Silvio Berlusconi came to power in 1994. He is a supporter of the war in Iraq, a fact which may have lead to his election defeat in 2006. However with the fall of the Prodi center-left coalition government, Berlusconi is again leading right-wing forces to power in Italy. All this background may seem irrelevant to you, but here is the link: several former American intelligence officials and military analysts interviewed by Vanity Fair believe that the Niger yellowcake documents were forged and foisted on policymakers in a classic psychological warfare operation to deliberately mislead the American public.[1] There were at least 14 instances prior to the January 28, 2003 State of the Union speech containing the infamous 16 words in which analysts at the C.I.A., the State Department, or other government agencies who had examined the Niger documents or reports about them raised serious doubts about their legitimacy—only to be rebuffed by Bush officials who wanted to use the material. Italian politics has a postwar history of American interference, influence buying, and violent covert activities conducted by secret neofascist organizations sometimes funded by the CIA. It is in this murky environment of ruthless competing ideologies that neoconservatives in the Bush administration were able to enlist persons with the political motivation and means to assist them in selling the war to Congress and the people.
The Niger psy-op had precedents. Michael Ledeen, an American fascist sympathizer was stationed in Rome as a correspondent for the neoconservative magazine, The New Republic in 1980. He met Francesco Pazienza a piduista and SISMI (Italian military intelligence) agent. They teamed up to write an incendiary and false article to help unseat President Jimmy Carter. Just before the 1980 election Ledeen charged that the President's errant brother, Billy, had received a payoff of $50,000 from Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, and had met secretly with PLO leader Yassar Arafat. A subsequent investigation by a journalist for the The Wall Street Journal concluded that the damaging article was part of a disinformation scam run by SISMI to tilt the U.S. election. Pazienza claimed that Ledeen was a paid agent of SISMI and even had his own code name, Z-3. Money from SISMI was sent to him via a Bermuda bank account. Pazienza was convicted in abstensia for fraud and extortion related to the affair. Pazienza's indictment named Ledeen as a co-conspirator. Ledeen was not charged. Ledeen played a prominent role in another disinformation operation from the eighties. He promoted the alleged Bulgarian secret service connection with Mehmet Ali Agca the shooter of Pope John Paul. The story did not pass the giggle test. Agca was a committed Turkish fascist-- a former member of the "Gray Wolves" a youth group of the Fascist National Action Party. Whether the disputed story was accurate or not, it made good anti-communist propaganda. When Reagan took office Ledeen was made special assistant to Secretary of State Alexander Haig. Later as a staff member of the National Security Council, he played a key role in initiating the illegal arms for hostage deal with Iran that later became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. He is now works for the American Enterprise Institute, a prominent neoconservative think tank in Washington, DC.
Ledeen has long standing connections with prominent right-wing Italian politicians. He has been friends with the Berlusconi Minister of Defense and co-founder of Forza Italia, Antonio Martino, since the 1970s. He played bridge with former SISMI director, Nicolo Pollari. In the words of a former CIA agent stationed in Italy, "Michael Ledeen is connected to all the players". No doubt the discredited former SISMI agent and peddler of information, Rocco Martino, was also known to Ledeen. Il Postino (the Postman) as he is known in the Italian press obtained forged documents from the Niger ambassador's secretary as well as SISMI's own document archives. The dossier was a hodgepodge of fake and real documents. The most important document, a two page memo purportedly sent to the president of Niger concerning the sale of 500 tons of pure uranium per year to Iraq, was a fake. Pollari denies Italian intelligence had anything to do with creating the documents, but Martino makes the perfect cutout--a discredited middleman that provides the maximum amount of deniability. The initial Niger Embassy robbery shortly after New Year's Eve 2001, in which letterhead and seals were taken, could have been aimed at creating a cover story for a war on Iraq. As early as 1992 hawks in the first Bush administration were lobbying for regime change there. The neocon lobbying continued through the Clinton years and resulted in the policy of regime change being enacted into law. The "Vulcans" included Michael Ledeen, Douglas Feith, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Feith would later run the Office of Special Plans and report to Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Secretary Donald Rumsfled at the Department of Defense.
Given Ledeen's deep Italian connections and personal history it would have been easy for him to make a request of an intelligence agent or even a member of an allied underground organization. There was no doubt about his position on war with Iraq. In his National Review columns he repeatedly pleaded the case for war. His hope was that the US would turn the region into a "burning cauldron" and "faster, please." Through his ties to White House political advisor Carl Rove, Deputy National Security advisor Stephan Hadley and Undersecretary Douglas Feith, he was wired into the White House Iraq Policy Group charged with marketing the war. One measure of his influence may be a series of secret meetings he set up—with Hadley's approval, he claims—in Rome in the second week of December 2001. According to the Italian newspaper La Reppublica, Nicolò Pollari had become frustrated by the C.I.A.'s refusal to let SISMI deliver a smoking gun that would justify an invasion of Iraq. At an unspecified date, he discussed the issue with Ledeen's longtime friend Minister of Defense Antonio Martino. Martino, the paper reported, told Pollari to expect a visit from "an old friend of Italy". Soon afterward, Pollari allegedly took up the Niger matter with Ledeen when he was in Rome. Ledeen says the meetings were about Iran not Iraq.
The Vice President, a rabid war advocate, got word of the Niger documentation from the Defense Intelligence Agency and confronted the CIA with the report. It had already been debunked by the agency and no mention of it was made in the President's Daily Brief, but when the Vice President gave the report credence, the agency was forced to backtrack. The French had managed to penetrate Saddam's inner circle by recruiting the Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri. Sabri told the CIA that Saddam did not have any weapons of mass destruction since they had been destroyed by UN weapons inspectors. The information confirmed what Saddam's son-in-law, General Hussein Kamal, had told the US in 1995 when he defected. But the CIA did not believe him. When Kamal returned to Iraq, Saddam had him executed. The good intelligence was not welcomed by the White House. The marketing campaign went ahead full bore. The opening salvo in the media blitz came from Secretary Rice who made a sensational remark about a "smoking gun turning into mushroom cloud". The riposte was so well received that other officials repeated it on the air. Selective leaks were made to credulous reporters like Judith Miller at the New York Times who wrote about Saddam buying aluminum tubes for refining centrifuges. Pollari met with Stephen Hadley the next day on September 9, 2002. It was a breach of protocol for a foreign intelligence official to meet with a member of the Security Council contrary to what Hadley characterizes as merely a "courtesy visit". Polari knew what the aluminum tubes were used for, but did not tell his American intelligence counterparts. The tubes were used to replace aging Medusa ground to air missile bodies that dated to Italy's weapons trade with Iraq. Two days later Hadley asked the CIA to clear a statement for the President's use that Iraq was seeking to buy enriched uranium oxide from Africa.
As if on cue, the false information was reinforced from abroad by Prime Minister Tony Blair who called the Niger disinformation a "dossier of death". Martino Rocco did his part by offering the documents to a reporter for Silvio Burlesconi's Panorama magazine. It was edited by a close political supporter of Burlesconi. Michael Ledeen had even contributed articles to it. The documents were duly transmitted to the CIA which immediately recognized them as previously discredited and worthy only of the trash bin. The State Department's intelligence bureau also doubted their authenticity. The French knew the Niger dossier was phony because Niger was their former colony. Their service so informed the CIA. US intelligence also knew that Sadddam already possessed 550 metric tons of enriched uranium ore. Saddam's problem was not a source of supply, but refining it to weapons grade. Nevertheless, the false report made it into the President's speech to the VFW in Cincinnati through the ideologues' sheer persistence and over the written objections of the agency. For the next two months there were repeated references to the bogus Niger yellowcake purchase in the regime's propaganda releases. Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenant, widely viewed in the intelligence community as an inveterate team player, denied ever seeing the State of the Union address with the sixteen words claiming that Saddam Hussein was resupplying himself with enriched uranium from Niger. In May 1999 George Tenant had failed to strike Osama Bin Laden with cruise missiles when the agency had intelligence--it would never be better in the opinion of his deputy--for thirty-six consecutive hours on his exact location. [2].
On March 7, 2003 the IAEA publicly exposed the Niger documents as forgeries. On March 14th the ranking Democratic senator on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked for an investigation by the FBI. The Republican chairman of the Committee refused to cooperate. The war began on March 19th. Later the Republican chairman incredibly claimed no one in the intelligence community attempted to have the language removed from the President's speech. There is no Ledeen fingerprint on the Niger forgeries. Despite the best efforts of journalists and investigators the ultimate source of the documents remains obscure. But their importance in bringing about a tragic foreign policy disaster cannot be doubted. The context of history is all we have to shine a light into the dark halls of power.
[1]The officials are Milt Bearden, former station chief and head of the Soviet-East European Division; Colonel W. Patrick Lang, who served as the D.I.A.'s defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, South Asia, and terrorism; Colonel Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell; Melvin Goodman, a former division chief and senior analyst at the C.I.A. and the State Department; Ray McGovern, a C.I.A. analyst for 27 years; Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia division in 2002 and 2003; Larry C. Johnson, a former C.I.A. officer who was deputy director of the State Department Office of Counterterrorism from 1989 to 1993; former C.I.A. official Philip Giraldi; and Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of operations of the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center.
[2]Frontline,"The Dark Side", January 20, 2006.