Saddam's Man in Niger
....
Ambassador Rolf Ekeus is quite possibly the world's most distinguished
international civil servant when it comes to questions of disarmament and
nonproliferation. A founder of the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute, and a former ambassador of Sweden to the United Nations and to
the United States, he has made the subject a lifelong specialty. Appointed
by the U.N. to head the UNSCOM inspection team after the end of the first
Gulf war, he is credited with uncovering, identifying, and destroying more
covert Iraqi weaponry than had been taken out by the war itself.

So widely recognized was the quality of his performance that, when
inspections were proposed again in 2000, even Kofi Annan proposed
renominating him for the task. (The appointment of Ekeus was overruled by
France and Russia, who insisted on Hans Blix.) I might add that the
experience also introduced Ekeus to what might be called the underside of
Iraqi tactics on WMD: He was once offered a straight bribe of $2.5 million,
to his face, by Saddam's deputy Tariq Aziz, and he took part in the
debriefing of the Kamel brothers--Saddam's in-laws--when they defected from
Iraq in 1995 with conclusive evidence of a state-run concealment program for
WMD facilities. Ekeus remembers being met by Zahawie when he first arrived
in Baghdad to begin Iraq's post-1991 disarmament, and being told by him
that, having met in the past as diplomats, they were now enemies.

"When I first heard that it was Zahawie who had been to Niger," he told me,
"I thought well, then, that's it. Conclusive." I asked him if he would put
his reasons in writing, and here they a
....
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...e.asp?ID=24438

....according to a new book entitled Shopping For Bombs, by the BBC's
security correspondent Gordon Corera, another visitor to Niger in that very
month of February 1999 was A.Q. Khan, whose black market in nuclear
materials was then unknown outside a very small circle in his home country
of Pakistan. According to a diary of the journey kept by Khan's associate
Abu Bakr Siddiqui and obtained by Corera, "Niger has big uranium deposits."
The next year, A.Q. Khan was back in Niger's capital. So we can say with
some assurance that Niger's authorities (so briefly and so leniently
investigated by Joseph Wilson) seem to have given at least the impression of
being open for business...