Defer to headquarters but to use information from another liaison service's source whose information cannot be verified on such an important, key topic should take the most serious consideration.

Tenet has insisted that he never saw that cable either. Nor does he remember a last-minute warning from Drumheller the night before Powell's speech. Tenet had called Drumheller seeking a phone number. "As long as I've got you," said Drumheller on the phone, "there are some problems with the German reporting." Drumheller writes that he tried to tell Tenet that Curveball was worthless. Tenet remembers the phone call, but not the warning. What Curveball said was found by the Iraq Survey Group to be wrong in every detail.

The claim that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger was not only weak but was based, if that is the word, on evidence, if that is the word, that was fabricated in so obvious a manner that the CIA claims not to have seen the documents until very late in the day.

First notice of the Iraq-Niger connection reached the CIA shortly before September 11, 2001, probably from Italian intelligence officials passing on a two-year-old telex that reported plans of the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican to visit Niger. Two Italian journalists who have investigated the case, Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D'Avanzo, note that the only significant Nigerien export is uranium ore. So this was an item of interest.

The uranium mines in Niger are under the control of a French company and the export of uranium ore is closely monitored by French intelligence, which answered a routine CIA query in the summer of 2001 by saying that nothing was amiss. The following spring, the CIA was again "knocking on our door", according to Alain Chouet, the director of the French intelligence branch that monitors WMD matters.

Chouet told Bonini and D'Avanzo, as they report in their book Collusion: International Espionage and the War on Terror, that there was now "an undeniable urgency" to US questions, which were no longer vague but full of detail. Again the French investigated; again the answer to the CIA was that nothing was amiss. But the Americans pressed the matter and now, for the first time, sent Chouet some documents. "All it took was a quick glance," said Chouet. "They were junk. Crude fakes."

At about the same time - June 2002 - a sometime Italian intelligence operative named Rocco Martino tried to sell the French a sheaf of documents reporting a secret Iraqi purchase of 500 tons of uranium yellowcake. Chouet had them checked against the material sent him by the Americans. "The documents were identical." A great deal more might be said about these documents, which had already been passed to the British in late 2001, according to Bonini and D'Avanzo. The Germans, too, were given a crack at them. "The Germans asked our advice," Chouet said, "and we told them they were trash."

What is clear is that the documents, which were fabricated with materials stolen from the Nigerien Embassy in Rome, were given or at least offered to the British, the Americans, the French and the Germans - all by the summer of 2002, when the US had decided on war to remove Saddam and was building a case that he threatened the world with WMD.

It should be noted here that intelligence services trying to bolster a weak case will sometimes pass a report under the nose of a foreign intelligence service to create an echo effect. Were the yellowcake documents the basis of British claims in an intelligence report released on September 24, 2002, that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa? As "the dodgy dossier", that report - allegedly "sexed up" by aides to Blair - later became the subject of a major inquiry by Parliament. The British insist that they have other credible information on the yellowcake story but refuse to say what it is.

The Italian intelligence service concedes that its man - Martino, the sometime operative - was the one who circulated the yellowcake documents, but insists that he did it simply for the money. Bonini and D'Avanzo don't believe it, and point out that Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, wanted a central role in Bush's coalition to fight the "war on terror". A report in Rome's La Repubblica on October 25, 2005, says that Berlusconi pressured his new intelligence chief, Nicolo Pollari, to provide the Americans with intelligence that would inflate Italy's role.

Who dreamed up the yellowcake stratagem? So far Americans - public and Congress alike - don't seem to care, choosing to lump the Niger documents with all the other phony, exaggerated reports under the category of "intelligence failures". The yellowcake story didn't stand up for long, but it didn't need to stand up for long. An echo effect put it into play after Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union speech, included it in the list of scary signs that Saddam was preparing trouble for the world: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Tenet makes much of the fact that he twice blocked use of the yellowcake claim by Bush - once in September 2002 and again a few weeks later - but his argument was a narrow one: the president should not be a "fact witness" on the yellowcake story because the facts were too iffy. But not too iffy, in Tenet's view, to include the yellowcake story in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002 that persuaded Congress to vote for war. Nor did Tenet protest when the State Department accused Iraq in December of leaving the yellowcake story out of its WMD declaration, when Bush repeated the charge in a report to Congress, when Rice cited it as an example of Iraqi duplicity in an article for the New York Times in January 2003, when Powell cited it a few days later in a speech in Switzerland, and when Rumsfeld cited it at the end of January.

The yellowcake story would have appeared in Powell's UN speech as well if Powell had not drawn the line and tossed it out. That left the secretary of state with a lot of atmospheric intelligence rigmarole and two factual claims - the aluminum tubes proved that Saddam was going for nuclear weapons and the mobile biological-weapons labs proved that he was a threat to the region and possibly the world. Powell's speech was all smoke and mirrors, but it was enough. Bush turned his back on the UN and prepared to go to war.

Blix, meanwhile, had been undergoing a kind of slow awakening. Blix never answered reporters' questions about his "gut feelings" on WMD, but he had them, and in the beginning they were roughly what everybody else believed - despite Saddam's ceasefire pledge to give up WMD at the end of the 1991 Gulf War, Blix believed that he retained some and was trying to build more.

But gradually the failure to find anything eroded Blix's confidence that his gut was correct. When the inspections resumed in November 2002, American experts suggested to Blix that the inspectors begin with Iraqi government ministries, seize computers and look for names and addresses on the hard drives. Blix thought this a lame idea; the inspectors had tried it before, but the Iraqis were too sophisticated to leave incriminating clues in such an obvious place. "I drew the conclusion," Blix writes in Disarming Iraq, "that the US did not itself know where things were."

Between late November and mid-March 2003, Blix reports, the UN inspectors made 700 separate visits to 500 sites. About three dozen of those sites had been suggested by intelligence services, many by Tenet's CIA, which insisted that these were "the best" in the agency's database. Blix was shocked. "If this was the best, what was the rest?" he asked himself. "Could there be 100% certainty about the existence of weapons of mass destruction but 0% knowledge about their location?"

By this time Blix was firmly opposed to the evident US preference for disarmament by war. "It was, in my view, too early to give up now," he writes. Blair in late February tried to convince Blix that Saddam had WMD even if Blix couldn't find them - the French, German and Egyptian intelligence services were all sure of it, Blair said. Blix told Blair that to him they seemed not so sure, and adds as an aside, "My faith in intelligence had been shaken." On March 5, Blix was on the phone with Rice and asked her point-blank if the United States knew where Iraq's WMD were hidden. "No, she said, but interviews after liberation would reveal it."

Two days later, Mohamed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in a report to the Security Council, decisively undermined the two principal US arguments that Saddam was illicitly pursuing nuclear weapons: the aluminum tubes that the CIA insisted were for use in a centrifuge to manufacture fissionable material were actually for conventional rockets, ElBaradei said, and the documents used to "prove" that Saddam was trying to buy uranium yellowcake in Niger were, in ElBaradei's diplomatic words, "not authentic".

Only people paying close attention to the details understood at once that he meant the documents were fakes, fabrications, forgeries. ElBaradei's experts had reached this conclusion in one day.

In that meeting of the Security Council, both ElBaradei and Blix reported their continuing plans for further inspections, and both said that outstanding issues might be resolved within a few months. This was not what the United States wanted to hear. In mid-February, Bush had derided efforts to give Iraq "another, 'nother, 'nother last chance". Blix had pleaded in a phone call about the same time to Powell for a free hand at least until April 15. "He said it was too late."

But three weeks later Blix soberly argued in his report to the Security Council for more time. "It would not take years, nor weeks, but months," he said. France, Russia, China and other council members favored the idea and proposed a new resolution that the Americans agreed to discuss but which was loaded with difficulties. "Nevertheless, I thought, here on March 7, there was something new," Blix writes in his memoir, "a theoretical possibility to avoid war. Saddam could make a speech; Iraq could hand over prohibited items."

The resolution went nowhere, but Blix did not give up hope even when Bush flew to the Azores on March 16 to talk war with his allies, Blair and Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar Lopez. "Most observers felt the war was now a certainty," Blix writes, "and, indeed, it came. Although I thought the probability was very high, I was also, even at this very late date, aware that unexpected things can happen."

Three years later, in a speech to the Arms Control Association, Blix reflected on that moment in his office at the UN - the afternoon of March 16 - when the State Department's John Wolf called to say that the time had come to pull the inspectors out of Iraq. "My belief is that if we had been allowed to continue with inspections for a couple of months more, we would then have been able to go to all of the sites which were given by intelligence," he said. "And since there were not any weapons of massive destruction, we would have reported there were not any."

An invasion might have taken place anyway, Blix concedes; the Americans and British had sent several hundred thousand troops to Kuwait and could not leave them sitting in the desert indefinitely. "But it would have been certainly more difficult," Blix said. Even so, in Blix's view, something important had been achieved. "The UN and the world had succeeded in disarming Iraq without knowing it." Blix guessed that Saddam hid his compliance so Iran wouldn't think him weak, but it was the Americans who were deceived.

That in outline is how the US got into Iraq. When Blair's UN gambit failed to provide an excuse for war, Powell made the US case, putting in the scary stuff - the "product" of Tenet's CIA - that Blix's inspectors had failed to find. No one paying serious attention was convinced. The French, German and Canadian intelligence services were appalled by the weakness of Powell's case - what could the Americans be thinking? Periodically over the following year Powell would tell his assistant, Larry Wilkerson, that Tenet had telephoned to say that the agency was formally withdrawing another pillar from his UN speech. "He took it like a soldier," said Wilkerson, "but it was a blow."

Tenet in his memoirs says almost nothing about UN inspections. The names of Blix and ElBaradei do not appear in his book. Tenet nowhere betrays genuine surprise that the CIA got everything wrong; maybe, he concedes, "reports and analysis ... were flawed, but the intelligence process was not disingenuous".

What shocked Tenet was the brutal manner in which the White House blamed him for the infamous "16 words", and even for the war itself, which never would have happened, the president's men implied, if Tenet had not assured them that the case for Saddam's WMD was a "slam dunk". When Tenet read the phrase in the Washington Post he seethed for a day and then called Andrew Card at the White House to say that leaking the "slam dunk" phrase to reporter Woodward was "about the most despicable thing I have ever seen in my life". Card said nothing.

Thus Tenet broods about his hurt feelings. In the flood of his many parting thoughts he never returns to his original question about the moment when war became inevitable, which was in any case rhetorical. More to the point would have been answerable questions, the kind any fair historian would put to him: When did Tenet first hear Bush talk about "regime change"? When did he realize that Iraq was next on the president's agenda? When did he understand that WMD were to be the heart of the argument for war? And when did he know that without Curveball and without the aluminum tubes, Powell would have been left standing in front of the UN with nothing?

Thomas Powers is the author most recently of Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda. He would like to thank the American Academy in Berlin, where this essay, in the latest New York Review of Books, was written.

(This essay, which considers At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA by George Tenet with Bill Harlow appears in the July 19 issue of the New York Review of Books and is posted here with the permission of the editors of that magazine.)

(Copyright 2007 Thomas Powers.)

(Used by permission Tomdispatch)

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