Washington ? The CIA expressed doubts as it passed along prewar claims that Iraq sought uranium from the African country of Niger, a senior intelligence official said Thursday. The allegations made it into President Bush’s State of the Union address anyway.

About a month after Bush’s speech, the United Nations determined the uranium reports were based primarily on forged documents initially obtained by European intelligence agencies.

A Bush administration official said the information was vetted by relevant agencies, and it was included in the president’s speech because at the time it was believed to be reliable. It is no longer regarded as such.

The Washington Post, quoting unidentified U.S. officials, said the CIA did not pass on the detailed results of its investigation to the White House or other government agencies.

The U.S. intelligence official, however, said the CIA’s doubts were made known to other federal agencies through various internal communications, starting more than a year before the war began.

The reports first surfaced around the end of 2001, when the British and Italian governments told the United States they had intelligence that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger.

That uranium, once fully processed, could be used in a nuclear weapon.

At the time, the allies did not describe their sources, which turned out to be a series of letters purportedly between officials in Niger and Iraq, the intelligence official said. In 2003, U.N. experts determined the letters were forgeries.

The CIA distributed the Europeans’ information to the rest of the government in early 2002 and noted that the allegations lacked “specifics and details and we’re unable to corroborate them,” the senior intelligence official said.

The reports made it into the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that was distributed throughout the U.S. government. But it also said they were uncorroborated.