Plame Affair Timeline - Key Background Events - October 2002

October 2002

• 6 October 2002: The National Security Council sent a sixth draft of a speech President Bush was to give in Cincinnati to the CIA. The draft contained the statement about Iraq "having been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide. Tenet and other CIA officials directed the text be removed from the speech as the certainty regarding the accuracy of the claim was weak.
• 7 October 2002: George W. Bush gives a speech in Cincinnati in which he, for the first time, lays out in detail the case for disarming Iraq. In that speech he asserts, "If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year." It is later revealed (in July 2003) that George Tenet had intervened to remove language from that speech referencing Iraq's alleged pursuit of Nigerien uranium. More specifically, Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was reported to be a main target of Tenet's entreaties.
• 9 October 2002: Elisabetta Burba, an Italian journalist for Panorama magazine, part of the media empire of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, contacts the U.S. Embassy in Rome, requesting authentication of some documents of interest that she has. These documents allegedly represent a contract by Iraq to purchase uranium "yellowcake" from Niger. The owner, not Elisabetta Burba, reportedly wants 15,000 euros for them. Panorama refuses to pay that amount unless they are first verified as authentic.
• 15 October 2002: The embassy in Rome faxes the documents to the State Department's Bureau of Nonproliferation in Washington, which in turn provided copies to the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). The INR's nuclear analyst will later decide they are a hoax in January 2003.
• During an inter-agency meeting the next day, analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Security Agency, and the CIA all obtain copies of the documents. None of the four CIA analysts in attendance remembers taking a copy, which later would show up in a CIA vault during a postmortem search.