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The spooky provenance of the smoking gun that backfired

April 27 2003
By Roger Franklin


Perhaps he should be given the benefit of the doubt - for now. The fact remains that the Iraq war has been a boon for forgers and peddlers of misinformation.

Take the phoney war's great hoax: the dossier that Colin Powell finally presented to the UN in early March as "proof" that Iraq had imported illicit uranium ore from Niger. For months before that, the Bush Administration kept the file close to its chest, citing it constantly, but seldom letting anyone take a closer look.

Now, quietly, quite a few people are paying it a good deal more attention, including a handful of congressional investigators. Far from clearing up the mystery, however, the digging has only deepened it. What investigators have achieved isn't much, having teased just a few tantalising strands of truth from a dark web of deceit - but for laymen, the whodunit is as captivating as a le Carre novel.

"Who falsified this?" chief weapons inspector Hans Blix demanded last week, arguing that his team should be readmitted to occupied Iraq. "Is it not disturbing that the intelligence agencies that should have all the technical means at their disposal did not discover that this was falsified?"

Disturbing indeed. Initially attributed only to vague "intelligence sources", the documents appeared to represent hard proof that Saddam Hussein was in flagrant breach of UN sanctions. As Powell explained, they constituted "an irrefutable smoking gun".

Within hours of being made available to the UN, however, they were exposed as fictions - and not very good ones at that. First, there was the quantity of uranium ore said to be involved - 500 tonnes - which would have represented 20 per cent of Niger's total annual output, a quantity so large it stretches credulity to imagine it being siphoned off unnoticed.

Then there were the documents themselves. One bore the signature of Niger's foreign minister - except that the man in question hadn't held that job for 11 years. Same thing with the letter alleged to have originated in the president's office. A simple internet check by UN officials revealed that the letterhead dated back to an earlier regime.

So who concocted them and why? The New Yorker magazine's Seymour Hersh points the finger at British intelligence, which he suggests may have dummied up the documents to help Bush quell congressional opposition to the looming war.

As a theory, Hersh's scenario fits neatly with the chronology of the march to war. Bush needed persuasive proof and - viola! - it materialised on cue. Yet that could also be the Hersh explanation's fatal flaw: Facts and circumstances dovetail just a bit too well.

The Administration's explanation, such as it is, paints a much murkier picture. The documents came not from a single source but from several, officials have said. Mentioned often as the point of origin is Italy, where one off-the-record Administration explanation insists that they were the work of a jobbing con man in cahoots with a Niger diplomat out to make a quick buck.

From Rome, according to this provenance, the file went to Paris. "The forgeries were sold to an Italian intelligence agent by a con man and passed on to French authorities," investigative reporter Jeffrey Sallot wrote in an unchallenged story in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

But hold on a tick. If the documents were relayed to the intelligence service of the country leading the opposition to the war, why would Jacques Chirac's spooks have distributed them any further? If true, they could only have lent considerable weight to the Bush Administration's argument.

Except, that is, if the people passing them along realised that they would be exposed as frauds. What better way to discredit Washington's case than to see prime exhibits for the prosecution revealed as flimsy frauds?

Thanks to the Bush Administration's eagerness to believe whatever suited its case, that is exactly what happened. When the US spy agency declined to give the Niger documents any credence, the true believers at the White House simply cut the agency out of the loop, as Hersh and others have reported.

The result: a US humiliation at the UN that destroyed its credibility and helped scuttle a Security Council vote authorising military force. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Tony Blair's advocacy of the war was interrupted by the need to put down a revolt within his own party - a revolt in which the bogus evidence figured prominently.

And who gained? Why the French, of course. C'est la guerre.



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