British document forgeries

Churchill’s
War vols. I (1987) and ii (2001)

Documents that purportedly showed Iraqi
officials shopping for uranium in Africa
two years ago were deemed “not authentic”
after careful scrutiny by U.N. and
independent experts, Mohamed
ElBaradei, director general of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),
told the U.N. Security Council.

ElBaradei also rejected a key Bush administration claim — made twice by the president in major speeches and repeated by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell yesterday
— that Iraq had tried to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes to use in centrifuges for uranium enrichment. Also,
ElBaradei reported finding no evidence of banned weapons or nuclear material in an extensive sweep of Iraq using advanced radiation detectors.

“There is no indication of resumed nuclear activities,” ElBaradei said.

Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation described the faked evidence as a series of letters between
Iraqi agents and officials in the central
African nation of Niger.
The documents had been given to the U.N. inspectors by
Britain and reviewed extensively by
U.S. intelligence.

The forgers had made relatively crude errors that eventually gave them away — including names and titles that did not match up with the individuals who held office at the time the letters were purportedly written, the officials said.

“We fell for it,” said one U.S. official who reviewed the documents.

A spokesman
for the IAEA said the agency did not
blame either Britain or the United
States for the forgery. The documents
“were shared with us in good faith,” he
said.

The discovery was a further setback to
U.S. and British efforts to convince reluctant U.N. Security Council members of the urgency of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Powell, in his statement to the Security Council
Friday, acknowledged ElBaradei’s findings but also cited “new information” suggesting that Iraq continues to try to get nuclear weapons components.

“It is not time to close the book on these tubes,” a senior State Department official said, adding that Iraq was prohibited from importing sensitive parts, such as tubes, regardless of their planned use.

[Saddam Hussein]Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein pursued an ambitious nuclear agenda throughout the
1970s and 1980s and launched a crash program to build a bomb in 1990 following his invasion of neighboring Kuwait. But
Iraq’s nuclear infrastructure was heavily damaged by allied bombing in 1991, and the country’s known stocks of nuclear fuel and equipment were removed or destroyed during the U.N. inspections after the war.

However, Iraq never surrendered the blueprints for nuclear weapons, and kept key teams of nuclear scientists intact after U.N. inspectors were forced to leave in 1998.

Despite international sanctions intended to block Iraq from obtaining weapons components, Western intelligence agencies and former weapons inspectors were convinced the Iraqi president had resumed his quest for the bomb in the late
1990s, citing defectors’ stories and satellite images that showed new construction at facilities that were once part of Iraq’s nuclear machinery.

Last September, the United States and
Britain issued reports accusing Iraq of renewing its quest for nuclear weapons. In
Britain’s assessment, Iraq reportedly had
“sought significant amounts of uranium from Africa, despite having no active civil nuclear program that could require it.”

Separately, President Bush, in his speech to the U.N. Security Council on
Sept. 12, said Iraq had made “several attempts to buy-high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.”

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