Rick Moran had commented on an earlier post of mine that WINPAC would not be happy that Fitzgerald was looking into the Niger documents – because his recollection was they had something to do with the initial confirmation of the Niger Intel. I give Rick credit for a pretty darn good memory – including the tip it was addressed in the Senate investigation report. He was very, very close!

Actually the forged documents were sent to the CIA in early October 2002, but the destination inside the CIA is redacted.

Here the documents stayed unchallenged until January of 2003, when the WINPAC section of the CIA was asked to respond to the Niger government’s December ’02 claim that they had not made any agreements with Saddam. It was then that WINPAC realized they did not have the documents! It was at this time a new version was sent to WINPAC and the forgeries discovered.

What happened to the documents sent in October of 2002? Well, there is evidence that does point back to the CIA CPD (Valerie Plame’s group at the time of Wilson’s Niger visit 8 months earlier):

On October 16, 2002, INR made copies of the documents available at the NIAG meeting for attendees, including representatives from the CIA, DIA, DOE and NSA. Because the analyst who offered to provide the documents was on leave, the office’s senior analyst provided the documents. She cannot recall how she made the documents available, but analysts from several agencies, including the DIA, NSA and DOE, did pick up copies at that meeting. None of the four CIA representatives recall picking up the documents, however, during the CIA Inspector General’s investigation of this issue, copies of the documents were found in the DO’s CPD vault. It appears that a CPD representative did pick up the documents at the NIAG meeting, but after returning to the office, filed them without any further distribution.

And then there is this final tidbit:

On December 17, 2002, WINPAC analysts produced a paper, U.S. Analysis of Iraq’s Declaration, 7 December 2002. The paper reviewed Iraq’s “Currently Accurate, Full and Complete Disclosure” to the UN of its WMD programs and made only two points regarding the nuclear program – one noted Iraq’s failure to explain its procurement of aluminum tubes the IC assessed could be used in a nuclear program, and the other noted that the declaration “does not acknowledge efforts to procure uranium from Niger, one of the points addressed in the U.K. Dossier.” An e-mail from the INR Iraq nuclear analyst to a DOE analyst on December 23, 2002 indicated that the analyst was surprised that INR’s well known alternative views on both the aluminum tubes and the uranium information were not included in the points before they were transmitted to the NSC. The DOE analyst commented in an e-mail response to INR that, “it is most disturbing that WINPAC is essentially directing foreign policy in this matter. There are some very strong points to be made in respect to Iraq’s arrogant non-compliance with UN sanctions. However, when individuals attempt to convert those “strong statements” into the “knock out” punch, the Administration will ultimately look foolish – i.e. the tubes and Niger!”