The Boston Globe July 12, 2003
CIA takes blame for Iraq charge
OK'd Bush's use of uranium story despite doubts
By Robert Schlesinger
WASHINGTON -- CIA director George J. Tenet said yesterday that his agency was to blame for allowing President Bush to present baseless allegations in his State of the Union address about Iraq's attempts to obtain uranium from Africa.
Tenet said that agency officials approved of including the accusation in the president's speech with the caveat that it had been reported by the British government, even though the US officials doubted the veracity of the report that the British had cited.
''This should not have been the test for clearing a presidential address,'' Tenet said in a statement released by the CIA last evening. ''CIA should have ensured that it was removed.'' The director said the underlying assertion, that Iraq was trying to reconstitute its nuclear program, was sound.
The statement, which gave a rare, detailed glimpse into the intelligence process, was released at the end of a day of finger-pointing by White House officials and intensifying criticism from congressional Democrats about how the administration used intelligence to build the case for going to war. Tenet's statemet appeared designed to quell the controversy.
''First, CIA approved the president's State of the Union address before it was delivered,'' he said. ''Second, I am responsible for the approval process in my agency. And, third, the president had every reason to believe that the text presented him was sound.''
Tenet's statement laid out in detail the agency's tracking of the uranium purchase report and shed light on the back-and-forth between intelligence officers who came to mistrust the story and administration officials who wanted to include it in the speech.
Reports first surfaced in 2001 that Iraq was attempting to acquire raw uranium from Africa, Tenet wrote, and the CIA attempted to confirm them. The agency dispatched former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV to Niger to investigate reports of a deal in that country, and Wilson reported back that the reports did not appear to be true.
Tenet said the CIA warned the British against using the same accusation in a September 2002 white paper about Iraq, ''because we viewed the reporting on such acquisition attempts to be inconclusive.'' The British, he said, discounted the US doubts.
In October, the intelligence community produced a 90-page classified National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, which outlined evidence that Saddam Hussein was attempting to reconstitute his nation's nuclear program. Tenet said the case made in that document did not depend on the story about the attempted uranium purchase in Africa, but that a three-paragraph section did discuss Iraq's existing uranium stockpile and cited reports that Iraq had tried to augment it by acquiring more from Africa.
White House officials included that reference in early drafts of the State of the Union speech, and CIA officials ''raised several concerns about about the fragmentary nature of the intelligence with National Security Council colleagues,'' Tenet said. ''Some of the language was changed. From what we now know, Agency officials in the end concurred that the text in the speech was factually correct -- i.e. that the British government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa.''
Tenet's account raised questions in the minds of some analysts about the extent to which White House officials understood, and the doubts that existed about the report.
Administration officials ''thought it was a zinger, and they wanted to keep it in, and so they basically haggled over the words,'' said John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org. ''It goes to the fundamental disconnect between intelligence officers and politicians, that intelligence is always caveated in a way that a policy speech cannot be.''
Tenet's surprise statement was issued after Bush and his national security adviser told reporters that the CIA approved of including the statement about Iraq's nuclear ambitions in the address and as Democrats on Capitol Hill intensified their demands that Bush fully explain the genesis of the false report.
Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, had repeatedly noted in a lengthy session with reporters traveling with the president in Africa that the CIA had cleared the speech and that no questions about the intelligence had reached the president, the vice president, or her.
Bush and Rice said that the president did not knowingly use false information in his speech. ''If the CIA, the director of central intelligence, had said, `Take this out of the speech,' it would have been gone, without question,'' she said. Rice said Iraq's reported attempt to acquire lightly processed uranium, also known as yellowcake, was a minor issue in the case against Iraq. Nevertheless, the allegation was one of a handful of examples Bush used in his Jan. 28 State of the Union speech to rally support against Iraq, along with recounting UN conclusions about previous Iraqi stores of chemical and biological weapons, US assessments of Iraqi ability to deploy such weapons, US intelligence reports of mobile biological laboratories, and Iraq's early 1990s nuclear program.
''You marshal and you save your best arguments for the State of the Union address,'' said Jeff Shesol, a Clinton administration speechwriter. ''If there were three or four arguments being made in this regard, presumably they would be the best three or four arguments that you had.''
Eight days after Bush's speech, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made a presentation of the case against Iraq in front of the UN Security Council and he omitted the assertion about African uranium.
''I didn't use the uranium at that point, because I didn't think that was sufficiently strong as evidence to present before the world,'' Powell told reporters in South Africa Thursday.
Not everyone was immediately satisified with Tenet's explanation. Senator Jay Rockefeller -- vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which is reviewing th prewar intelligence -- said that, ''even if the CIA approved the Niger statement as factually accurate, since it pointed to British rather than US intelligence, the speech was still blatantly misleading, and a lot of senior officials in the administration and the intelligence community knew it.''
''Our larger inquiry into prewar intelligence on Iraqi WMD will determine whether this was an isolated incident or part of a pattern of intelligence errors and distortions,'' Rockefeller said. ''When it comes to matters of war, we must accept nothing less than accurate, unbiased information.''
Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, criticized the CIA for ''sloppy handling'' of the faulty information, specifically blaming Tenet before the director's statement was made public.
Administration officials said yesterday that Tenet's job was not in danger.
In the House, 16 Democrats who voted in September to authorize Bush to go to war with Iraq if necessary -- including Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Malden -- sent him a letter asking for justification of the intelligence he had cited in making his case.
Material from The Associated Press was used in this report. Globe correspondent Bryan Bender contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2003, Globe Newspaper Company.
