Terror Watch: Enter The FBI

But for reasons that are unclear, the CIA never followed up on the offer. One explanation, sources said, is that the CIA had gotten a report from the Italians about the documents, including what agency officials believed was a "verbatim text" and didn't believe it was necessary to have the primary source material themselves.

An agency official acknowledged "there were some discussions" between the State Department and the CIA about turning the material over to the agency, but no follow up took place. "It's unclear" why, the official said.

In any event, the failure has proven in retrospect to be a much bigger, if not catastrophic, bureaucratic foul-up. Throughout the fall and in the weeks prior to the State of the Union address, the CIA had tried to warn the White House that the intelligence reporting about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger was "fragmentary" and not reliable. At one point, CIA director Tenet himself personally advised deputy national-security advisor Steve Hadley to remove a reference to the uranium purchases from a speech Bush was preparing to give in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002.

But the idea that the documents themselves--which underlay the claims--was based on forged material did not become known until after Feb. 4, 2003, when the International Atomic Energy Agency asked the U.S. government to back up some of the allegations it was making about Iraq's nuclear program.

At that point, the U.S. mission to the United Nations turned the documents over Jacque Baute, an aide to IAEA executive director Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei who was responsible for monitoring Iraq-related nuclear issues.

Once IAEA forensic analysts got them, it became immediately clear that the documents were not genuine. "Within two hours they figured out they were forgeries," said one IAEA source familiar with the material.