Who forged the uranium documents that bamboozled the U.S.? A chronology.

Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet took a bullet for the president last week, accepting responsibility for the now-discredited "16 words" in Bush's January State of the Union address about Iraq's efforts to purchase uranium in Africa.

"These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president," Tenet said in a statement Friday.

Tenet's gallantry, however, does little to answer the question first raised in early March when inspectors at the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency judged fake a mysterious set of documents Bush had relied on to buttress his claim about Iraq's nuclear ambitions. Press speculation has fingered Iraqi dissidents as the group who had the most to gain in alleging Saddam's uranium shopping spree. The paper trail behind the documents has led to: a "con man" out to make money; Italian intelligence; and "the French." Some publications even suggest the United States, Britain, or other interested powers forged the uranium letters.

The documents are only a part of the disputed "intelligence" the Bush administration used to enlist support for an Iraq invasion. Other intelligence findings, which the administration and its principal ally, Britain, still support, assert a Saddam-Africa nuclear connection.

In the four months since the uranium documents were unmasked, the press has made only halting progress in identifying the counterfeiters, which may help explain why the documents seemed credible in the first place. Why wasn't Secretary of State Colin Powell ever tempted to cite the Niger intelligence? Who devised and executed the Niger scam? What exactly did they hope to gain from it?

A driftline cast into the Nexis sea captures hundreds of stories written about the disputed documents. It's beyond the scope of this article to determine who reported what first, so in condensing those stories into a timeline, more effort has been made to give a sense of how the story has unfolded in all its contradictory glory.

March 8, 2003—TorontoGlobe and Mail
Jeff Shallot of the Toronto Globe and Mail cites U.N. sources in reporting IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei's conclusion that "Secret documents detailing attempts by Iraq to buy uranium for nuclear warheads from Niger are forgeries. …" Shallot hypothesizes a con man, who sold them to an Italian intelligence agent, and then "passed [them] on to French authorities." Shallot continues:

There is no evidence that the forgeries were part of a dirty tricks operation by the United States or any other government to discredit Iraq, even though U.S. and British officials said the documents supported their case against the Baghdad regime.

March 9, 2003—New York Times
ElBaradei tells the New York Times' Felicity Barringer that his "experts found anomalies in the signatures, the letterhead and the format of the document." Whose interest might the forgery serve? "I'm sure there's a lot of people who would be delighted to malign Iraq," said ElBaradei. "It could range from Iraqi dissidents to all sorts of other sources."

March 14, 2003—CNN
David Ensor of CNN cites "knowledgeable sources" who say one of the forged documents, a letter discussing the uranium deal with Iraq, contains the faked signature of Tandja Mamadou, the president of Niger. He continues, "Another, written on paper from a 1980s military government in Niger, bears the date of October 2000 and the signature of a man who by then had not been foreign minister of Niger for 14 years."