the meeting was between the then National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and Nicolò Pollari, in the presence of an Italian and US delegation that included Stephen Hadley. October 2002 6 October 2002: The National Security Council sent a sixth draft of a speech President Bush was to give in Cincinnati to the CIA. The draft contained the statement about Iraq "having been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide. George Tenet, then head of the CIA, and other of his CIA officials, directed the text be removed from the speech as the certainty regarding the accuracy of the claim was weak. 7 October 2002: George W. Bush gives a speech in Cincinnati in which he, for the first time, lays out in detail the case for disarming Iraq. In that speech he asserts, "If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year." As directed the previous day by George Tenet, particularly through contact with Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, the speech does not reference Iraq's alleged pursuit of Nigerien uranium. 9 October 2002: Elisabetta Burba, an Italian journalist for Panorama magazine, part of the media empire of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, contacts the U.S. Embassy in Rome, requesting authentication of some documents of interest that she has been offered. These documents allegedly represent a contract by Iraq to purchase uranium "yellowcake" from Niger. The owner has reportedly told Elisabetta Burba that she can review the documents but can only use them if she pays 15,000 euros. Panorama refuses to pay that amount unless they are first verified as authentic. 15 October 2002: The embassy in Rome faxes copies of these BP-documents to the State Department's Bureau of Nonproliferation in Washington, which in turn provided copies to the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). It will be a few weeks, early January 2003, before INR analysts conclude the Burba Panorama documents are fabricated fakes. 16 October 2002: During an inter-agency meeting, analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Security Agency, and the CIA all obtain copies of the BP-documents. None of the four CIA analysts in attendance remembers taking a copy, which later would show up in a CIA vault