Yellowcake forgery: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

The term Yellowcake Forgery refers to falsified classified documents initially "uncovered" by Italian intelligence which possibly depicted an attempt by Iraq's Saddam Hussein regime to purchase yellowcake uranium from the country of Niger, in defiance of United Nations sanctions.

These documents and other indicators may have been used as evidence by the United States and United Kingdom governments during the Iraq disarmament crisis that Iraq had attempted to procure nuclear material for the purpose of creating "weapons of mass destruction." This claim was part of the political basis for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Yellowcake, a uranium oxide, is a raw material used in the manufacture of nuclear reactor fuel rods. Yellowcake's uranium component can be refined into either plutonium or enriched uranium for use in a nuclear weapon.

Timeline of Uncovering the Alleged Forgery

The classified documents, which appeared to depict an Iraqi attempt to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger, had allegedly been suspected by some individuals in U.S. intelligence as fraudulent according to news reports. According to other news accounts of the classified situation, by early 2002, investigations by both the CIA and the State Department had found the documents to be inaccurate. Days before the Iraq invasion, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) cast doubt on the documents to the U.N. Security Council. An FBI investigation into the provenance of these documents has been reopened.

During the 2003 State of the Union speech U.S. President George W. Bush said "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." However, the British claim could not be substantiated with evidence.

"Critics claim the statement in the speech was a reference to the documents. Retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson wrote a critical op-ed in The New York Times in which he explained the nature of the documents, and the government's prior knowledge of their unreliability for use in a case for war. Shortly after Wilson's op-ed, in a column by Robert Novak, the identity of Wilson's wife, undercover CIA analyst Valerie Plame, was revealed. The Senate intelligence committee report and other sources seem to confirm that Plame gave her husband a positive recommendation. However, they also confirm that she did not personally authorize the trip (and in fact did not have any authority to do so).

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report also claimed that when Wilson briefed the CIA on his trip to Niger, CIA analysts felt the claim that Iraq sought WMD from Africa was further substantiated, though the State Department thought Wilson's findings refuted the claim. But the CIA had warned the President in March 2002 that Wilson's trip had concluded the claims were unsubstantiated.[1]

The "Plame affair" (aka. "CIA leak scandal"), which ensued as a result of the unauthorized disclosure of Plame's covert identity, is an ongoing political scandal and criminal investigation into the source of the leak which "outed" Plame, and whether or not that person committed a crime.

The actual words President Bush spoke: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" suggests that his source was British intelligence and not the forged documents.[2] However, the Administration has admitted that the claim was "a mistake." The Butler Report issued after a review by the British government concluded that the report Saddam's government was seeking uranium in Africa was credible. Nevertheless, the Butler report fails to advance any evidence to substantiate this conclusion. Furthermore, the Butler report concluded that "The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it,"[3]which again could not be verified. Further, the Financial Times released a story in the summer of 2004, indicating a "strong belief" among European intelligence communities that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger (June 28. 2004). Again, no proof is shown for this claim. In any case, French intelligence had repeatedly warned the Bush administration a year before his State of the Union address that the allegation could not be supported with evidence.[4]

In January 2006, the New York Times revealed the existence of a memo which stated that the suggestion of uranium being sold was "unlikely" because of a host of economic, diplomatic and logistical obstacles. The memo, dated March 4, 2002, was distributed at senior levels by the office of former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and by the Defense Intelligence Agency.[5]

In late 2002, the administration was soliciting support for a policy of military force to disarm Iraq of weapons. The U.S. government had for some time alleged that Iraq both possessed and was continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction including nuclear, biological, and chemical arms. Among the allegations was that Iraq had attempted to purchase yellowcake. In particular, CIA director George Tenet and Secretary of State Colin Powell both cited an attempted yellowcake purchase from Niger in September testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. At that time, the U.K. government also publicly reported an attempted purchase from an unnamed African country. In December, the State Department issued a fact sheet listing the alleged Niger yellowcake affair in a report entitled "Illustrative Examples of Omissions From the Iraqi Declaration to the United Nations Security Council".[6] In his January 2003 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush repeated the allegation, citing British intelligence. The administration later conceded that evidence in support of the claim was inconclusive and stated "these 16 words should never have been included" in Bush's address to the nation, attributing the error to the CIA.[7]

Previously, in February 2002, three different American officials had made efforts to verify the reports. The deputy commander of U.S. Armed Forces Europe, Marine Gen. Carlton Fulford, went to Niger and met with the country's president. He concluded that, given the controls on Niger's uranium supply, there was little chance any of it could have been diverted to Iraq. His report was sent to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers. The U.S. Ambassador to Niger, Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, was also present at the meeting and sent similar conclusions to the State Department. At roughly the same time, the CIA sent Ambassador Joseph Wilson to investigate the claims himself. Wilson had been posted to Niger 14 years earlier, and throughout a diplomatic career in Africa he had built up a large network of contacts in Niger. Wilson interviewed former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, who reported that he knew of no sales to Iraq. Mayaki did however recall that in June 1999 an Iraqi delegation had expressed interest in "expanding commercial relations", which he had interpreted to mean yellowcake sales.[8] Ultimately, Wilson concluded that there was no way that production at the uranium mines could be ramped up or that the excess uranium could have been exported without it being immediately obvious to many people both in the private sector and in the government of Niger. He returned home and told the CIA that the reports were "unequivocally wrong". The CIA retained this information in its Counter Proliferation Department, and was not even passed up to the CIA Director, according to the bipartisan, unanimous findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee's July 2004 report.

In early October 2002, George Tenet called Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, asking Hadley to remove reference to the Niger uranium from a speech Bush was to give in Cincinnati on Oct. 7. This was followed up by a memo asking Hadley to remove another, similar line. Another memo was sent to the White House expressing the CIA's view that the Niger claims were false; this memo was given to both Hadley and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Further, in March 2003, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released results of his analysis of the documents. Reportedly, it took IAEA officials only a matter of hours to determine that these documents were fake. Using little more than a Google search, IAEA experts discovered indications of a crude forgery, such as the use of incorrect names of Nigerien officials. As a result, the IAEA reported to the U.N. Security Council that the documents were "in fact not authentic." The U.N. spokesman wrote:

The I.A.E.A. was able to review correspondence coming from various bodies of the government of Niger and to compare the form, format, contents and signature of that correspondence with those of the alleged procurement-related documentation. Based on thorough analysis, the I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents, which formed the basis for the reports of recent uranium transaction between Iraq and Niger, are in fact not authentic. We have therefore concluded that these specific allegations are unfounded.[9]

In a July 2003 op-ed, Ambassador Wilson recounted his experiences and stated "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."[10] However, as the president had cited "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," it is unclear how Wilson came to his conclusion, as it was the British Government, not Wilson, upon whom the president's statement was based. Later that month, political commentator Patrick Buchanan stated, "[T]he truth now, we know, is that a forgery was put together to get this country into a war with Iraq, that forgery found its way into our intelligence agencies, it found its way into the State of the Union, and the president of the United States should show more indignation and outrage that this was done." Buchanan also claimed, "Somebody in our own government knew very well that was a forgery, and they advanced it on up the line." [11]

By late 2003, the trail of the documents had been partially uncovered. They were obtained by a "security consultant" (and former agent of the precursor agency to SISMI, the SID), Rocco Martino, from Italian military intelligence (SISMI). An article in The Times (London) quoted Martino as having received the documents from a woman on the staff of the Niger embassy, after a meeting was arranged by a serving SISMI agent. ("Tracked down," by Nicholas Rufford and Nick Fielding, Sunday Times (London), Aug. 1, 2004.) Martino later recanted and said he had been misquoted, and that SISMI had not facilitated the meeting where he obtained the documents. It was later revealed that Martino had been invited to serve as the conduit for the documents by Col. Antonio Nucera of SISMI, the head of the counterintelligence and WMD proliferations sections of SISMI's Rome operations center. [12]

Martino, in turn, offered them to Italian journalist Elizabetta Burba. On instructions from her editor at Panorama, Burba offered them to the U.S. Embassy in Rome in October, 2002. [13] Burba was dissuaded by the editors of the Berlusconi-owned Panorama from investigating the source of the forgeries.

It is as yet unknown how Italian intelligence came by the documents and why they were not given directly to the U.S. In 2005, Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of counterterrorism operations at the CIA and the intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, expressed the opinion that the documents had been produced in the United States and funneled through the Italians: "The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein ...." [14]

According to a 2003 article in The New Yorker by Seymour Hersh, the forgery may have been a deliberate entrapment by current and former CIA officers to settle a score against Cheney and other neoconservatives. Hersh recounts how a former officer told him that "somebody deliberately let something false get in there." [15] Hersh continues:

He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’ ” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. “Everyone was bragging about it—‘Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.’ ” These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.

In an interview published April 7, 2005, Cannistraro was asked by Ian Masters what he would say if it was asserted that the source of the forgery was former National Security Council and State Department consultant Michael Ledeen. (Ledeen had also allegedly been a liaison between the American Intelligence Community and SISMI two decades earlier.) Cannistraro answered by saying: "you'd be very close." [16]

In an interview on July 26, 2005, Cannistraro's business partner and columnist for the "American Conservative" magazine, former CIA counter terrorism officer Philip Giraldi, confirmed to Scott Horton that the forgeries were produced by "a couple of former CIA officers who are familiar with that part of the world who are associated with a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy." When Horton said that must be Ledeen, he confirmed it, and added that the ex-CIA officers, "also had some equity interests, shall we say, with the operation. A lot of these people are in consulting positions, and they get various, shall we say, emoluments in overseas accounts, and that kind of thing." [17]

In a second interview with Horton, Giraldi elaborated to say that Ledeen and his former CIA friends worked with Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. "These people did it probably for a couple of reasons, but one of the reasons was that these people were involved, through the neoconservatives, with the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi and had a financial interest in cranking up the pressure against Saddam Hussein and potentially going to war with him." [18]

The suggestion of a plot by CIA officers is countered by an explosive series of articles [19] in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.[20][21][22] Investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.

Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. What may be most significant to American observers, however, is La Repubblica's allegation that the Italians sent the bogus intelligence about Niger and Iraq not only through traditional allied channels such as the CIA, but seemingly directly into the White House. That direct White House channel amplifies questions about the 16-word reference to the uranium from Africa in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address -- which remained in the speech despite warnings from the CIA and the State Department that the allegation was not substantiated. [23][24][25][26]

While some officials in the CIA were skeptical of the Niger documents, President Bush relied mainly on intelligence from Britain for his State of the Union message and used the Niger documents for confirmation. Britain had multiple sources for the intelligence that Iraq sought uranium from both Niger and the Republic of Congo. Here are some conclusions from the Butler Report (which was very critical of other aspects of intelligence findings on WMD in Iraq) found on pages 122-125: [27]

Conclusion 494. There was further and separate intelligence that in 1999 the Iraqi regime had also made inquiries about the purchase of uranium ore in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this case, there was some evidence that by 2002 an agreement for a sale had been reached.

Conclusion 499. We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government’s dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" was well-founded.

Conclusion 503. From our examination of the intelligence and other material on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa, we have concluded that:

a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.

b. The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger’s exports, the intelligence was credible.

c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium, and the British Government did not claim this.

d. The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it.

Although sources other than the Niger documents are mentioned, no evidence of this is advanced.

In March 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, agreed not to open a Congressional investigation of the matter, but rather asked the FBI to conduct the investigation.

In 2003, unidentified "senior officials" in the administration leaked word to columnist Robert Novak that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative. This may have been meant to discredit Wilson's trip as a personal junket, suggested by his wife, or it may have simply been an act of revenge. The CIA requested an investigation into whether this public disclosure was illegal, thus the Niger uranium controversy spawned an on-going legal investigation and political scandal.

In September 2004, the CBS News program 60 Minutes decided to delay a major story on the forgeries because such a broadcast might influence the 2004 U.S. presidential election. A CBS spokesman stated, "We now believe it would be inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election." [28]

Nicolo Pollari, director of the SISMI intelligence agency,[29] told an Italian parliamentary intelligence committee that the dossier came from Rocco Martino, a former Italian spy.

The Los Angeles Times reported on December 3, 2005, that the FBI reopened the inquiry into how the Bush administration came to rely on forged documents linking Iraq to nuclear weapons materials as part of its justification for the invasion. The bureau's initial investigation found no evidence of foreign government involvement in the forgeries. But the FBI did not interview Martino, a central figure in a parallel drama unfolding in Rome. This oversight and recent revelations in La Repubblica is reason for reopening the investigation.

Citing concern the forged Niger documents might be evidence of a "larger deception campaign," (i.e. Plame affair or Downing Street memo) it has been requested that the FBI determine the source of the forgeries and why the intelligence community did not realize earlier that the documents were fraudulent, among other questions.[30]