In parallel with these on-site inspections, analysts at IAEA headquarters in Vienna were poring over new information submitted by Iraq, comparing it to the records we had accumulated between 1991 and 1998 and further data we had compiled through remote monitoring during our four years of absence from the country. The Iraqi declaration was consistent with our existing understanding of Iraq’s pre-1991 nuclear program, but we continued to seek clarification where there were gaps.
After 139 inspections of 106 locations over those first sixty days, we had uncovered no evidence of efforts on the part of Iraq or its scientists to revive the country’s nuclear weapons program. The inspections continued unabated. But two specific technical issues dominated the nuclear debate with the aim of accelerating the march to war: Iraq’s attempts to procure high-strength aluminum tubes from abroad and the alleged purchase of uranium from Niger.
The aluminum tubes were cited on numerous occasions by Western officials as irrefutable proof of Iraq’s renewed nuclear ambitions. As evidence, the officials referred to the June 2001 seizure, in Jordan, of a shipment of tubes bound for Iraq. Shortly before the readmission of inspectors to Iraq, Condoleezza Rice, for example, had gone on CNN to declare that these tubes were “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs.”[7] Rice’s statement was misleading: experts at the U.S. Department of Energy had long been on record saying they believed these tubes were best suited for artillery rockets.
Our inspectors made it a high priority to visit the Nasser metal fabrication facility, where we knew Iraq made conventional artillery rockets of similar dimensions. The Iraqi engineers there showed the inspectors thousands of completed rockets, fabricated from tubes of precisely the same aluminum alloy and with the same tolerances as those of the tubes intercepted in Jordan. The engineers gave a simple reason for their procurement attempts: they were short on supplies. As for why they had sought those particular specifications, their reasons were equally straightforward: they wanted accurate rockets, they wanted to minimize design changes, and they wanted the tubes to be anodized to keep them from rusting.
Nowhere did we find evidence of a revived centrifuge enrichment program. On January 27, 2003, when I made an interim report to the Security Council, I gave our conclusion regarding these tubes: “From our analysis to date, it appears that the aluminum tubes would be consistent with the purpose stated by Iraq and, unless modified, would not be suitable for manufacturing centrifuges.”
The U.S. response—or lack of one—was remarkable. President Bush delivered his State of the Union address the next day. In one of the most watched speeches of the year, he again claimed that Iraq was trying to purchase aluminum tubes “suitable for nuclear weapons production.” There was no mention of the IAEA’s contradictory conclusion based on direct verification of the facts in Iraq. Nor did Bush note the differing analysis of the U.S. Department of Energy.
Colin Powell’s dramatic address to the UN Security Council came one week later, on February 5. Listeners expected a definitive presentation of the intelligence on Iraq’s WMD programs. With characteristic charisma and force of presence, Powell reassured his audience, “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions.” When it came to discussing the aluminum tubes, he acknowledged existing “differences of opinion,” but declared, “Most U.S. experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium.”
Powell later told me he had spent a week at CIA headquarters, drilling their people on every piece of “evidence” and asking questions to ensure the veracity of the information. He added jokingly that if he had gone along with all their evidence his presentation to the council would have been a few hours long.
At the secretary-general’s private luncheon that followed Powell’s UN statement, Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister—an accomplished diplomat and historian, with a presence that rivaled Powell’s own—addressed Powell with what seems, in retrospect, like a prophecy: “You Americans,” he said, “do not understand Iraq. This is the land of Haroun al-Rashid.[8] You may be able to destroy it in a month, but it will take you a generation to build peace.”
Powell was visibly irritated. “Who is speaking about use of force?” he retorted—something of a bizarre comment, since the speech he had just delivered pointed in only one direction.
Ultimately, a painstaking analysis of the aluminum tubes issue in the New York Times, published when the war was in its second year, pointed out that two days before his Security Council speech, Powell’s intelligence experts had sent him a memo confirming that the United States used a seventy-millimeter tactical rocket that employed the same high-grade aluminum, with similar specifications.[9] Yet Powell declared that the tubes Iraq sought required a tolerance “that far exceeds U.S. requirements for comparable rockets.”
Another centerpiece of the case against the Iraqi regime was the allegation that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium from Niger. President George Bush had emphasized this point in his January 2003 State of the Union address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Allegedly, between 1999 and 2001, Hussein’s representatives had tried to purchase five hundred tons of uranium oxide, yellowcake, from Niger. In late September 2002, the Blair administration in the United Kingdom revealed an intelligence dossier that included this assertion. The IAEA had been pressing for the relevant documentation ever since, in order to investigate, and after months of asking intelligence agencies for evidence of this illicit transaction, we were finally provided with copies of the papers on February 5, the same day as Colin Powell’s Security Council address.
Although the United Kingdom and the United States had taken more than three months to supply the “evidence”—a small sheaf of letters and communiqués between officials from Niger and Iraq—it took Jacques Baute and his team only a matter of hours to figure out that the documents were fake. One letter, alleged to be from the president of Niger, Mamadou Tandja, was full of inaccuracies and had an obviously falsified signature. Another letter from October 2000, supposedly from the Niger minister of foreign affairs and cooperation, bore the “signature” of Allele Habibou; but Minister Habibou had not held office since 1989.
Nor was the purported sale logically plausible. Niger is one of the world’s largest uranium producers. The output of the two uranium mines in question is a valuable commodity, an important supply line for Japanese, Spanish, and French nuclear power companies. Sales and production are under constant supervision, not just by Niger but also by foreign entities. The notion that five hundred tons of yellowcake—enough to produce roughly one hundred nuclear bombs—could be shipped out to Iraq undetected was absurd.
Even more puzzling was the fact that a forgery that had escaped detection through months of examination by the world’s top intelligence agencies was immediately exposed by an IAEA physicist using Google searches and common sense. Equipped with his conclusions about the Niger documents, Jacques consulted with a number of Western officials. They had nothing to say. Not once in the days that followed did a single American or British official dispute the logic of the IAEA analysis.
7
September 8, 2002. This was the same appearance in which Rice, with a first-rate bit of melodrama, coined the phrase “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
8
Haroun al-Rashid, who ruled the Arab empire from Baghdad in the late eighth century, is a historical figure of mythic stature, considered the greatest of the Abbasid caliphs. Al-Rashid’s reign was marked by extraordinary cultural, scientific, and political prosperity.
9
David Barstow, William J. Broad, and Jeff Gerth, “How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence,”