Newsday: Niger Uranium Rumors Wouldn't Die

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http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-niger17feb17,0,809759.story?page=1&coll=ny-leadnationalnews-headlines

Niger Uranium Rumors Wouldn't Die

WASHINGTON — In the spring of 2001, long before Sept. 11 and the American focus on Iraq, the CIA asked its Paris station about rumors that 200 tons of nuclear material had vanished from two French-owned mines in the West African nation of Niger.

...

"Everything was accounted for," the former spy said. "Case closed."

Hardly.

Over the next two years, other U.S. intelligence, military and diplomatic officials in cities across Europe sent Washington a growing stream of cables and reports suggesting that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium from Niger.

Experienced intelligence officers repeatedly knocked down those reports, sometimes after painstaking inquiry.

But like the carnival game "Whack-a-Mole," similar reports kept popping back up in different places. The unconfirmed reports were embraced by the White House, which began to repeatedly warn that Iraq was trying to build nuclear weapons.