The row over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction is threatening to cause serious damage to senior intelligence figures on both sides of the Atlantic. Claims made before the invasion that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium for nuclear bombs are rapidly unravelling, undermining the justification for the war.

Both Tony Blair and President George Bush declared they had intelligence showing that Saddam had been trying to acquire uranium — an essential ingredient for an atomic bomb — from Africa.

But now much of the evidence for those claims is disputed — and in some cases discredited. It has forced the White House to admit that Bush’s state of the union speech in January was inaccurate. And it has tarnished Blair’s reputation.

It may yet cost George Tenet, the head of the CIA, his job and raises serious questions about the reliability of claims by British intelligence.

How did such a serious matter become so distorted? Its roots lie in November 2001, two months after the devastating Al-Qaeda attacks on America, when Italian secret service agents were approached by a west African diplomat. He knew, he said, of a plot by the Iraqis to buy hundreds of tons of uranium ore (yellowcake) from Niger.

He had a small bundle of documents which, for a price, he was willing to pass on. The documents purported to be letters between Iraqi agents and officials from Niger.

On the surface the claims appeared to make sense. It was already known that Iraq had bought yellowcake from Niger in the 1980s. That nuclear programme had been dismantled, but nobody knew for certain whether or not Saddam had tried to resurrect it. The Niger documents offered tantalising evidence.

A deal was struck and the documents swiftly passed into the hands of the Americans. Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, the US ambassador in Niger, was asked to prepare a report assessing them.

Soon afterwards, at the end of February 2002, Joseph Wilson, a senior American diplomat, was told by the CIA that the office of Dick Cheney, the vice-president, had questions about the claims. Would he be prepared to carry out an investigation? Wilson accepted the brief and travelled to Niamey, Niger’s capital, a city he knew well. He met Owens-Kirkpatrick, who told him she had already investigated the documents and debunked them in her reports to Washington. Wilson continued with his own inquiries.

There are two main uranium mines in Niger and both are tightly controlled by a consortium of French, Spanish, German, Japanese and Nigerian companies. Wilson concluded that their supervision was too rigorous for any Iraqi attempt to purchase ore to have gone unnoticed.

“Before I left Niger,” Wilson said last week, “I briefed the ambassador on my findings, which were consistent with her own. In early March I arrived in Washington and promptly provided a detailed briefing to the CIA. I later shared my conclusions with the State Department African affairs bureau.”

Several sources say Wilson’s findings were also communicated to Britain, but Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, denies this. Whatever the case, the documents were at best dubious. The State Department’s bureau of intelligence and research concluded that they were “garbage”.

BRITAIN by September last year had still not seen the disputed documents relating to Niger, but its own sources were giving it information.

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