Then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney wrote: “On July 20 [1990], the two of them [Israeli defense minister Moshe Arens and deputy chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces Ehud Barak] took seats at the small round table in my office, and pulling papers and maps out of their briefcases, they presented evidence of the advanced stage of the Iraqi nuclear program. Access to European technology, they believed, was helping the Iraqis speed completion of a uranium enrichment facility, and we had a narrow window of time in which to stop the program. …I took very seriously what Arens and Barak had to say–particularly since they described a program much further advanced than the one portrayed in our intelligence assessments.”
– Dick Cheney, In My Time, Page 182