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Nov 10, 2005, 1:11:46 PM11/10/05

Salon
November 9, 2005

Niger forgeries: The Italian connection

Did Italian spooks collude with American neocons to trump up evidence for war?

By Samuel Loewenberg

Rocco Martino never met Lewis "Scooter" Libby, but he did hang with Michael Ledeen,
General Nicolo Pollari and Senator Massimo Brutti; can't seem to get their stories
straight ... Silvio Berlusconi may be in denial about the funky stamps ... and the
yellowcake seems to have been baked in Italy after all.

Welcome to Italy's latest scandal, a dizzying tale that catapults the government of
Silvio Berlusconi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Berlusconi) into the midst of
the unfolding controversy over the Bush administration's trumped-up evidence for
weapons of mass destruction. The faked documents formed the basis of George Bush's
now-infamous claim in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Saddam had tried to buy
nuclear material from the African republic of Niger
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowcake_Forgery), which was among the
administration's most important justifications for the invasion of Iraq.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html

The Senate Intelligence Committee is beginning an investigation this week on how the
Bush crowd came to use the bogus evidence, despite repeated warnings by the State
Department and the CIA about the dubious nature of the dossier. But don't hold your
breath for any dramatic revelations from the Republican-controlled committee. A
recently terminated investigation by the FBI turned up nothing. Tellingly, the feds
specifically exculpated the Italian secret service over allegations in the Italian
press that it had a role in disseminating the forged documents. And just last week an
intelligence oversight panel of the Italian Senate held closed-door hearings and
found … nothing.

The real work of unraveling this scam has been coming from the press, both in the
U.S. and Italy. Among the most dramatic revelations to date have been by
investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo, who co-wrote a series in
the left-leaning Italian daily "La Repubblica".
http://nuralcubicle.blogspot.com/2005/10/berlusconi-behind-fake-yellowcake.html

According to Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo, the Italian secret service, known as
SISMI, hatched an elaborate plan to get the forged documents to the hawks in the Bush
administration and still keep their hands clean. The reporters allege the falsehoods
were propagated at the behest of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was eager to
help his new American friend make the case for war. While the articles do not go so
far as to say Berlusconi knew about the scam, they do finger Italian intelligence
chief General Nicolo Pollari.

The bogus dossier at the center of the scandal is what President Bush relied on in
his January 2003 State of the Union speech. The documents purport to show that Iraq
tried to buy 500 tons of "yellowcake" uranium from Niger. Yellowcake is a type of
concentrated uranium that can be used to make nuclear weapons. As it turns out,
Niger, the world's second poorest country, was not involved in anything illicit other
than the beginnings of a famine, which has not received one-hundredth of the press
attention of the sexier WMD controversy.

The Niger uranium scams have led to at least one concrete result, although probably
not the one the mysterious perpetrators intended: the indictment of Irv Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Dick Cheney. Lewis Libby, like many white-collar
criminals, was busted not for the crime itself but for lying to prosecutors about
it -- in this case, what he knew about covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Plame) and whom he heard it from. The White
House campaign against Valerie Plame Wilson appears to have been designed to
discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_C._Wilson), who went public with his claims that
the Niger-Iraq connection was a fabrication.

Which brings us back to Italy. According to the "La Repubblica" series, the source of
the fake nuclear evidence was a disgraced Italian police official and former SISMI
informer named Rocco Martino (http://www.dkosopedia.com/index.php/Rocco_Martino), who
was working with a shadowy senior SISMI official named Antonio Nucera. The Italian
secret service had tracked Rocco Martino's dealings with French and British officials
and knew he was peddling the false documents, according to the reporters.

General Nicolo Pollari
(http://www.serviziinformazionesicurezza.gov.it/pdcweb.nsf/pagine/ee_direttoresismi),
the SISMI head, admits in the stories that his service was tracking Rocco Martino.
But in public statements since then he claims he was innocent as to the substance of
his former informant's dealings.

Carlo Bonini told Salon it was clear that SISMI knew about the forgeries, not least
because they were secretly passing on the story about the Iraq-Niger connection to
pro-war hawks in the Bush administration. His claim has since been backed up by
reporters from the American news agency Knight-Ridder.

An October 29 story by Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel asserts that "Italy's
military intelligence agency, SISMI, and people close to it, repeatedly tried to shop
the bogus Niger uranium story to governments in France, Britain and the United
States. That created the illusion that multiple sources were confirming the story".
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/13085306.htm

The story quotes a U.S. intelligence official as saying, "SISMI was involved in this;
there is no doubt".

As the documents were making their way to the American allies, General Nicolo
Pollari, the SISMI chief, held a secret meeting in Rome with senior Pentagon
officials, including hawks Harold Rohde and Lawrence Franklin
(http://www.cicentre.com/Documents/DOC_Larry_Franklin_Case.htm), the Iran analyst at
the Pentagon charged with passing unauthorized information to AIPAC, the pro-Israel
lobby; and neoconservative civilian Michael Ledeen
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/ledeen/ledeen.php), infamous for his role in the
Iran-Contra affair.

According to "La Repubblica", this paved the way for a Washington meeting between
Nicolo Pollari and Stephen Hadley
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/hadley/hadley.php), at the time the second in
command at the National Security Council. It was Stephen Hadley who ultimately took
the blame for the inclusion of the Iraq-Niger falsehoods in Bush's State of the Union
speech. Stephen Hadley, who is today the president's National Security Advisor, told
reporters last week that he has no "recollection" of the Niger uranium intel being
mentioned at the meetings.

The "La Repubblica" articles make the case that the Italian secret service did not
pass on the forgeries themselves, but instead talked up the information in them, as a
way of setting up an intelligence "echo chamber". By keeping quiet about the
forgeries, says Carlo Bonini, the Italian spooks could pass on seemingly valuable
information without having to take responsibility if the scheme went awry.

"The question is why SISMI didn't ring the bell for U.S. that the documents were
faked", Carlo Bonini told Salon. He noted that the unreliable Rocco Martino only
played a small part in sourcing their story, and the majority of it came from
contacts in Italian, U.S. and other foreign intelligence and diplomatic services.

SISMI and the Italian parliament, for their part, maintain that Rocco Martino cooked
up the whole scam to make money. Rocco Martino, who by all accounts is as unreliable
as they come, claims he was nothing more than a "postman" and didn't know the
documents were faked.

What Rocco Martino knew about the Niger dossier, which apparently also included
outdated 10-year-old Italian intelligence, is still far less important than what the
Italian and the American governments knew.

According to Knight-Ridder, a U.S. State Department WMD analyst cast doubts on the
documents immediately upon seeing them. In the weeks before Bush's infamous January
28, 2003 State of the Union speech, the analyst concluded the documents were crude
forgeries, writing, "documents bear a funky Embassy Of Niger stamp (to make it look
official, I guess)".

Both the Silvio Berlusconi and Bush administrations deny the allegations. But their
denials raise more questions than they answer.

Testifying before the Senate intelligence oversight panel on Thursday, General Nicolo
Pollari, the SISMI chief, denied any Italian government involvement in the forged
dossier.

Silvio Berlusconi says neither his government nor the Italian intelligence agency had
any part in the alleged scam. The La Repubblica stories threatened to damage the
reputation of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi told the conservative newspaper Libero,
saying, "If they were believed, we would be considered the instigator" of the war in
Iraq.

Silvio Berlusconi's and SISMI's claims of innocence were recently bolstered by a
clean bill of health from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, which announced
on Friday, November 4, that it had closed its two-year investigation into the
fraudulent dossier. According to the New York Times, an FBI official confirmed
reports that the agency had sent a letter to the Italian government on July 20
thanking it for its help and clearing the Italian secret service of disseminating the
false documents.

But that is a bit strange, since, according to Newsweek, as of September 2004 the
Italians had still not given the FBI permission to interview Rocco Martino. Moreover,
the thoroughness of the FBI inquiry is itself questionable: Although Rocco Martino
had visited the U.S. twice in the summer of 2004 to appear on television, and by the
time of his second visit had been the subject of international press coverage because
of his role in the scandal, the FBI reportedly never even attempted to interview him.
In fact, to this date the FBI has never interviewed Rocco Martino.

The FBI did not return three calls by Salon asking for comment.

The Senate hearings also disclosed that the Italian intelligence agency first warned
the U.S. and Britain about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium on October 15, 2001, about a
month after the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001. SISMI acknowledged
that on that date it confirmed to the CIA that it had "intelligence data" provided by
"a creditable source". (The "creditable source" was a female SISMI asset known as "La
Signora", who according to the La Repubblica series took part in the forgery scheme).

Italian officials have seemed quite confused about whether SISMI ever had the
documents or not. In the wake of the hearings last week, Senator Massimo Brutti
(http://www.senato.it/leg/14/BGT/Schede/Attsen/00000392.htm) told reporters that
SISMI had warned the U.S about the fake dossier around the time of Bush's infamous
State of the Union speech in January 2003. (The French, to whom Rocco Martino also
peddled the bogus papers, and whom both Italian officials and neocon strategist
Michael Ledeen
(http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.23424,filter.all/pub_detail.asp) have accused
of being responsible for peddling the fraud, alerted the U.S. to the fraud on
February 4, 2003). But later that day he backtracked, calling Reuters and the
Associated Press and saying that he had been mistaken, that SISMI never had the
documents and therefore could not have warned about them.

After President Bush made his State of the Union claim that Iraq had been trying to
buy uranium in Africa, the International Atomic Energy Agency investigated the Niger
dossier. They proved them to be "a crude forgery" within two hours, according to
Newsweek. What did the IAEA do that the American and British governments apparently
hadn't? They Googled them.

The FBI may have closed its investigation of the Niger yellowcake forgery, but many
questions about the role played by both Italy and by Bush administration hawks
remain.
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/salon67.html