More than a year before US President George W. Bush declared that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons material in Africa, the French spy service began repeatedly warning the CIA that there was no evidence to support the allegation, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The Times account, posted on its Web site on Saturday night, described what it said were previously undisclosed exchanges between the US and the French in 2001 and 2002. The Times quoted the retired chief of the French counter-intelligence service and a former CIA official.
The French conclusions were reached after extensive investigations in Niger and other former French colonies, the Times quoted the former French official as saying.
The account of the former intelligence official, Alain Chouet, was "at odds with our understanding of the issue," the Times quoted a US government official as saying. The US official declined to elaborate and spoke to the Times only on condition that neither he nor his agency be named.
However, the essence of Chouet's account -- that the French repeatedly investigated the Niger claim, found no evidence to support it, and warned the CIA -- was extensively corroborated by a former CIA official, the Times said.
The repeated warnings from France's Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, DGSE, did not prevent the Bush administration from making the case aggressively that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons materials, the Times said.
It was not the first time a foreign government tried but failed to warn US officials off of dubious prewar intelligence. In the notorious "Curveball" case, an Iraqi who defected to Germany claimed to have knowledge of Iraq's biological weapons. Bush and other US officials repeatedly cited Curveball's claims even as German intelligence officials argued that he was unstable, unreliable and incorrect, the Times said.
The CIA requested French assistance in 2001 and 2002 because French firms dominate the uranium business internationally and former French colonies lead the world in production of the strategic mineral, the Times said.
"In France, we've always been very careful about both problems of uranium production in Niger and Iraqi attempts to get uranium from Africa," Chouet said.
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