FORGING THE CASE FOR WAR

[Guest guest]

Forging the Case for War

 

 

Who was behind the Niger uranium documents?

 

 

by Philip Giraldi

 

 

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

http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_11_07/feature.html