When the Bush administration issued its pre-war claims that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa, the CIA had not yet obtained the documents that served as a key foundation for the allegation and later turned out to be forged, US officials say.

　　The CIA didn't receive the documents until February 2003, nearly a year after the agency first began investigating the alleged Iraq-Africa connection and a short time after it assented to language in US President George W. Bush's speech that alleged such a connection, the officials said.

　　Without the source documents, the CIA could investigate only their substance, which it had learned from a foreign government around the beginning of 2002. One of the key allegations was that Iraq was soliciting uranium from the African country of Niger.

　　Even as the CIA found little to verify the reports, Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to put them into public statements. Sometimes the CIA succeeded in getting the information removed.

　　For instance, the agency tried to have the Niger reference removed from a State Department fact sheet in December 2002, but the document was published before the change could be made, one US intelligence official told The Associated Press, speaking only on condition of anonymity.

　　CIA Director George J. Tenet spoke in closed session to the Senate Committee on Intelligence about the matter on Wednesday.

　　The discredited documents at the center of the controversy are a series of letters purportedly between officials in Iraq and Niger. The letters indicated Niger would supply uranium to the government of Saddam Hussein in a form that could be refined for nuclear weapons.

　　The CIA declined to say how the agency eventually obtained the documents.

　　After the CIA received the documents, the government provided them to the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, which quickly deter-mined them to be forgeries. The UN Security Council was alerted on March 7, two weeks before American and British forces invaded Iraq.

　　But the documents had already been used for public claims in at least two places: the December 19 State Department fact sheet and Bush's January 28 address, in which he uttered the line: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

　　When the Niger claim first arose, the CIA sent a retired diplomat to Africa to investigate in February 2002. The diplomat reported finding no credible evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger.