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.Cheney had given the information to theCIA, which in turn asked a prominent diplomat, who hadserved as ambassador to three African countries, to inves-tigate.He returned after a visit to Niger in February 2002and reported to the State Department and the CIA that thedocuments were forgeries.The CIA circulated the ambas-sador s report to the vice president s office, the ambassadorconfirms to TNR.But, after a British dossier was releasedin September detailing the purported uranium purchase,administration officials began citing it anyway, culminat-ing in its inclusion in the State of the Union. They knewthe Niger story was a flat-out lie, the former ambassadortells TNR.42The claim seemed odd to a staff member on the Senate SelectCommittee on Intelligence who had been following the story ofIraq and Niger.It was odd, she thought, because it could not betrue.Wilson had traveled to Niger in late February 2002.TheU.S.intelligence community had received the forged documentson October 9, 2002, more than eight months after Wilson s trip,when they were delivered to the U.S.embassy in Rome.The committee asked Wilson to submit to an interview.Whenconfronted with evidence that contradicted his public allega-tions, Wilson claimed that he must have misspoken. But if itwas a simple mistake, as Wilson suggested, he had made it onthree separate occasions in interviews with three separate pub-lications.Not surprisingly, Wilson changed his story after beingconfronted by the Senate s investigators.On July 6, 2003, he told his story in his own name for thefirst time in an op-ed published in the New York Times.He ac-knowledged that he never saw the forgeries, and he later con-ceded the same point in an appearance on television.43 It shouldhave been a crucial admission, giving pause to the editorialistsand politicians who had relied on Wilson to support their claimsabout the administration s mendacity.Wilson had been a com- Stephen F.Hayes412pelling source precisely because he presented himself as a factwitness regarding the forged documents.His evolving narrative apparently had escaped the notice ofhis editors at the New York Times.The same editorial pages thathad published Kristof s columns, including the former ambas-sador s claim that he had debunked the forged documents, nowcarried his admission that he had never seen them.The Times published Wilson s op-ed under the headline, WhatI Didn t Find in Africa :Based on my experience with the administration in themonths leading up to the war, I have little choice but toconclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq s nu-clear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqithreat.Wilson gave readers of the Times a rundown of his activitiesin Niger:Those news stories about that unnamed former envoywho went to Niger? That s me.In late February 2002,I arrived in Niger s capital, Niamey, where I had been adiplomat in the mid-70s and visited as a National SecurityCouncil official in the late 90s.I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea andmeeting with dozens of people: current government offi-cials, former government officials, people associated withthe country s uranium business.It did not take long to con-clude that it was highly doubtful that any such transactionhad ever taken place.44White House officials were stunned.They had obtained fromthe CIA the Agency s one-and-a-half-page report on Wilson strip. We were given the contents of what the report had said, says one White House official. The guy goes over there andcomes back and says Iraq was looking for uranium.We thought, Shit, we should declassify that and put it out. Cheney413Wilson had not submitted anything in writing upon returningfrom Niger.Instead, two CIA officials chatted with him at hishouse about his trip shortly after he returned.For the most part,they found the details of his time in Niger unsurprising and notparticularly significant.There was one exception: Wilson s meet-ing with the former Nigerien prime minister, Ibrahim Mayaki.Not surprisingly, Mayaki told Wilson that Niger had signedno contracts with rogue states while he served in the government,first as foreign minister and then as prime minister, from 1997 to2000.But he provided one tantalizing detail.Although Mayakidenied that Niger agreed to provide Iraq with yellowcake, hetold Wilson that the Iraqis had come looking.He had spokenwith a top Iraqi official in 1999 who told Mayaki he wantedto explore expanding commercial relations between the twocountries.As Niger has virtually nothing else the Iraqis mighthave desired, Mayaki concluded that this request for enhancedtrade meant one thing: the Iraqis wanted uranium.The CIA s analysts thought Wilson s report corroborated ear-lier intelligence that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger
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