Officials at the Vienna-based international atomic energy authority insisted that, contrary to the British prime minister's statement to members of parliament (MPs) this week, the only intelligence about attempts to buy uranium from Niger came from documents that were found to be forgeries.
Only some time after the forgeries were revealed on March 7 by the IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei did the inspectors receive further ill-defined information.
"We've now been told vaguely there is something else," one official said. "But at the time, the forged documents were the only intelligence we had."
For example, the claim about Iraq trying to buy uranium oxide from Niger first emerged in the British government's document about Iraqi weapons procurement on September 24 last year.
Even before IAEA officials realized that the documents were forgeries, they had serious doubts about the authenticity of the claim because of the nature of Niger's uranium extraction industry.
The IAEA quickly realized that the documents handed over by the US were fake. The most glaring mistake was one letter purportedly signed by a Nigerian minister who had been out of office for 10 years.
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