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 A Question of Trust
Has Bush's credibility taken a hit after questions about his State of the Union? |
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A Soldier's Life
How the war is straining U.S. soldiers—and haunting those they left at home |
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Seven Days, Seven Deaths
Their reasons for serving varied, but now their families share a common grief |
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Bush's Speech
Other key charges from the State of the Union remain unproved
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Gulf War II
Inside the allied plan to finish off the Iraqi regime
[3/31/2003]  |
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Life After Saddam
TIME takes an inside look at the U.S. plans for occupation
[3/10/2003] |
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FOLLOW THE YELLOWCAKE ROAD
How did a story that much of the national-security apparatus regarded as bogus wind up in the most
important speech of Bush's term? The evidence suggests that many in
the Bush Administration simply wanted to believe it. The tale begins
in the early 1980s, when Iraq made two purchases of uranium oxide
from Niger totaling more than 300 tons. Known as "yellowcake,"
uranium oxide is a partially refined ore that, when combined with
fluorine and then converted into a gas, can eventually be used to
create weapons-grade uranium. No one disputes that Iraq had a
nuclear-weapons program in the 1980s, but it was dismantled after the
first Gulf War. Then, in the mid-1990s, defectors provided evidence
that Saddam was trying to restart the program.
Finally, late in 2001, the Italian government came into possession of
evidence suggesting that Iraq was again trying to purchase yellowcake
from Niger. Rome's source provided half a dozen letters and other
documents alleged to be correspondence between Niger and Iraqi
officials negotiating a sale. The Italians' evidence was shared with
both Britain and the U.S.
When it got to Washington, the Iraq-Niger uranium report caught the
eye of someone important: Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney's chief
of staff, Lewis Libby, told TIME that during one of his regular CIA
briefings, "the Vice President asked a question about the implication
of the report." Cheney's interest hardly came as a surprise: he has
long been known to harbor some of the most hard-line views of
Saddam's nuclear ambitions. It was not long before the agency quietly
dispatched a veteran U.S. envoy named Joseph Wilson to investigate.
Wilson seemed like a wise choice for the mission. He had been a U.S.
ambassador to Gabon and had actually been the last American to speak
with Saddam before the first Gulf War. Wilson spent eight days
sleuthing in Niger, meeting with current and former government
officials and businessmen; he came away convinced that the
allegations were untrue. Wilson never had access to the Italian
documents and never filed a written report, he told TIME. When he
returned to Washington in early March, Wilson gave an oral report
about his trip to both CIA and State Department officials. On March 9
of last year, the CIA circulated a memo on the yellowcake story that
was sent to the White House, summarizing Wilson's assessment.
Wilson was not the only official looking into the matter. Nine days
earlier, the State Department's intelligence arm had sent a memo
directly to Secretary of State Colin Powell that also disputed the
Italian intelligence. Greg Thielmann, then a high-ranking official at
State's research unit, told TIME that it was not in Niger's
self-interest to sell the Iraqis the destabilizing ore. "A whole lot
of things told us that the report was bogus," Thielmann said later.
"This wasn't highly contested. There weren't strong advocates on the
other side. It was done, shot down."
Except that it wasn't. By late summer, at the very moment that the
Administration was gearing up to make its case for military
mobilization, the yellowcake story took on new life. In September,
Tony Blair's government issued a 50-page dossier detailing the case
against Saddam, and while much of the evidence in the paper was old,
it made the first public claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from
Africa. At the White House, Ari Fleischer endorsed the British
dossier, saying "We agree with their findings."
THE DOUBTS THAT DIDN'T GO AWAY
By now, a gap was opening behind the scenes between what U.S.
officials were alleging in public about Iraq's nuclear ambitions and
what they were saying in private. After Tenet left a closed hearing
on Capitol Hill in September, the nuclear question arose, and a
lower-ranking official admitted to the lawmakers that the agency had
doubts about the veracity of the evidence. Also in September, the CIA
tried to persuade the British government to drop the allegation
completely. To this day, London stands by the claim. In October,
Tenet personally intervened with National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice's deputy, Stephen Hadley, to remove a line about the
African ore in a speech that Bush was giving in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Also that month, CIA officials included the Brits' yellowcake story
in their classified 90-page National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's
weapons programs. The CIA said it could neither verify the Niger
story nor "confirm whether Iraq succeeded in acquiring uranium ore
and/or yellowcake" from two other African nations. The agency also
included the State Department's concerns that the allegations of
Iraq's seeking yellowcake were "highly dubious"—though that
assessment was printed only as a footnote.
At a time when it was trying to build public support for the war, the
Bush Administration did not share these internal doubts about the
evidence with the public. In December, for example, the State
Department included the Niger claim in its public eight-point
rebuttal to the 12,200-page arms declaration that Iraq made to the
U.N. two weeks earlier. And a month later, in an op-ed column in the
New York Times titled "Why We Know Iraq Is Lying," top Bush aide Rice
appeared to repeat the yellowcake claim, saying, "The declaration
fails to account for or explain Iraq's efforts to get uranium from
abroad." Nor did the U.S. pass on what it knew to international
monitors. When the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. group,
asked the U.S. for data to back up its claim in December, Washington
sat tight and said little for six weeks.
The battle between believers and doubters finally came to a head over
the State of the Union speech. Weeks of work had gone into the
address; speechwriters had produced two dozen drafts. But as the
final form was taking shape, the wording of the yellowcake passage
went down to the wire. When the time came to decide whether Bush was
going to cite the allegation, the CIA objected—and then relented.
Two senior Administration officials tell TIME that in a January
conversation with a key National Security Council (NSC) official just
a few days before the speech, a top CIA analyst named Alan Foley
objected to including the allegation in the speech. The NSC official
in charge of vetting the sections on WMD, Special Assistant to the
President Robert Joseph, denied through a spokesman that he said it
was O.K. to use the line as long as it was sourced to British
intelligence. But another official told TIME, "There was a debate
about whether to cite it on our own intelligence. But once the U.K.
made it public, we felt comfortable citing what they had learned."
And so the line went in. While some argued last week that the fight
should have been kicked upstairs to Rice for adjudication, White
House officials claim that it never was.
NUCLEAR FALLOUT
But if it was good enough for Bush, it wasn't good enough for others.
Colin Powell omitted any reference to the uranium when he briefed the
U.N. Security Council just eight days later; last week he told
reporters that the allegation had not stood "the test of time." Nor
did Tenet mention the allegation when he testified before the Senate
panel on Feb. 11. "If we were trying to peddle that theory, it would
have been in our white paper," an intelligence official told TIME.
"It would have been in lots of places where it wasn't. A sentence
made it into the President's speech, and it shouldn't have."
Did Bush really need to push the WMD case so hard to convince
Americans that Saddam should be ousted? In a TIME poll taken four
weeks before coalition forces invaded, 83% of Americans thought war
was justified on the grounds that "Saddam Hussein is a dictator who
has killed many citizens of his Iraq." That's one claim that has
never been contested. In the same TIME poll, however, 72% of
Americans thought war was also justified because it "will help
eliminate weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."
The unseen threat of a Saddam with WMD was an argument that played to
Bush's strengths. As a politician, Bush has always been better at
asserting his case than at making it. After 9/11, his sheer
certitude—and the faith Americans had in his essential
trustworthiness—led Americans to overwhelmingly support him. The
yellowcake affair may have already changed that relationship, for as
the casualties mount in Iraq, polls suggest that some of that faith
is eroding. Which means the next time Bush tells the nation where he
wants to go, it may not be so quick to follow.
—With reporting by
Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper and Adam Zagorin/Washington, John
F. Dickerson with Bush in Africa, J.F.O. McAllister/London and Andrew
Purvis/Vienna
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