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Forging the Case for War
Who was behind the Niger uranium documents?
by Philip Giraldi
10/29/05 "The
American Conservative" -- -- From the beginning, there
has been little doubt in the intelligence community that the outing
of CIA officer Valerie Plame was part of a bigger story. That she
was exposed in an attempt to discredit her husband, former
ambassador Joseph Wilson, is clear, but the drive to demonize Wilson
cannot reasonably be attributed only to revenge. Rather, her
identification likely grew out of an attempt to cover up the forging
of documents alleging that Iraq attempted to buy yellowcake uranium
from Niger.
What took place and why will not be known with any certainty until
the details of the Fitzgerald investigation are revealed. (As we go
to press, Fitzgerald has made no public statement.) But recent
revelations in the Italian press, most notably in the pages of La
Repubblica, along with information already on the public record,
suggest a plausible scenario for the evolution of Plamegate.
Information developed by Italian investigators indicates that the
documents were produced in Italy with the connivance of the Italian
intelligence service. It also reveals that the introduction of the
documents into the American intelligence stream was facilitated by
Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans (OSP),
a parallel intelligence center set up in the Pentagon to develop
alternative sources of information in support of war against Iraq.
The first suggestion that Iraq was seeking yellowcake uranium to
construct a nuclear weapon came on Oct. 15, 2001, shortly after
9/11, when Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his newly
appointed chief of the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza
Militare (SISMI), Nicolo Pollari, made an official visit to
Washington. Berlusconi was eager to make a good impression and
signaled his willingness to support the American effort to implicate
Saddam Hussein in 9/11. Pollari, in his position for less than three
weeks, was likewise keen to establish himself with his American
counterparts and was under pressure from Berlusconi to present the
U.S. with information that would be vital to the rapidly
accelerating War on Terror. Well aware of the Bush administration’s
obsession with Iraq, Pollari used his meeting with top CIA officials
to provide a SISMI dossier indicating that Iraq had sought to buy
uranium in Niger. The same intelligence was passed simultaneously to
Britain’s MI-6.
But the Italian information was inconclusive and old, some of it
dating from the 1980s. The British, the CIA, and the State
Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research analyzed the
intelligence and declared that it was “lacking in detail” and “very
limited” in scope.
In February 2002, Pollari and Berlusconi resubmitted their report to
Washington with some embellishments, resulting in Joe Wilson’s trip
to Niger. Wilson visited Niamey in February 2002 and subsequently
reported to the CIA that the information could not be confirmed.
Enter Michael Ledeen, the Office of Special Plans’ man in Rome.
Ledeen was paid $30,000 by the Italian Ministry of the Interior in
1978 for a report on terrorism and was well known to senior SISMI
officials. Italian sources indicate that Pollari was eager to engage
with the Pentagon hardliners, knowing they were at odds with the CIA
and the State Department officials who had slighted him. He turned
to Ledeen, who quickly established himself as the liaison between
SISMI and Feith’s OSP, where he was a consultant. Ledeen, who had
personal access to the National Security Council’s Condoleezza Rice
and Stephen Hadley and was also a confidant of Vice President
Cheney, was well placed to circumvent the obstruction coming from
the CIA and State.
The timing, August 2002, was also propitious as the administration
was intensifying its efforts to make the case for war. In the same
month, the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was set up to market the
war by providing information to friends in the media. It has
subsequently been alleged that false information generated by Ahmad
Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress was given to Judith Miller and
other journalists through WHIG.
On Sept. 9, 2002, Ledeen set up a secret meeting between Pollari and
Deputy National Security Adviser Hadley. Two weeks before the
meeting, a group of documents had been offered to journalist
Elisabetta Burba of the Italian magazine Panorama for $10,000, but
the demand for money was soon dropped and the papers were handed
over. The man offering the documents was Rocco Martino, a former
SISMI officer who delivered the first WMD dossier to London in
October 2002. That Martino quickly dropped his request for money
suggests that the approach was a set-up primarily intended to
surface the documents.
Panorama, perhaps not coincidentally, is owned by Prime Minister
Berlusconi. On Oct. 9, the documents were taken from the magazine to
the U.S. Embassy, where they were apparently expected. Instead of
going to the CIA Station, which would have been the normal
procedure, they were sent straight to Washington where they bypassed
the agency’s analysts and went directly to the NSC and the Vice
President’s Office.
On Jan. 28, 2003, over the objections of the CIA and State, the
famous 16 words about Niger’s uranium were used in President Bush’s
State of the Union address justifying an attack on Iraq: “The
British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Both the British and
American governments had actually obtained the report from the
Italians, who had asked that they not be identified as the source.
The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency also looked at the
documents shortly after Bush spoke and pronounced them crude
forgeries.
President Bush soon stopped referring to the Niger uranium, but Vice
President Cheney continued to insist that Iraq was seeking nuclear
weapons.
The question remains: who forged the documents? The available
evidence suggests that two candidates had access and motive: SISMI
and the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.
In January 2001, there was a break-in at the Niger Embassy in Rome.
Documents were stolen but no valuables. The break-in was
subsequently connected to, among others, Rocco Martino, who later
provided the dossier to Panorama. Italian investigators now believe
that Martino, with SISMI acquiescence, originally created a Niger
dossier in an attempt to sell it to the French, who were managing
the uranium concession in Niger and were concerned about
unauthorized mining. Martino has since admitted to the Financial
Times that both the Italian and American governments were behind the
eventual forgery of the full Niger dossier as part of a
disinformation operation. The authentic documents that were stolen
were bunched with the Niger uranium forgeries, using authentic
letterhead and Niger Embassy stamps. By mixing the papers, the
stolen documents were intended to establish the authenticity of the
forgeries.
At this point, any American connection to the actual forgeries
remains unsubstantiated, though the OSP at a minimum connived to
circumvent established procedures to present the information
directly to receptive policy makers in the White House. But if the
OSP is more deeply involved, Michael Ledeen, who denies any
connection with the Niger documents, would have been a logical
intermediary in co-ordinating the falsification of the documents and
their surfacing, as he was both a Pentagon contractor and was
frequently in Italy. He could have easily been assisted by ex-CIA
friends from Iran-Contra days, including a former Chief of Station
from Rome, who, like Ledeen, was also a consultant for the Pentagon
and the Iraqi National Congress.
It would have been extremely convenient for the administration,
struggling to explain why Iraq was a threat, to be able to produce
information from an unimpeachable “foreign intelligence source” to
confirm the Iraqi worst-case.
The possible forgery of the information by Defense Department
employees would explain the viciousness of the attack on Valerie
Plame and her husband. Wilson, when he denounced the forgeries in
the New York Times in July 2003, turned an issue in which there was
little public interest into something much bigger. The investigation
continues, but the campaign against this lone detractor suggests
that the administration was concerned about something far weightier
than his critical op-ed.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer, is a partner in Cannistraro
Associates, an international security consultancy.
November 21, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
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