According to presidential Advisor Karl Rove, former ambassador “Joe Wilson was wrong [in his July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed ] when he said he debunked forged documents sold to Italian intelligence and passed on to the French that appeared to document Iraqi attempts to buy uranium for nuclear weapons. He [Wilson] later claimed he told the CIA ‘that the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.’ On Meet the Press he boasted, ‘When I came back from Niger and debriefed, I had not, of course, seen the documents, but one of the points that I made was if these documents did not contain certain signatures–specifically, the signature of the minister of energy and mines and the prime minister–then they could not be authentic.’ The problem is that the documents didn’t surface until October 7, 2002, eight months after his mission to Africa. So he was claiming that he had raised a red flag about forged documents that had not even surfaced at the time of his supposed warning. [CIA Director George] Tenet’s statement pointed this out, saying, ‘there was no mention in the report [by Wilson] of forged documents–or any suggestion of the existence of documents at all.’ ”
– Karl Rove, Courage and Consequence, Page 324