding to questions regarding how the claim that Iraq sought uranium in Africa made it into the President's January 28, 2003, State of the Union address. The statement that the Director of Central Intelligence and the CIA did not object to the claim was false. In October 2002, the CIA expressed doubts about the claim in two memos to the White House, including one addressed to Ms. Rice. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet also warned against using the claim in a telephone call to Ms. Rice’s deputy in October 2002.

Actually, the evidence against Rice's claim is richer. So, let's take a closer look at what happened, using extracts from the Senate (SSCI) Report, to understand why Rice's claim was at best misleading, and based on a strict interpretation, just false.

3.2.1 NIE Timeline
3.2.2 Post-NIE backtracking and CIA White Paper
3.2.3 Cincinnati Speech
3.2.4 2003 State of the Union
3.2.5 Inferences

The work on the NIE got started on 12 September 2002 and the first draft was circulated on September 23, 2002 :

On September 12, 2002, the DCI officially directed the National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Strategic and Nuclear Programs to begin to draft an NIE. The National Intelligence Council (NIC) staff drew the discussion of nuclear reconstitution for the draft NIE largely from an August 2002 CIA assessment and a September 2002 DIA assessment, Iraq's Reemerging Nuclear Weapons Programs. The NIO sent a draft of the entire NIE to IC analysts on September 23, 2002 for coordination and comments and held an interagency coordination meeting on September 25, 2002 to discuss the draft and work out any changes. [page 52]

The Senate Report points out that the IC deliberately left out the uranium from Africa reporting from the Key Judgements of the NIE, and only included a brief mention of it in the body of the NIE (see Sec. 3.1 for more). The NIE was released on October 1, 2002:

On October 1, 2002, the NIC published the NIE on Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction. The language on Iraq's efforts to acquire uranium from Africa appeared as it did in the draft version and INR's position that "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are highly dubious" was included in a text box, separated by about 60 pages from the discussion of the uranium issue. [page 54]

However, immediately after the NIE was released, senior CIA officials started to dramatically backtrack from the uranium claim:

(U) On October 2, 2002, the Deputy DCI testified before the SSCI. Senator Jon Kyl asked the Deputy DCI whether he had read the British white paper and whether he disagreed with anything in the report. The Deputy DCI testified that "the one thing where I think they stretched a little bit beyond where we would stretch is on the points about Iraq seeking uranium from various African locations. We've looked at those reports and we don't think they are very credible. It doesn't diminish our conviction that he's going for nuclear weapons, but I think they reached a little bit on that one point. Otherwise I think it's very solid."

(U) On October 4, 2002, the NIO for Strategic and Nuclear Programs testified before the SSCI. When asked by Senator Fred Thompson if there was disagreement with the British white paper, the NIO said that "they put more emphasis on the uranium acquisition in Africa than we would." He added, "there is some information on attempts and, as we said, maybe not to this committee, but in the last couple of weeks, there's a question about some of those attempts because of the control of the material in those countries. In one case the mine is completely flooded and how would they get the material. For us it's more the concern that they have uranium in-country now. It's under inspection. It's under control of the IAEA - the International Atomic Energy Agency - but they only inspect it once a year." The NIO told Committee staff that he was speaking as an IC representative and was representing INR's known view on the issue. He said at the time of his remarks, he did not believe that the CIA had any problem with the credibility of the reporting, but said the CIA may have believed that the uranium information should not be included in an unclassified white paper.

(U) Also, on October 4, 2002, CIA published an unclassified White Paper, Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs. The NIO for NESA started work on the white paper in the spring of 2002, well before efforts began on the classified NIE. A CIA NESA analyst drafted the body of the White Paper and did not include text on Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium from Africa. [page 54-55]

So, immediately after the NIE was released, the CIA started to seriously backtrack and dismiss the uranium claim as not credible. The CIA's unclassified White Paper (which was actually a truncated version of the Key Judgements section of the classified NIE) that was released *after* the NIE was released, did not mention the uranium from Africa claim. This is important to note because even if the CIA did not want to reveal "sources and methods" (as was incredulously claimed by the WINPAC Director as the reason why he wanted the claim removed from the Bush 2003 SOTU - see Sec. 3.2.5 below) they could easily have introduced a simple, general statement that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium from Africa, in the NIE Key Judgements and the White Paper (just like the British did in their own declassified White Paper released prior to the NIE). That would not have revealed sources or methods. Yet they chose not to do so - because the claim was not based on credible or reliable intelligence.

What's more, the CIA's seniormost officials (including George Tenet himself) made deliberate attempts to dissuade the White House from using the uranium claim in a speech in October 2002 (after the NIE's release) - a claim that the White House/NSC had included in the speech draft:

(U) On October 4, 2002, the NSC sent a draft of a speech they were preparing for the President to deliver in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was draft six of the speech and contained the line, "and the regime has been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide from Africa - an essential ingredient in the enrichment process."

(U) The CIA's former Associate Deputy Director for Intelligence (ADDI) for Strategic Programs, told Committee staff he was tasked by the Deputy Director for Intelligence (DDI) to handle coordination of the speech within the CIA. On October 5, 2002, the ADDI brought together representatives for each of the areas of Iraq that the speech covered and asked the analysts to bring forward any issues that they thought should be addressed with the NSC. The ADDI said an Iraq nuclear analyst - he could not remember who - raised concerns about the sourcing and some of the facts of the Niger reporting, specifically that the control of the mines in Niger would have made it very difficult to get yellowcake to Iraq.

[DELETED] Both WINPAC Iraq nuclear analysts who had followed the Iraq-Niger uranium issue told Committee staff they were not involved in coordinating the Cincinnati speech and did not participate in the speech coordination session on October 5, 2002. The WINPAC Deputy Director for Analysis also told Committee staff he did not recall being involved in the Cincinnati speech, but later clarified his remarks to the Committee in writing saying that he remembered participating in the speech, but did not recall commenting on the section of the speech dealing with the Niger information. Committee staff asked the CIA to identify who might have attended the Cincinnati speech coordination meeting and raised concerns with the ADDI about the sourcing and facts of the Niger reporting. The CIA told Committee staff that the NESA Iraq analyst, [DELETED] believes he may have been the one who attended the meeting and raised concerns about the Niger reporting with the ADDI.

(U) Based on the analyst's comments, the ADDI drafted a memo for the NSC outlining the facts that the CIA believed needed to be changed, and faxed it to the Deputy National Security Advisor and the speech writers. Referring to the sentence on uranium from Africa the CIA said, "remove the sentence because the amount is in dispute and it is debatable whether it can be acquired from the source. We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue. Finally, the Iraqis already have 550 metric tons of uranium oxide in their inventory."

[DELETED] Later that day, the NSC staff prepared draft seven of the Cincinnati speech which contained the line, "and the regime has been caught attempting to purchase substantial amounts of uranium oxide from sources in Africa." Draft seven was sent to CIA for coordination.

[DELETED] The ADDI told Committee staff he received the new draft on October 6, 2002 and noticed that the uranium information had "not been addressed," so he alerted the DCI. The DCI called the Deputy National Security Advisor directly to outline the CIA's concerns. On July 16, 2003, the DCI testified before the SSCI that he told the Deputy National Security Advisor that the "President should not be a fact witness on this issue," because his analysts had told him the "reporting was weak." The NSC then removed the uranium reference from the draft of the speech.

[DELETED] Although the NSC had already removed the uranium reference from the speech, later on October 6, 2002 the CIA sent a second fax to the White House which said, "more on why we recommend removing the sentence about procuring uranium oxide from Africa: Three points (1) The evidence is weak. One of the two mines cited by the source as the location of the uranium oxide is flooded. The other mine cited by the source is under the control of the French authorities. (2) The procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory. And (3) we have shared points one and two with Congress, telling them that the Africa story is overblown and telling them this is one of the two issues where we differed with the British."

(U) On October 7, 2002, President Bush delivered the speech in Cincinnati without the uranium reference. [page 55-56]

Now, the Senate Report also points out that despite these attempts by the CIA, other individuals in the CIA were, on other occasions, approving White House papers or other documents that included the uranium from Africa claim. This is where the WINPAC stovepipe was in operation, as discussed in Sec. 3.3 and Sec. 3.4 of this post. However, the fact remains that the White House knew that the seniormost leadership of the CIA, including the DCI, were most definitely not "standing by" the NIE claim on uranium from Africa. On more than one occasion after the NIE had been published (and before the State of the Union speech was drafted) the CIA tried to dissuade the White House from using even a generalized uranium from Africa claim because they did not trust the credibility of those reports, or the claim of the British Government in this regard.

The CIA's reticence was also apparent at the time of the SOTU. To understand that, let's compare how the draft of the SOTU started off and how it ended up, and why.

The Senate Report notes that the White House was the one that included the uranium claim in the SOTU draft they sent to the CIA (barely a day before the actual SOTU speech):

On January 27, 2003, the DCI was provided with a hardcopy draft of the State of the Union address at an NSC meeting. [page 64]
...
The White House also told the Committee that the text they sent to the CIA in January said, "we also know that he has recently sought to buy uranium in Africa." [page 65]

According to the Senate Report, the WINPAC Director expressed discomfort at the mention of the uranium claim, although it is claimed incredulously as having to do with revealing "classified information" or "sources and methods" rather than the "credibility" of the reporting. The latter was an obviously false cover story simply because the actual statement in the draft did not reveal either sources or methods and did not reveal classified information since a uranium from Africa claim had already been mentioned in declassified documents and speeches by both the British Government and the American Government by then.

The Senate Report notes that the WINPAC Director subsequently agreed to a change in language whereby the speech would refer to the British White Paper ("the British government has learned") rather than to the claim that "we also know..." (More on this below).

(a) Technically speaking, Rice's claim that "had there been even a peep that the agency did not want that sentence in or that George Tenet did not want that sentence in, that the director of Central Intelligence did not want it in, it would have been gone" was deliberately misleading since it clearly did not apply to the original uranium from Africa claim inserted by the White House into the SOTU speech. There was *more* than a "peep" - there was active opposition to the wording originally proposed by the White House on the uranium allegation.

(b) Rice's claim that "But the NIE, which, by the way, the Agency was standing by at the time of the -- the time of the State of the Union" was flat out false. After all, the CIA WINPAC Director was doing the *opposite* of "standing by" the NIE claim. Let's recall that the NIE said the following (and provided names of countries in Africa, associated with this claim):

Iraq also began vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake... [page 52]

Yet, the WINPAC Director balked at the following text in the White House draft:

...we also know that he has recently sought to buy uranium in Africa... [page 65]

There is no fundamental difference between the two statements. Yet, the WINPAC Director opposed the statement because the CIA had already declared, after the NIE had been published, that they did not find the uranium from Africa claim credible.

To put it in another way, the CIA WINPAC Director (Alan Foley) was taking the position that the claim, at least in so far as it referred to U.S. intelligence knowledge on the uranium claim, was not something the CIA was willing to stand by, regardless of what the NIE may have stated. The claim that he was opposed to the claim not because it was not credible but because he was concerned about revealing "sources and methods" (or "classified information") was clearly a false cover story because the actual statement in the SOTU draft did not reveal either sources or methods and did not reveal classified information since a uranium from Africa (or Niger) claim had already been mentioned in declassified documents and speeches by both the British Government and the American Government by then. Yet, the WINPAC Director agreed to leave the uranium claim in the speech if it referred to British intelligence, even though the CIA thought the British claim was not trustworthy and even though the WINPAC Director also claimed that he told the NSC Special Assistant that the CIA had asked the British to remove the uranium claim from their White Paper (something the NSC Special Assistant denied).

There is only one explanation for this game that was played: the White House wanted to keep the claim in the speech despite CIA opposition and the WINPAC Director obliged by telling the WH they could refer to the British claim if they wanted, but not to the CIA itself (this is fakery at its worst as I've explained before). After having done so he concocted a fake cover story that his concern related only to "sources and methods" (rather than the issue of credibility of the uranium claim), so that the White House could claim, falsely, that the credibility of the claim was not challenged by the CIA at the time of the SOTU. Thus, even the most generous interpretation of Rice's "had there been even a peep" comment indicates that it was deliberately misleading.

(c) There is a more basic point. The White House introduced the uranium claim in the SOTU draft in January 2003 despite George Tenet having told the White House in October 2002 that the "President should not be a fact witness on this issue" (to stop the White House from using the claim in the Cincinnati speech at that time, despite CIA objections). The White House insisted on keeping the claim in the SOTU speech despite the WINPAC Director's initial opposition and discomfort with the claim at the time of the SOTU, and decided to refer to British intelligence (which the CIA did not consider reliable on this matter) rather than their own NIE. Moreover, the White House's chief speechwriter had also been informed of the dubiousness of the uranium from Africa claim in October 2002 (see below). So, it is at the minimum grossly misleading to assert, as Rice did, that there was not a peep from the CIA or George Tenet expressing reservations about the uranium claim.

It is no surprise, then, that Rice later conveniently attributed her statement as having been based on a faulty memory.

NOTE: Let's also keep in mind that the CIA memos expressing concern over the use of the uranium from Africa claim in the Cincinnati speech were also sent to the the White House's Chief Speechwriter:

MR. RUSSERT: But when you say that no one in our circles, and it was maybe down in the bowels of the Intelligence Agency, a month after that appearance, you said this, “The CIA cleared the speech in its entirety.”

And then your top deputy, Stephen Hadley, on July 23, said this.

“Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters that he received two memos from the CIA in October that cast doubt on intelligence reports that Iraq had sough[t] to buy uranium from Niger to use in developing nuclear weapons. Both memos were also sent to chief speechwriter Michael Gerson and one was sent to national security adviser, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Hadley said.”

All in all, Rice's claim was false. The CIA did not "stand by" the NIE uranium claim.

There are at least three incidents recounted in the SSCI Report (and possibly a fourth) which indicate that during the time that some individuals in WINPAC were peddling the uranium claim, WINPAC knew that the uranium claim was bogus/not credible.

3.3.1 WINPAC Deputy Director for Analysis and October 2002 Cincinnati speech coordination

3.3.2 NESA/WINPAC comments for Oct 2002 CIA testimony to SSCI

3.3.3 WINPAC Director's comments to NSC Special Assistant prior to 2003 SOTU

3.3.4 Possible fourth incident: Did WINPAC attended the NIE coordination meeting?

The SSCI Report says the following (emphasis mine):

Both WINPAC Iraq nuclear analysts who had followed the Iraq-Niger uranium issue told Committee staff they were not involved in coordinating the Cincinnati speech and did not participate in the speech coordination session on October 5, 2002. The WINPAC Deputy Director for Analysis also told Committee staff he did not recall being involved in the Cincinnati speech, but later clarified his remarks to the Committee in writing saying that he remembered participating in the speech, but did not recall commenting on the section of the speech dealing with the Niger information. Committee staff asked the CIA to identify who might have attended the Cincinnati speech coordination meeting and raised concerns with the ADDI about the sourcing and facts of the Niger reporting. The CIA told Committee staff that the NESA Iraq analyst, [DELETED] believes he may have been the one who attended the meeting and raised concerns about the Niger reporting with the ADDI.

(U) Based on the analyst's comments, the ADDI drafted a memo for the NSC outlining the facts that the CIA believed needed to be changed, and faxed it to the Deputy National Security Advisor and the speech writers. Referring to the sentence on uranium from Africa the CIA said, "remove the sentence because the amount is in dispute and it is debatable whether it can be acquired from the source. We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue. Finally, the Iraqis already have 550 metric tons of uranium oxide in their inventory."

[DELETED] Later that day, the NSC staff prepared draft seven of the Cincinnati speech which contained the line, "and the regime has been caught attempting to purchase substantial amounts of uranium oxide from sources in Africa." Draft seven was sent to CIA for coordination.

[DELETED] The ADDI told Committee staff he received the new draft on October 6, 2002 and noticed that the uranium information had "not been addressed," so he alerted the DCI. The DCI called the Deputy National Security Advisor directly to outline the CIA's concerns. On July 16, 2003, the DCI testified before the SSCI that he told the Deputy National Security Advisor that the "President should not be a fact witness on this issue," because his analysts had told him the "reporting was weak." The NSC then removed the uranium reference from the draft of the speech. [page 55-56]

Here's what we learn from this very important segment in the SSCI Report.

• The CIA NESA analyst "raised concerns...about the sourcing and facts of the Niger reporting" during the Cincinnati speech coordination meeting on October 5, 2002. Note that these were not merely concerns about "sourcing and methods" but rather "sourcing and facts". This also becomes apparent in the strong follow-up from the ADDI and the DCI to pushback on the White House's intent to use of the uranium claim despite CIA concerns, by citing why the claim was dubious and not credible.
• The two WINPAC Iraq nuclear analysts were not present at the coordination meeting, but the WINPAC Deputy Director for Analysis was present. Although he tried to make it appear that he was not present, he later "clarified his remarks" (probably because it must have been discovered that he was indeed present) to say that he was present but "did not recall commenting on the section of the speech dealing with the Niger information" [page 56]. This is significant because he must have heard that the "sourcing and facts" associated with the uranium claim were not credible and that the uranium claim should not be used (even if he did not "comment" on the uranium claim).

It is implausible to me that the WINPAC Deputy Director for Analysis would hear this and then not convey this information back to the WINPAC Iraq nuclear analysts.

The SSCI Report says the following (emphasis mine):

[DELETED] On October 1, 2002, in preparation for an SSCI hearing on the NIE the following day, a CIA NESA analyst prepared responses to questions anticipated from SSCI Members. The [DELETED] WINPAC Iraq nuclear analyst sent the NESA analyst comments for inclusion [PARAGRAPH DELETED]
...
(U) On October 2, 2002, the Deputy DCI testified before the SSCI. Senator Jon Kyl asked the Deputy DCI whether he had read the British white paper and whether he disagreed with anything in the report. The Deputy DCI testified that "the one thing where I think they stretched a little bit beyond where we would stretch is on the points about Iraq seeking uranium from various African locations. We've looked at those reports and we don't think they are very credible. It doesn't diminish our conviction that he's going for nuclear weapons, but I think they reached a little bit on that one point. Otherwise I think it's very solid." [page 54]

The NIO for Strategic and Nuclear Programs in his October 4, 2002 testimony to the SSCI also cast doubt on the credibility of the uranium claim (and said that he was conveying the INR view). But here is what's significant in the above passage:

• The NIE was released on October 1, 2002. On the very same day, a CIA NESA analyst prepared responses to anticipated questions on the NIE from SSCI members. These responses were obviously used by the Deputy DCI. The fact that the Deputy DCI threw cold water on the uranium claim indicates that the NESA analyst's talking points must have included points that seriously challenged the credibility of the uranium claim.
• The fact that the Deputy DCI threw cold water on the uranium claim the day after the release of the NIE (which had the uranium claim mentioned in the body but not the Key Judgements) makes it clear that the CIA was not "standing by" the uranium claim in the NIE.
• Most importantly, the declassified portion of SSCI Report has a cryptic note that "WINPAC Iraq nuclear analyst sent the NESA analyst comments for inclusion". The SSCI unacceptably classified the crucial portion following this sentence but it is natural to expect that the WINPAC analyst must have had access to what the NESA analyst finally submitted to the CIA leadership (to check whether WINPAC's inputs were included). It would make no sense for the WINPAC analyst to submit comments and not bother to check if the comments were included in the final draft. This automatically means that the WINPAC analyst must have known that CIA NESA pointed out that the uranium claim was not credible and that this was the official position of the CIA that would be communicated to the SSCI in the next few days.

This is discussed extensively in Sec. 3.2. The WINPAC Director's comments makes it very clear that he was aware that the uranium claim was not credible.

As I discuss in Sec. 3.1, it is quite likely that WINPAC represented the CIA in the NIE coordination meeting and failed to challenge the insertion of the uranium claim into the NIE draft. If WINPAC analysts did in fact attend the NIE coordination meeting, they would have known that INR strongly dissented from the claim and considered it "highly dubious".

In several places, the SSCI Report is vague (this almost appears deliberate) on the specific individual/group within the CIA that was responsible for certain positions or claims. This is particularly the case with the report's narrative on some incidents where someone in the CIA apparently approved a White House claim on the uranium matter. As I show in this section, on those specific occasions, the word "CIA" must be a reference to WINPAC.

3.4.1 WINPAC was the group stovepiping the uranium claims

3.4.2 WINPAC was a key White House arm to "mainstream" fake intel in other situations as well

3.4.3 WINPAC did have some good guys

Multiple incidents recounted in the Senate Report prove that at least in Sep 2002 and beyond, WINPAC was the group within the CIA that was "approving" the White House's desired claims on uranium from Africa.

3.4.1.1 October 7, 2002 and January 15, 2003
3.4.1.2 December 18, 2002
3.4.1.3 January 20, 2003
3.4.1.4 Late January 2003
3.4.1.5 Conclusions

Here is one incident that occurred immediately after senior CIA officials, including the DCI, had specifically warned the White House against using the uranium claim in his Cincinnati speech (Sec. 3.2.3) because the claim was not credible (emphasis mine):

On October 7, 2002, President Bush delivered the speech in Cincinnati without the uranium reference. On the same day, the CIA prepared comments on a draft White House paper, A Grave and Gathering Danger. The comments suggested a change to the draft language saying "better to generalize the first bullet as follows: Sought uranium from Africa to feed the enrichment process." The original text from the White House had said "sought uranium oxide, an essential ingredient in the enrichment process, from Africa." The White House did not publish the paper. [page 57]

Which group in the CIA was allowing this claim in the WH paper immediately after the CIA went to great lengths to point out why the claim was bogus and that the President should not be a fact-witness on this matter?

No prizes for the correct answer. Although the SSCI Report does not reveal this information on page 57, it (perhaps inadvertently?) revealed the answer on page 62 (emphasis mine):

On January 15, 2003, thirteen days before the State of the Union address, WINPAC provided comments on a White House paper, A Grave and Gathering Danger, saying "better to generalize first bullet as follows: Sought uranium from Africa to feed the enrichment process." WINPAC had submitted identical language when it commented on the same paper in October. The paper was never published.

Let's set aside the question of why the SSCI Report did not care to mention WINPAC on page 57 (and on other pages, describing similar situations). One of the pieces of learning here is that the phrase:

...CIA prepared comments on a draft White House paper...[page 57]

should have actually been written as follows:

...WINPAC prepared comments on a draft White House paper...

What's more, here you have the NSC/WH apparently receiving two opposing views on the uranium matter at almost the same time, with the view from George Tenet being far stronger and more categorical and representing the official CIA view. Why did the WH not tell their WINPAC contacts that they were wrong, that they should be following the lead of George Tenet? Obviously, the WH did not want to do so because they wanted to peddle the fake uranium claim and use their cooperative plants contacts inside WINPAC for cover.

The narrative on the coordination of the Ambassador Negroponte speech also mentioned that NSC was coordinating with WINPAC (emphasis mine):

(U) Later the same day, an NP special assistant prepared a draft of the fact sheet based on an existing copy of Negroponte's speech and sent the draft to the Director of WINPAC at the CIA for coordination. In a phone conversation with an NP special assistant, the WINPAC Director made a few edits, but did not change the reference to Iraq's procurement of uranium from Niger. The suggested edits were outlined in a State Department e-mail and show no comments regarding the Niger uranium information. [page 60]

(U) Separately, the NSC staff coordinated the Negroponte speech directly with the WINPAC Director and he recommended that "Niger" be replaced with "Africa" in the speech. [page 61]

Another example is the following (emphasis mine):

On January 20, 2003, the President submitted a report to Congress on Iraq's noncompliance with UNSC resolutions. The report stated that Iraq had failed to include in its declaration "attempts to acquire uranium and the means to enrich it." The CIA and the White House have told Committee staff that the IC did not coordinate on this draft. In a written response to a question from Committee staff, the Department of State said that their usual role was to prepare the pre-decisional drafts of this periodic report. Their draft, which was provided to the NSC on December 9, 2002, did not include the language contained in the final draft on Iraq's failure to declare "attempts to acquire uranium and the means to enrich it. The CIA Inspector General told Committee staff the text for the report had been drawn from WINPAC's assessment of Iraq's UNSC declaration. [page 63]

The WINPAC assessment referred to above is the one from December 17, 2002 and here is what the Senate Report says:

On December 17, 2002, WINPAC analysts produced a paper, U.S. Analysis of Iraq's Declaration, 7 December 2002. The paper reviewed Iraq's "Currently Accurate, Full and Complete Disclosure" to the UN of its WMD programs and made only two points regarding the nuclear program - one noted Iraq's failure to explain its procurement of aluminum tubes the IC assessed could be used in a nuclear program, and the other noted that the declaration "does not acknowledge efforts to procure uranium from Niger, one of the points addressed in the U.K. Dossier." [page 60]

As the SSCI Report notes, the CIA official that the NSC Special Assistant discussed the uranium claim with - for the SOTU speech - was the WINPAC Director. See Sec. 3.2.4 for more on this.

(a) WINPAC was the NSC/WH contact

Based on the numerous incidents described above, it is a reasonable conclusion that the other occasions in the Sep 2002+ time period where the Senate Report states that the "CIA" approved some text for the NSC/WH, that it was specifically WINPAC that approved the text and not some other group within the CIA.

Here are two of the other known occasions where WH/NSC text was approved by someone almost certainly in WINPAC. (A third one where the WH/NSC claim was not approved is discussed in Sec. 3.4.3).

September 24, 2002 (emphasis mine):

In a response to questions from Committee staff, the White House said that on September 24, 2002, NSC staff contacted the CIA to clear another statement for use by the President. The statement said, "we also have intelligence that Iraq has sought large amounts of uranium and uranium oxide, known as yellowcake, from Africa. Yellowcake is an essential ingredient of the process to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." The CIA cleared the language, but suggested that "of the process" be changed to "in the process." The President did not use the cleared language publicly. [page 51]

September 11, 2002 (emphasis mine):

In a written response to questions from Committee staff, the White House said that on September 11, 2002, National Security Council (NSC) staff contacted the CIA to clear language for possible use in a statement for use by the President. The language cleared by the CIA said, "Iraq has made several attempts to buy high strength aluminum tubes used in centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. And we also know this: within the past few years, Iraq has resumed efforts to obtain large quantities of a type of uranium oxide known as yellowcake, which is an essential ingredient of this process. The regime was caught trying to purchase 500 metric tons of this material. It takes about 10 tons to produce enough enriched uranium for a single nuclear weapon." The text was identical to the text proposed by the White House except that the CIA had suggested adding "up to" before 500 metric tons. The President never used the approved language publicly. [page 49]

This last extract (regarding the 9/11/02 incident) is particularly interesting for two reasons as discussed below.

(b) WINPAC was the stovepipe for fake intel

If you read the incident that occurred on 9/11/02 (see above), there are two things that are striking about the incident.

First, the "approval" by the "CIA" occurred on the same day (9/11/02) that (likely) other individuals in the CIA transmitted their concerns about the credibility and validity of the uranium claim to the British Government. It defies logic to assume that the "CIA" as a whole would be approving a claim they were backtracking from, on the very same day, with the British (conveying the CIA's official position to the British). However, it is not illogical to assume that some individuals in WINPAC may have been pursuing their own (WH) agenda separate from the rest of the CIA, considering the evidence presented in Sec. 3.3 and Sec. 3.4.1.

Second, there is strong (indirect) evidence in the SSCI Report, that what was "approved" by WINPAC (my inference) on 9/11/02 was later used by the White House in their draft of Bush's Cincinnati speech (emphasis mine):

On October 4, 2002, the NSC sent a draft of a speech they were preparing for the President to deliver in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was draft six of the speech and contained the line, "and the regime has been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide from Africa - an essential ingredient in the enrichment process."

Note the similarities in the phrases contained in the "CIA"-approved draft of 9/11/02 and the NSC draft dated 10/4/02:

• Approved on 9/11/02: "regime was caught trying to purchase up to 500 metric tons" [the phrase up to was specifically suggested by the NSC's CIA contact(s)]
• Draft on 10/4/02: "regime has been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons"

What this means is that:

• WINPAC likely approved the uranium claim on 9/11/02 even though the CIA was questioning its validity on the very same day in a communication to the U.K.
• The White House used the WINPAC-approved wording in the Cincinnati speech draft on 10/4/02 and was told by the ADDI for Strategic Programs (based on CIA NESA's input) that the claim should be dropped because it is not credible
• The White House continued to stick with a modified version of the claim
• This prompted DCI George Tenet himself to intervene and in no uncertain terms tell the NSC/WH to stop using the claim [more in Sec. 3.2.3]

The above incident was clearly not the only one where fake intel was "approved" for the WH by the WH-friendly contacts in WINPAC. Sec. 3.4.1 provides numerous other examples. What we see is a clear pattern that when the White House wanted to have a (uranium) claim approved, they went to their contacts in WINPAC. Some WINPAC personnel were repeatedly misrepresenting the CIA's actual judgment on the uranium claim on all the occasions discussed above. All these incidents occurred after George Tenet and other senior CIA officials had directly told the White House/NSC that the uranium claim was not credible, that the British claim was not credible on this matter and that the President should not be a "fact witness" on this issue. Many occurred after senior WINPAC officials knew that the claim was bogus (Sec. 3.3). In fact, the White House's "approvers" within WINPAC were so blatant in misrepresenting the intelligence that it was even discussed in an email exchange between a DOE analyst and an INR analyst, as the Senate Report points out:

On December 17, 2002, WINPAC analysts produced a paper, U.S. Analysis of Iraq's Declaration, 7 December 2002. The paper reviewed Iraq's "Currently Accurate, Full and Complete Disclosure" to the UN of its WMD programs and made only two points regarding the nuclear program - one noted Iraq's failure to explain its procurement of aluminum tubes the IC assessed could be used in a nuclear program, and the other noted that the declaration "does not acknowledge efforts to procure uranium from Niger, one of the points addressed in the U.K. Dossier." An e-mail from the INR Iraq nuclear analyst to a DOE analyst on December 23, 2002 indicated that the analyst was surprised that INR's well known alternative views on both the aluminum tubes and the uranium information were not included in the points before they were transmitted to the NSC. The DOE analyst commented in an e-mail response to INR that, "it is most disturbing that WINPAC is essentially directing foreign policy in this matter. There are some very strong points to be made in respect to Iraq's arrogant non-compliance with UN sanctions. However, when individuals attempt to convert those "strong statements" into the "knock out" punch, the Administration will ultimately look foolish - i.e. the tubes and Niger!" [page 60]

Considering that the WINPAC Deputy Director for Analysis knew that the uranium claim and the British claim were not credible, and considering that the WINPAC Director himself knew the same - it is more than egregious that some WINPAC analysts were flat out lying in their December 17, 2002 paper that even touted the British claim.

So, to recap, WH-friendly WINPAC personnel were stovepiping raw intel to the White House to meet the WH's expectations while the CIA was politely telling the WH through alternate channels, that included George Tenet himself, that the uranium claim was basically garbage. (Almost makes one think that WINPAC was operating under the WH's control).

What's more, in the first week of October 2002, the NSC/WH was evidently receiving two opposing views on the uranium matter from the CIA - the WINPAC view and the official view of the CIA conveyed by someone as high as George Tenet in a far more aggressive and categorical manner. Why did the WH not tell their WINPAC contacts that they were wrong, that they should be following the lead of George Tenet? Obviously, the WH did not want to do so because they wanted to peddle the fake uranium claim and use their cooperative plants contacts inside WINPAC for cover.

The WINPAC-as-stovepipe conclusion is not surprising considering what else we know about WINPAC.

Let's take a brief diversion away from the uranium from Africa matter to note that there is additional evidence that WINPAC, a group created by the Bush administration early in their first term, was set up in order to enforce the White House's agenda of mainstreaming fake intel. This was a convenient arrangement since the White House could then blame the CIA for the fake intel, saying that WINPAC was part of the CIA, while having White House friendly actors in senior positions within WINPAC to enforce the White House agenda and to claim that there was "no" politicization of intelligence - a chimerical fiction that helpful "bipartisan commissions" like the Robb-Silberman Commission would later gratuitously indulge.

To see how this played out in matters unrelated to uranium from Africa, let's consider some additional examples on how WINPAC management helped fix the intelligence for the WH prior to the Iraq war.

We know that a WINPAC analyst named "Joe" was a serial fabricator who was primarily responsible for aggressively pushing the fake aluminum-tubes-for centrifuges claim. The amount of power he was given to peddle his litany of lies was enormous considering that the opposing views and far more thorough analysis of the IC's nuclear experts (DOE) were discarded time and again to push Joe's views. It is no surprise though, considering that Joe was more than happy to fabricate fake claims for the White House.

In one of her many impressive pieces on the Valerie Plame matter, Emptywheel at The Next Hurrah also notes this:

WINPAC is an umbrella organization set up early in Bush’s first term to bring together all the expertise on WMD in one place.
...
First, we know that WINPAC includes Operations officers. We know, for example, that two WINPAC officers who questioned the CIA’s use of Iraqi intelligence were kicked out of WINPAC. One of these appears to be the CIA officer now suing the CIA for retaliating against him for refusing to adapt his intelligence to desired outcomes.

WINPAC officers kicked out of WINPAC for not toeing the WINPAC management's line?

Here's more on that from the Robb-Silberman Report (but note how helpfully the "bipartisan report" interchangeably uses the terms WINPAC and CIA to deliberately obfuscate what was really happening; emphasis mine except in the first two lines):

Conclusion 27

The CIA took too long to admit error in Iraq, and its Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center actively discouraged analysts from investigating errors.

...In this respect, the infamous case of Curveball offers an excellent example.

After the initial phase of the war, two WINPAC analysts who had traveled to Iraq began to have doubts about the foundation of their assessments, particularly the BW assessments. Yet CIA management was resistant to this new information [851]. The reaction of CIA management in this instance demonstrates at best a lack of encouragement for dissenting views. As described above, when analysts traveled to Iraq in the summer and fall of 2003 and began to investigate Curveball's bona fides, serious doubts arose about his truthfulness. The WINPAC BW analyst who had conducted the investigations in Iraq brought his concerns to WINPAC management. He argued that Curveball was a fabricator because he had lied about his access (in particular covering up that he had actually been fired from his government job in 1995), lied about being present during a BW accident when he had actually been out of the country at that time, and lied about the purpose for the trailers found by Coalition forces [852]. According to the analyst, however, management was hostile to the idea of publishing a reassessment or retreating from Curveball's information, since other analysts still believed in his veracity.

By January 2004, however, travel records confirmed that Curveball had not even been in Iraq during the time he claimed to have been present at a BW facility, and this discrepancy convinced most analysts that Curveball was a fabricator. By March 2004, when CIA was able to interview Curveball and he could not explain imagery that contradicted his reporting, "any remaining doubts" about Curveball's reliability were removed, according to the former WINPAC BW analyst [853].

CIA management, however, was still reluctant to "go down the road" of admitting that Curveball was a fabricator. According to the former WINPAC analyst, Directorate of Intelligence management was slow in retreating from Curveball's information because of concerns about how this would look to the "Seventh Floor" and to "downtown." When Curveball's reporting was finally recalled in May 2004, the CIA alerted senior policymakers to that fact, but CIA did not publish a reassessment of its position on Iraq's BW program [854].
...
Moreover, the analysts who raised concerns about the need for reassessments were not rewarded for having done so but were instead forced to leave WINPAC [857]. One analyst, after presenting his case in late 2003 that Curveball had fabricated his reporting, was "read the riot act" by his office director, who accused him of "making waves" and being "biased." [858] The analyst told Commission staff that he was subsequently asked to leave WINPAC. Similarly, a WINPAC CW analyst who pressed to publish a reassessment of Iraq's CW program in late 2003 was also, according to the analysts, "told to leave" WINPAC [859]. Although managers must be able to overrule subordinates once an issue has been debated, managers must also create an atmosphere in which such debate is encouraged rather than punished [860].

In contrast, the fact that George Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Tenet after WMDgate is enough evidence on its own that the Bush White House systematically put in place a mechanism to reward those that toed its line, while punishing those that did not.

As Emptywheel also notes:

And then there are the three egregious misjudgments that follow-up studies have pinned on WINPAC. A WINPAC analyst was the guy who convinced the CIA to trust intelligence from Curveball, in spite of all their misgivings about him. And the Robb-Silberman report (Bush’s whitewash of pre-war intelligence) declared that WINPAC

"was at the heart of many of the errors . . . from the mobile BW [biological warfare] case to the aluminum tubes," the commission reported, saying it feared "a culture of enforced consensus has infected WINPAC as an organization."

So in matters specifically related to intelligence on Niger and on Iraq intelligence more generally, WINPAC was central to sustaining unreliable claims that, ultimately led us to war.

The Robb-Silberman report's cover-up of a key mechanism of the politicization of intelligence by the Bush White House (using the WH-friendly management at WINPAC) will forever taint their reputations. As Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment noted (emphasis mine):

To most reasonable observers, this would be a clear case of senior management not wanting to change a threat assessment that was heavily used by the White House "downtown." Political considerations trumped the findings from the professional analysts. However, the commission does not agree. . They label this "bad management" and a "failure of tradecraft."
...
The Los Angeles Times notes in an April 1 editorial, "Somehow, the panel must have missed the intelligence agents who told reporters for The Times on several prewar occasions that they thought their product was being politicized and that they were pushed to provide evidence to support the Bush administration’s claims." The panel must have also forgotten (even though it cites the article from the Washington Post December 9, 2004 in footnote 860) about the lawsuit filed by an analyst who said his superiors at the CIA "insisted that Plaintiff falsify his reporting" and when he refused, he was removed from his position. These claims may not be correct, but they are not even mentioned by the commission. In fact, their existence is denied.
...
Finally, if it truly was management and tradecraft failures that skewed the intelligence, then why didn’t these failures skew the intelligence prior to 2002? Same management, same tradecraft, but the estimates in 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001 were decidedly more cautious and more accurate. It is only in 2002 that the estimates make several unexplained dramatic leaps in findings and certainty. The Carnegie Endowment study, "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications" detailed this pattern in January 2003.

The dots are all there, but the commission did not connect them. The commission did not question the president or the vice-president, or apparently any senior official outside the intelligence agencies. Thus, we do not know what happened in the repeated meetings Vice President Cheney had with CIA officials. We do not know what impact the vice-president assertions of "absolute certainty" of an Iraqi nuclear program in August and September 2003 had on the development of the deeply flawed October National Intelligence Estimate. We do not know how the intelligence activities of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Stephen Cambone and Under Secretary Douglas Feith impacted the assessments because the commission never examined their work. They could have done all this, even with their purposely narrow mandate to examine only the performance of the intelligence agencies. They did not.

As Sec. 3.4.2 indicates, WINPAC sometimes did have some honest analysts - but they were overruled and punished on more than one occasion by their WH-friendly bosses intent on spreading bogus claims to please the WH.

In this light, there is one incident reported in the Senate Report which suggests that there was possibly one WINPAC uranium analyst who disagreed with the uranium claim (emphasis mine):

Some time in September a member of the NSC staff discussed the Niger uranium issue with a CIA analyst. The CIA analyst told Committee staff that during coordination of a speech (he was not sure which one) with an NSC staff member, the CIA analyst suggested that the reference to Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium from Africa be removed. The CIA analyst said the NSC staff member said that would leave the British "flapping in the wind." In a written response to a question about this matter from the Committee, the NSC staff member said that the CIA did not suggest that he remove text regarding Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium from Africa. The NSC staff member said the analyst suggested that Saddam's meeting with his "nuclear mujahedin" was more compelling evidence of Iraq's effort to resurrect the Iraqi nuclear program than attempts to acquire yellowcake, but said the analyst never suggested that the yellowcake text be removed. He said he had no recollection of telling a CIA analyst that replacing the uranium reference would leave the British "flapping in the wind" and said such a statement would have been illogical since the President never presented in any one speech every detail of intelligence gathered on Iraq either by the U.S. or by the U.K. [page 51]

Consistent with my observations in Sec. 3.4.1, I infer that the "CIA analyst" referred to here was also a WINPAC analyst. But this analyst was likely different from the other WINPAC analysts who were peddling the uranium claim. The claim by the NSC staffer that "such a statement would have been illogical since the President never presented in any one speech every detail of intelligence gathered on Iraq either by the U.S. or by the U.K." is clearly unmitigated nonsense because the clear intent of the phrase "flapping in the wind" was that the UK would be placed in a position which was not endorsed by the U.S. Indeed, the sensitivity of revealing that the CIA contradicted the British claim prior to the British White Paper being published was manifest in the SSCI's bending over backwards to help out on this matter. They classified almost the entire discussion of the British White Paper thereby preventing readers from noting that the CIA communicated their concerns to the UK over the credibility of the uranium claim in their White Paper on 9/11/02 - prior to the British White Paper being released later in September 2002.

The bottom line is that WINPAC was not monolithic either and it is quite possible that there were good analysts intent on highlighting the truth to their managers. That said, the fact remains that on the uranium matter, in the majority of the occasions, some WINPAC personnel peddled the bogus uranium claim in some form or another.

Using the timeline captured in Sec. 2.2 and the analysis in subsequent sections, we can separate out the documented positions expressed by various individuals within the CIA on the uranium claim, into four categories. As shown below, this reveals how the stovepiping of the fake uranium claim was largely the work of certain WINPAC personnel who were cooperative with the White House.

4.1 Known list of individuals or groups within the CIA who either removed the uranium claim or tried to get the uranium claim eliminated in the time period 8/1/02 - 1/28/03

4.2 Known list of individuals or groups within the CIA who made an attempt to significantly downplay or eliminate the uranium claim in the time period 8/1/02 - 1/28/03

4.3 Known list of individuals or groups within the CIA who continued to perpetuate the uranium claim in the time period 8/1/02 - 1/28/03

4.4 An ambiguous incident

• NESA (8/1/02)
• Possibly a WINPAC analyst (9/??/02) [see Sec. 3.4.3]
• NESA (10/1/02)
• Deputy DCI (10/2/02)
• NIO for Strategic and Nuclear Programs (10/4/02)
• NESA (10/4/02)
• NESA (10/5/02)
• ADDI for Strategic Programs (10/5/02)
• DCI (10/6/02)
• Senior CIA official(s) (10/6/02)

• CIA officials who interfaced with British MI6 - who expressed concerns to the British about the uranium claim (9/11/02)
• NESA - changed the claim to say that Iraq "may" have been trying to seek uranium rather than that Iraq had in fact sought uranium (10/??/02) [This was a clear attempt to downplay the veracity of the claim, as I've explained before]
• WINPAC Director - tried to get the uranium claim eliminated from the Bush SOTU and claimed that he also warned the NSC (White House) that the CIA did not agree with the British claim (the latter was denied by the NSC Special Assistant). However the WINPAC Director also claimed, bizarrely, that he agreed to let the SOTU draft refer to the British claim (Late January 2003) [see Sec. 3.2 for details]

• Likely WINPAC (9/11/02) [see Sec. 3.4.1 for an explanation]
• Likely WINPAC (9/24/02) [see Sec. 3.4.1 for an explanation]
• Unknown CIA analysts (were they from WINPAC? - see Sec. 3.1) who participated in the NIE coordination meeting (9/25/02)
• WINPAC (10/7/02)
• WINPAC (12/17/02)
• WINPAC Director (12/18/02)
• WINPAC (1/15/03)
• WINPAC (1/17/03) - this was the day after the WINPAC (uranium) analysts directly received copies of the Niger forgeries in which they did "notice some inconsistencies"

• The SSCI Report claims (page 63) that the NIO for Strategic and Nuclear Programs, on 1/24/03, faxed the relevant contents of the NIE (including the uranium claim) to the White House to provide materials for Colin Powell's upcoming speech at the UN. This may give the impression that the CIA was supporting the uranium claim. However, this is in contradiction to a later passage in the report where the SSCI Report claims that even though the "initial input for the speech came from the CIA" (page 66) there was no draft of Powell's UN speech which had the uranium claim in it (page 67 and page 82, conclusion 25). The SSCI Report also says that the CIA "removed some of the information that the White House had added to the speech, gathered from finished and raw intelligence, because the information was single source and uncorroborated". (page 67).

5.1 The WINPAC/White House stovepipe

In this post I have presented direct and inferred evidence using the Senate (SSCI) Report that indicates the following:

• the uranium from Africa hoax in the Bush SOTU was largely due to the "cooperation" (with the White House) of a few individuals at WINPAC
• there were significant opposing views within the CIA on the uranium claim (especially within CIA NESA, even setting aside INR's well-known dissent that the claim was "highly dubious"), and
• the position of the CIA's top management (including then-DCI George Tenet) was that the uranium claim was not credible

The picture that emerges is that the uranium from Africa claim was stovepiped to the White House by certain individuals at WINPAC (Sec. 3.4) using known bogus (raw) "intel" (Sec. 3.3), in order to meet the White House's expectations, while a parallel communication channel that even included then-DCI George Tenet was trying hard (and ultimately unsuccessfully) to get the WH to drop the uranium claim (Sec. 3.2). Thus, a rogue operation involving select WH-cooperative personnel in a WH-created group within the CIA (WINPAC) was conveniently used to paint the "CIA" as a monolithic entity that got the intel "wrong".

The data shows a clear pattern that when the White House wanted to have a (uranium) claim approved, they went to their contacts in WINPAC. Some WINPAC personnel were repeatedly misrepresenting the CIA's actual judgment on the uranium claim on multiple occasions. Most of these incidents occurred after George Tenet and other senior CIA officials had directly told the White House/NSC that the uranium claim was not credible, that the British claim was not credible on this matter and that the President should not be a "fact witness" on this issue. Many incidents occurred after senior WINPAC officials knew that the claim was bogus (Sec. 3.3). In fact, the White House's "approvers" within WINPAC were so blatant in misrepresenting the intelligence that it was even discussed in an email exchange between a DOE analyst and an INR analyst (Sec. 3.4.1.5).

5.2 WINPAC probably had a dissenter or two in its midst

There is some evidence that not every analyst in WINPAC was trying to toe the WINPAC management and White House line (Sec. 3.4.3), but other incidents unrelated to the uranium matter show that such analysts were often punished for publishing or pushing the facts, as opposed to fictions (Sec. 3.4.2).

5.3 SSCI report misled

The analysis in this post also provides much more clarity on the Senate (SSCI) Report's highly ambiguous, cryptic statement in its Niger conclusions section:

Conclusion 20. The Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) comments and assessments about the Iraq-Niger uranium reporting were inconsistent and, at times contradictory. These inconsistencies were based in part on a misunderstanding of a CIA Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) Iraq analyst's assessment of the reporting...

I have demonstrated that this conclusion is highly misleading because the uranium from Africa hoax was not just because of the reporting of one WINPAC analyst but at least a few WINPAC personnel. Moreover, the body of the SSCI Report is written with what appears to be deliberate vagueness and obfuscation to provide the false impression that the CIA was one confused mess on the uranium matter. I suspect that one or more Republican members of the SSCI may have influenced the narrative in the SSCI Report to ensure this outcome to keep the focus away from the WINPAC stovepiping operation that led to the fake uranium from Africa claim.

5.4 White House deliberately allowed stovepipe

In the first week of October 2002, the NSC/WH was evidently receiving two opposing views on the uranium matter from the CIA - the WINPAC view and the official view of the CIA conveyed by someone as high as George Tenet in a far more aggressive and categorical manner. Yet the WH did not tell their WINPAC contacts that they were wrong, and that they should be following the lead of George Tenet (Sec. 3.4.1.1). Obviously, the WH did not want to do so because they wanted to peddle the fake uranium claim and use their cooperative plants contacts inside WINPAC for cover.

5.5 WINPAC v. The Others in the CIA (especially NESA)

The analysis also (indirectly) suggests that there was probably a battle of sorts on the uranium claim, between WINPAC on the one hand and the rest of the CIA on the other - especially CIA NESA, which like WINPAC, is part of the CIA's DI (Sec. 4; also see Sec. 3.3.2). In the end, George Tenet made a decision to flush NESA (and others) down the toilet in exchange for a Presidential Medal of Freedom, by allowing the White House to scapegoat the CIA as a whole on the uranium matter and allowing the Bush administration to get away with a litany of misleading statements and lies that misrepresented the intelligence assembled by the IC.

It is also rather odd that NESA, which originally issued a report on 5/10/02 supporting the uranium claim and then changed their mind starting 8/1/02 (possibly due to the feedback received from French intelligence - Sec. 2.1) seemed to not figure much in the intel reporting on the uranium claim subsequent to October 2002. Was this because of their repeated attempts to point out (especially in early October 2002) that the uranium claim was not credible (Sec. 4.1)? This question is neither addressed nor answered by the SSCI Report.

5.6 The CIA's DO

In the critical post-August 2002 timeframe there is no mention of any papers from the CIA's DO addressing their position on the credibility of the uranium claim. Considering that the DO was the one that issued the original Niger uranium intel reports and it was in the DO's CPD vault that a copy of the Niger forgeries was discovered by the CIA Inspector General, the relative lack of information on the DO's position post-August 2002 is very odd indeed.

P.S. Let me add that this post does not discuss the Niger forgeries at all (that's reserved for a future post). There is no implication in any of the material in this post that NESA was aware of the Niger forgeries and I don't have any information to date that sheds light on whether or not this was the case. All that this post focuses on is that CIA (including NESA) knew that the uranium intel was not credible for multiple reasons - the forgeries may or may not have been one of those reasons.

ADDI: Associate Deputy Director for Intelligence
CIA: Central Inteligence Agency
CPD: Counter Proliferation Division (CIA DO)
DCI: Director of Central Intelligence
DI: Directorate of Intelligence (CIA)
DO: Directorate of Operations (CIA)
DOE: Department of Energy
INR: Bureau of Intelligence and Research (State Department)
NESA: Near-Eastern and South Asian Analysis group (CIA)
NIE: National Intelligence Estimate
NIO: National Intelligence Officer
NSA: National Security Advisor
NSC: National Security Council
SSCI: Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
SOTU: State of the Union
WH: White House
WINPAC: Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (CIA)