DID THE FRENCH TRY TO TRICK US about the purported Niger-Iraq uranium contacts? Bush cited British intelligence in his speech rather than documents which he had because the documents seemed suspicious--- and in fact were fairly clumsy forgeries, e.g., bearing the signature of a foreign minister 14 years out of date.

Where did the forgeries come from? The March 8, 2003 Toronto Globe and Mail says

The forgeries were sold to an Italian intelligence agent by a con man some time ago and passed on to French authorities, but the scam was uncovered by the IAEA only recently, according to United Nations sources familiar with the investigation.

Slate has a good timeline of stories on the provenance of the documents.

[CNN, March 14] U.S. officials are saying that they got the documents from the intelligence service of another country, which was not Britain and was not Israel, but which they will not name.
...
April 10, 2003-- Washington Post
Western intelligence officials tell op-ed columnist David Ignatius that the forgery "was originally put in intelligence channels by France" but that "the officials wouldn't speculate on French motives."
...
July 14, 2003 -- Agence France-Presse
The news wire reports the Italian government's denial that its intelligence services "handed the United States and Britain documents indicating that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapons programme."
This "denial" fails to satisfy, of course, because earlier reports mentioned only that Italy provided a summary of the documents to the United States.
Finally, AFP cites a Financial Times report that Britain received information about Iraq's Niger uranium aspirations from two sources, "thought to be France and Italy"--- which brings us right back to where we started.

Thus, the picture we get is that the documents were forged by some private person and then passed through Italian and French government hands to the United States. But why would France, which was hostile to the U.S. case against Iraq, willing to pass along documents purporting to help the U.S. case?

The obvious answer is that the French knew the documents were forgeries, and wanted to tempt the Bush Administration into citing them publicly. Somebody would then pull the rug out from under Bush. Or, the French could do it, if need be.

Note that this strategy is a good one regardless of whether Iraq really was trying to buy uranium from Niger. Either way, the Bush Administration would be embarassed. And if the contacts were real, then the forgeries would distract attention from genuine intelligence, and make the Americans reluctant to use the real stuff lest they be burned twice.

This reminds me of something else related to France. During the War, I expected that afterwards we would discover records of bribes to French officials and covert deals between Iraq and French companies (and German, Belgian, etc. companies). We haven't. I'm surprised.

I did, however, come across a Pravda article laying out the story of Iraq's first nuclear weapons program-- the one that Israel blew up, to universal condemnation by the civilized world. The article is rather wild (it talks about Israeli assassinations of Iraqi nuclear scientists and blowing up equipment in France before it could be delivered to Iraq), but I suppose it is correct when it says that the Soviet Union refused to help Saddam with his nukes, but France stepped in to help, for a hefty price.

...That-era French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac offered Saddam a reactor, which was rather powerful for that time. In addition to the reactor, Chirac offered Hussein a laboratory with a yearly reserve (72 kilos) of 93% enriched uranium. Nothing was mentioned about IAEA guarantees, although that quantity of nuclear fuel was enough for producing several A-bombs, the capacity of which could be comparable to the one that was dropped on Hiroshima. The French definitely realized that offering the nuclear fuel and the reactor to Iraq was not a game. However, France eventually sacrificed that for the sake of three billion dollars. Paris thought that Iraq would not be able to extract plutonium without a very important component. Saddam did not ask for it, which meant that he was going to build just a network of nuclear power plants in his country. However, Baghdad turned out to be rather sly: in 1976 Iraq signed a contract with Rome to purchase that very missing component v the so-called hot chamber. This chamber is used to process radioactive ingredients of the nuclear fuel, extracting plutonium as a result.
The USSR was very unhappy to learn about the deal between Iraq and France. Foreign Minister Gromyko was very upset, when he read a paragraph of the official agreement, which ran: ?All persons of Jewish nationality can not take part in the program either in Iraq or in France.� Gromyko concluded that an A-bomb was meant for Israel....

There's lots more to the article, though how much of it is true I don't know

JULY 19. The latest news implies, without saying it outright, that the French were not involved and U.S. knowledge of the false documents came straight from Italy. See the Washington Times of July 19.

[ http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/03.07.15a.htm ]

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